Geolocation trending spells opportunity for early-adopter marketers. FB poised to dominate.
TREND TRANSLATION: Geolocation will catch on by this time next year with early adopters. At that point it will be a fertile ground for marketers to early-adopt geolocation strategies in their marketing plans - mobile or otherwise.
Foursquare, a geolocation-based game, allows users to pull out their phones as soon as they enter any restaurant, landmark or event and check in just so they can be named ‘mayor’ of that establishment (whoever checks into any particular location the most times - or becomes the first one to do so becomes mayor of that location - at least until someone checks in there more often).
It’s fascinating and it bizarre, but it's catchy as hell and demonstrates that Foursquare has tapped into something powerful. Geolocation is the next Twittier, but Foursquare is probably not going to be the Twitterkiller (if you can kill a company that has no revenue model, that is) because as good as Foursquare is at figuring tracking your friends, it lacks the interactive features that make Facebook so powerful. So, if Facebook can do geolocation right, they're poised to dominate that trend.
While FB has been almost totally silent with regard to its plans for geolocation, there have been an increasing number of rumors about Facebook finally coming close to launching these features and all signs point to them being true: For one, Facebook recently revised its Privacy Policy to explicitly allow for location-based features. And perhaps more importantly, the clock is ticking: Twitter launched its Geolocation API in October and Facebook can’t afford to be left behind. Facebook must implement location if it’s going to maintain its status as the world's number one social network.
When it does launch, Facebook is going to have a massive impact on the current location based service environment. Much of this still-nascent space will change. And those that fail to evolve quickly will die.
TREND TRANSLATION: Geolocation will catch on by this time next year with early adopters. At that point it will be a fertile ground for marketers to early-adopt geolocation strategies in their marketing plans - mobile or otherwise. This is a good place for a little customer entertagement. It's an opportunity to make your marketing fun - at least for a little while.