Last night I saw a local blog post by Brant Collins that was a response to a twitter conversation with a good friend @Tsudo. In it Brant expresses a very elementary understanding of location based social media that sadly I have seen other “social media experts” struggle with as well.
First you “experts” completely downplay the overall value to the end user. Thinking of location based media as a game is stupid. Yes those elements are there, and I will get into that later, but it is not the true value to the user.
The value is in being at a place and sharing it with friends and seeing where your friends are. It really is that simple and it really does work on a much deeper level. Yes, as an end user when I enter a place it is great to check-in and see others that I know there. I am likely to seek them out and visit. Also if I see friends of mine checking in at a restaurant that I have not visited or watching a sports game from a team I do not follow, I am more likely to check that out because they took the time to check in and let me know they were doing that.
Because of this is the reason I tend to side with Gowalla more so than 4square. I think Gowalla’s use of location based pins helps to give a better sense of where someone has been. Featured locations tell me when visiting a new city some places I should visit. Lastly I am a huge fan of the event checkins, because sometimes simply being at a place does not tell the whole story. If I were to check-in at the River Market on May 28th, that would not be the real story of why I am there, It would be the event of River Fest, or a specific concert.
Second, the real value back to companies lies in the fundamental principle of social media, that is the value of word of mouth. What businesses (at least should) be most interested in is not who visits, but the influence of those who visit. This is a real struggle for businesses and one I’ve dealt with personally. You can’t measure influence by a stat, only by long term growth. This is a common problem across all social media. The more you try to measure hard data the more you are going to fail. The value of influence and word of mouth trumps everything, all you can do is encourage it. Which leads to…
Third, everything else is just a hook. Games, badges, mayors, coupons… it is all just to encourage the end user to check-in and tell their friends. This tends to be a way to move a casual or new geo-social user into checking in. In my experience once a user gets to know the system all of this fades into the background. It honestly sounds like to me Brant that all you want is free shit, and if that is your whole driver in social media then you have a larger problem.
See the reason your pipe-dream of you walking into a place, it automatically knowing that you are there, and giving you something for free to encourage a further purpose tells me that you don’t get social media. “Social” here is the key word. It is not centered around you and your purchase, it is centered around your interaction with the world.
By having a platform that just automatically posted when you are somewhere it completely destroys the legitimacy of the platform. This gets back to influence and word of mouth. I hold value in check-ins because I know that the people I chose to follow took the time to inform me of their location. Now the experiences of those check-ins is not always positive, but with comments there is a way to share negative experiences as well. I wouldn’t think as much to just seeing where people are automatically, of course I hate it when people auto post every single time they turn on Live Stream too, so go figure.
Again I am no expert, I’ve expressed that over and over again. I am very likely wrong about something in this post. All I try to do is think less about what something means to me personally and more about the big picture. There are plenty of people who disagree with that perspective, but I like to think there is a little more to the word “social” than just me.
