7. Marketing to Social Location Sharers

In this chapter we are going to explore how social location sharing platforms can be used to create marketing communication campaigns by businesses of different sizes. The principles of all of these types of campaigns remain the same:

• Know your customer

• Understand what will motivate customers to take part in your campaign

• Understand how that fits with the platform you have decided to use for the campaign

These principals hold true whether your company is a mom and pop corner store or a multisite national chain. The first principle of knowing the customer cannot be overstated. The level of “knowing” tends to differ depending on the size of the operation, though not always. It is a common myth that small businesses are better at knowing their customers. Chains—while managed from a corporate headquarters—are often operated at a local level by staff who want to retain a local feel.

For example, a local Starbucks coffee shop may well be operated by staff that gets to know their regular customers and their preferred orders. This is a national chain operating at a local level. In this situation it becomes increasingly difficult for the locally owned businesses to differentiate themselves purely on the basis of “knowing” the customer.

Knowing the customer is more than being aware of his or her favorite coffee choice, though. It involves understanding what motivates your customers to choose you over your competition. Given the amount of choice available, knowing the answers to the following questions is critical:

• Why do your customers choose to shop your location over the competition?

• What do you offer that your competition doesn’t?

• How are you currently differentiating yourself?

• Would your customers switch if your competition changed?

Answering these questions gives you a better understanding of your customers and a better appreciation of them in terms of loyalty. Would your customers switch if your competition changed?

If you know what differentiates you from your competition, is that difference based on only one thing? For example, are you in a location that offers free parking, whereas your competition suffers from having no parking nearby or only paid parking? Convenience is a strong attractor for many consumers. If this situation changed and suddenly your competition was able to operate on the same basis as you, would your customers find your competitors more convenient and switch because of other factors?

Meeting the Needs

Differentiation, at least to achieve customer loyalty, must be multifaceted. In the 1940s, Abraham Maslow published his “Hierarchy of Needs,” which outlined the order in which human beings meet their needs to achieve satiation and satisfaction in life. Differentiation for customers—especially the social customer, who has a broader network from which to draw referrals to alternative products and services—must operate on a similar basis. Figure 7.1 shows the different levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, this combined with the following sections, explain each of the needs outlined by Maslow and how you might apply that thinking to your social location marketing efforts.

Figure 7.1. Comparing the needs of social consumers to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Physiological Needs

At the most elementary level, Maslow’s theory explains that humans have basic physiological needs—breathing, nutrition, and so on. Obviously, if these physiological needs are not met, the human body ceases to operate. So, if you were to compare Maslow’s theory to your work in social location marketing, you could compare Maslow’s basic physiological needs to the consumer’s need for the proper environment. Does the environment in which your location operates meet the basic needs for your customers? For example, if your company is a food outlet, consider things such as temperature, seating, access (including disabled access), washrooms, changing rooms, and appropriateness of size. These elements all differentiate your venue at a physiological level that affects the consumer in a sub-conscious way. These elements help your customers get a “feeling” about your venue—one that either engenders comfort or one that makes them uncomfortable.

Safety

The next level in Maslow’s hierarchy is safety: personal, financial, health, and the provision of some type of safeguard—insurance if you will—against misfortune. Consumers need to know that

• Doing business with you is a wise choice—that they can trust you.

• Your product or service will not endanger them or their loved ones.

• They can trust that your credibility is not in question.

• Should they have an issue, you are likely to deal with them in a fair and honest way.

The social consumer acquires this information in several ways:

• Asking members of their social networks

• Reading reviews of your product or service

• Watching how your brand interacts with others on various social media platforms

• Finding blogs that either talk specifically about your brand or talk about the industry in which your brand operates

The social consumer has a wealth of information about your products and services available to them from which to make these decisions. A lack of interaction with customers, a bad experience that has gone unresolved, or product recalls that are not then addressed in the social web are things can damage a brand’s image and therefore make the social consumer question whether selecting your product or service is a safe choice. Similarly, it’s important that potential customers see that you already have a community of avid—possibly even passionate—consumers that regularly choose the product or service your brand offers. Doing so reinforces to the social consumer that choosing your company’s products or services is a safe choice, and that others have made this choice before them and have been rewarded by having a good experience.

This is almost a herd experience. We all know the adage “safety in numbers.” Many social consumers do not want to be the lone wolf. Instead, they want to be a part of the herd. Being part of the herd allows consumers to follow where others have gone before them and had safe shopping experiences with brands that communicate, resolve, reward, and generally act in a way that the social consumer is rapidly coming to expect. To be a part of the consideration cycle that we discussed in Chapter 1, it is important that a brand seek to meet these expectations through the use of both traditional and social business practices.

Belonging

Maslow’s next level in the Hierarchy of Needs is “belonging.” The social consumer wants to be a part of the brand community. They want a sense of community, to feel included, and to feel special. In the general human sense, this is the need that drives us to seek the company of friends and family, and to seek the sense of being loved and accepted. Without these feelings, human beings can suffer anxiety, depression and feelings of rejection.

In some cases, it is even possible that the need for “belonging” will overcome the two previous needs in the hierarchy—physiological and safety. Actions displayed by members of a cult are often the result of this type of situation—the willingness, for example to take part in mass suicide. This example shows just how strong a driver this need is for human beings. Social businesses should view the need to belong in this perspective. Being social isn’t just a new marketing craze—a technology-enabled addition to available communications channels—it is a basic human need.

