Location Intelligence using Social Media Data: Customer Location Aware Systems

In the recent past, a variety of new social media sites have emerged – location Based Services( like foursquare, gowala), Group Deals( like groupon),  microblogging( like twitter, fb). These social media sites have provided integration features with other SM sites, for instance A foursquare checkin can be configured to automatically publish a tweet with the URL of location checked-in. All these data being primarily open source, we have various business opportunities to leverage the data by integrating this with the internal customer data. 
             A retailer’s major concern is the need to understand their customers better, to gain the 360 degree view of the customer. Most of the companies, have strategy to integrate the internal customer behavior data acorss POS, Ecomm, Mail order,etc. By leveraging the social media data and integrating with location based services(like foursquare) and microblogging services(twitter), the retailers now have the ability to track customers.
           When a customer checks-in to a location adjacent to the store, the retailer could idetify this event of the customer, and target in real time with offers/product recommmendation which would likely bring him to the store, increase footfalls and sales.  The channel could be either sms, email or voicemail. The offer could be linked to his/her overall sentiment score by analyzing the customer tweets over time. Meaning, a dissatisfied customer could be given a high value offer as compared to neutral/satisfied customer.
            Pharmacy retail stores could leverage this platform for refill reminders, so to increase drug adherence. When a customer is identified to be closer to the store, a message could go out via channels namely email, sms, voicemail, etc. This increases good will and they feel being cared about, which intun increases loyalty.
          The online world with rise of social media sites has raised concerns about user privacy. I feel the users should be well educated about their privacy settings in these social media sites, and any of the targeting should be done only based on the users approval. We need to instill the message in customers ”The more the data you share with us, the better is the service you recieve”.
Shown below is a 5 slider deck which talks about this idea of “Location Intelligence using Social Media data: Customer Location Aware Systems” which won Social Media Analytics event at an Analytics expo.

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