Social Media and the Small Business…Location Based Marketing, eh…..huh?

This is the third installment of Social Media and the Small Business, a series designed to educate the small business owner on the power of social media in today’s business world.

 

Location Based Marketing, eh…huh?

 

The Power of Geotagging for the Small Business

 

Location, Location, Location.  The old real-estate addage privides an entire lecture in three words (or one word now that I think about it).  Brick-and-mortar businesses grow around their location.  The better location beats the better product most of the time (Times Square vs. Main Street, USA).  In this new business climate dominated by social media, a concept is now emerging called “Geotagging.”   As A Matter of Fact, location based marketing is slowly redesigning “Location, Location, Location,” into “Tagging, Tagging, Tagging.”

Geotagging is the process of logging your gps location into a host of websites for the public to use as a type of yellow pages. For those who haven’t heard of Geotagging before there is quite a public following to them.  They are called “Lo-social” websites.  Flikr, Foursquare, Yelp, SCVNGR, Facebook, Google, Loopt  and Gowalla are a few websites that support Geotagging.  You may have heard of some of those, eh?

What’s in it for you?

From a business perspective, Geotagging makes perfect sense.  Every time people return to your business, they log in to, let’s say for the sake of conversation Foursquare.com, they tag that they were there.  Some companies reward the person who tags them the most (in foursquare they are entitled the “Mayor” of your business).  The Mayor receives discounts, services, gift cards, whatever you can dream up.  This will cause a stir between the Mayor and others who visit.  This is designed to promote more visits (or at least more tagging).  The more your business is tagged, the more competitive it gets with the Geotaggers and the greater following you will have.  This vicious circle repeats itself over and over and over again.

Some rewards are less monetary in value and more virtual, such as virtual “badges.”  These are given pretty much as bragging rights (e.g. first to tag, first to tag twenty times) that the public can have as status symbols on their profile.

SCVNGER.com puts a twist on their Geotagging philosophy.  They call themselves a game and instead of checking in, you have challenges to perform.  For instance just Geotagging your business may be worth a few points, but taking a picture with the manager, well that would be a larger number of points.  Singing the National Anthem….you get the idea.

There are a host of Lo-social sites right now. Is your business registered with them?

Flikr.com gives the option geotagging all photographs uploaded to it’s site.  Foursquare.com focuses it’s Geotagging community to a social network and provides some fantastic marketing opportunities. 

Lee Odden, in his online marketing blog www.toprankblog.com (that’s right, a blog), gives 17 tips for starting Location Based marketing campaigns.  One concept that hit me while I was reading through his article was the idea that your business may already be on those lists.  People may already be tagging your business and you don’t know it because you’ve never been exposed to the idea.

Another good read as you learn about Geotagging is Shane Snow’s article on Mashable.com.  Worth the click and five minute read. 

It would be wise to at least consider Geotagging sites as part of your social media strategy.  Their main advantage is they bring actual people into your actual business to spend some actual money.  In addition to the bottomline, customers can leave feedback of Lo-Social sites.  The feedback that you will receive from these sites can only help you understand your local public better, and in this economy gaining that feedback is not just a good idea, it is vital.