While the rest of the world waits for smartphones to support RFID, which would make it more cost effective for others to implement this technology, there’s no excuse for you to not start think about implementing RFID into your business. There are a lot of benefits that come from using RFID technology: from creatively engaging with new and existing customers, understanding and meeting your customers’ habits and needs, and overall creating a unique service and experience. Many companies are missing out on a special opportunity, while a select few are using it as a chance to create an effective offline and online customer and branding experience. It’s an investment like with anything new, with a bit of risk, but a successful implementation of RFID could pay off in the short and long run.

Here are a few brands that have used the technology to bridge the gap between offline and online activities and marketing:

Vail Resort’s Epic Mix

By having a RFID tag in your ski pass or lift ticket, you’re able to track your ski stats, share accomplishments, and connect with others seamlessly. With the introduction of Epic Mix Photo this season, resort photographers now have the ability to post photos while you’re on the slopes directly to your Facebook account. For casual and serious skiers, Epic Mix offers a ton of value by tracking each person’s ski adventure and gets friends involved with updates to Facebook and Twitter.

The Ushuaia Beach Hotel

By setting up RFID readers (Facebook pillars) throughout the hotel, visitors are able to share their whereabouts and activities on Facebook by swiping their RFID installed wristband. This features a camera that allows you to take and share photos, check-in through Facebook Places, and posts updates to your wall. Events such as the Facebook F8 Conference have done similar work using RFID enabled passes.

Coca-Cola and Google Wallet   

Google has invested heavily in this technology, blazing a trail to bring payments to mobile using NFC (Near Field Communication), a form of RFID. If you haven’t looked into Google Wallet yet, you can watch this video to learn more. This technology does more than just replace a credit card with your smartphone (nobody wants an exploding wallet). It allows you to redeem Google Offers, special savings both online and offline, and also store reward cards so you don’t have to lug those around anymore. It’s quick, convenient, and safe.

In the end, the possibilities for RFID use are endless. When researching RFID and how it’s been steadily implemented and utilized more and more, you’ll find some pretty amazing examples out there. I’m interested to hear what you think about RFID and when you think it will catch on.

Have you seen any examples of RFID being linked with social media? Please feel free to share below!

Without further ado, here is my Top 1 Prediction for 2011…

1. Facebook Launches Distributed Ad Network – an Endgame to Take on Google

I’ve been preaching this to colleagues/friends for the past year, and with each strategic move Facebook makes, I feel more certain about it. Facebook’s ultimate Google-threat is going to be the launch of a distributed ad network. Let’s review the evolution:

Facebook Platform (Social Graph)
While Google may know your search history, sites you visit, and can mine through your Gmail messages, Facebook has been gathering data on everything about you (well, as much as you are willing to reveal). They know not just where you live, but your phone number, your various social relationships, religion/sexual orientation/political leanings, the things you “like”, as well as your level of influence (how much of what you post gets likes/comments/reposts or how many people “hide” you in their newsfeed). Everything is represented in the “social graph”, and Facebook owns it.

Facebook Pages
As Facebook’s popularity began to skyrocket, brands wanted in the game so they could “fish where the fish are”. Pages allowed brands to set up shop and connect with an audience. Applications (built on the Facebook platform) could be integrated into pages as well, providing another level of data acquisition/usage tracking.

Facebook Ads
With the amount of traffic Facebook was generating, launching an ad service (albeit a rather shoddy one) was a no-brainer. Not only could they monetize their existing site traffic, but brands would throw them millions billions of dollars – to buy ads that drive people back to Facebook (and, in turn, add value back to Facebook). A brilliant business model, indeed!

Facebook Connect
Next, Facebook launched “Connect“. This allowed external sites to provide an easy way for users to log in using their existing Facebook credentials. As more and more sites adopted Connect, Facebook began to control identity, and in turn bring those external sites into the social graph (with the launch of Open Graph, Facebook has since killed off Connect in favor of using Oauth-based logins on top of the rebranded Facebook Platform).

Facebook Places and Social Commerce
Given some of their recent acquisitions (such as Hot Potato), Facebook isn’t hiding the fact that they are investing heavily in mobile/location-based-services (LBS’s). “Places” tie everything together. You “check in” at a place. You attend an event at a “place”. Not only do they want to know who you are and what you like, but where you are and who you are with as well. With the proliferation of “deals” services (most notably Groupon and LivingSocial, and location-based deals/offers provided by Foursquare, Yelp, Shopkick, etc.), it’s a proven model that a) $$works and b) has a long tail effect that even the smallest local mom-and-pop business can leverage.