So, when thinking through a social communications campaign, whether at the higher social media level or at the more specific social location sharing level, it is important to think through the aspect of the campaign that meets this particular need. Does the campaign make customers feel like they belong, that they are a part of a community, that in some way taking part in the campaign includes them in a broader way than if they don’t take part?

A campaign that shows social consumers that they are part of a community of participants and encourages interaction with them will go a long way to meeting this need. Leveraging that aspect of the social location sharing platform that shows other participants’ actions to each other, which is common to all of them, is going to be key to a successful campaign that seeks to meet this need.

Esteem

The next level is esteem—the desire to be valued and accepted by others. Human beings need to engage in activities that give them a sense of contributing to something and in doing so receive the esteem of others.

Maslow actually noted two levels of esteem, higher and lower:

• The lower-level esteem is based on the need for people to feel that others recognize their value and their status within a group or groups.

• The higher-level esteem is derived from a need for a sense of self-worth, self-reliance, strength, independence, and freedom. This is ranked as the higher of the two because it is obtained through experience and self mastery.

The need for status, for the opportunity to contribute and to receive the esteem of others, can be seen at work on social media platforms all the time. Those who gain what is commonly referred to as “influencer” status are often those who share information most often. These influencers are viewed as “in the know” or having access to information that others do not. Those who provide insight to situations, technology, news, and so on are also seen in this way.

If a person can provide information that the group perceives as having value, that person’s worth increases, and thus, so does the esteem in which that person is held. Many social media app users are driven to achieve this status because the ability to share in the social media world is greatly amplified over their ability to share in the real world. This desire for esteem is partially responsible for what has been observed as the social media echo chamber effect. This can be best described as the constant repetition of the same information, regardless of whether that information has already been shared. This occurs because the desire to be seen and to share useful information is greater than the potential downside of repeating information and being seen as a part of the echo. Also, some people will often re-create content based on the posts of more popular creators in an attempt to attract attention to themselves. This is known as the “me too” concept. This type of content adds nothing to the conversation because the concept is not extended or developed—it is simply rehashed.

This need for esteem is also one explanation of the “self-promoter” type in social media. Self-promoters want to share useful information and share information about themselves in a way that—rightly or wrongly—gives others the impression that they have more influence than he or she actually does. For example, some self-promoters will share pictures of themselves with true influencers at events. These pictures are posed in such a way as to make others think that the self-promoter is close friends with the real influencer. Another technique is to conduct one-sided conversations on Twitter, in which the self-promoter talks “at” the influencer with no response, but continues the conversation as though the influencer has responded.

It is important for marketers to understand the need some people have for appearing to have influence. More importantly, the marketer must be able to see the difference between those who actually wield influence and those that only provide an appearance of doing so. In social location marketing, having a truly influential user share his or her location and a recommendation about that location can be a huge win. However, the truly influential are few and far between. The mid-tier influencer is a better target for social media marketers because these people not only have a degree of influence, but they are striving for greater influence. That means if you provide those people with opportunities to meet their own needs for increasing their status with their peers/user groups, your campaign is likely to see a greater return on investment.

Self-Actualization

Maslow’s final stage in the hierarchy of needs is self-actualization, which is the process of becoming everything that a person is capable of becoming. Of course, the ideal self for each individual will vary for each individual over time. For example, a young man might see his ideal self as a career-orientated, high-achieving businessman. However, as he grows older, perhaps marries and has children, his ideal self might change to become an ideal father. Therefore his steps toward self-actualization will also change.

This process of self-actualization is important to the marketer because your marketing campaigns will be much more powerful if they can speak to the individual at a level that connects with the consumer’s path to becoming his or her ideal self. When it comes to social media, many users want to be—or at least want to be perceived as being—more influential. Therefore, a campaign that helps these consumers realize this goal will resonate with them and is more likely to be adopted. Again, this is why knowing your target audience is so important. By identifying and speaking to the goals of your audience, your campaign has a better chance of success. Although it is still important to retain the genuine nature of the message, this shouldn’t limit the creativity of your campaign. A good example of this is a deodorant campaign aimed at young men whose ideal self is one that is successful with the opposite sex. The campaign plays on this in a humorous way, by implying that the use of the product will have every woman within miles running to them. Even the most socially challenged young man will realize that the claims are not real, and that they are in fact meant as a joke. However, because this campaign is targeting the ideal self of that audience, the message still resonates.

The Needs of the Social Consumer

Social consumers add a layer of complexity to self-actualization because they have both real-world needs and social web needs. Although these needs are usually in sync, social consumers—especially those who are using the social web to express themselves—often will find it easier to realize some of their ideal self goals through the use of social platforms than they would through the use of more traditional real-world platforms. For example, a person might see herself as one day being a published author of a book for children. In the real world, this person is overwhelmed at the prospect of having to find an agent, a publisher, a designer, an editor, and so on. However, by using social web tools, this person can connect with others, establish an online relationship, and find assistance for meeting that ideal. This person can even self-publish the book and promote it via social tools. The point is that this person’s ability to reach her particular self-actualization goal has become easier through the use of the social web.

Marketers must understand how self-actualization goals are more easily met via social media than they would be through more traditional, real-world methods. This understanding is crucial if you are to truly build effective campaigns that meet the needs of, and create engagement among, the social consumers that form the user base of social media in general and social location sharing tools in particular. Although a person can be a social consumer and not use social location sharing tools, it is not true that a person would be a user of social location sharing tools and not be a social consumer. So marketers aiming to use social location marketing must understand the needs of the social consumer first.

