Back in April of this year Local Search News did a great piece on the local business opportunity for Twitter and it seems that this is the first big announcement I’ve seen yet in that direction.

What does the integration of Twitter on CitySearch include?  Well business will be able to include an existing Twitter account, or create a new business specific account, through their CitySearch profile set up. Once set up: 

• Consumer will see a stream of recent tweets related to the business posted with a one minute delay to the web…. sandwiched between the original editorial and consumer reviews on the business profile page.
• Consumers will have the option to look at the full listing of the last 100 tweets related to that businesses twitter name
• A new feature on its way will pull out common words from tweets for a particular business in order to synthesize the sentiment or common themes without users having to read through hundreds of tweets.
• The fresh ‘content’ also has the potential to boost the visibility of the CitySearch profile pages among search engines.

This seems like a great move for both sides. As a leader in its field CitySearch is always looking for new ways to offer more and more information and tools to its users, and Twitter provides a unique new real time supplement to the longer form reviews that currently help make CitySearch stand out.  Is a restaurant packed tonight, or did Madonna just show up? The existing web reviews system just wasn’t a good solution for that, but Twitter is.

For Twitter this is a significant move into the arena of potentially useful commercial applications of their technology with the leader in the online city guide market. 

It will be interesting to see how successful the filtering and parsing technology works… from my experience there are a few gem tweets in a stream, but often a huge number of largely useless tweets as well, if not downright spam, so helping filter through and letting the genuine and useful ones raise to the top may be key to its usefulness.

While there is no specific location technology at work here, everything about this deal speaks to creating place specific digital information, which is likely to be largely created by and for folks directly in the vicinity of the place. In fact, if there is an algorithm helping to control what tweets are shown, I would hope that they seriously consider factoring into the equation the physical proximity of where the tweet was created in order to give more weight to those actually at the location.

I think that this may take six months of fine tuning, but I think it has the potential to be a huge hit.

As soon as Apple opened their app store I loaded every application I could find that looked like it might make cool use of location awareness, and I must say that after playing around with quite a few, Loopt certainly seems like the best so far… not including the Google powered maps application that comes standard.

But before I get too far along in my experiences with the various applications, I think that everyone that is currently making a living or hoping to make a living in the world of LBS, needs to drop whatever they’re doing and personally write a hundred thank you notes to Steve Jobs and all the staffers over at Apple that made location awareness such an important part of the iPhone (for the computer geeks among us, the thank you notes are that stack of little square pieces of paper that your grandmother gave you that you stuck in the bottom drawer of your dresser).

Ok so with that out of the way, there are a number of finder applications available for the iPhone and they’re all trying to do something slightly different: find friends, find places, find events, etc. From the initial batch that became available with the launch of the app store I tried Loopt, Yelp, Eventful, Whrrl, Where, EarthComber, Limbo and Nearby.

The only ones that I still use today are Loopt and Yelp.

You can tell from using the application that Loopt has been doing this for a while, and has learned the pain points for consumers and has done a great job of streamlining and simplifying the interface… there is a difference between complexity and power that I think Loopt gets… Loopt is not complex, but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful.

First of all, getting a new Loopt account up and rolling was super easy, in fact it was so quick and painless that I’ve long since forgotten exactly what I had to do, I think it was just supplying my phone number and maybe a password… but I remember going from tapping on the icon to having a new account in well under a minute, and that’s all that matters.

Next it allows me to add friends either by typing in their phone number or going through and selecting friends from my iPhone contacts… again a very easy process.

The maps are provided by Microsoft Virtual Earth and are great quality and easy to navigate around through one finger panning and zooming, and they’ve partnered with Yelp to help beef up the POI listings and reviews.

Updating your friends on “What’s Up” is another simple 2 step process, just click on “What’s Up” and “Update” or feel free to add a blurb or photo (either from the camera or from your saved pictures) about what you’re up to.

