Tuesday night, the inimitable SchneiderMike, senior VP of the digital incubator at Allen & Gerritsen, held court at Meadhall for a meeting of Content Strategy New England, talking location-based marketing as it relates to content strategy. He literally co-wrote the book on location-based marketing, and his passion for the topic is infectious.

Despite the noise and the distraction of about a thousand beers on draft, Mike dropped a ton of valuable insights, some of which I have captured below:

• The biggest opportunities for content strategy beyond the checkin come from the semantic web. How can LBS leverage data — history, tips, friends, etc. — to enhance context and create more informed user experiences?
• People expect an experience around a place. What are the content types within an experience? Is place a content type? A place has structure — how do we define that?
• A huge challenge for content strategy around location is fragmentation. A place can exist in multiple databases. As much as possible, we need to own the standardization of our venue data across all platforms and enable our content to be served across all of them.
• Food for thought: there’s no W3C standard for location. Relatedly, we need to expand our editorial style to account for location.
• We need to start thinking of the web as a giant database.
• Context, context, context!
  • A good example of this is The History Channel on Foursquare, which adds branded content to the local, mobile experience.
  • The realty company Corcoran, believe it or not, is also good at this.
• Some services of note:
  • Ditto – An app that addresses your intent, most relevant at or before the decision point for what you want to do, semantically leveraging structured content and metadata to make recommendations.
  • Forecast – Another app centered around intent, sharing your upcoming plans with friends.
  • Über – Request a car direct to your location
  • Where
• “Media organizations have a shit ton of content,” and they’re adapting it for LBS.
• Apps should be smarter by looking at checkin history, friends, etc to make recommendations. Draw conclusions. Leverage rating data against location to make real time recommendations.
• Can content enter the Uncanny Valley and be too participatory? There are good and bad uses. Be relevant and useful. Don’t overreach beyond reason.
• “We’re all layered.” As content strategists, we need to understand these layers and how individuals want to use those layers. What channels make sense for which content/engagement? Use the right channel.
  • We need to wrangle these data streams in a social CRM.
• Re: daily deals, these will continue. But we need to make deals feel like content
  • We need to push smarter, more relevant deals — things we know they want. Groupon is a Ponzi scheme. Apps like Level Up type stuff will grow, integrate into point of sale system.
• Foursquare does not look at itself as a media channel, and it needs to. Brands need to know impressions and “dones” (for tips). That’s how we’ll get to effectiveness. How effective is History Channel? Who knows?
• Checking in to TV shows is gaining in popularity, as a means to find others who share your passion.
  • There is multiple screen convergence happening while watching television.
  • Hashtags add context and community to the viewing experience.
• Checkins are an unnatural behavior; there must be a great motivation to do so.

A lot of food for thought. Thanks, SchneiderMike! Want more? Check out this cheat sheet excerpted from “Location-Based Marketing for Dummies,” including the five rules of location-based marketing.