Figure 7.1 shows how Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs can be translated to the needs of the social consumer and how those individual needs fit into the increasing scale of needs. A campaign is unlikely to meet all of these needs at the same time. In fact, trying to do so will likely confuse your audience. However, meeting these needs at the appropriate time is much more likely to achieve success.

For example, consider a campaign that speaks to the cleanliness of a food outlet that is run at the time the food is purchased. If the social consumer is buying food, we know what physiological need is being met and therefore which of the corresponding social consumer triggers the consumer is most concerned with and therefore most likely to comment on. There is little point in trying to get the consumer to comment on the feelings of community at that point. That need will be met later in the purchase cycle after the food has been consumed.

Social Customer Relationship Management or Customer Information Management

Companies that leverage social location marketing are likely to encounter social customer relationship management (sCRM). Your company’s experience with information management and what you’re already doing to collect customer information will determine just how deeply you go with sCRM. Social media, in my opinion, is changing Social CRM into Social CIM (Customer Information Management). With respect to social location marketing, this is perhaps the better term to use.

Many organizations have attempted to impose CRM disciplines and systems onto the social media engagements that they undertake without considering first if the applications that they are going to be leveraging will actually supply them with enough data points to enable this.

Social location sharing apps (Foursquare, Gowalla and so on) are not sufficiently developed at this point to provide enough data points that would allow you to fully integrate them into a CRM system. However, they do provide enough data to supplement customer information that is already being captured and further extend customer engagements into the social web; thus, Social CIM is more appropriate.

The difference being that a fully evolved CRM system would allow for the tracking of each engagement point across the social web. Currently, there are no fully integrated systems that allow for this kind of detailed tracking. However, the data provided by some of the tools does allow for information to be captured about a customer. For example, while it might not be possible to find out what other pages a Facebook user likes, it is possible to collect the information that they “like” your business page. This isn’t a complete picture, but it’s useful information nonetheless.

The type of customer information that a business should be collecting at various touch points includes the following:

• Name

• Address

• Telephone number

• Email address

These pieces of data are the very minimum that should be collected. However, you might not—and quite probably should not—collect all this information at the same time. The intention here is to get some usable data from the customer, not to bombard them with questions that end up acting as a barrier to them completing the engagement. So, start with the email address and the corresponding name, and then add from there. There are various ways to capture this type of data from a customer. A customer loyalty program is perhaps the easiest and most straightforward. Other than some printed index cards and a pen, no technology is required for the most basic system. Have the customer fill out the form, give it back to you, and when they come back to the venue, give them some kind of reward in return.

Adding technology to the mix can be as simple as entering the collected information into a spreadsheet, or if you are slightly more advanced, a contact database. If you are going to use social location marketing, you will need this more advanced approach, but even this is still very basic compared to cumbersome CRM systems, and it is usually a lot more manageable by a resource challenged organization.

The data provided by social location sharing apps varies from app to app. For example, at the time this book was written, only Foursquare and Yelp have dedicated dashboards for business owners that provide any kind of metrics. However, all the apps show the check ins at venues. That data collected includes who, when, and where information. For a single location venue, this is the type of data that will add to any other information that you have already captured from other sources that will go into your sCIM system—whether that is software or paper based.

Included in this who, when, where data is one very important piece of information: your competitors. You can start to see when your customers go to your competitors’ venues and then cross-refer that to what your venue was doing on that particular day.

Is there a menu change needed? Are your opening hours different? Were you short staffed that day? Is there a deeper pattern to when your customers prefer your competitors to you?

All this takes time, both to acquire the data and to analyze it. For some this will be beyond their resources; for others this will provide valuable insight into how their business is operating and where there are opportunities for improvement. As with all data, it is important that you use it in a way that does not cause analysis paralysis; that is, the business is not so overwhelmed by the data that it achieves nothing with it. It is equally important that the business not make major decisions based solely on location sharing data. Rather, this data should be used to inform the business about performance and give indicators of areas of improvement, customer loyalty, and opportunities to reward customer loyalty. It should be tempered with other data points, verbal feedback, visible responses, and so on. Social location sharing data is going to be only a small percentage of the data available to any business.

Incorporating customer information capture should always be a part of the strategic thinking that goes into the design of a social location marketing campaign. While the outward appearance of the campaign may well be to provide a fun experience for your customers and potential customers, don’t forget the business aspects of the campaign and miss the opportunity to carry the engagement beyond just the initial contact.

I have seen this done on many occasions with companies both large and small who have missed obvious opportunities to capture customer information in either a discrete, piecemeal fashion or in a more overt manner. Remember that the customer can always say no when asked to share information, but if you never ask them you will never receive it. It is hard to reward customers you don’t know. Capturing that customer information does bring with it the responsibility of privacy and safeguards, certainly something that all businesses should be aware of and have proper procedures in place that control access to and use of customer information.

With organizations from banks to Facebook making the headlines for accidentally leaking customer information, your organization doesn’t need to join the ranks of these companies and have to handle that type of PR nightmare. So before you start capturing and using customer information, make sure you have the capability to secure it and capture only the information that you believe you are really going to need, not just everything you can get hold of. For example, if you don’t need the name of your customers’ children’s’ school, don’t capture it, even if they do check in there (not something I advise people to do).

