Agency Execs Weigh in on Facebook Places’ Marketing Implications

By Kiran Aditham 

By now, most of us are aware of Places, Facebook’s own geo-location service that officially goes live today and which some are already calling “both cool and creepy.”

But what of the potential marketing benefits with the Foursquare/Gowalla-backed service, which allows users to share locations with friends that are updated in real-time? Well, we asked execs at a few shops to weigh in on how marketers can effectively leverage geo-location data and whether or not consumers will embrace the service. Take it away, boys.

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The reaction to Places is going to be really interesting to watch, because the user community doesn’t put a lot of faith in Facebook when it comes to privacy. If they can manage to help people get over the basic privacy issues–and figure out how to handle the more complicated “creep factor” stuff that could happen, then it will be a big hit.

While there isn’t any ad or marketing platform yet, the potential in this is obvious. The critical thing marketers face is making sure that your brand acts appropriately within this context. Despite the temptation, companies can’t just start bombarding people with location based offers–or all the offers will just become noise. The ad industry will need to hold back a little bit on launching the sales pitch, and work on finding a way to develop a natural dialog with people around the places that they go so marketing can be a benefit, and not an intrusion. –Robson Grieve, President of Creature

Facebook clearly has the largest user base so that should help adoption tremendously. Hopefully, their service will be accurate enough so that a restaurant owner will know someone is actually in the restaurant when they check in, not sitting in a car at the nearest intersection. The opportunities to engage and reward customers who visit and check in frequently are enormous, but right now most of the competing services can be exploited.–Kevin Purcer, Director of Interactive Services at Erwin-Penland

Facebook’s addition of geo-location is a huge step in bringing the latest technology to the mainstream. Most marketers have “figured out” how to use Facebook whether it’s for awareness, driving store traffic, or just keeping touch with their consumers. And most marketers have been interested in geo-location services but have not utilized it yet with the exception of a few brands on Foursquare.

The addition of geo-location services on Facebook opens up the technology to mainstream marketers and makes launching these campaigns far more easy and accessible. Facebook has been smart in waiting until the market was ready for this technology, and the adoption of Foursquare has shown that the market is ready. Today we enter a new frontier in interactive marketing. Thanks, Facebook!–Frank O’Brien, Founder, Conversation

More: “Vitrue Hopes to Enable Agencies on Facebook via Free API

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