As cool as FourSquare is, why stop there… Mr. Best Buy CMO, if you’re listening here is what I think would be a more comprehensive way to use mobile and location data in your business:

First and foremost be sure people can find your stores when they’re looking for them… call Universal Business Listing and Localezeto make sure your complete list of stores and as much information about those stores is correctly propogated out to all the players in the geoweb… oh year and be sure to claim all of your Local Business Listings on Google. 

Want to pull more customers into your physical stores from the web and mobile web? Check out folks like milo.com, where customers can search for items carried in your store on the web and then find the closest nearby store where they can walk in and purchase it then and there… or hire some clever local SEO experts and associated content to create massive amounts of web content around all of your most popular products and tie them back to the location of each of your stores… that way digital searches for “Garmin Nuvi Detroit” lead folks to your brick and mortar stores.  

Want to better understand the people that already come into your stores why not ask someone like Sense Networks if they can drill down around your stores to see how far folks that are coming to your store are traveling to get there, where they go before and after going to your store, or if there is a nearby roadway that could should be driving more traffic but is not… it may be time to buy a new billboard on that nearby superhighway.

Want to help your suppliers and store management better understand what is selling and why? Why not talk with the folks over at Awhere.com to take a deeper dive into the demographics, weather and a variety of other geographically specific factors occurring in the areas around each store that may be having an impact. Not selling many GPS dog trackers at store #2718?  Maybe its because pet ownership in a 50 mile radius of that store only indexes as 28 versus the national average.

Once you’ve got customers in your store why not provide better in store service and create a little mobile store portal to help customers do things like find their way around (Blue Umbrella Indoor Navigation), look up consumer reviews on the items you carry and do price comparisons on items for sale, look at what you have in inventory, and leave feedback for a manager, etc.

In fact, why not just sell virtual digital goods right there in the store through the phone while you’re at it. Why not give Apple a call and remind them about that nifty digital meets physical affiliate marketing patent they filed, and see if you can put it to use by marketing music through listening stations in the store where consumers can download directly to their iPhones while providing Best Buy with a nice high margin affiliate fee for driving the download.

I am sure there is more, but that should be enough to get the ball rolling in 2010.

But a common theme these days is that shiny, new and cool is all well and good, but how do you make money from any of this stuff?  Well I was given a walk through of the offerings of a company called Awhere this week and it certainly seems to fit in the category of highly valuable and actionable use of location information that is clearly designed to allow its users to get better information, and to use that information to make or save money.

In essence, Awhere is a piece of software offered as a service over the web that allows clients to feed in their proprietary information which is somehow related to a place (like store sales data), which is then combined with other information that Awhere has gathered related to that same place (like area demographics, weather, new home starts), and can quickly provide you back with valuable and powerful information to help make smarter decisions.

While there are many potential applications for the software, the company’s bread a butter business right now seems to be around the consumer packaged good value chain… manufacturers, distributors and retailers. Years ago Wal Mart revolutionized the way their supply chain functioned by gathering and providing to their partners really, really good insights into what and where items were selling via RetailLink.  So good that it was able to push more and more responsibility for sales in Wal Mart stores over to the manufacturers who provided the products, essentially saying here is all this great information you need about your product sales across all of our Wal Mart stores, if sales problems come up, I expect you to go out there and pro actively fix them.  Since Ahwere’s software plugs into Retail Link, to a degree it is a tool that can help businesses manage their RetailLink data and sell more at Wal Mart, but the system is extensible to any type of location or point of sales type of data. 

For companies in the CPG value chain, Awhere allows businesses to manage, organize and access sales information across a myriad of manufacturers, distributors and retailers while also layering in important information from other 3rd party providers that could be having an affect on the sales data, particularly information tied to geographic factors immediately around retail stores like ranging from area weather, household incomes in the area, composition of different ethnicities in the area population, new home sales in the area, or even public health outbreaks.

A hypothetical example… let’s say it’s your job is to sell more of Burt’s Bees Lip Balm, and the product is currently distributed by four companies into 5,000 retail stores. At the most basic level all of the sales and inventory data from those distributors and stores would be nicely plotted out on a map to give a quick overview of where you’re selling and not selling on a store by store basis. Then let’s say you notice a visible swath of stores on the map which are doing noticeable better than others (something you’d never notice looking at row after row in a spreadsheet)… but at first glance, there is no rhyme or reason as to why, but start layering in information such as cold or dry weather conditions, household incomes, or the magazine subscription list where Burt’s Bees ran a 12x schedule last year and it all may seem to make a lot more sense.  Or let’s say that you notice two dozen specific stores located right near beach on-ramps, six in Hawaii, ten in Southern California and eight in South Florida that are in historically poor BDI/CDI markets, but yet are doing blockbuster sales. A category manager calls these stores and discovers that surfers are using Burt’s Bees Lip Balm not to wax their lips but to wax their surfboards…and hence a new product line is born.

The world is awash in information, with too few people and systems to help sort it all out, and in many instances we know what happened according to a bunch of numbers in a spreadsheet but with little other context or ability to really visualize it and make sense of it.

If the old adage is that a picture is worth a thousand words, Awhere is hoping that for CPG companies in particular a map is worth thousands of dollars!