Facebook Places has people all atwitter about the promise of location awareness. Commercial interests have already begun to take small steps toward turning existing services, like Foursquare and Gowalla, into money-making machines. Digital advocates will not be left on the side of the road, either.
Chris Connelly offers up a good blog post with some ideas on how Places fits into the advocacy toolkit. The views he expresses are valid, and his admonition not to get caught up in location awareness just because it’s the hot, buzzworthy thing these day is particularly important.
However, I’m not sold on location awareness as a near-term advocacy tool of great success. That’s not to say it can’t play a minor supporting role in some efforts, but I simply don’t see it as a campaign cornerstone anytime soon — unlike other social media tools and networks have already become.
Facebook Places is said to open up a huge new audience for location awareness. Indeed, one of the knocks against existing players in the space was that even though they are growing quickly, they’re still largely home to early adopters and the uber-geeks as opposed to mainstream people who make up the backbone of most successful advocacy endeavors.
The 500 million Facebook user figure gets thrown around a lot in the Places discussion, as if to suggest that many people will now suddenly start to spout off about where they are. But let’s dig a little deeper. By Facebook’s own account, only about half that many people log in daily. And by the company’s figures, only about 25-30% of its web users also use the mobile Facebook platform.
So the number of potential Facebook Places users is much, much smaller than 500 million. Of course, even with a plausible audience of tens of millions of users, that’s still a lot. But what percentage of those Facebook users will then go the extra step to record location? Probably a lot closer to Foursquare’s 3 million user mark than the Facebook high water mark of half a billion users.
So it’s still a small market. A growing one, perhaps, and there’s no doubt that Facebook’s entry heats up the opportunities, but we’re still not at a stage yet were significant investment makes sense for most advocacy efforts. Of course, it always depends on the circumstances, and location awareness might be a great platform if your target audience is San Francisco Bay Area geeks, but perhaps not so much if you’re looking to reach suburban bankers.
For most campaigns, it’s still a watch and wait time for location awareness.
Thanks for the nod, Chip! Glad to see this conversation continuing.
I agree that the near-term advocacy implications of Facebook Places are more limited. It is very unlikely that Places is going to be campaign cornerstone in the immediate future. But I still believe the right applications of the technology could prove useful – and perhaps generate earned media coverage in the process if done particularly well.
You make a great point about the number of users being less than 500 million. But if even 10% of users adopt Places (or simply neglect to update their privacy settings) we’re still talking 50 million people. With even 1% adoption, we’re nearly doubling Foursquare with five million people.
End of the day, though, you’re absolutely right. Location-based services are a smaller market, but a growing one – and the true advocacy implications (not to mention business and marketing implications) are still shaking out. For now, I think the key is to keep an eye on it and be aware of what CAN be done. That can help keep nonprofits and advocacy groups in a position where they can make strategic plays in the location-based space when their needs and goals demand it.
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