We have been a little obsessed with the possibilities of location-based social networks and gaming platforms lately so we decided to check ourselves instead of checking in. We hope you enjoy this tongue-in-cheek look at the LBS space. As always, if you have questions about how to activate with this stuff, drop us a tweet (@schneidermike or @EricLeist), leave us a comment, or contact us here.

If you compare all location-based services to Foursquare, you need to stop right now. The user experience on SCVNGR, an application for virtual scavenger hunts, is entirely different from those on other location-based services. Yesterday, The Ad Club hosted a SCVNGR hunt for local advertising and marketing professionals to find the judges for the The Hatch Awards. Eight a&g employees joined the hunt in downtown Boston.

How a SCVNGR trek works

1. A company or organization licenses the SCVNGR platform to create a journey complete with trivia questions, miniature missions and puzzles.
2. Users download the SCVNGR application onto their smart phones and use it to find the locations within their desired trek. They can also play over SMS.
3. SCVNGR tracks each user’s progress throughout the trek and awards points for completing tasks.
4. At the end of each hunt, the winners are rewarded with prizes ranging from Super Bowl rings to iPads.

What SCVNGR gets right

• It’s easy to access for both users and companies.
  
• It provides a gaming layer on top of geo-locality that brings the user past the simple check-in found on Foursquare and Gowalla.
• It gives users tangible and intangible incentives to explore hot spots and sights they might not have found otherwise.
• Through the activity tab, SCVNGR chronicles a shared experience for all users participating in the hunt.

SCVNGR still has to overcome a few barriers

• It does not operate well in verticals. Challenges for one trek are mixed in with general challenges as well as challenges from other treks. SCVNGR doesn’t provide a filter for users to find exactly what challenges need to be completed for a specific trek.

Congratulations to a&g's Matt Dexter and Lauren Steingold who accidentally got engaged while completing a task for a different SCVNGR trek.

• Challenges with open-ended answers are sometimes very picky. One of yesterday’s tasks required users to name what artifacts were displayed in a glass case at The Green Dragon Tavern. A gaggle of Ad Club members huddled around the case guessing answers like “musket” and “rifle.” SCVNGR was simply looking for the word “gun.” On an old-fashioned paper list scavenger hunt, a wider range of correct answers would have been accepted.
• At times, SCVNGR’s challenges are too virtual. They don’t necessarily require users to go find a location. One of The Ad Club’s challenges told users to go to Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park and write a rhyming poem about Boston. But users didn’t actually have to physically go to the park. They could write the poem from anywhere, which takes the “hunt” out of scavenger hunt.
• Scavenger hunts are team experiences, but the application does not make it easy for multiple users on the same team to follow along on each of their phones. Instead, teams share one cell phone that tracks their progress, which can present lots of confusing “wait, let me see your phone” moments. Couple that with the difficulty of trying to read a cell phone screen in bright daylight.

SCVNGR has enormous potential to allow users to find the gaming layer on top of the world around them. New developments for the application are popping up all the time, so expect some of these issues to be resolved soon. SCVNGR just announced a rewards program earlier this week, and a Blackberry application is rumored to be on the way.

The location space is expanding in many different directions right now. Want to talk more about location-based services and some of the goodies we’re working on at a&g? Drop us a tweet (@schneidermike or@EricLeist), leave us a comment, or contact us here.

(left to right) Mike Schneider, Leighann Farrelly, Phil Thomas Di Giulio and Wayne Sutton (photo by @leximaven)

Our own Mike Schneider moderated this week’s MITX panel discussion titled “To Check-In or Not To Check-In? The Opportunities of Location Based Social Networking.” The panel consisted of Pegshot co-founder Phil Thomas Di Giulio, Yelp Boston Marketing Director Leighann Farrelly, and Wayne Sutton, Business Development & Marketing Strategist for TriOut.

We’ve aggregated some of the key insights and tweets from the panel discussion. Enjoy!

Key insights:

• Businesses should take an active role in promoting check-ins and brand engagement on location-based services.
• Each LBS has a different spin. Pegshot puts content first and location second. Triout puts community first, then location. Whrrl puts check-ins first and then integrates a post-checkin experience. Yelp puts food and reviews first and check-ins further down on the priority list. These subtle nuances help to differentiate each service.
• Businesses will have to figure out how to treat data from LBS platforms. That data currently only represents a fraction of a customer base. Marketers need to devise ways of proving the value on these new platforms.
• Check-ins are a means to an end. Businesses and LBS services will have to work together to drive measurable action from those check-ins.

From the Twitterverse:

Are you using an LBS? How are you seeing marketers use these new platforms? Want to talk more about location-based services and some of the goodies we’re working on at a&g? Drop us a tweet (@schneidermike or @EricLeist), leave us a comment, or contact us here.

Foursquare just passed the million user mark with 40 million check-ins. This explosion of location-based social networking is generating a wealth of data that can be used for smarter marketing. With the availability of data, arises the need to integrate, synthesize and ultimately visualize this data to derive patterns and relationships and most importantly, insight.

Integrate & Synthesize

Often referred to as spatial intelligence, the ability to discover and analyze relationships using location as a dimension and integrating it with other business intelligence elements can lead to data nirvana. However, the biggest potential of location-based data is the insight that it can offer to what might happen in the future. (Feel like Nostradamus yet?)

Predicting patterns of behavior based on ‘check-in’ behavior can help marketers achieve what they have always strived for: being in front of the customer at the exact time the need exists. Think contextual marketing (but defining context became a challenge, think behavioral targeting (‘uniqueness’ in online behavior is debatable). How about trip-based segmentation and targeting based on Foursquare/Gowalla streams? Trip-based predictive segmentation is not new especially in the traditional DM world built on the RFM model. Imagine adding a content layer to that model, with attitudinal intent. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start talking about persona-based segmentation and then clustering various personas into communities based on the user’s paths and check-in trajectories.

Mary, the social butterfly

• Mayor of 20 clubs, bars

John, the ‘living-out-of-a-suitcase’

• Mayor of home airport and checked into 12 other airports

Jack, the responsible husband

• Bi-weekly trips to the grocery store, bank

Visualize

Powered with the ability to segment location-based data and its predictive possibilities, how do you manifest it into a compelling visual? Let’s look at of one of the most famous information design artifacts: Charles Minard’s representation of Napoleons retreat from Moscow in 1812 and understand how we can apply some of Tufte’s fundamental principles to location-based data visualization



More than 2 dimensions (multivariate)
Current location-based visualizations are map-based and some have attempted the geo-temporal dimensions. Austin Vicarious.ly‘s time-lapse visualization of check-ins during SXSW had two dimensions, time (temporal) and location (geo). On the other hand, Minard’s representation has multiple dimensions (army size, location, direction, time, temperature).

A multi-dimensional approach to location-based data visualization can be to integrate time, location, size (based on check-ins), pre-defined content clusters or segments, non-spatial attributes (financial, economic, competitive), predictive variables like propensity to check-in etc. The possibilities are endless.

Mix words/images/numbers
If an info-graphic can survive without the help of a key, it has done its job. Often times ‘content’ and ‘data’ are not uttered in the same sentence, because of the perception that data is ‘structured’ and content is ‘unstructured’. If the visualization can marry the two, the result of the insights can be far more than cursory.

The ultimate potential of location-based data and visualization is the ability to identify patterns, causality and relationships to formulate smarter strategies. It will be interesting to watch how this plays out for business intelligences providers, marketers who want their hands on this data, marketing services companies that will emerge and of course for Mary, the social butterfly who will be leaving much more than a digital footprint the next time she checks into her favorite club.

Knowing where something happens can often lead to knowing why it happens.