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.