Talking about how great new innovations in social media are, is fun and easy. You can do this and you can do that. Isn’t it great?
More often, however, the difficulty comes in when trying to explain in clear terms what the benefit of these new social platforms is to business. Businesses want to know: What’s in it for me, how can we use it and how long will it take to see results.
Each of those questions is tough to answer definitively, because a certain amount of trail-and-error is required to know for sure.
Then I came across this simple four-step process for explaining the business value of Foursquare, developed by Ogilvy PR Worldwide. What’s interesting about it isn’t what they’re saying — any social media marketer worth their salt already know this — but rather how they are saying it
Take a look at the image below. Click here to see it in full-size.
Every strategy needs to be unique to an individual company’s needs. So trying to use the above figure as your company’s plan for geolocation/Foursquare would be a mistake.
Instead, use the above figure to start the conversation on the right track. Determine what you want to get out of the services, how your customers might already be using it, and set some goals for what you’d like the outcome to be.
Geolocation services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, loopt and now Facebook Places, offer businesses a lot of great tools to engage both current and potential customers. But each services is different, as is each business. In order to get the most out of them, it’s important to have developed a clear strategic approach.
Photo source: Team Sticker Giant/flickr
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