But the coup de gras, is the link you can create with a Loopt Facebook widget. Once you’ve added the application to your Facebook account and linked it with your mobile application, all of your updates feed into your Facebook account and show up on your wall. This is important for me because at this stage in the game finding friends that can or want to get Loopt is not easy, so being confined just to Loopt with just my tech savvy friends would be a pretty lonely experience, but the Facebook updating utility allows me to connect with my larger group of Facebook friends, even if it is just for me to post “What’s Up”… in fact I now find myself providing updates through Loopt instead of directly via Facebook.

Now I am hoping that they come out with an embeddable widget where I can add my location and ‘What’s Up’ in places besides Facebook, like the Skyhook/Loki widget.

The Others

Ok so here is a quick rundown of my experiences with Yelp, Eventful, Whrrl and Where. I’ll save the others for another post, another day:

Yelp, is also another well done and slick application, although I think they still have some work to do in organizing the information. The default categories include categories that seem random to me… are that many people really looking for coffee & tea? Maybe so but not me. And when I search for restaurants around me, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason behind the results provided, which I find frustrating… the top 10 results can be up to 20 blocks away, even when there are obviously ten restaurants closer… it seems to be taking into account quality/popularity in addition to proximity but the heck if I can figure out how to change the default setting. In reality I don’t typically get the results I want from proximity searches, although when I already know the name of the restaurant I do use the Yelp search function to get a better idea about the restaurant before committing to going.

I loaded up Eventful hoping to be able to quickly find nearby and last minute activities around the city to do with my kids, ala GoCityKids. In reality Eventful on the iPhone seems to really focus on the young hipster crowd looking for a band or show. I tried playing around with it anyway to see if I could find a upcoming and nearby college football game to go watch in the New York City area… a search for “college football’ returned some comedian’s routine under “Events” and a midtown bar that evidently was showing the BCS championship game back in January under “Venues”. I know NYC is a bad town for college football, but c’mon it can’t be THAT bad!

Whrrl and Where were non starters for me.

Where kept crashing for the first few weeks I gave it a try, I tried again more recently and it seems a little bit more stable now, but I still get error messages. Like Yelp the organization of Where seems to leave quite a bit to be desired… I am still not sure what to do with Quibblo Polls, SkyMap or HeyWhatsThat (no mountains in NYC, so I assume I don’t need that) and I’ve tried signing up for Buddy Beacon twice now with no luck. Zipcar and Starbucks locators are nice, but I don’t drink much Starbucks coffee or rent Zipcar vehicles, so don’t need those either. The application feels like one of those really slick $2 million dollar commercials for a financial services company that forgets to put the name of the bank in at the end… in other words it gets you all worked up and interested through the slick look and feel, but then forgets what the original purpose was in the first place…

Whrll gave me major password problems. I had a Whrrl account from online that didn’t seem to work on the iPhone application, so I couldn’t get into it for a while. When I did get in I remembered that none of my other friends use it and I didn’t really care what other top Whrrlrs thought about stuff in my neighborhood. So despite a nice slick application, I can’t figure out what to do with it and don’t want to hound and explain to my friend why they should get on it. So I am taking that one off.

Look out for another post on round two of the iPhone location aware apps coming soon.

I’ve grown to the believe that there is a huge opportunity in the area that ReachLocal is targeting… there is so much advertising money floating around in the local markets and until recently so little attention being paid to servicing brick and mortar retail folks who just have a few thousand dollars a month to spend on digital advertising.

While Google is now up to something like 1.5 million advertisers, and has done a great job of servicing the long tail of online oriented advertisers. It’s the long tail of offline advertisers, which is proving to be a bit tricky to convert to online, not just because they’re the long tail and there are tens of millions of them, but they don’t live and die by traffic to their website… heck many don’t even have websites and can be pretty ambivalent toward the whole thing!

One of the newest companies to pop up on my radar screen in this area is a company called Paper G recently started by some Yale and Harvard students.  Paper G is focused on the digital display advertising space and one of their products PlaceLocal is trying to solvea familiar problem for this market which is how you make it super easy for folks with very little time, digital resources and digital wherewithal to develop and run digital display ad creative. 

