Vancouver Internet Marketing Social Media Marketing Consultant Canada

Sep 8, 2010

As location-based services have emerged as compelling ways for businesses to interact with potential customers, there have been a flux of marketing and social media platforms that help set up campaigns. Context Optional, SnackSquare, Geotoko, Sprout Social and a number of other platforms are helping brands run campaigns on services like Foursquare, Twitter, Gowalla and now Facebook Places. PlacePunch is launching its platform in the space, and has already enlisted a well-known brand as a client.

Location-based services, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, are proving quite popular with consumers open to sharing their locations with the world. They’re also built to be inherently business-friendly, as most allow retailers to incentivize checkins and social sharing behaviors in the hopes of attracting swarms of patrons to their businesses.

As the space continues to evolve, new platforms, technologies and services are emerging with the specific intention of helping small businesses reward their loyal patrons with deals for their in-store behaviors.

Summary of location-based social media marketing services available for businesses looking to take advantage of mobile location-based marketing, checkins, barcode scanning & group buying:

1. Verified Checkin Rewards - SCVNGR 

2. Social Barcodes - Bakodo.com iPhone app can scan most barcodes. Stickybits.com and Shopkick.com integrate social experience w/ barcode scanning

3. Group Deals - Groupon.com LivingSocial.com , OpenTable, Yelp.com , Zagat.com all offer group deal services to businesses. GroupTabs.com
combines group buying with checkins.

4. Challenge-Based Rewards - SCVNGR, Foursquare, Gowalla offer challenge based rewards allowing businesses to decide what rewards to offer and reward criteria.

5. OPt-in Deals - Bizzy.com is a go-between for businesses and local consumers -- it allows businesses to upload deals and consumers to create a list of businesses they want to hear from.

Connect

to your favorite businesses

like never before

Bizzy is where the world’s local businesses and customers come together. Finally: an exclusive place where you connect and communicate with only the businesses you really care about,
when and how you want.

What Bizzy says about themselves: Our Mission

We believe there needs to be a dedicated place where the world’s local businesses and their best customers come together to connect and communicate. At Bizzy, our mission is to be that place: a place free of spam and intrusive marketing messages where customers can stay in touch with the shops, spas and studios they really care about, when and how they want.

SCVNGR is a game.

And playing is easy. Go places. Do challenges. Earn points! That’s the core of it, but there’s a whole lot more. Discover cool new places. Do exciting new things. Share what you’re up to with your friends. Unlock badges (and even real world rewards) by doing quick, fun challenges at your favorite places as you go about your daily life.

SCVNGR is a game platform.

SCVNGR is as much a game as it is a massive experiment in building a mobile game together. We want to build the game layer on top of the world. And that’s only possible if you’ll build it with us.

To make this happen, we’ve designed an incredibly powerful (and easy to use) platform that means that whether you’re an individual player, a local store, a museum, a historic monument, a restaurant or anything in between, you can participate in building SCVNGR with us.

SCVNGR is the game layer on top of the world.

And we want you to build it with us. To date, over 650+ institutions and tons more individuals are building on SCVNGR by adding fun, creative challenges to their favorite locations.

The more people that play (and build) SCVNGR with us, the better it gets. And we’re pretty excited to see where that takes us all.

Download the mobile SCVNGR app to your smartphone (e.g. on iPhone click on Apps and search for SCVNRG and download free app). Then you can login using Facebook Connect or by creating a new account on your phone or by visiting http://www.scvngr.com