While many businesses are just debuting their mobile presence,
marketing strategies for the small screen are already evolving, as mobile web usage becomes habit for more and more consumers. And, although services that utilize the GPS functionality of mobile devices have been around for some time now, geotargeting—advertising to Smartphone owners based on their GPS location—is a growing trend that will be invaluable to brands and advertisers over the coming months and years.

Though controversial from a privacy standpoint, it’s clear that users are adapting to the location-sharing check-in model first popularized by startups like Foursquare and Gowalla, which Facebook has recently adopted as another dimension of their social networking site (SNS), called “Places.”  Facebook users can now use the iPhone app, or visit a related Facebook page (touch.facebook.com) through their mobile browsers to check-in, and share their location with friends in the form of a geographic status update.  The social networking giant, with over 500 million users, is marketing the new function as a way to capture and preserve memories with the added dimension of location, so that users can look back on their data and recall where they were on a specific day and at a specific time, and who they were there with. In fact, Facebook’s VP of Products actually introduced “Places” as a service that would preserve shared memories for users to reminisce about when feeling a bit nostalgic.

But while the consumer-facing announcement of this new application focused on its sentimental value, Facebook executives used a different tone to bill the service on the business side of things.  In Facebook’s Help Center, a page has been devoted to “Places for Advertisers” and, additionally, those interested in learning more can download the guide to Places for advertisers.  Though currently businesses cannot target ads at users that check in to their ‘location,’ advertisers can claim their businesses with a “Place Page,” and target anyone that likes the page.  But Places affords advertisers an even better chance to reach an audience by posting check-ins to the New Feeds of users’ friends.  That means, if you your friend Adam checks in at the Taco Bell down the road, his check-in, essentially a brand interaction, will be posted in his friends’ New Feeds, and Adam will effectively promote Taco Bell of his own volition (and, who knows, maybe he will always look back fondly on that one time at taco bell…).

In the Places guide for advertisers, these check-ins are described as “stories” that can “generate powerful, organic impressions in friends’ News Feeds, extending your brand’s reach to new customers.”  As this explanation quite eloquently puts it, Places offers advertisers an unprecedented and extraordinary opportunity to promote brands through current customers’ engagements.

But more broadly, Facebook’s endorsement of location-based social sharing, and geotargeting, represents the evolution of convergent mobile-social advertising campaigns, and the shape of marketing efforts to come.  One application of this fusion, for example, is sending out location-specific promotions, or with Places, sending promotions to users that have “liked” your Places Page.  Interactions like these between brands and consumers, that take place on social networking sites, and which result from something the user did on a mobile device, are becoming more prevalent, as is the notion of convergent marketing.

Some brands have a long way to come before mastering mutli-touch, new media marketing campaigns that fully integrate these applications—but having a presence on both the mobile Web and major social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, is a good start for businesses that want to keep up with rapidly-evolving consumer trends.  And as the new media industry continues to grow and advance, it is critical that advertisers realize the potential that underlies these trends, and start planning for the future of mobile-social marketing.