Geolocating – opening new possibilities for marketing and service

Geolocating (i.e. the application of geotagging) is quietly moving from something cool that you can do with your smart device, telling friends where you are via a Tweet or identifying a bunch of like-minded folks in your area to say hi to, to something with a multitude of potentially quite useful applications. And as more and more people willingly (indeed actively) shout their current location to the world, the potential appears for some innovative and creative uses of the technology.

For example, imagine you’re an O2 customer with an iPhone. Now wouldn’t it be useful to have pushed to you, as you wandered into to a particular cell on their capacitous UMTS network, real time information about the state of that cell. Is it congested? Does it have any problems at present? Does it have any capacity to serve you immense volumes of super-fast data in the next few minutes, or would you be better walking 250m up a particular street to take advantage of a cell with far more capacity at that moment? No need to call O2 to complain about poor network quality with that information is there. Or how about when you get near to your local bus stop, you automatically get pinged with the arrival times for the next few buses from the area.

Taking it a bit further, what about establishing real-time virtual marketplaces, based on location. A collection of businesses (or indeed individuals) could publish what services they have to offer at a point in time, say micro-time-bound offers such as Starbucks offering 2 for 1 on pastries for the next ten minutes. A local deli – being sharp – are also in the area and respond to this geo-offer in real time, offering 2 for 1 on pastries and a half price espresso. Suddenly markets become just that – reacting real-time to the actions of others, and to the reactions of consumers, all bound within a real local area.

And – to make sure you only see what you want when you want, how about you tell your device that you want to know about certain kinds of information at certain times of the day – no bus updates between 9 and 12 please, shopping offers only near payday, oh and lot of cheap beer info every night??

The applications of all this are limited really only by the imaginations of those businesses smart enough to embrace it. If I was a brand with a decent Facebook presence, who actively used Twitter as a marketing tool or who had a geographically dispersed customer base whom i served identically irrespective of their location, I’d be starting to think how I could use this to be local as well as global – ‘what can I do for my customer wherever they are?’. Only a few geeks are geotagging today, but it won’t be long before it’s the norm to do so from the phones of the masses. Those who are already thinking about how they’ll exploit this will immediately have the upper hand…