Some Examples of What Can be Done With Geolocation

The excerpt below from the O'Reilly publication HTML5 Geolocation offers a few examples on what you can do with Geolocation and the different ways you can exploit it to your benefit.

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There is no doubt that geolocation will continue to grow for years to come—just look at the ever-increasing trends among the popular location-based services for mobile phones to see why. While Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Glympse, and all the rest continue impressive growth (and will continue to do so for quite some time), the W3C Geolocation API will also continue to open ever more doors for native browser applications in this market. Consider some of the following:

• Geolocation applications have gone from niche and novelty pieces of software to cultural and trendy “must-haves” in today’s mobile world.
  
  
• Phones are becoming increasingly “smart,” with more and more people switching from basic cell phones to smart devices, and the smartphone market is growing around the world and tapping into new markets.
  
  
• More smartphones equals more GPS-enabled devices to utilize geolocation technology.
  
  
• Companies now recognize the huge earnings potential with advertising on the popular location-based services, particularly as advertisements can be directed to individuals and specific locals.
  
  
• HTML5 and the W3C Geolocation API will allow for websites to add geolocation to their functionality, removing the native application-only nature geolocation software shared in the past.

Also, expect that the accuracy of a location will continue to improve with time. This will make geolocation more enticing to some, and scarier to others (those concerned with privacy, in particular). All of the existing methods for gathering a location will improve their precision, and perhaps new methods will be created that give better results from the start. Triangulation of a Cell ID will continue to improve due to the continuing additions of new and stronger cell towers (more towers means more signals from which to calculate). GPS will also continue to advance as new satellite systems are launched and due to improved cooperation amongst agencies and governments. Finally, techniques for IP address tracking are improving as research and interest grows in geolocation.

Note: A computer scientist at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu, Yong Wong, along with colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, developed a method to identify a device using only an IP address to within 100 meters (690 meters on average). This without any information from the user!

Geolocation became a buzz-word in 2009 as social media applications took off with the introduction of Foursquare. The following year, technology writers dubbed 2010 “the year of the check-in” and the “year of geolocation.” 2011 thus far has seen a continuation of this branding, as it is being referred to as “the mobile revolution.” This year and the years to come will see more businesses embracing geolocation and social media applications. The mashup of several types of mobile applications (geolocation, social media, augmented reality) and the merging of a few existing ones should bring a more robust, diverse, and mature market.

Geomarketing

Geomarketing is a term that refers to marketing based specifically on geolocation. Advertisements on Facebook have been using this type of marketing, relying on IP addresses to locate the user logged into their site, and then customizing advertising based on this information. Search engines like Google and Bing do the same thing. This is a passive approach to geomarketing, and it has proved to be very effective. Taking an active approach to geomarketing, however, is proving to be the future of advertising.

Specials and Offers

Thanks to social media and geolocation, companies are taking a much more active approach to geomarketing on mobile platforms. An example of this type of geomarketing is the Specials available at certain locations in Foursquare. These Specials are sometimes even further “specialized” for an individual, giving the “mayor,” the individual with the most check-ins, an exclusive deal or free perks.

Companies are beginning to realize, if they have not already, that there is a huge potential for gaining new customers with a business and advertising model similar to what the social media applications like Foursquare are currently doing. Geomarketing also creates the possibility for previously unseen customer loyalty, which increases revenue. In addition to the geomarketing potential in social media applications, there is also the rising coupon-based applications that also rely on geolocation. Groupon-like applications that benefit from knowing a user’s location also give companies the ability to personalize the offers they make available to a customer.

Geomarketing in the future will rely more on the customer’s current location, with applications that track the user’s movements playing a large part in allowing companies to promote specials that pertain to certain locations. A scenario like the following will be possible: A person turns his vehicle onto a busy road lined with stores. A text message, email, or some other form of notification suddenly appears on his smartphone with specials for three stores located down the road. The technology for this type of functionality already exists.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing blends together two words, “crowd” and “outsourcing”. Crowdsourcing has been defined as using the collective intelligence of a large and diverse group of people to complete tasks that would otherwise be done by an individual or small group. The Internet has greatly improved the idea of crowdsourcing as it has made it far easier to gain access to large numbers of people for collaborative efforts.

Thanks to crowdsourcing and geolocation technology, geographic information for natural disasters and conflicts from around the world is growing. Every day people are becoming geospatial analysts on the ground as events unfold. There have been examples of this with the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the 2010 BP oil disaster, the unrest and revolutions in the Middle East in 2010 and 2011, and the earthquake in Japan in 2011. As a real-world instance of using crowdsourcing, ArcGIS Mobile projects were used for boom monitoring during the cleanup of the BP oil spill.

Companies have come to realize that utilizing crowdsourcing has benefits, including the following:

• Ideas can be explored without incurring large costs.
  
  
• A larger pool of talented people can be accessed to attack a problem.
  
  
• Customers’ desires or feelings about brands and offers are discovered quickly.
  
  
• Giving customers a “voice” can induce brand loyalty.

Yelp brought the idea of crowdsourcing to social media, allowing users to leave both Tips and Reviews for any business in its database. Many of the social media applications have since implemented similar ideas. Learning more about a business before visiting it has become easier with these applications, and more importantly, customers can develop a tangible connection with the businesses they review—giving them a sense of ownership with the brand or business in the process.

Marketing departments are now using the reviews and tips submitted by users to shape their advertisements and to create specials and offers to match the crowd’s input. In doing this, customers are receiving more personalized and relevant offers directly via their smartphones, reinforcing their feedback and brand loyalty.

Specialization

One of the goals of geomarketing, from a business’s point of view, is to be able to deliver marketing and advertisements that are specific for a location to the customer. Web-based advertisements are using geolocation to deliver content that is relevant to a city level. The location is most likely found based upon IP address, so it makes sense to only deliver content that is granular to this level. After all, desktop computers are usually being used in work or home environments which do not move, so there is no need to deliver content more specific than city-wide advertisements.

The story is different for smartphones, which may be moving while a user is browsing the Web or accessing a social media application to check in at a business. In this case, more specialized forms of advertisements are much more likely to be effective.

The future of geomarketing should see more of this granular advertisement that relies on geolocation for producing specialized content for the user. More mobile applications like Shopkick will enter the market to give users specialized offers and content based solely on where they are when using the application. Giving users a sense of individual attention will succeed in building brand and company loyalty.