It is important to think through the information you are going to need from a customer and decide the best route to obtain that information. For example, if you are going to ship them a prize, you will, at some point, need an address to which to ship the prize. However, you won’t need that before you award the prize. But if you want the address so that you can send direct mail, you will need to find a legitimate reason for the consumer to give you that information. The social consumer is unlikely to part with information simply on the off chance that they might be shipped a prize. This is where the transparency demanded by the social consumer comes in. If your intent is to send them product information along with some offers in the form of money-off coupons and so on, and you want to send them in the mail, tell them that is what you want to do.

Yes, it is likely you will capture fewer addresses this way, but the ones you do capture are from consumers who have decided that they want to engage with you through this medium; you have provided them with the choice and they have recognized that. It has become a conversation about how they, as a social consumer, want to be communicated with; this shows them you are valuing their preferences and considering them as part of the conversation. The social consumer values this highly in brands with which they choose to engage. This is part of doing social business.

The same process applies to other information that you capture about your customers. An email address given as a method of identification—for example, used as a login for a personalized experience on a website—is not the same as giving permission to be emailed with offers. Be clear about how the information is going to be used, both at the time of exchange and in the future. Think about the occasions when you have handed out a business card at a meeting, conference, and the like, only to find yourself added to a mailing list for products or information you are not interested in. This is a common theme at conferences: run a competition, put a fishbowl at the conference stand, ask people to drop their card into the bowl for a chance to win. No disclosure that the company is also going to use that business card and add you to their customer information system or that they are going to follow up with you to see if they can sell you something.

At conferences this practice has become so common that it is almost expected. There is a tacit agreement that if you put your card into a fishbowl at a stand, there is a good chance that someone is going to email, call, or write to you about that company’s products or services. With that known, you decide to take that risk in the hopes of winning an iPad, or a vacation, or whatever gift the company is offering as an inducement.

This does not work with the social consumer. The social consumer has higher expectations and a lower tolerance for their information being used in ways that they were not expecting. When Facebook changed its terms of service, there was a huge outcry. People threatened to delete their accounts over it. Campaigns to boycott Facebook were organized. Facebook rethought their approach (though truth be told, not that many accounts were deleted, and the furor died down after a few days). However, the point was made. Social consumers are very savvy. They like to control their information and how it is handled by third parties.

They are increasingly less likely to hand over their information for the proverbial free cup of coffee. They value their information more highly now and see it as part of their social capital. Even more so, they are starting to recognize the value of their social networks and the value it has to marketers, so granting access brings with it an even higher expectation in terms of a value exchange.

In the past, consumers were all too ready to promote a store or product, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes because of the cachet that being associated with the brand brought. Store bags with the name of the store are still a common site in any shopping mall. Customers become walking billboards for the places where they shop. They do this because they are already customers, they are advertising their taste in a particular product line. They are showing the world that they made a purchase choice and in some cases are attracting the social capital that goes with making that choice, especially when it comes to premium brands.

The online marketer has long sought to find a method of leveraging the “store bag” marketing experience. When a consumer makes a purchase through a website, that purchase is closed—no one knows about it except the consumer and the seller. There is no bag to walk around with the product in, no one else to share with at the time of purchase. Social location marketing is one step to filling that void, enabling the marketer to receive the kind of promotion that the real-world store gets from providing a bag and allowing the social consumer to attract social capital associated with a purchase.

Because many users of social location sharing apps link their accounts to their other social media accounts, such as Twitter and Facebook, the promotional value of their check ins is increased. This is the social consumers’ version of walking the mall with a shopping bag (which they might well still be doing in the real world). Now, not only strangers see their preference for a place of purchase but those with whom they share some commonality and perhaps even exert some influence over. This makes the social consumer more powerful than the traditional consumer and therefore more valuable to the marketer.

“I shop here, you should too” is the message the social consumer is broadcasting. This relates back to our discussion earlier in the chapter of a sense of community and of safety in numbers. Human beings seek reassurance in their lives that they are making good decisions. Receiving affirmation and confirmation of their decisions, in even small ways—such as knowing that they are buying a product from a location that has been recommended by a family member, friend, colleague, or even a network connection—provides that reassurance.

Because of this broadcast nature of the social check in and because the social consumer is aware of this, the marketer engaging in social location marketing needs to be aware of the value that the social consumer places on broadcasting a message.

This value will vary from social consumer to social consumer but at the very least has a perceived base value among that particular social consumers’ network. They know what they are worth, or at least what they feel they are worth. Some of this is being driven by sites that now place monetary value on social network exchanges—those that tell users how much their tweets are worth. Other sites, such as Klout, assign scores to users based on their social capital and ability to influence others. Although the true value of these sites is still being debated, what is beyond doubt is that they have awoken in social consumers the recognition that when they share a brand name, product, or service with their network, it has worth; it has a value, whether in a financial sense or in the form of some kind of reward, consumers know that they are entering into an exchange system.

With sites such as WeReward that are enabling marketers to pay users for check ins, and others that are translating social capital into everything from free hotel rooms to upgrades on airlines, the social consumer is fast displaying the signs of “entitlement.” This is most commonly displayed in their decisions to choose a particular brand, product, or service not based solely on fit, price, or even just service, but also on the ability of that brand to increase the consumers’ social capital or reward them in some way for making the purchase.

