Geotargeting + Location Based Services + Twitter = Conduit Marketing

Recently (and reluctantly) I signed up for Twitter. I only say reluctantly because there is a good chance that a constant feed based on my life will be somewhat less than what I would like it to be. Or it may be more PC to say different from what I think it should be. I have two young children and my ability to travel and do the things that I used to do have been somewhat hampered by my need to go to the zoo or the aquarium or the botanical gardens or the museum or the movies or the park. I am, in fact, not complaining and now that I think of it I should set up a Twitter Parent feed so that other parents could join us while we are out.

Anyway. I’ve been talking to a group about how their planned location based services (LBS) could interact with geotargeting provided by companies such as whrrl and Loopt and started to wonder how this could be tied into the feed that Twitter or FriendFeed enables. I’ve posted about the potential interaction of these two technologies and am thinking about how users (specifically of Twitter mobile) could become conduits for marketers.

For example:

A person goes to a store and sees a type of spice their friend has been looking for. They place a geographical marker on the product location using whrrl. The stores LBS sees that the user is placing a marker and offers to supply the person with a video about the country where the spice came from and how it is processed. The person accepts the video and adds it to the marker. The person saves the marker and notification of the marker goes out to their friend AND is pumped into their twitter mobile feed. (Next time their friend is within 1 mile of the store a notice goes off that the marker is near by and offers directions to the store.) Everyone tracking that person’s feed sees where they have been and has access to the video.

Two things immediately spring to mind based on this:

1. The LBS does not have to exist. It is a value add for the person placing and receiving the marker. The real benefit is having the marker information pumped into their Twitter feed real time.
2. Tracking of Twitter feeds need to be shown geographically. There is a Twitter mapping service called Twitter Vision and it is a good start but you would need the ability to enter in a cell or Twitter ID and then watch them become the conduit.
3. This type of real-time viral marketing could make for some very interesting behavioral models as well.

So, I will be setting up my Twitter account over the next week and just figured out that I don’t have the right phone for Twitter mobile or whrrl. Great excuse to upgrade!