This past summer I had the great fortune of meeting Mike Schneider, SVP, Digital Incubator at Allen & Gerritsen.  We co-authored this piece which first appeared on the Harvard Business Review blog as well as a white paper “Loyalty in 4-D: How Brands and Consumers Can Win at Location-Based Services” that you can download here.

Thanks to the emergence of location-based services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and now Facebook Places, millions of users are recording their daily adventures and broadcasting digital breadcrumbs to their social graph. However, the brand value of a check-in on a location-based … Read more

This was originally written for, and posted on, MediaPost: Engage: Boomers.

Last week, scheduling a dinner meeting, I tried to recall the name of a restaurant where I had recently eaten a phenomenal cacio e pepe dish.  I could see the restaurant in my mind and even the approximate location but for the life of me I couldn’t remember its name.  I could have googled it or just described the location to my dinner guest had it not dawned on me: I could just log into … Read more

In real estate, the mantra has always been “location, location, location” to underscore the value of being in the right place.  Now, with the advent of geo-location social networks like FourSquare, GoWalla, Hot Potato and CauseWorld that mantra extends to the digitally connected world.  Only now, the physical location takes a back seat to the sharing of physically being at the location.  And, that sharing of location check-ins is valuable for both the providers of these services and marketers.  Which is why Twitter began … Read more