The social consumer is viewing the exchange as a two-tiered barter system. At the first level is the monetary exchange that we are all familiar with. I give you a certain amount of real-world currency in exchange for your product or service. At the secondary level we are witnessing an almost barter-like system, where I, as the social consumer will perform some kind of social action on behalf of the brand; in return, the brand will provide me with something that I value.

As with prices for goods and services, the cost of the secondary exchange fluctuates from social consumer to social consumer and from brand to brand. Some are willing and able to reward social consumers who are considered to be influential to the brand’s intended audience with high value (in a financial sense) rewards. Others are either less willing or less able to make that exchange. This new economic model is so nascent that as yet it is difficult to see whether it is sustainable, and if it is, at what level. That is, will it follow a preexisting economic theory, or will a new set of theories have to be written for this? (For an introductory discussion on this type of exchange system, I recommend The Whuffie Factor by Tara Hunt).

Sustainable or not, the reality is that this system is here now and it is increasing in its use. Any marketer planning a social media marketing/social location marketing campaign in the next 12 to 18 months would do well to ensure that this element is baked into their plan so as not to be caught out by the expectations of a social consumer base whose sense of entitlement is growing.

What are you prepared to exchange in return for social consumers using their social capital on your behalf? What is your likely return on investment for them doing so, and what is the likely lift going to be? These are the usual questions asked going into any campaign. Where it becomes problematic for most organizations is that they have no data on which to base their judgments. When making a media buy, an organization can look back at its previous media buys and set expectations based on those, but with an exchange based on social capital, there is so little public data available. For most companies, no previous data means it is very hard to make a real-world estimation. With stories circulating of people like the television celebrity Kim Kardashian being paid $10,000 for a single sponsored tweet but no resultant data released regarding the lift produced by that tweet, it is hard to put this into traditional media buying terms.

What might an actual social location marketing campaign look like? Next I’ll propose a few ideas that cover single location venues, multilocation venues, using social location marketing without a location, and business-to-business campaigns.

Elements of a Social Location Marketing Campaign

Regardless of the size of the organization or the number of venues that you have, certain elements will be core to any campaign if it is to be successful. These elements are app agnostic and will fit with the features that each provides.

Fun—One of the main points of a social location marketing campaign should be to avoid “check-in fatigue” among your customers. To ensure that your customers actually want to join in, there needs to be an element of fun. Checking in at your location should not be a chore. Rather, it should be enjoyable.

Measurable—Don’t do something you can’t measure. So many companies embark on campaigns for which they have no means for measuring success. I am really baffled as to why they do this. They come up with a great creative but they give no thought to how they will measure if their wonderful creative had any positive effect on the business.

Repeatable—When people hear about your fun campaign, they will want to join in—or at least that should be the intent. Make sure that your campaign is repeatable—meaning that return customers can repeat the positive experience, and new customers can have the same experience that they’ve heard others have had.

Shareable—The key is word of mouth, so the activity and the reward should be something that participants want to talk about, want to share with their networks, and want to encourage others to take part in. A Facebook post or Tweet that says “I just got XXX from Company Y” is something that will catch the eye of a user’s network and provoke questions.

Creative—By this, I mean do the unexpected, different, or nontraditional. Remember that the audience for this type of campaign is largely made up of early adopters of new technology. These are the people who specifically seek out the new and unusual. They are easily bored. Think hip-hop guinea pigs selling cars, not insurance salesman.

Focused—Don’t make the campaign too broad, because this will lead to confusion among the audience. Your audience should recognize immediately what the campaign is about. Focus the campaign and the rewards around a particular product, service, or event. The product, service, or event that is the focal point of the campaign can always be used to promote other offerings that you have. This is much better than trying to fit your entire catalog of offerings into one campaign.

Reward—Ensure that the reward fits the campaign theme, as well as the audience and the effort that the participants have to put into earning it. Making the participants jump through hoops is allowable if the reward for doing so is perceived as worthwhile. Again, the days of the free coffee being a sufficient reward are over.

So now that we have a better understanding of who we are marketing to, and the ways in which we can plug into their needs, what does a campaign actually look like? What are the elements that go into a campaign for different types of businesses and how do those fit into the greater marketing communications strategy?

In the upcoming three sections, we consider the various types of social location marketing campaigns for businesses that have a physical location, and also consider how a business without a physical location or one that is not open to their customers can still join in the social location marketing space.

What is important to consider with these ideas is that they are not meant as blueprints, but as suggestions drawn from experience with the tools, conversations, and interviews with businesses already using them. I’ve included my own thoughts on how best to leverage the platforms. If you try out any of these and have success, please feel free to contact me with your story (contact details are in the last chapter of the book). I’m always looking for case studies. If you try them and they don’t work, please contact me as well, just not through a lawyer!

My recommendation is to read through the ideas, think about how they apply to your business and your audience, and then adapt them so that they make the most sense for you and your organization. Most of all, however, have fun with them. As I have said before, with social media in general and social location marketing in particular, given the low cost of giving social location marketing a spin, you aren’t risking the bank when trialing these campaigns—or at least you shouldn’t be. Remember what works or doesn’t with one app might well work or not on another. That’s the beauty of the diversity that currently exists with social location sharing apps.

Single Location Businesses

Single location venues were the first to recognize the usefulness of social location sharing apps in terms of marketing. These early adopter businesses had little or no marketing materials to work with and had only one opportunity to offer a reward—when someone became Mayor (see Figure 7.2).