The PlaceLocal product greatly simplifies the process of making an online display ad. I gaveit a trial with a popular burger joint, Five Napkin Burger, that opened a new location on the Upper West Side a few months ago.  Essentially all I had to do was type the name of the business and the city andPlace Local did most of the rest.  After typing in “Five Napkin Burger” and  “New York” PlaceLocal first found the business (ok so it was really the old location in Hells Kitchen, but I give them credit there anyway) and one click later it was busy scraping the web or hitting various APIs to find stuff to  put into the ad. While I waited a minute or two for it to do its thing, I must admit that I was pretty skeptical that it could be this easy and still be good, but I must say the result was pretty damn impressive.

After more than a few minutes of whirling ‘working’ icons… woo hoo it had found a bunch of content to use in the ad!  At this point you get to pick some VERY basic components to put in your ad like the logo, the design style and click through URL and PlaceLocal populates the rest with a slick flash movie full of restaurant images, menu images, and snippets from reviews from popular restaurant review sites like Yelp. 

There were a few hiccups with my trial run with Five Napkin Burger… PlaceLocal couldn’t come up with a logo so I had to crop the company name out of another image, but it was super easy to do with the tools provided by PlaceLocal.  And while at first pass most of the reviews selected were stellar there is one looping through that disses the endive leaves on their burger, and another Yelp snippet which simply says “a perfect side for this perfect burger” with no reference to what that side may be.   Fortunately they have great tool so you can easily get back in there and see the whole review and then edit what appears in the snippet in the ad.  In fact their tool for messing around with the assets that go into the ad were pretty good… you can add various photos and change things like business category and hours etc… and the whole thing is vey well designed to make it powerful enough to change many of the things you wanted to change without introducing too much complexity to the process.

Once the ad is created you can buy into three simplified buckets of media buying with spends ranging from $300 to $1,000 at what works out to about a $15 CPM.  

I am not sure how much traction they’ll get as a stand alone place to create and run local advertising but as a tool for easily creating local oriented ads the product does very, very well.  So it’s not surprising to see local newspapers and folks like Time Out New York flocking to check out their service as a valuable tool for their sales force selling their own owned and operated sites.  Over time too many of the similar format of intertwined user reviews and photography in a flash movie may begin to get old, but I suspect that they can develop some new templates to keep the ad creative options fresh and flexible.

It shouldn’t take long before folks like CitySearch, ReachLocal and others take notice and try to rip it off or partner with these guys.

So I’ll just dive back in with one of the ones that I have been wanting to investigate further, just because it seems to come up the most and I’ve been negligent in checking them out… it’s Groupon and what I’ve heard more than a few times about them growing into a big player in the future of location based marketing.

So I finally spent two minutes signing up for Groupon and loaded up their iPhone app. As a consumer it’s pretty damn easy, simply register and tell Groupon what city you live in and every day they tell you about a super duper new deal that you can get at an area business… like a yummy Cheesesteak sandwich for $4 instead of the regular $11, or an $88 round of golf for $42. As with most anything there is some fine print, but it doesn’t seem too bad, and the savings often pretty significant.

For businesses the biggest benefit is driving sometimes huge amounts of foot traffic through the door to take advantage of the deal. Even if they make less (or no money) because of the deep discount, a bunch of customers being driven through your front door is usually not such a bad thing… and did I mention that unlike regular coupons, there is no upfront costs, Groupon just takes their cut once enough customers buy the deal through the Groupon website.

Coupons have been with us for over a century, and Groupon is just coupons on digital steroids with a few differences besides the no upfront costs for businesses. Unlike traditional coupons with Groupons there is just a single offer per market per day… so there is a sense of scarcity and ‘getting a deal’ created, and arguably Groupon gets customers a bigger discounts than most comparable paper coupons. Deals are marketed both by Groupon itself, but also since a minimum number of buyers is necessary for anyone to get the deal, customers are encouraged to promote the deal to their friends adding another powerful social marketing partner in the customers themselves.

So there you have it, a quite successful example of a company using a unique approach and leveraging digital technology to drive good old foot traffic into a brick and mortar store. Online driving offline…  woo hoo! The power of social networking… you betcha! Digital cutting out the middleman once again… yep. But is this really a killer location based opportunity? I am not so sure.

