Hanging Out at the Intersection of Digital and Physical

After my post last week on Foursquare tips and location-based services in general, I received a lot of feedback in the comments, tweets and offline, and the majority of those could be placed into three categories:

1. I see the value in location-based services, but I don’t know how to leverage it
2. Cleveland/Columbus/Anytown, USA isn’t SV/Austin/NYC and we’ll never get to “mainstream”
3. Foursquare? The kids game? Honey, you need a real job. (Thanks mom)

My point in that earlier post was to outline ways technology has evolved a specific business segment, yet many have ignored it.

Let’s take it a step further from a more proactive approach.

In the days leading up to SXSW, we have been inundated with updates from the location service big boys Foursquare and Gowalla. But while the lucky jerks going to SXSW were packing their hipster gear and boarding planes, they may have missed the dénouement:  a Foursquare and Starbucks Customer Rewards Program.

My initial reaction was that I loved the partnership, not because I adore Starbucks, but because if we know anything about the Starbucks marketing team, is that they will find a variety of ways to inform their audience.  More awareness will equal more users on Foursquare, which if you read my earlier post is something I think is a positive. But before this starts reading less like something informative and more like press release for SBUX, the deal does have implications outside the nerd parameters of location-based services. From the NYT Bits Blog:

“It’s where the intersection between digital and physical starts to get interesting,” said Chris Bruzzo, vice president of brand, content and online at Starbucks. “Starbucks loves that, because we’re always looking for that intersection, which we think is the evolution of social networks.”

As people who know me can tell you, finding that intersection is the moment when I start talking really, really fast. And it’s when you find that intersection is when you can give clients or your company real value. Action. Transaction. Conversion. Perhaps I just never had a good analogy for it.

For everyday users, the intersection is where these digital worlds manifest themselves into our everyday routine (or that we are reminded to inject themselves) and eventually, some semblance of critical mass (not “mainstream”). When a critical mass threshold has been achieved, and only then, the data has a value that companies that want to pay for it. Again, it’s not about becoming “mainstream,” just a threshold where it makes sense. Was there a better fit for Foursquare than Starbucks? Could a McDonald’s – Gowalla partnership have had the same cachet and could it have achieved the same threshold?

Perhaps it will be deals like this that will remove the words “social media” and call it what it is: smart marketing. Social isn’t a black box or magical pixie dust. Just because we toss around words like digital or social or interactive doesn’t it make it outside the boundaries of your capabilities. All we are doing is injecting new technologies or an online presence around existing marketing plans, goals and audiences. No one owns this stuff, not PR, not ad agencies and certainly not any one marketing discipline.

Flickr photo courtesy of andrewmartin

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