Figure 7.2. The earliest attempts at social location marketing were pretty basic.

Since then, businesses realized that they have to offer more to their customers (see the A.J. Bombers case study at the end of Chapter 6 for an example) if they are to really get engagement. With the advent of new apps, businesses are now able to offer their customers more.

Let’s consider an imaginary coffee shop that for convenience we will call Bob’s Brews. Bob’s Brews wants to use social location marketing as part of its broader social media efforts. It has one location positioned in the downtown area of Everytown, a small city with a population of a few hundred thousand. Most of its current business comes from passing foot traffic. Bob’s Brews offers a limited food menu and an extensive coffee menu.

In this imaginary city, there are a total of six coffee shops, including two outlets from national chains. So Bob’s Brews has to compete not only with local competition but with the marketing budget of national chains. It is looking to social location marketing to offer some form of differentiation in its marketing campaign because none of the other coffee houses are using it at present.

Bob’s Brews is going to need to ask itself some questions before it embarks on its campaign:

• How much do we want to spend on this type of marketing?

• What do we already know about our customers?

• How are we already reaching them through social media?

• Which platform will we use?

• What will we offer as rewards for loyalty?

• How do we make this fun for the customer and profitable for us?

Given that Bob’s Brews is a small outlet and a single venue location, we will assume that it does not have thousands of dollars to spend on a marketing campaign. So we will, for the sake of this example, assume that whatever is spent has to be under $500, including promotional items.

In this example, we are going to accept that the staff of Bob’s Brews are fairly proficient at recognizing regulars to the coffee shop and know a few of them by name. However, that is as far as they have taken their Customer Information Management to date. In other words, the Social CIM resides in the heads of the staff and not in a system anywhere, which is a fairly common situation for a lot of small businesses.

So far, Bob’s Brews has set up a Twitter account and has a Facebook page. However, it doesn’t have a strong grasp on how to use either of these tools and makes only occasional status updates, usually with special offers. It occasionally gets replies on Twitter, but these are few and far between.

Originally, Bob’s Brews thought that offering a free coffee might be the direction to go in for a reward, but it has since realized that it needs to offer something a little more compelling, and so it has decided to offer an escalating scale of rewards. The first level will be a reusable travel coffee mug; the second level will be two pounds of the winner’s favorite coffee; the third and final level, which will be awarded to only one winner, will be a blend named after the winner, which will be added to the Bob’s Brews coffee menu.

To win these prizes, Bob’s Brews decided to limit the campaign to a one-month duration and to award the prizes based on frequency of visits, some form of interaction with the venue, and finally the best suggested blend of coffee beans for the new menu item.

What it has yet to decide on is which app to use to promote this campaign. To make this decision, it is useful to step through a process similar to that outlined in the decision tree shown in Figure 7.3.

Figure 7.3. A decision tree can be helpful when determining which social media app is the best fit.

The tree shows us that the more flexible we make the rewards system, the greater the options are in terms of the apps we have to select from. Conversely, the narrower we make the reward system, the fewer our choices.

This tree covers only 5 of the 10 or so apps that are available at the time of writing. However, these five apps offer the most in terms of flexibility to offer a reward system to a small business. This is especially true for small businesses looking for a method of using the app that is free or very low cost to them.

Given the nature of the campaign that Bob’s Brews has decided on, and following the tree, it quickly becomes apparent that SCVNGR is the most applicable choice of app for Bob’s Brews to run their campaign on.

That is not to say that it should ignore the other platforms. For example, it should definitely claim its venue on each of the apps and ensure that the information on them is correct and up to date. In particular, when it comes to Yelp, Bob’s Brews should ensure that it has set up a Yelp page and logged in to the business dashboard to ensure that it does not have any unanswered negative reviews.

All this should be done in parallel with running a marketing campaign. Remember that social media, including social location marketing, is a two-way communication channel. It is not just there for a business to push out a message but is often used by customers as a way of communicating, either directly or indirectly with the business.

SCVNGR, as discussed in Chapter 6, offers a progressive gaming experience for users and allows business owners to create different challenges within their venue that the user can complete to receive points. These points can be accumulated toward a specific reward.

By making the campaign time constrained, Bob’s Brews decided to run it for only one month; it will need to ensure that it communicates the campaign through the use of their other social media channels, such as Twitter and Facebook. This is an overhead that the business needs to recognize at the outset of the campaign. These campaigns do not run themselves. They require involvement throughout the process. It is essential, for example, to ensure that all members of staff know what the campaign is and how it works. Starbucks was embarrassed when it partnered with Foursquare to offer free coffee through the app, only to find that not all store managers had been briefed on the campaign and were turning away customers who were requesting their reward. They subsequently pulled the campaign. Doing so not only cost them a marketing opportunity but made them seem incompetent—not something any business wants.

So having decided what the campaign will consist of, which app it will run on, and how the rewards will be made, Bob’s Brews is ready to enter the world of social location marketing. Given SCVNGR’s options for challenges, Bob’s Brews can offer its customers the opportunity to interact with the environment that they are in. For example, it can set up challenges as simple as getting customers to take a picture of their favorite brew. However, the app gives the flexibility that if the company wanted, it could do something a lot more complex and fun. For example, it might set up a “Barista” challenge, where customers get to be the Barista as part of a challenge.

The actual challenges will depend on the creativity of the team putting them together and the constraints of the environment they find themselves operating in. Obviously, customer safety is paramount, so that has to be considered when putting these challenges together.