In the general sense, the offers are available on a market by market basis so in that sense its a location based offer, but only in the most basic sense. It’s not what I’d call hyper local or even local since they seem to be targeting large major metros… and from one point of view the lack of submarket geo location can be seen as a detriment… that $4 cheesesteak sandwich that is usually $11 is great but the heck if I am going to hop the subway ($4.50 round trip) for an extra 20 minutes during my lunch hour to go 25 blocks out of my way to save $7 on a sandwich… and that’s the problem I’ve had with many of the offers I’ve seen from Groupon so far: nice savings, but often not products relevant to me or convenient to places I go. The company seems to argue that this is kind of the point, getting people to go new places and try new things by dangling the carrot of a super low price in front of them.

But for Groupon, going more local than they currently do could begin to get tricky. In many ways their current model and going more local seems to work against one another… the web lowers barriers to make it easier and easier to get more and more people involved, achieving the big numbers of buyers that Groupon needs to be effective. Creating more locally targeted offers is great for potentially increasing relevance, but it also creates more and more offers diminishing the impact of any one offer, both in the marketing ‘wow’ factor and the number of folks who may be virally promoting any one offer. Too many friends ‘promoting’ their area deals would run the risk of devolving the offers into something that looks more like spam than a can’t miss opportunity, and seemingly the amount of Groupon promotion behind any one offer would also be diminished.

I also wonder how much of a role redemption rates play into their model… as in someone bought it because it seems like a cool thing to try and for not much money, but never get around to redeeming it. Stats seem to vary about redemption rates with gift cards ranging from 4% to 15%+ of gift cards going un redeemed, and 33% of the value never being redeemed (tower group). And you’d think that the potential for un-redeemed Groupons may even be higher for something like a $4 cheesesteak sandwich versus say a $20 Best Buy gift card.  This is another area where more localization may work against their current model, the closer and more convenient a retailer is, the less likely that they Groupon will go un redeemed.

It sounds like increased localization is already on the Groupon roadmap, it will be interesting to see how they do it and if it’s a success.  The amount of buyers they can get excited and on board for deals sometimes seems pretty amazing. I suspect there is a certain snowball effect derived from viral components of online social networking marketing that drive those large numbers of buyers today… the question will become how they’ll continue to exploit that when deals are geographically more fenced in, inherently limiting (or at least muddying the waters of) who is being marketed to for any single offer.

After playing with the geo location features on my mobile twitter client Tweetie and also playing with the location oriented Twinkle application by Tapulous, which all use various types of technology to determine your location and the filter out tweets from folks outside a certain radius… going back to the old school way of registering yourself on a good old fashioned website
with your twitter name and your city or zip code just felt well, very old school…

So I had to dig around and find out why such an old school thing like a local twitter registration site would even exist, let alone seem to be proliferating.

From the best I can tell, there seem to be two potential drivers… one is that I was suprised to learn that nearly 2/3 of twitter users are using the service directly through the web or via a desktop application. Maybe it’s because of how I was introduced to Twitter, but I always thought it more as a mobile thing… you know with the 140 character limit thing and all… well evidently it’s not. So that alone explains alot, most people don’t have the technological approach to a geo-filter available and they just want to find local people to twitter with… fair enough.

But the other cool aspect of a list of local twitter users is for accomplishing the opposite of what the location aware technology does for ya… location aware tech allows you to see those immediately around you and their tweets, but the old fashioned registration site in theory could let you drop in on virtual tweeps and their tweets in a specific area somewhere else.

Now the inner Colbert in me may joke that focusing in and reading the tweet stream of the general public in Shanghai if you live in New York, seems pretty damn useless, and in many cases it probably is. But in some cases it could be valuable, for example if you’re heading to a new city and are looking for recommendations on where to get a good steak, who better than to ask than the local twittersphere in the city where you’re headed. Or if you want to keep tabs on what the buzz is in your old college town, you can drop in on the local tweet stream there… in theory having a local group to zoom in on could have huge possibilities in allowing journalists to zoom in to follow the local action related to a breaking news event in a particular area.

