Brandthony

Or not.

I was recently catching up with some old issues of Ad Age that I hadn’t gotten around to when I stumbled upon this article about Facebook’s hopes of taking geo-location to the mainstream. I have tons of reservations about geo-location services anyway, but this quote from Seth Goldstein blew my mind (and not trying to knock you Seth, you’re more than welcome to explain your point further in the comments section):

“People talk about location-based advertising, but location removes the need for advertising,” said Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia.com. “If you know where the consumer is, and that she is physically touching your brand, then you do not need to rely upon traditional mass-media channels to reach her.”

There seems to be this grand idea amongst some in social media circles that in order to prove the efficacy of the medium they must show how it completely abolishes everything about marketing and advertising that’s every been taught, practiced, and written about.

I personally think it’s counter-productive in getting people to take the field of “social media marketing” seriously. It’s just flat out pompous.

What integrated marketing across various channels provides is a ubiquity of message that in turn creates frequency and exposure at different points in the purchase decision process. The reason frequency is important in marketing is because consumers generally need multiple exposures to a product before trial. Basically, it has to be burned into your memory bank.

To be fair, Seth Goldstein is talking about a form of frequency here too, in that hopefully you’ll see all of your friends “checking in” at Mickey D’s for a Big Mac and be compelled to go get a Big Mac. But, what if Consumer X keeps seeing his friends talking about the new “Bacon Cheddar Chicken McBurger” sandwich but forgets to stop in because there was no billboard on the highway near the McDonalds advertising the sandwich.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested or previously exposed to it, there was just no message at that potential purchase time to remind him. So, yeah, multi-channel communication is still important.

And with geo-location in general, here’s where the math gets messy. Facebook is a social networking tool meant to connect friends and family that the general public understands. But as you get into more niche social services, the understanding and adoption wanes.

Twitter is still used by only about 7% of the population (not that it isn’t powerful in its own way) and Facebook could potentially give the boost to the “check-in” concept that has only been adopted by a couple of million people on services like Foursquare and Gowalla.

And one has to wonder, is the reason for fairly slow adoption for Foursquare because of a lack of awareness or because people just don’t know why they’d want to use it? Foursquare has been installed in everything from giant signs in Vegas to window decals, but use is still relatively low compared to the general population.

This all circles back to one of my core theories about social media. Just because something can be shared doesn’t mean it will be shared. For every 200-million-view YouTube video, there are 27 million videos with only 12 hits. People will share what they find interesting, and if “@SoAndSo checked in at McDonalds” isn’t interesting then it won’t be shared.

So really, even if Facebook rolls out geo-location, will 300 million people really start using it just because it’s on Facebook or will the general idea still not catch on with them? After all, when I wanted to tell my friends where I was and what I was doing back in the day, I simply typed a status update. But that’s soooo 2008, right?

Related posts:

1. Best of Social Media #1: Viral Culture, Pizza Holdouts, & The Value of Social Currency
2. Why I Don’t Read Social Media Marketing Books
3. Is Social Media Marketing Similar to Door-to-Door Sales?
4. How Social Media Catapulted Sony Pictures To First $2 Billion Year