Stranger than Fiction

Earlier this month, SXSW Interactive attendees were all atwitter, awaiting the outcome of a battle between location-sharing social media companies Foursquare and Gowalla. Fundamentally, Foursquare and Gowalla do a lot of the same things well: they find your location using the GPS in your mobile device, they find points of interest (restaurants, bars, clubs, etc.) near that location, they let you “check in” at any point you choose, allow you to broadcast that check-in to your friends (along with comments) and then reward you with incentives for checking in often. Yes, there are some differences between the two apps (Foursquare gives you easy access to a list of compiled local tips from all of the apps’ users for your immediate location, Gowalla lets you see users who are checked in at a point of interest even if they’re not one of your friends, etc). But for someone who spends a lot of time out bar-hopping or bouncing from party to party, the benefits for either are clear – both of these apps make it beyond easy to let your friends know where to find you. The issue at hand is that it also makes it beyond easy to let brands know where to find you.

On the simplest level, for the businesses listed on the apps, one can easily imagine sponsored links that filter to the top of the list a user sees for any given location. Not much harder to imagine the app finding your location and then serving up banner ads for one the many local businesses within a few yards of where you’re standing. Two-for-one drafts at this bar. A 10% discount on cans of soup at that grocer. It would be tough to get much more targeted. Both apps also offer reward systems for consistent usage. Whether you are collecting icons or badges, ultimately you hope these incentives will turn into some kind of tangible goods and in most cases they already do. As this system gets more robust in both applications, there is a great opportunity for brands to find ways to get into the goody bags that go out to users with the most badges. But perhaps most importantly, if brands were able to befriend users as they are in other forms of social media, Foursquare or Gowalla could become intensely powerful research tools to observe consumer behavior as well as share tips about where to find their products, where to get the best deals or go to the best brand-sponsored parties.

Bottom line though: Is it cool or invasive? We’d argue that it’s both, but not necessarily in a bad way. Just by using technology like this, you are essentially asking all who are listening to tell you what they think of where you are. You are also looking for input. And why shouldn’t a brand provide that input as well as one of your friends? Also, you are doing this for rewards. Why shouldn’t one of those rewards be the inside scoop on some very local deals? It feels like, if done well by brands, this could be a win-win for everyone involved.