The future of Geolocation & Mobile Web go hand in hand
June 3rd, 2010 by Kevin Smith
Recently, analysts at Morgan Stanley released an 87-page report that identified some of – what they considered to be – the most important online trends that would determine where the future of the internet is headed.
A nice – shorter – write-up of the findings can be found on gigaom.com.
One of the most Tweetworthy findings to come out of their research was a dramatic shift towards mobile web use. In fact, they predict that mobile web use will surpass desktop web use within the next 5 years.
You read this blog, so it can be assumed that you’re a pretty tech savvy person, so think of how many of these you already have: a kindle, a smartphone, an iPad or a GPS system. According to the folks at Morgan Stanley, we’re still very much at the beginning of the Roger’s Adoption curve. More and more people will begin to gravitate and rely on mobile technology to access content and part of that reason is because mobile content will be personalized content – all thanks to Location Based Services.
Yes, Location Based Services or sometimes called, Geolocation. The same technology that fills up your Facebook and Twitter feed by letting you know that someone you’re only friends with online just bought a slurpie at a random 7-11.
Sure, Foursquare is annoying at times…well, most of the time. But it’s square one in the timeline of Geolocation services – and already has over 1 million users worldwide. And much like Google was the evolution of an idea dating back to 1945, Geolocation will evolve and find higher purposes.
In terms of marketing, Geolocation will eventually become the Holy Grail. Think of how many hours and marketing dollars are spent trying to determine how to display the right message to the right prospects at the right time. So embrace it and start getting familiar with the technology, because if the researchers at Morgan Stanley are right, within five years if it’s not a part of your marketing plan – it will most likely be a part of your competition’s plan.
For consumers, Geolocation is the next level of internet customization. Soon the value of Geolocation services will be on par with how we value mobile apps today – enabling the web to come to us.
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This post was featured as a social media dream segment of the June 3rd edition of This Week In Social Media.
Kevin Smith is an Account Supervisor at PJA Advertising & Marketing. Follow him on Twitter: @Mr_KevinSmith
June 15th, 2010 at 6:04 am
Kevin,
your observations are spot on, as a geolocation marketing company we have been reading many reports like the Morgan Stanley report and all of them show a very strong growth curve in geolocation marketing. You are also quite correct in noting the maturity level of the technology, while the adoption rates are currently high for apps like foursquare and yelp, we believe as the market and the consumer mature, these game or social networking based systems will fall by the wayside as new less intrusive apps are adopted.
We have invested heavily in this concept and have steered clear of social networking, and games. Do you really want to know that your twitter acquaintance bought a slurpie at 7-11, or do you just want to know where the nearest 7-11 is? Do you really want to be the mayor of 7-11? Or take a photo of your slurpie for others to see? We believe the maturity of the market will result in these cute offerings being traded for fast informative data without overload.
Dan Hurd
http://geoplum.com
(here is the shameless plug)
get the apps by visiting geoplum.com with your iPhone, Android or Blackberry phone.
December 29th, 2010 at 7:31 am
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