Look to the Future of Location-based Marketing

The rate of change in location-based marketing presents both opportunities and challenges. Knowing the trends in location-based marketing is critical to ensuring that today’s decisions translate into tomorrow’s successes.

Opportunites to target market at decision point

• Geo-targeting: One of the things that will only become more prevalent over the next couple of years is geotargeted (messages and offers based on location) advertising. For example, adding location to services such as DART for Publishers (an online ad-serving system now owned by Google).

  
  

  One thing that you can start thinking about as you test location-based services (LBS) is how you could use your LBS or recommendation engines like WHERE (or even Twitter) to start to serve more geographically relevant ads to your customers.

  
  



• Day-parting: What’s really exciting about the promise of geotargeted advertising is that it comes with the advantage of day-parting (serving up time-sensitive ads, such as lunch ads around noon) and demographic targeting. Most important is that prospective customers will actually have a way to act on these targeted ads via an LBS.

  
  

Challenges of a changing technology landscape

• Hardware in the location to support passive check-in: As location-based marketers try to make checking in easier on their customers, more LBS providers will move to on-premise hardware.

  
  

  Right now, a majority of LBS providers rely on GPS to allow customers to check in to a venue.Only shopkick — a company that powers LBS programs for the likes of Simon Malls, Sports Authority, Target, and Best Buy, among many others — requires retail stores to install physical hardware in their store that will passively check in customers if they have the shopkick application open on their smartphone.

  
  



• Geofencing: You will also start to see more LBS and businesses using geofencing, which is isolating a particular location for privacy reasons. But as more companies adopt LBS and offer richer incentives to customers to check in, concerns around “gaming the system” will grow. To combat this problem, geofencing allows tighter controls over ensuring that a customer is physically in your venue (or at least within a 20-yard perimeter).

  
  



• Wireless network technologies: Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G, LTE, WiMax microwaves are able to connect mobile devices over longer distances and are becoming more pervasive.

  
  

  This trend is creating a need for LBS to create enough elasticity around its check-in rules. For example, someone can go from a Wi-Fi network (which can sometimes interfere with GPS) to a 3G or 4G network, and then pick up public Wi-Fi networks.

  
  

  Location-based providers have to understand these patterns and not penalize customers if a local coffee shop’s Wi-Fi connects to a router five miles away and thus makes it appear that the customer is not actually in the store but rather next to the building housing the router.

  
  

dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/look-to-the-future-of-locationbased-marketing.html

Taste-Testing a Bottle of Wine when Dining Out

The process of tasting wine from a bottle that you've ordered in a restaurant can be intimidating, but this quick guide to the wine-tasting ritual makes it easy. Evaluating wine involves a bit of ceremony, but there’s logic behind it. Step by step, the wine-presentation goes like this:

1. The server or sommelier presents the bottle to you (assuming that you’re the person who ordered the wine) for inspection. Check the label carefully and feel the bottle with your hand to determine whether its temperature seems to be correct. If you’re satisfied with the bottle, nod your approval to the server.

   
   

   This step enables you to make sure that the bottle is, in fact, the bottle you ordered.

   
   



2. The server removes the cork and places it in front of you. Inspect the cork and sniff it to make sure it’s in good condition.

   
   

   In rare instances, a wine may be so corky that the cork itself will have an unpleasant odor. On even rarer occasions, the cork might be wet and shriveled or dry and crumbly; either situation suggests that air has gotten into the wine and spoiled it.

   
   

   If the cork raises your suspicions, wait to smell or taste the wine itself before deciding whether to reject the bottle.

   
   



3. The server pours a small amount of wine into your glass and waits. Now is when you swirl the wine in the glass, take a sniff, perhaps a little sip, and then indicate whether you find the wine acceptable.

   
   

   If the wine is fine, you can nod or murmur, “It’s fine.” If something is wrong with the wine, now is the time to return it — not after you’ve finished half the bottle!

   
   

   If you decide that the bottle is out of condition, describe to the server what you find wrong with the wine. If the sommelier or wine specialist agrees that it’s a bad bottle, he may bring you another bottle of the same, or he may bring you the wine list so you can select a different wine. Either way, the ritual begins again.

   
   



4. If you accept the wine, the server pours the wine into your guests’ glasses and then finally into yours.

   
   

   Now you’re allowed to relax.

   
   

dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/tastetesting-a-bottle-of-wine-when-dining-out.html