Location-based services

Those who know me have seen me geek out in the past year over location-based services, but LBSs are nothing new. Brightkite has been around since 2007; Loopt, 2005. And Dodgeball, the now-defunct brainchild of Dennis Crowley that Google bought and replaced with its own lackluster Latitude location service, was founded an eternity ago in 2000.

In 10 years LBSs didn’t make it very far along the adoption curve, hindered in part by privacy concerns and a perceived lack of utility. That has started to change in the past year with a new crop of LBSs such as Gowalla and Crowley’s Foursquare that hook users with a playful experience and ameliorate privacy issues by letting users choose when and with whom to share their locations. Foursquare and Gowalla are said to only have 150,000 and 50,000 users respectively, but those numbers will balloon this year and competition will only get more fierce.

Besides the game aspect, Foursquare users are finding themselves benefiting from freebies as businesses move to use the service as a kind of loyalty system, and Gowalla is working on a similar model. The uses for LBSs in B2C marketing are abundant, and the more-established players aren’t leaving all the fun to startups. Twitter recently added the ability to embed location info in to tweets, and I’d be shocked if I couldn’t do the same with a Facebook status update by year’s end.

If Facebook can get it’s 300+ million users sharing their locations, you can bet marketers will be lining up at their door with sacks of cash.

A note on mobile

A lot of people have declared 2010 the Year of Mobile, which is funny given that the same label was applied by others to 2009, 2008 and 2007. Maybe we’ve just finished the mobile decade, or maybe we’ve just started it. Certainly there’s much to be excited about in mobile: Google today will unveil its Nexus One phone, meant to compete with the venerable iPhones, which will probably see its fourth version released this year. Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Palm are all still very much in the fight for mobile platform dominance.

More and more sites are optimizing their content for the mobile experience. A lot of what’s done on mobile is simply being translated from the desktop.

Other tools, like location-based services wouldn’t be possible without the advanced mobile devices that have proliferated in the past few years.

The point is this: mobile isn’t a trend. It’s a shift in how we access information, and trying to pick one year to label as its year is as futile as retrospectively trying to figure out which year was the Year of the Internet.

As the mobile technology advances, so too will the marketing. Geofencing will allow businesses to alert you of deals the moment you walk through their doors. If you have a newborn at home, you’ll have a coupon for diapers in your hand at the exact moment you need it.

For the privacy-conscience, perhaps a less high-tech solution: Google is betting big on two-dimensional barcodes and text message marketing is everywhere. Whatever the delivery method, mobile has done the seemingly impossible: made coupons and loyalty programs sexy.

Search

Writing about search seems passé. Google was born in 1998; end of story, right? Maybe, until you consider the impressive slice of market share that Bing was able to capture in less than a year. But let’s assume for a second that the public web is already fully searchable. What’s left? Chances are you can’t easily search your corporate e-mail or files. When simple concepts like search and tagging that played a huge part in the web in the past decade finally make a full jump to the corporate world and other closed systems, we’ll all be able to work smarter and faster.

And what about those thousands of tweets you’ve written? Good luck trying to search for a link you shared weeks ago. Twitter’s current search system is woefully underpowered. Twitter’s recent search deals with Bing and Google maybe have made the company profitable, but they also bode well for finally unlocking the wealth of information available within your social circles.

Real-time web

There was a lot of discussion in 2009 about the death of RSS. That probably doesn’t mean anything to the average user who only knows RSS as “that orange button at the top of the page,” but the gist of the discussion was this: is RSS too slow in a world where news breaks in seconds on Twitter?

The result was a funny thing called PubSubHubbub, but the amazing thing was that we now live in a world where waiting 30 minutes for a blog post to appear in an RSS reader is just considered way too slow.

I’m not as big on the real-time web as some mainly because I don’t see it as a technology so much as it is a characteristic that will be bred into our existing tools and eventually we will take for granted.

But remember this: The real-time web is exemplified every time someone’s minor tiff with a company blows up into a case study for bad reputation management. It’s those companies that learn to respond in real time that will win.

The rise of the community manager and a social media culture change

This is by far the most exciting point on this list. Discounting anything before three years ago, the social media timeline looks something like this: 2007 saw great new tools, 2008 brought businesses starting to take social media serious and 2009 brought the fights about who owns social media. Is it an advertising function? Does it belong with P.R.?

My hope is this year will bring companies realizing that for social media to be its best, those walls can’t get in the way. For many brands customer service, not P.R. or advertising, has proven to be the killer function of social media. In the consumer’s mind, great customer service beats great marketing any day.

My hope is more organizations will realize that social media can turn into a serious investment, though it doesn’t have to; that it’s not a silver bullet. Some have already hired community managers to be a liaison between the organization’s public and internal silos.

My hope is more companies will integrate the idea of social into their DNAs: that organizations will ensure they have happy employees so those employees will naturally want to be advocates for their organizations; that companies currently hamstrung by industry regulations will fight to be included in the conversation.

Hopefully I’m not being naïve.

Happy New Year.