Step Into The Real World | DIY Location Based Services
AdAge and ReadWriteWeb have both weighed in on new services offering what has quickly been coined DIY LBS, a new approach that allows brands to easily get location-based communication channels up and running without a lot of hassle.
The concept is pretty simple. Just as Blogger makes publishing to the web easy, platforms such as Socialight allow brands, organizations or individuals the ability to post content to location and easily curate their own networks. If Foursquare is a wider network like Facebook, these types of applications are more akin to Ning.
One easy way to look at a potential value proposition is a hotel concierge programming a channel highlighting all the must-do’s within a short walking distance of the hotel. Users could access via the mobile web, or on a branded iPhone application, and be served content based on their individual location.
So why would someone want to create a new network?
Socialight founder, Dan Melinger, told AdAge:
“It makes sense for brands to work with existing location-based services when they want to market specifically to the demographic using that LBS within the feature-set that’s available via that service,” Socialight’s founder, Dan Melinger, told me. But, he said, that may not always align with a brand’s goals and existing location-based services are relatively small — they might not overlap with a brand’s the existing and target demographics for most brands.
ReadWrite weighs in with their perspective:
…These niche networks can be closed communities for just a select group of people working on an invite-only system. The second difference between those publicly available services and the ones designed with these new toolkits is that they are laser-focused on a single purpose. You may not want to spam up your Twitter account where you promote your business to discuss things related to your local book club for example, but you could easily do so via a niche network.
Via AdAge/ReadWriteWeb
