What Best Buy Could Do In Mobile and Location Marketing
I was going through my Twitter stream the other day and noticed a few tweets referencing Foursquare involving BestBuyCMO… Foursquare is undoubtedly getting a ton of press these days, and much of it for good reason… it’s new, interesting and fun, and has a lot of potential and implications for marketers… and did I mention it’s getting a lot of press these days.
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: Read more
Metaplaces: Sense Networks
I thought one of the most interesting and informative speakers at Metaplaces was Tony Jebara from Sense Networks. While I have posted about Sense Networks in the past, Tony did a great thorough, and mechanical walk through of his company that provided some interesting new insights.
He describes the company as an analytics company, like Nielsen, with a particular focus on segmentation analysis, and importantly one that doesn’t deliver anything directly back to a single end user, but rather allows its business customers to have a better understanding of aggregate customer behaviors.
Sense Networks pulls together call data and location data from 10 million devices, and slices and dices the data in a variety of different ways to provide, what it hopes, is a useful analysis for companies. The subscriber location and call usage data is almost all consumer opt-in, gathered directly from wireless subscribers, and is limited just to lat, long, time and call details.
But Sense Networks uses this information, Read more
Sense Networks: No PBRs For You!
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.
City Sense: If U Like Wall Street, U May Also Like Rikers
I came across Sense Networks last summer when they arrived out of stealth mode and think they’re potentially doing some of the most interesting and exciting stuff in LBS… out of the 212 nonetheless (+40.7-74 didn’t seem as catchy)! take that left coasters!
What the heck do they do you may ask? Well rather than just pasting the long description from their about us page, here is the twitter inspired version: they collect, process and analyze (in real time) anonymous data on the whereabouts of a ton of location aware devices (phones, navigation devices and sensors) in order to uncover useful information related to patterns of historical location data.
Sounds cool huh?!
So, you know how when you go to Amazon to buy a book, and you get the’people who bought that book, also bought this book’? Well on one level Sense Networks is trying to do that for everyone as they traverse the streets that is their city or town… folks that go to the Statue of Liberty, might also like the Empire state Building (aka tourists), folks that go to the meat packing district on Friday nights, might also like Alor Cafe in Staten Island for brunch on Sunday (aka the bridge and tunnel crowd)… you get the idea.
Since I don’t live in SF and don’t know the area very well it’s hard to really tell exactly what the iPhone application can and can’t do at this point, it’s being positioned as a nightlife finder… so presumably if you’re looking to head out to a bar and want a better idea of where and when to go, a quick consulation of CitySense can let you know that Cantina on Sutter is hopping right now, but Lion Pub on Divisadero, well not so much… by the way Sense Networks folks, those Google and Yelp points of interest really need to be layered directly over the map, it would make a huge difference in helping users get their bearings!
But more than anything the CitySense nightlife finder application seems to be more about creating a tangible and visible showcase for the Sense Networks business and technology…but thinking about what’s happening behind the scenes and how it could be used in a variety of applications is where it indeed gets quite interesting.
