One of the things I learned at the #BigBoulder Conference from the guys from @ESRI this past week was that location is the glue between datasets. Demographic, psychographic, content, etc is all linked to location. I, of course, love this thought and the issue is that most people don’t share their location. Approximately 5% of the US uses location based services and Facebook just pulled it’s stalking feature. I’m not sure this is going to change anytime soon.
I’ve also posted about the future of social being visual and with this comes the opportunity to share location: passively. Every image taken with a smartphone (unless you turn the option off) is geotagged. With the amount of images shot today of food, sunsets and puppy dogs comes a tremendous amount of location-based data. As more people take pics on Instgram/Facebook, Twitter, etc they should be offered the option to share the location that photo was taken. (How many times have you heard the question; Where was that picture taken?) This “after-the-fact” option may appeal more to those that don’t think location first and would ignite the location-based marketing opportunities we’ve (or at least I’ve) been waiting for. I’m waiting to see how does this first. Could be Instagram. Won’t be Foursquare since they already know where you are when you check-in. Could be Apple! We will see . . .
