Skip to main content

Location-Based Gaming and New Search Challenges (and Opportunities)

I've been trying to get up-to-speed on the mobile industry these days and had a thought on search and implications for marketers. All this may be obvious, but I figure I'd jot it down while I'm thinking about it.
I was looking into all the new location based gaming companies starting up these days. In looking over what companies like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Booyah are doing, it seems like it introduces new opportunities for how search and targeted advertising will work. Each of these games is producing a rich amount of content regarding where, when, and how consumers behave in the real world. This is incredibly valuable if you're a retailer or service provider. Apply some analytics to this data set and you could form completely new segmentation strategies based on behaviors rather than demographics. For example, make offers to those people that may actually respond to them based on their previous behaviors (e.g. they don't always frequent the same locations but are willing to try new ones).
More importantly, these services are generating content that are linked by social networks. A big part of consumer choice is based on what other consumers are doing. More specifically, your friends. So all the check-ins and experience comments all provide valuable guidance to your friends on how to consume. Basically the same idea as digg or StumbleUpon, but for consumption of real rather than virtual places and experiences. I imagine this is where companies like Media6 come in for Facebook. They allow you to send ads to a "network neighbor" of one of your current customers. Win-win. Advertisers get what they want (ads targeted at people that are 5x more likely to be interested) and consumers get what they want (recommendations from friends - albeit they don't know they're coming from friends).
Much of this content is being pushed to you, though. Whether it's ads or it's Facebook and Twitter updates from your friends, recommendations are being pushed your way. But when you're searching for something, how are search results using that wealth of knowledge from all those different sources - Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, etc. - to filter and rank your search results? Folks have been talking about social networking being the next wave of search for a while (see Time Magazine, Read Write Web, and others for examples). But it seems like there are some significant barriers to making this work, namely silos of information across services. It makes it difficult for advertisers to reach out through all of these different networks and makes it difficult for consumers to search across them.
Perhaps that's where solutions like Yext.com come in for local small businesses (more in this DukeGEN article). They allow companies to list their ads across multiple properties and only charge a fee based on "pay-per-action phone calls". They transcribe the call using voice-to-text to determine whether the phone call was a meaningful lead. Same model as online click-throughs - pay-per-action instead of pay-per-click.
I guess one take-away for advertisers is that there is an increasing ability (and need) to focus on the person rather than the demographic. I thought this presentation from Charlene Li from Altimeter Group was pretty good on this topic. But no real complete solutions still.
Definitely a lot going on here. Warrants more research.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Fortunate 400

So there's rich, and then there's super rich. I recently read an article in the WSJ about the top 400 taxpayers based on income. Pretty incredible statistics. Those top 400, or what they call the "Fortunate 400", pulled in $85.6 billion in income in 2005. That's over $200 million each ... in one year! Here's a quick graphic to drive that home: Very impressive. There's all the obvious jaw-dropping statistics to go with that. For instance, to make the cut to be in the 400 you had to pull in at least $100 million. With an average of $200 million, that means there's people pulling in well over that number. Obviously, quite crazy numbers, and generally speaking not necessarily anything to be concerned about. I'm all for capitalism. But one of the more disheartening statistics was that adjusting for inflation, the minimum income to make the cutoff into the Fortunate 400 has nearly tripled since 1992. That's probably not a good sign as I imagine that...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano

I found this opinion piece ( Democrats aren't innocent bystanders ) interesting on how both Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for polarizing the electorate and undermining some of its faith in democracy. It references two other posts that were pretty good as well: The Disease of Delegitimization The Weimarization of the American Republic The second article is really long and heavy on history.  But given all of the comparisons people make between the current times and those of post-WWI Germany, I found it interesting to dive in to understand where the comparisons are coming from and how close we really are.  The short answer is that we aren't that close (phew). Seems like post-WWI Germany was incredibly fragile.  This was a good excerpt that summarized it: So, unlike the 60s, you have a dynamic in which both sides are behaving like radicals, in which the establishment isn’t yelling “stop,” and in which oikophobia is more evenly distributed, relative to its Boo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nine Prescriptions for Building the Duke Entrepreneurial Community

I think Duke can have one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the world. Are we there yet? Well, not yet. But there's a tremendous amount of momentum that I saw build in just the past two years while I was getting my MBA at Duke. While leading Duke's 10th annual business plan competition, the Duke Start-Up Challenge (DSC) , last year, I witnessed a near doubling of participation on campus in just a single year. The interest on the ground was clearly there and building rapidly. But now that I'm an alum, I'm looking back and wondering ... how do we rev-up the Duke entrepreneurial community even more? I read a great article by Daniel Isenberg, a professor of management at Babson, called " How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution " in the June edition of the Harvard Business Review. Isenberg outlines nine prescriptions for governments that want to create entrepreneurship ecosystems in their countries. Although he was focused on governments an...
3 comments
Read more