Category: Geolocation Technology

Companies are seeing the technology as an opportunity to communicate more effectively with consumers.

Smartphone shoppers not only provide businesses with revenue through sales, but through geolocation techniques, they are also giving companies important data about where they are at various times of the day and on different days of the week.

This data is being used to help improve the relevancy of the way that businesses communicate with consumers.

By using the information collected through geolocation, they are able to provide far more personalized and relevant information so that the communication between brands and consumers can considerably improve. For instance, when someone checks into a coffee shop on a regular basis in the morning, that data can be collected in order to identify this pattern so that the individual can then be sent a coupon at that time and for that business.

This type of geolocation technique could make a notable impact on mobile marketing effectiveness.

In this way, geolocation can not only help businesses to reach consumers at the times that are most relevant with an offer that they will find most appealing, in order to encourage more spending at the store, but it can benefit the consumer, as well. It means that the advertising and promotions that he or she receives will more closely reflect what is actually wanted.

That said, it is vital that geolocation technology be treated very carefully. There is a thin line between collecting data so that relevant mobile marketing can be produced, and simply inundating a consumer with ads based on everything that he or she has ever done. The chief revenue officer at Foursquare, Steve Rosenblatt, explained that “Relevance and content is what it all boils down to.”

Foursquare is a highly popular geolocation company that experiences approximately five million mobile check-ins every day. Rosenblatt stated that “The more you check in, the more data [we have] and the more relevant information we can send.” The more consumers take part in this type of activity, the better brands will be able to understand what they want so that mobile marketing can be personalized in a highly accurate way.

The hope was that the smartphone friendly barcodes will help to help locals learn their history.

As the use of QR codes increases among historical buildings and sites, the Boone County library has implemented the barcodes to help to link the community with their local history.

The project is being called the Chronicles of Boone County and works as an online local encyclopedia.

Kaitlin Mullikin, a local history associate, is at the heart of this project, which employs QR codes to provide information to local smartphone users. She explained that the barcodes have already been seen on historical roadside markers all around Boone County, and that they are also on a number of Burlington historic buildings.

When the QR codes are scanned, they link the user directly to the Chronicles mobile website.

There, the smartphone user who has scanned the QR codes will be able to see an overview of the building, event, or person that is related to the location of the barcode, and will provide links to the sources that were used to provide that information.

According to Mullikin, the links that are provided within the descriptions themselves help to demonstrate the connection that exists among the events, places, and people throughout Boone County. She said that she first came up with the concept when she was a Northern Kentucky University public history graduate student.

She explained that she was looking for a capstone project and that one of her co-workers at the library had recently attended a webinar that had provided her with information about location-based digital collections that use geolocation through GPS coordinates. The library had already implemented QR codes for other purposes at that time.

Mullikin explained that it was “the path of least resistance” for providing this information to the public. She stated that “the most interesting part of studying history is reading primary sources – sources from people there at the time or first person accounts.”

She also pointed out that people who are interested in learning more about the information that they have seen, after having viewed the general description that is provided by scanning the QR codes, it is possible for users to look at the sources. Then, they can read more by using the books that were identified on that list.