What Can Geo-Social Applications Do for You?

Cotton RohrscheibBefore I dive too heavily into this post I should probably define Geo-Social Applications. These applications such as Gowalla, Foursquare, Loopt, Brightkite, and Waze are social applications that interact with popular social networks like Twitter and Facebook and allow their users to share their geo-location with their friends and or followers. For the most part these geo-locations consist of businesses (aka Your Clients), some of these locations are predefined based on GPS coordinates and some sort of sophisticated mapping database and some, my favorite ones, are crowdsourced geo-locations.

By crowdsourced I mean that the locations inside these applications are predominately established by it's users. For example, I was on the other side of town the other day and stopped into a Starbucks that wasn't my normal Starbucks. I went to check in on Gowalla and noticed that it wasn't already listed in their database as an available option so I created the spot. Now, the next person that pulls into that Starbucks can check in on the location that I created.

Now, how does this have advantages to business owners. Since these applications are still somewhat in their infancy, there is a lot of speculation. I know of some local businesses in the Central Arkansas area that are working with a few of these applications to implement cross promotions, nothing has officially launched that I am aware in our area in terms of business promotion on a large scale, but as soon as something does I will be sure to post as much detail as I can about it.

I have shared my take on these geo-social applications a few times to friends, I am of the opinion that they are the second wave more or less of the social media boom. I see Social Media as being the "tool" to deliver and share content, but the Geo-locational aspect of this movement brings a little bit more to the table in that not only does it allow you to do promotions via Twitter and Facebook, but it also allows you to physically bring people to your location (if they want to check-in to participate in contests, promotions, etc.) This is definitely something to consider if you own a bricks and mortar business.

If you are interested in learning more about Geo-social applications, please don't hesitate to contact us…

Today, Foursquare was featured on CNN, here's the video with some other ideas as to how businesses are capitalizing on the popularity of Geo-Social Applications:

About the Author

Cotton Rohrscheib

Cotton is a veteran developer having worked on over 300 projects worldwide, ranging from small business to the Fortune 500. Today Cotton enjoys exploring the possibilities of software development and website integration with all business models in mind.

Cotton has served on numerous boards of directors and most recently as the President of a State Tourism Organization. He resides in Conway, Arkansas with his wife Donna and attends The Church Alive, where he is a Youth Leader in his spare time. Cotton also remains active in many aspects of the development community and interacts frequently in blogs and forums with other members of the development community.

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Cotton Rohrscheib