On a related note there is a great article on Local Search News about how Twitter should register and create accounts for local businesses to help better identify them in the twittersphere. Not so we can follow the local Italian restaurant to read a constant stream of tweets about how good their last batch of lasagna is, but to allow for a common currency for referring to specific places and establishments as twitter nation so often does. It makes a lot of sense to me.

Traffic.com Offers Solutions to Traffic Problems Highlighted in Texas Transportation Institute Study

Web Site, Toll-Free Hotline, and Mobile Alerting Solutions

CNN Money

WAYNE, Pa., Sept. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Traffic.com, a NAVTEQ company , and a leading provider of personalized traffic information, provides information to help drivers avoid the worsening traffic conditions reported in yesterday’s Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) 2007 Urban Mobility Report. Traffic.com offers free, convenient solutions that equip drivers with the information they need to get where they’re going faster.

According to the TTI report, 4.2 billion hours are spent stuck in traffic each year in the U.S., wasting 2.9 billion gallons of fuel at a cost of $78 billion. Traffic has gotten worse, affecting more of the day, and becoming more unpredictable. With morning and evening rush hours lasting as long as 3 hours in large U.S. urban areas, a reliable and immediate source of current roadway conditions is imperative for drivers. On-demand, real-time updates as well as scheduled alerts have become a necessity for on-the-go drivers.

“Free commuter solutions offered by Traffic.com keep drivers more informed and better able to plan routes to avoid traffic congestion,” explained John MacLeod, Executive Vice President of NAVTEQ, “and we’ve packaged that information so it is at people’s fingertips, wherever they may be.”

Traffic.com’s free Web site and personalized alerting solutions give users comprehensive city-wide information as well as detailed traffic condition information.

For free real-time traffic information on-demand, drivers across the country can:

   Call Traffic.com's free traffic hotline at 1-866-MY-TRAFC (1-866-698-7232)

    Text a city code or saved MyTraffic drive name to TRAFC (87232)

    Access Traffic.com mobile Web site at http://mobi.traffic.com, via Web-enabled cell phone or mobile device browser

Last week there was a really good article in Business Week on Sense Networks, which I think is one of the more interesting companies out there in LBS.

I had posted about Sense Networks previously, but the Business Week article gives a nice long overview of some of the recent developments.

The article focuses a lot on the tribes and the study of the behaviors of those within the tribe for the purposes of mobile advertising delivery, which is very interesting indeed, but we may have quite a wait before that information could be put to use in a live, on demand ad call, particularly since there seems to be a lot of pushback to using such information on an individual user level, as opposed to in aggregated form.

The whole article made me think about drilling down on the places rather than the people and how old school some of the current marketing tools really are and how a refresh may be in order. Take for instance target marketing by zip code. First of all, if the U.S. covers over 9 million square kilometers, and includes 43k zip codes, that means on average a zip code covers 213 square kilometers. Sure there are some sweeping generalizations you can posibly make about everyone in that 213 square kilometer area, but they would be just that… sweeping generalizations.

I just had a look at a map of my hometown zip code in Gainesville, Florida which is home to the University of Florida and which in many ways is a pretty dichotomous place, where conservative deep south meets liberal college town, and just eyeballing the map I can think of at least four different ‘areas’ of residences which probably have little more than a love of Gator football and a Publix in common.

The zip code covers a good chunk of the city which includes areas of student oriented housing full of 18-21 year old undergrads, at least two good sized trailer parks, a very large upscale development full of mostly white collar families, and at least a few farms. Now I don’t know how many people fit into each of those four ‘types’, but I am sure there are marketers in New York buying that zip code thinking they’re getting college students, and well I guess they’d be probably about half right, but it’s certainly not the complete story.

Zip codes were designed to help the government get the mail out to you, and in todays information age they seem about as useful for marketing as the dewey decimal system is for organizing and helping you find the worlds information.

Maybe we’ll see a Sense Networks “Network of Reservations” to go with their “Tribes” which can reveal some details on the territory within those zip codes and clump similar reservations together for use by marketers on and offline alike.

No matter how many ads for the Albertson’s $9.99 case of PBR special my parents see, I don’t suspect that, even in this economy, they will become buyers anytime soon.