Several years ago there was a movement pushing on the internet known as hyperlocal. The philosophy was all your search engine optimization (SEO) should not only be geared towards to local market (Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, etc) that it should be geared to the specific neighborhoods in those cities. Recent changes take us beyond that even more.
SoLoMo, or Social Local Mobile, takes the game to mobile devices. The reason for this change is because hyperlocal centered around delivering search results based on the users IP address. While this provided targeted ads based on a general area of results, the limitation is that IP addresses can be from many miles away and an ad might not be as geographically relevant.
As smartphone users in the US continue to grow, now estimated at almost 98 million, mobile is no longer the future of marketing, it is the present. As geo-location technology has gotten smaller and better over the years, smartphones are equipped with a technology that is far superior than what IP addresses can deliver. Social media resources like Foursquare, Yelp, Facebook (which recently acquired Gowalla) are now poised to own SoLoMo. It is one of the many reasons that Google developed Google+ as the way people search is changing and they want to profit from those changes.
As a business, it is clear that adapting to the ever changing marketplace is a daunting task. For years, advertising in the yellow pages was considered a place you had to be. In the late 1990′s, the internet took off and you had to have a presence online with a website. That was all fine and dandy for a number of years until Google changed the way people find information online. They owned the space for a good number of years until Facebook came along and changed the way we consume information. About the same time, Apple developed the iPhone and changed the way how we consume that information. No longer are we tied to a computer or laptop, we now have a powerful computer no bigger than the size of most people’s wallets. As a result, where consumers consume their information has now changed.
Businesses need to adapt to the ever changing environment, allowing them to continue to connect with their desired audience. Those that do not will fail in the marketplace.
Here are a few links to provide more information about SoLoMo.
- SoLoMo Revolutions Picks Up Where Hyperlocal Search Left Off
- New York Times – SoLoMo
- SoLoMo – Implications for Marketers
- SoLoMo and the Future of Mobile Technology