As you can see from this example, it is a fairly easy path to go from no social location marketing to having a full-blown campaign. The important element of any campaign is to know why you are doing it. In this case, Bob’s Brews wants to achieve a level of differentiation from its competitors. By running these challenges, it is very likely to gain a reputation as being a “fun” place to drink coffee and certainly a different place to enjoy a brew.

Multiple-Venue Businesses

Cohesiveness is key with multiple-venue businesses when it comes to marketing communications, whether those are social media based or not. Although regional variance is allowable and often encouraged to ensure a more “local” flavor, offers that are available in only one area or at certain venues are more likely to frustrate customers than attract them.

If a consumer is a customer of a brand in one location and encounters that brand in another location, the consumer expects a similar experience. The Marriot Hotel chain recognized this many years ago and goes to great lengths to ensure that their facilities are almost identical anywhere in the world. The closet always contains an ironing board and an iron, for example. This provides a level of reassurance to its customers. So it is with marketing communications and marketing campaigns.

If I am a customer taking part in a reward-based campaign at one location, I have the expectation that I will be able to continue taking part at other locations as well. This comes down to even basic customer reward programs like loyalty stamp cards. If I pick up the card at one location and then make a purchase at another location, I still expect to have the card stamped for my purchases. What I don’t expect is to be told that the card is valid only at the original location. I point this out because surprisingly this still happens.

Marketing communications is not just a customer-focused activity, it must be an internal activity as well. All locations must be involved in the activity and be aware of the campaign and how it applies to their location.

One advantage that the multiple venue business has over the single venue business is the capability to build in an element of “bread-crumb” game play. In this form of campaign, the idea is that customers can take part at a single location, but they can achieve a greater reward by playing at multiple locations—by completing a challenge/task at one location that leads them to a follow-up task at the next location, and so on.

This type of game play is better to suited to a longer-term campaign. With this type of game play comes the additional requirement to provide progress status to the players. They need the system to keep track of how close they are to their reward. This acts not only as a reminder but as a motivator to keep them interested in continuing to play the game.

Multiple-venue campaigns are, by their very nature, more complex than those operated at a single location. There is no reason why a business that operates multiple locations cannot operate the same campaign at each of its locations, with the caveat given earlier, that the rewards are collectible at each location rather than just the one where the user commenced playing.

This is certainly a good starting point for businesses with multiple locations; it allows the organization to ensure that all staff members are given the same information and that they all understand the concept. As the organization gains experience with social location marketing, it can build in the more complex elements that incorporate variance in the location.

For example, a business that has outlets in different regions of the United States might want to have an overall theme for its social location marketing but have regional variations so that the campaign has a local flavor and is therefore more appealing to local customers.

The basic principles of a social location marketing campaign do not change, and the decision tree given earlier is just as applicable to the multiple-location business as it is to the single-location business. One key difference is the volume of data that the campaign generates, and this should not be underestimated. Again, there is no point in running a campaign without clear metrics in place beforehand and a clear understanding of what those metrics will mean. What part of the business operation will they impact, and who will collate and report the data captured?

A multiple-location business operating a well thought through social location marketing campaign has the potential to generate a considerable amount of earned media (blog posts, traditional media coverage, and so on), which goes a long way to meeting the ROI questions posed by the C-Suite. These side-effects of utilizing what is still considered to be a new and innovative marketing channel should not be underestimated when contemplating the use of social location marketing. The very fact of being first in an industry, or just in a particular location, to use these types of campaigns can bring a considerable amount of brand awareness beyond the actual campaign.

Marketing Without a Location

This seems counterintuitive. How can you possibly use social location marketing if you lack the key element of a location? This is a question I am asked frequently at presentations I give on this topic. It applies equally to the business-to-business arena as well as those businesses that operate only in an online capacity.

If the public can’t check in at your location, how are you going to use these apps as marketing communication channels? The answer is surprisingly simple: use someone else’s location. I am not suggesting here that you simply take over someone’s store as though it was your own. But the use of familiar and popular landmarks as a focal point for the location piece of your campaign works very well. In fact, when it was first launched, this was exactly how Gowalla promoted the service. Obviously, it didn’t have people checking in at its offices in Austin. Instead, Gowalla focused its marketing campaign around popular locations such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the Empire State building in New York, and other popular landmarks.

As we discussed in Chapter 5, Coca-Cola, who has no retail locations, successfully utilized social location marketing campaigns by simply having a promotions team member appear at various locations throughout a city. This not only provided a set of locations around which to base the campaign, but it increased the game play of the campaign because players had to also track and locate the promotions team member.

Several other companies have used this same model. Interestingly enough, even those with locations where the public can check in have found this type of campaign to be effective.

Landmark locations do offer the opportunity for a greater level of interaction than those of a store or other type of retail environment, if for no other reason than they make for better pictures, which can be uploaded via the app. This comes with the usual caveats of making sure that whatever you are challenging people to do is actually possible and legal. (Getting them to spray paint your logo on a famous landmark might well get you brand awareness, but not in the way you want!)

Another option for a business without a publicly accessible location is the use of the trips feature within Gowalla, SCVNGR, or Yelp. By setting up a series of locations in the app that are in some way connected, and listing them as a recommendation by your business, you get brand awareness without any campaign.

