Customer Experience Crossroads

Improved local search is coming soon to a smart phone near you

 
I was looking for maps of local meeting places (aka Starbucks) one day recently, and found this great little tool called FindbyClick. It looked like something I could really use, and I was excited to see it had mobile download availability. Just not for my Blackberry. Darn.

This prompted a quick e-mail to the company, which resulted in a delightful conversation with Kevin MacDonald, head of the location-based product group at developer Pentura.

FindbyClick was a media darling for a brief period when it was first introduced, but is not the main line of business for this IT development company. Nevertheless, it has a place in the hearts of the team, and is still in line for some development.

"My dream is to tap into the community, to help take content that would be of interest to others, and to use this content to create a social network on a map," Mr. MacDonald says.

He observed that a challenge for all mapping services, whether Google Maps, MapQuest or TomTom, is that "they have a lot of stale data."  He had hoped to build enough of a community that people would go in and correct incorrect data. This did indeed happen in some instances. "We had one guy who had a Wal-Mart obsession," who did considerable work tagging and moving points around to their correct locations. Another individual provided many of the locations and tags for Starbucks in Hong Kong.

Mr. MacDonald believes that the launch of FindbyClick was "a little ahead of the curve." IPhone had not yet been released, and mobile device capability was constrained. At the time this service was built, only Nokia had the capacity to put such an application on their phones.

Subsequently the firm has worked with a number of major organizations on location-based applications, including Google.

Maps as information sources

You can learn a lot from mapping. For example, Mr. MacDonald notes that Manhatten is covered with Starbucks, but New Jersey has almost none. We speculated that perhaps New Jerseyites were more of a Dunkin Donuts crowd. Or perhaps they get their Starbucks at work, not in their home neighborhood. You can tell alot about the people in an area by the stores and services in the area.

The future of mapping is definitely bright

Mr. MacDonald agreed with me that push marketing to your mobile device is not likely to be appealing to many people -- the "turn around now for a great deal" kinds of applications that were forecast a decade ago.

Instead, what he sees is the potential for predictive functionality based on an individual's own tags. So my phone might tell me about things that are similar to what I have already expressed interest in. If I have tagged a lot of delicatessens on my maps, my phone might find additional delis for me from the lists of things others have tagged. This feels something like Del.icio.us functionality brought to a map, and that would be excellent.

Another limitation has been the lexicon of descriptions available to tag a given location, which Mr. MacDonald likens to working with a limited vocabulary. In the future we will have more free-form searching, instead of being limited to a specific set of tags.

FindbyClick will launch a new version in 2009, "with more data, more content, and content more personalized to you."

Experience design implications

So many of the things we want are local. And the web has not been very good at local search. When we are looking for a hair salon, we want one that's convenient. Even more for a drycleaner. Same thing for a daycare, a dentist, or a framing shop. Sometimes it's urgently local, as is the case with a gas station or a bank machine.

With local search and mapping getting better, and with smart mobile devices ready to help, we will all be able to get out from behind our desks more and find the places we need. If your company has any kind of physical presence, you will want to be considering how you will take your place in these interactive maps.

Resources:

Pentura Solutions Inc.-- an IT consulting firm that developed FindbyClick

Google Maps Mania --  a blog about Google Maps. Here's their story about FindbyClick

FindbyClick the blog -- Kevin MacDonald's blog

Personalized Direct Mail Steps Up a Notch

I got a package in the mail this week that contained an inflatable globe (very handy, and I mean that) with a sticker on it directing me to a web site. A web site just for me.
How cool is that? When I got there, a nice sound and light show telling me more about e-Rewards, and offering to send me a report on global online research capabilities.

We're not really experts on direct marketing here at the crossroads... but this just felt very engaging to me.  You're welcome to try the site yourself, for as long as it lasts. But please don't order the book, I don't want hundreds of them to arrive! ;0)  Here's the link.

Vialuna are the clever folk behind this piece.

Trend Watching

Personalization
I've been monitoring the term personalization with various alerts for a while now.  The traffic on this term is steadily rising.  A few months ago, days would go by with no alert. As of this week, every day I get an alert, and every day there is an increasing number of items on the list.
I don't know if any personalization is actually happening out there, but everyone is talking about it.

Instant Messaging
WebEx, the meeting host people, are advertising secure instant messaging on the AOL interface as a business application. Get ready to lose the rest of your free time.
I also think this means that the research opportunities using instant messaging are going to keep getting better, now that a secure application is available.

I tried to register on the WebEx site this morning to download their free whitepaper and tell you all aboutt this.  The registration page hung on me so many times I gave up. Tried their home page, thinking I could find some basic info there.  Guess it was important enough to buy full page ads in major business magazines, but not important enough to be findable on the home page.

Over at WebEx, someone is probably sayind, "gawd, I hope nobody blogs about this mess-up". 

Personalization Trend Watch: Consumers Become Producers

The personalization trend is being driven at the core by the desire of people to be the producers and creators of their own lives. This is the conclusion of an excellent opinion piece by Thomas de Zengotita in the LA Times: The iPod as a Reflection of You, (free registration required) and his analysis is spot on.

But what's going on underneath all this is that consumers want to displace producers entirely. What customers really want is to produce for themselves. And not just for themselves. Ultimately, they want to produce themselves.

Things being what they are — things like refrigerators and cars and stoves — consumers can't actually become manufacturers. But wherever media technologies are making it possible for consumers to become the producers, they are doing it. The terms "customer" and "customize" have always been affiliated. Now they are fusing.

The challenge I see around me is that many (most?) organizations have finally figured out branding, and finally  got control of the global brand, and the last thing they want to do is give up any of that control to the consumer.

In some respects, it's easy for Apple: because they've given you content control, the look and feel are all clearly Apple, through and through.  But what do you do when you are Citibank or Ford?

It's all well and good to say "be more like Apple", the challenge is translating this personalization & customization desire in a meaningful way to other industries.  The organizations that figure out how to permit maximum consumer empowerment while simultaneously supporting a strong brand will be the winners in the next few years.