Why location is more important today than yesterday..

… but not as important as tomorrow.

What are the implications of social posting on location by consumers?

A recent report by ListenLogic – 25% of social media shopping conversations are posted by consumers while they are in an actual store. Fueled by the explosive growth of the smartphone market share, consumers are commenting on their experiences as they happen. Whether you are a restaurant or retail shop, a doctors office or a registry of motor vehicles… the comments are flowing live.

boston
All around people are making their voices heard…

This means three things:

1) You have a new and self generated source of publicity, people telling people what you do while they are experiencing it. Obviously you want to knock their socks off, and make then rave about your product, or service.

2) You need to be ready to respond in real time, if they @mention you in a tweet, or comment on your facebook page, it would be good to be there to help them. What a new level of service for a customer to be able to get an answer to a question they themselves were probably not expecting.

3) Even if you only sell offline, you need to be aware that there are conversations going on about you and your company, your staff and your products… you can be present to help and rectify, or you can be absent to accept the outcome of the comments.

This is trend that is only increasing, with each wave of upgrades the cell phone landscape is adding more and more smartphones to the population’s pockets. Application developers from Facebook to Foursquare to Google to Yelp are all building location based commenting, check-ins, and reviews into there functionality… if you noticed those are some big tech names.

What can you do?

  1. To prevent negative comments from making it out: Start by making sure you are proactive with your account sharing, why not have your customer steer an angry message to you rather than the general public, maybe you can rectify the situation and save a blemish from rearing its ugly head. A visible facebook account, twitter account, and better yet email account may collect the wrath in a way that is less damaging. Basically provide an ear and an outlet, and try to fix the situation.
  2. Encourage your customers to make there location known, for those of us with a smartphone and the respective apps, it is likely that is all we need. you will reap the benefit of the word of mouth machine, the social proof, and this exposure can really only be good. Any publicity is good publicity right? Charlie Sheen? Anyone?
  3. Begin with standard monitoring, if you don’t have a smartphone, get one. Have notifications set for mentions on twitter, and posts on your facebook page. Once you see how powerful this monitoring can be, as a service and sales tool, you may want to invest in a social media dashboard, $25 a month that allows you to manage all your accounts with a common inbox to prevent logging in and out, lets you set up keywords (brand monitoring) and automate more in depth monitoring. Like say how much is your competitor mentioned compared to you. This is known as ‘Share of Voice’

Do you think it is worthwhile to monitor this or not? Let me hear it!


Posted

in

,

by

Comments

7 responses to “Why location is more important today than yesterday..”

  1. @ixlr84u2 Avatar
    @ixlr84u2

    the didital landscape if more amd more tied with mortar. we started with brick and mortar to click and mortar now we see an upcoming trend click and mobile whats next

  2. Amrita Devasahayam Avatar

    With social media, companies now have easy access to conversations around their product/brand which they never would have had offline unless they shed tonnes of money in research & field studies. This is an opportunity that companies need to learn to utilise so they can realise their business objectives more efficiently.

    1. Spiro Pappadopoulos Avatar

      Well it looks like we see eye to eye on this.

      Spiro Pappadopoulos
      Evenfall – GuestFeed
      Contact Me [image: YouTube] [image:
      Facebook] [image:
      WordPress] [image:
      Twitter] [image:
      Twitter]
      Spiro’s Table Blog A New Menu Section –
      Explained
      Signature powered by

      WiseStamp

  3. Matt Brennan Avatar

    Completely agreed. By 2013 more people will be using the internet through a mobile device than through a computer. This will be hugely important.