I did this for our company. We do not have a location that has visitors, so I created two trips in Gowalla—a coffeehouse tour and a restaurant tour, both in Austin. As people check in at the locations I listed, they are notified that they just checked in at a spot that is part of the Incslinger Coffeehouse Tour or the Incslinger Restaurant Tour. When they complete the tour, if their Gowalla account is connected to Twitter, it sends a tweet announcing that they completed the tour, which gives me the opportunity to reach out to them via Twitter.

Simple, effective, and free. No location needed. This type of mini-campaign is more suited to brand awareness but there is no reason you couldn’t attach a free offer to the tour for the person who completes it first; you can also promote that via other social media channels.

The point is to ensure that you know why you are doing it and what you are looking to get out of it, which brings us to the next section of this chapter.

Getting to the ROI

As I’ve mentioned throughout this book, knowing what you are going to measure is crucial, not just to social location marketing but to any form of marketing communication. It’s critical that you understand how you are going to track ROI before you start a campaign, not after it’s already live. Thinking about ROI early allows you to design your campaign so that you actually have a means for measuring success. If your campaign is designed to raise brand awareness, how will you measure that? If it is designed to support a product launch, how will you judge that it was successful?

Whereas traditionally ROI is measured in dollars and cents, you can use other measures to estimate the effectiveness of a campaign. However, ultimately there is no reason why social media marketing in general and social location marketing in particular should not have a financial element to it. Why shouldn’t it drive sales? Why shouldn’t it increase revenue? Campaigns that do this tend to be more creative and more engaging, and for many their biggest obstacle is getting past the technology.

Don’t use this as an excuse not to measure and not to push the metrics into the realms of revenue. The closer a campaign gets to showing true ROI, the greater the support from the C-Suite. Giving away free products doesn’t have to lose you money. Though many marketers factor this loss into the budget for the campaign, they fail to factor in the sales that they expect to generate from the campaign. As discussed previously in this book, part of the reason is they have little or no reliable data from the social location marketing efforts of others on which to base their assumptions.

One of the easiest ways to get to the metrics of a campaign is to use social media monitoring tools such as those from ViralHeat, Lithium or Radian6. All these tools provide data regarding the volume of conversations being undertaken about a particular set of terms, which might include your organization’s brand, product names or services, across social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, as well as various blogs. In addition these tools also provide an analysis of the sentiment of these posts and conversations.

Before starting your campaign, take a baseline and measure what people are already saying about your product, service or brand. Run the campaign and see what the impact is of that on the level of conversations, the places where those conversations are happening (blogs, Facebook, Forums, Twitter etc) and then measure again after the campaign. This provides a very tangible set of metrics that can be used to illustrate how a particular social media campaign impacted the organization.

That is why my recommendation is always to start small, figure out the friction points within your organization and within the delivery mechanism of the campaign, and then build out from there. This methodology will provide a much better basis for a marketer to make more educated estimates of return for a campaign.

Case Study

A Shaggy Dog Story

Venue: Austin Dirty Dog

Participant: Blair Smith

Austin Dirty Dog is a five-location organization centered in Austin, Texas. They provide a very popular dog wash environment, where dog owners can choose to either bathe their dogs themselves or have it done by professional groomers.

Austin Dirty Dog was an early adopter of social location marketing, having noticed that some of their venues were already being entered into the Foursquare database by their customers.

The first step for them was to edit each of the venue pages to ensure that the information about each location was correct and update things such as telephone numbers, Twitter accounts, and so on.

Having completed this process, they decided to work out a series of “Mayor Specials” that they would use to promote the use of Foursquare at their venues and to engage their customers.

They completed the paperwork and submitted it to Foursquare only to be told that at the time Foursquare was only supporting specials from food and beverage outlets, places where they felt people gathered to be social. Obviously they were not regulars at the dog wash!

Eventually, Foursquare opened up the specials functionality to other businesses, and Austin Dirty Dog continued to use it. They put some signage at each location and after a few weeks were excited to get their first “Mayor.”

After they had been running their partnership with Foursquare for a few months, I checked in with them to find out what their results had been. I asked Blair Smith, co-owner, what impact partnering with Foursquare had on the business:

“I honestly haven’t seen any impact on our business—at least directly. Dog grooming/washing isn’t something that people generally do on a whim. However, when people check in and post it to their Facebook/Twitter accounts, we may get new customers from that. However, I’ve never been told that directly.”

To date they had not had anyone redeem the Mayor offer. They hadn’t seen any increase in revenue that they could directly attribute to the use of Foursquare, and overall it had become something that they had no real sense of worth from doing.

They decided to try and work with Gowalla, but after contacting them and not receiving a response for over two weeks, they were not hopeful that Gowalla was going to be any better an app for them than Foursquare had been.

Was this the wrong type of business for social location marketing? Was Austin Dirty Dog just too early to the game? Overall I feel that they were too early to the game in some ways, in that Foursquare was not ready for them as a type of business. I also think that with a lack of focus on an actual campaign and the accompanying metrics, this methodology was not going to work.

However, I think this is a valuable lesson for all small businesses to learn from. Don’t expect the new medium to do the work for you. For every new method you try, there will be additional work for the business to make a success of it.

I also think that as much as all the app creators want to be available to all businesses, they are focusing on those that will generate most revenue for them as companies, which is to be expected. Certainly Foursquare and Gowalla are now rolling out more of a “self-serve” model for marketers who do not have the large budgets to partner directly with these app creators, but who want to still be involved in a way that makes them different from their competitors.