I was answering my wife's cellphone last night for her, and could identify that it was her parents calling from San Francisco because her Caller ID had the number listed as "Home." This made me laugh a little bit. My wife lives with me in Santa Barbara and her parents are 300+ miles North in the Bay Area. She hasn't lived with her parents for almost 10 years. Furthermore, growing up, she lived in a number of different locations for extended periods of time before ending up at this one house where her parents live now. And I would surmise that should her parents move to some random farmhouse in Arkansas, for example, my wife would dutifully update the number in her phone, but would still leave the Caller ID notation as "Home."
With the advent of a variety of presence management and GPS related technologies, we are getting smarter at being able to find people we need to. As marketers, isolating individual customers to a particular place is an invaluable tool. Services such as Akamai allow online companies like mine to serve a gallery of different home pages that caters to the specific "wheres" of our customers. Change language on your site on the fly so that you refer to "y'all" in Tennessee and "You Guys" in New Jersey. Present customers with stock photography of models that are representative of their communities (anybody ever wonder why the weatherman in Miami is Hispanic, while the weatherman in Santa Barbara is whiter than Vanilla Ice in a snowstorm?). In a market where it is now expected that websites know you personally, this kind of customization is key.
That being said, we will soon need to get more philosophical with locations. Just as "Home" reflects way more than a specific set of geographic coordinates for my wife in her cell phone, one wonders if geo-marketing won't have to recalibrate itself to keep up with the times. More than ever, people are literally taking their geography with them, whether it be through a Vonage number that allows you to make calls from a Losa Angeles area code while you travel to Toronto, or an eFax number that lets you do the same with faxes and voicemail. IP addresses and cookies are quickly becoming the last vestiges of real location online, and with cookies going the way of the dodo (depending on who you believe), we could have even less real data to use to localize offers to our customers.
That's why it will be the marketer that figures out this geotagging thing who will eat all of our lunches when it comes to selling things on the Web in the coming years. And I don't mean just by letting customers know where YOU are. Get customers to find utility in telling you where THEY are at any given time and you will make bank. I don't know if anyone's hit this out of the ballpark get, but folks are getting closer every day.
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