Rumors have been swirling that Facebook might begin to charge users, but Facebook stands to make way more money by charging for their users than charging from their users directly (they will still make money off their users in other ways, such as Facebook Credits).

Social Plugins
After unveiling Open Graph, Facebook then released a suite of “social plugins” that anyone could customize/embed into their website with just a few lines of JavaScript code to instantly add Facebook-powered comments, content recommendations, and friends’ activity. Wouldn’t it be trivial to provide a customizable ad widget to majorly trafficked sites such as CNN.com or WashingtonPost.com who are already using Facebook’s social plugins? This would long-tail all the way down to the least-trafficked websites who use “like” buttons.

Facebook Apps and iFrames
Without getting too technical, Facebook has made some changes in the way applications are built on the Facebook platform. In the past, you could utilize FBML (Facebook Markup Language), but this is being deprecated for iframe-based development using Facebook’s JavaScript SDK and Social Plugins. This basically means you will be able to build Facebook apps that can run the same way on either on your own website or within Facebook. The new page design that was recently leaked shows they are doing away with “tabs”. What does this mean? Facebook may control the user’s wall/news feed, but they want to push the traffic back out to external sites (scale out traffic/users/ads/reach).

Search Partnerships
Yahoo and Google both know they screwed up big by not scooping up Facebook when they had the chance for a few “paltry” hundred million. Instead, Facebook took a minority investment from Microsoft. Since that time, Facebook has struck out a search partnerships with Microsoft-owned Bing and has been speaking with AOL (even though AOL just renewed their search deal with Google).

Even though these search engines only make up only around 13% of the current search market, Facebook is already the most-trafficked website on the planet, so this will only add to their reach (that’s a lot of potential ad impressions!).

Facebook Messages
Facebook recently relaunched their messaging service to be a unified communications platform blending email, IM, and SMS. Think about it – how many of your Facebook friends do you ever email (or even know their email addresses)? Now Facebook can mine your conversations and use that data to target ads. Combine that with the fact that Facebook is now allowing people to grab @facebook.com email addresses, and that looks like a direct attack on Gmail. I would venture to guess that there are more Facebook users with @aol.com addresses than @gmail.com addresses – they could potentially acquire tens of millions of more users who might be more apt to switch to an @facebook.com address than @gmail.com. And then they can run advertisements against them.

Conclusion
Do you see a pattern emerging here?

At the end of the day, Google’s bread and butter are the revenues they generate from Adwords. And you may argue that for Facebook, and IPO is their endgame. However, any thoughts of an IPO will hinge on the successful launch of a large-scale ad network initiative, as it will add billions to their pre-IPO valuation.

This is some serious stuff. If/when Facebook decides to launch their end-game ad network, they can simply flip a switch and enable millions of sites to start displaying highly-targeted (“scarily”-targeted, in fact) ads that will instantly put a damper on Google’s revenues/market share while catapulting Facebook’s revenues into the tens of billions.

Curious to hear what you think – drop a note in the comments, or hit me up on Twitter.

I’m as excited as anyone about the social marketing potential of the ‘real-time’ web, particularly as it applies to the mobile/location-based space. As more and more people flock to apps such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and BriteKite to document their every movement, everyone from local businesses to global brands are taking notice and trying to put together strategies to engage and reward consumers with “badges” (virtual “social currency”) and discounts/offers (tangible incentives) through these platforms (for the sake of my post, we’ll assume these are mostly actual consumers and not just all of us industry folks).

But the question remains – are you engaging/rewarding the right people? Let me use an analogy to illustrate…

Growing up, I spent a good deal of time working/hanging out at my family’s pizza business. Like a typical small-town local business, there were always a few interesting characters/regulars who would make it their home away from home, hanging out in the store day after day. They’d interact with other customers, tell jokes, and drink soda. Lots and lots of free soda. But they would never buy more than a slice of pizza during the course of a day.

In their minds, they were the “mayors” of the restaurant, where “everyone knew their names” and in a way they felt like they “owned” the place. But to us, they were “mascots” – nice folks, fun to have around, but of no real value to the business (and in some ways, potentially distracting to both customers and staff). They often came alone (didn’t have many friends), nor did they go out of their way to promote the business. My point is, don’t equate activity with influence.

So, when executing your location-based (or any consumer engagement) strategy, ask yourself – are you actually targeting “Mayors” or “Mascots”?

