Location, Location, Location: The next computing cycle

DIGI MARKETING

I have already written about the rapid growth of mobile devices: no longer merely phones, but multi-function, highly portable digital devices. For marketers, one of the game-changing features of mobiles is their locational intelligence: your mobile knows where you are, even if you don't. This opens up new possibilities for personalising marketing, suiting the location of the potential customer.

Your mobile doesn't even have to have GPS (global positioning system). Try an application like Google Maps on your mobile. Choose the menu item "My Location". A dot will appear to indicate where you are. Google claims it's accurate to within 500 metres. In my experience, at least in urban areas, it will nail you to within about 100 metres. All done by triangulation between the different cell towers that are conversing with your phone.

Mobile web access: As mobile devices become more powerful, so mobile internet access soars. Mary Meeker, the managing director of Morgan Stanley, in her annual address to the Web 2.0 Summit recently termed mobile internet the "next major computing cycle".

She predicted that mobile web access would become 10 times greater than desktop access and that it would grow far faster than traditional access. That means more potential customers using locationally aware devices to browse the web. That means an opportunity for marketers to provide locationally relevant messages.

As we have already seen, search is now the entry point to the internet for most users. Even when users know the website address (URL) they want to go to, they often type it into a search engine. The search engine will fix any typos and spelling errors, and get them where they want to go. As mobile web access grows, we can expect mobile search to grow.

Mobile local search: Already the major search engines offer mobile versions, adapted to the needs of mobile users. That doesn't just mean a different layout, more suitable for a mobile screen. It means a change in the search algorithm itself.

A search for pad Thai from a desktop yields encyclopedia entries, lots of recipes, some pictures, and a few restaurants from around the world. The same search in the mobile version yields restaurants close to the searched that serve pad Thai.

These localised search results are likely to provide greater customer benefit (probably the mobile searcher is not looking for recipes) - and, at the same time, they provide a low-cost vehicle for small businesses to get noticed.

So make sure you have a website (no matter how small your business) and that the mobile version of that website works, looks good and carries informative content about what you do, and how you do it better than others. And consider buying advertising in mobile search results.

The market for mobile advertising is set to explode. No wonder that Google just spent $750 million to acquire AdMob, one of the largest mobile advertising platforms. AdMob claims to have delivered mobile ads that have been seen more that 126 billion times. But remember, in digital it's not impressions that are important: it's participation - active engagement. One way to get engagement is to harness the power of social networks.

Mobile social networks: Social network sites are the success story of the web. Now they are going mobile. Once countries reach 3G levels of mobile access (as most have already: hint, hint), mobile social networks take off.

eMarketer, a leading digital marketing research company, recently predicted that more than 600 million people worldwide will access social networks from mobile devices by 2013.

Japan's leading social network, Mixi, already delivers two-thirds of its page views to mobile devices. Accessing social network sites from mobiles gives some very major user benefits. If I choose (giving permission), the social network will show my location to my friends, and allow me to see their locations.

It can also display items in the neighbourhood likely to be of interest to me. If I have joined groups on the social network that are interested in art, the mobile social network site can display nearby art galleries. If my profile mentions an interest in Japanese food, it can display nearby Japanese restaurants.

What's more, the mobile social network site can harness the power of my social networks by displaying my friends' reviews and comments about those art galleries (or restaurants). It also provides a vehicle to provide relevant, locationally specific, information both from my social network and from digimarketers. Locational relevance will become a major factor in digimarketing success.

Dr Ian Fenwick is an adviser at the Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration, and founding partner of digiAindra Co. He recently co-authored 'DigiMarketing: The Essential Guide to New Media & Digital Marketing' (Wiley 2008). e-mail ian@digiAindra.com or see his presentations at http://www.SlideShare.net/Ian.Fenwick. Follow him at http://www.Twitter.com/DrIanFenwick