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.
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