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Facebook to take over location-based marketing
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TEXT OF STORY
Stacey Vanek-Smith: You can use your smart phone to find just about anything these days: Your friends, the nearest pizza place -- and now the friends and the pizza place can find you, too. It's called location-based marketing, and the world's largest social network is about to get in on the game. Janet Babin reports.
Janet Babin: Facebook hasn't revealed much about its new service, but it would be the biggest player in location-based marketing.
Larry Weber is chairman of marketing services company W2. He says geo-location could help Facebook's 400 million users find each other:
Larry Weber: You want to know where your friends are, or gee, I graduated from this college in 1992, I wonder if anybody I graduated with is in New York today.
Businesses would like to know who's in New York today too, and just about everywhere else.
Greg Warren: Retail is about location and mindset, so if it gets two of those down, and facilitated by groups of friends, that's a lot going for it.
That's Greg Warren, an executive with MediaVest, a media buying firm. He says with Facebook's new service, advertisers could target people nearby, and offer them deals to get them in the door.
I'm Janet Babin for Marketplace.
As an actual Facebook advertiser, the ability to target customers in our hometown is vital. But Facebook is already doing geographic targeting--what are they going to do differently? The article doesn't really mention this.
As a person who has had a Facebook profile for 7 years, however, I do have privacy concerns.
Derivative features like this are one of the many reasons more and more people are beginning to sour on Facebook. The company has shamelessly ripped off Twitter, FriendFeed (which it acquired), ConnectU (the Harvard precursor), and now - with it's location-based play - Foursquare, Gowalla, and the like. Plus, I'm not sure that all of this bloat actually creates value for the everyday user...