(Note: Even one of my company’s clients, Sports Authority, recently dove head-first into the location-based marketing space by offering $10 in-store cash cards via Foursquare to the “Mayors” of each of their stores nationwide. While it has made for a great PR/industry piece, the overall impact is just a blip on the radar compared to what they have seen by providing Facebook and Twitter-exclusive offers to their hundreds of thousands of fans and followers (or millions of others through weekend circulars), and won’t have solid loyalty metrics for some time. And like any other business, unless these location-based social tactics are integrated into a larger CRM/loyalty initiative, you will never know if you are in fact targeting “Mayors” or “Mascots”)

The videophone was a revolutionary product that was featured prominently in the 1964 World’s Fair. Huge amounts of time and money were spent creating it and just because it was technically possible, it was predicted that there would be an enormous demand for it. But it turned out that no one actually wanted a videophone. In fact, that the parties cannot see what each other looks like is viewed by most people as a major benefit to voice-only communication not a limitation.

When I worked in Interactive Television, every year there would be two or three companies that invested a large amount of effort in developing systems to allow users to click on a person on the screen. The envisioned killer app for this was inevitably buying what the person was wearing, the example being whatever happed to be the hit show of the moment such as Sex and the City. Even ignoring the difficulties of coordinating the business cycles of television and fashion to have products on shelves when a show airs, it was always a cumbersome user experience. TV shows are edited (such as cutting between two people having a conversation) so timing a click to be on the intended person is difficult. It would be much easier to simply select that actor from a menu. The hubris of these technologists is such that one company even blatant stated that TV shows would no longer need to be edited as if it were a flaw that would finally be corrected with their product.

Now with location based services, the holy grail is evidently walking down the street and getting beamed a coupon when passing by a certain vendor, usually Starbucks. Apparently the technologists’ vision of the future is being bombarded with offers as we stroll down a city street, even though everyone at the conference admittedly had no desire for this much less the average person. But these efforts perpetuate because it makes a good trade show demo and an even better pitch to a client or venture capitalist. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in a previous post, selling the client on the presentation rather than the result usually leads to something that no one actually uses.

Modern humans evolved about 200,000 years ago and we all have the essentially the same brains as our ancient ancestors. It’s amazing that something like a film can deeply emotionally engage us, but it somehow taps into the way our minds work. Social interaction whether around a campfire or on Facebook hasn’t changed much; people still want essentially the same things whether it’s to flirt or boast or establish social hierarchies. Technology and media that address human needs or solve human problems can be very successful. Some companies like Apple are amazingly adept at this. Products that simply demonstrate their technical capabilities are doomed to fail.

While mapping and geographic tools have been successfully utilized in many areas such as driving directions and event locations, some of the more interesting applications are in what might be called “location-based social media.” All social networks generally incorporate members’ location as a piece of information, but these sites and services offer very specific geographic functions and often incorporate related technologies such as GPS and mobile.

Frappr, Platial, and Socialight are sites that allow users to collaboratively mark locations on a shared map and post notes or comments about them. The uses are fairly open-ended and range from favorites places around town to fan clubs showing where everyone lives. Socialight also allows users to send a location to a mobile phone, but all that’s send is a link to a web page.

A service more oriented towards mobile is Dodgeball. It allows users to SMS their current location which is then broadcast to their friends, sort of like a geographic twitter. It gets a little complicated for places with multiple locations such as Starbucks and suffers from the limitation of only being about the immediate moment. Instead of saying to a friend, “let’s have a drink at Ace Bar tomorrow after work,” users have to sit around and wait for an alert, then drop everything to rush out to meet someone who serendipitously happens to be in their vicinity.

For planning, Dopplr provides services focused on travelers. Users can see friends who will be in the same city at the same time and make plans based on this. It obviously has some value to people who travel frequently, but doesn’t provide any other travel related features such as lodging or local information, so its use is very limited and “who will be in the same place as me” is a simple function that is likely to be incorporated into all travel sites. In fact, travel-oriented communities such as Travelpod or RealTravel provide this and much more.

For photos from around the world, the capability to add geotagging metadata to indicate location has led to many creative applications. Flickr was one of the first services to offer this and its map is an engaging way to explore and organize photos in addition to things like text tags. Flickr also provides a comprehensive API which has allowed developers to build their own interesting applications such as Trippermap and loc.alize.us. Locr is another photo service with a very specific geographic presentation.

One of the most robust geographically-oriented communities is at Geocaching, sort of a global hide-and-seek game where people use GPS devices to find caches hidden by other users. Geocachers are a passionate bunch and generally love outdoor adventures. At best the goal is to share personal favorite locations such as a beautiful view or secret hide-away, with the cache more an excuse for the journey.

These examples are quite varied. Some are simple and fall short, while others have very intriguing aspects. All hint at the amazing potential for the social application of geographic information, which is still in its early stages. As technologies advance and people become more accustomed to interacting with spatial data, it will be exciting to see increasingly sophisticated and compelling implementations of location-based social media.