SCVNGR “chief ninja” Seth Priebatsch and Gowalla CEO Josh Williams both employ game mechanics to elevate their location-based services, and both believe that gaming’s inherent fun factor can motivate more important behaviors, including social good. But that’s where the similarities stop.

The duo delivered keynote addresses at SxSW Interactive, Priebatsch in front of 4,000, Williams in front of a smaller crowd is his company’s backyard (figuratively — Gowalla is Austin-based).

Priebatsch’s thesis essentially reads like this: The construction of the social ecosystem is largely complete; “the framework has been decided.” It’s called Facebook. The next decade will not be about building digital plumbing or social connections, but gaming the established architecture to “traffic social influence.” SCVNGR uses this game dynamic to drive its users to complete location-centric challenges.

The 22-year-old, a proud Princeton dropout donning PU-orange shades, proceeded to offer examples of powerful game mechanics in action, as well as broken processes that gamification can remedy.

Take Groupon, for instance, as a potent example of the game layer driving customer acquisition. The deal-a-day monster has essentially fused three powerful game mechanics into a $15 billion enterprise equation: “free lunch” + communal gameplay (sharing across decentralized networks) + countdown = the deal is on!

Then there’s customer loyalty, where American Express has ingeniously leveraged “level up” game psychology to create status through card colors (gold, platinum, black). SCVNGR clearly drew motivation from this concept with its new LevelUp pilot that combines LBS with Groupon-esque discounts.

SCVNGR's Seth Priebatsch

For Priebatsch, there are no boundaries to the influence that games can wield in the social realm. For Williams, however, “gamification” (a dirty word in his book) is a means to an end. What’s that end? That’s what LBS must figure out to escape its current “purgatory.”

That purgatory, Williams noted, is the potential not only for check-in overload, but for check-ins and virtual rewards (badges, et al) to be misconstrued as endpoints rather than context wrappers for driving greater utility.

Williams’ future for LBS includes narrating personal histories, building and solidifying communities and fostering social good, though he admits that “social validation” will always be a driver (see what enabling photo posting did to mainstream Facebook).

Foursquare is the biggest pure-play LBS, with 7.5 million users. SCVNGR and Gowalla each count about 1 million. That’s an intriguing start, but far from a mainstream experience. Neither Priebatsch nor Williams had concrete ideas for how to push forward (at least none that they let on), but this much they certainly agree on: Building bolder value requires delighting users, and that must transcend temporal check-ins.

Though no cure-all solutions were put forward, these entrepreneurs’ contrasting outlooks on the future of the converged mobile-social-local universe offered a refreshing reminder that not all location services are created equal…that the space isn’t confined to just Foursquare and a flock of rewards-based followers.

Gowalla's Josh Williams

The post SxSW: The Location Wars (cont’d) — Defending and Transcending ‘The Game Layer’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Ironically, on the same day Facebook sprung a major announcement — the unveiling of Deals as a natural extension of Places — that could have thunderous effects on popularizing social location tools, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released a survey that suggests LBS has a way to go.

The study, which polled approximately 3,000 adults, reports that only 4 percent of U.S. adults in total use “geosocial” services like Foursquare or Gowalla. Note that surveying began in early August, before the official rollout of Facebook Places.

Among Pew’s other notable findings:

– Early adopters of location-based services skew young (no surprise), male and Hispanic. Eight percent of adults 18-29 use these online services, double the standard rate. Speaking of double, men double up women in LBS adoption (6 percent to 3 percent). And top users are Hispanics at 10 percent.

– Unsurprisingly, active social media users have a greater attraction to LBS. Among Twitter advocates (which surged from 6 percent to 24 percent over the past 25 months), 10 percent utilize geosocial tools. Facebook and other social network users are less inclined, but still show a higher affinity (6 percent) than the general population.

Pew’s numbers underscore a theme BIA/Kelsey has accentuated for months — that popular adoption of LBS is not on par with the electricity surrounding these platforms. Funding for companies such as Foursquare and Gowalla has been robust, but advertisers remain curious — and some speculative — if the status updates, check-ins and virtual rewards propagated by these brands can mainstream.

As BIA/Kelsey’s Mike Boland has emphasized, virtual rewards (badges, mayors, etc.) will have a limited shelf-life if not ultimately backed by more alluring, tangible rewards.

Many businesses already realize that and are incentivizing virtual, social currency with real inducements. Now, with Facebook adding Deals to Places and opening it up to its 20,000 SMBs to customize check-in deals (four different categories) for consumers, mainstreaming to scale could occur more quickly than research studies would suggest — both from SMB advertiser and user perspectives.

The post Pew: Geosocial Not Mainstream … Yet appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Some people (like me) don’t like games. Game mechanics-driven “check in” media like Foursquare, GoWalla, Loopt and BrightKite mostly leave them cold.

But what if check-ins triggered group buying discounts? That’s the concept behind GroupTabs, a new service launching in New York City next week. The idea is that offers could be floated on smartphones with a one- or two-hour window, and users can check in at the location. When enough people arrived, the discount (“20% off Wine Bar Purchases”) would kick in. The location pays a fee for the promotion if it reaches its threshold.

Led by former Citysearch sales exec Zane Friedman, GroupTabs began development in April. It has adopted Foursquare’s open API for check-ins, and plans to work with other check-in systems as well. One modification it has made is that it requires check-ins to be made at the location: Foursquare lets you do it all from your home or other locations.

“We give people a reason to try LBS [location-based services],” says mobile vet Josh Malin, who is part of the three-person start-up team. “Immediacy determines what they’re doing. They are not in it for the badge.”

Malin says the site will begin with one deal a day, and maybe add several deals a day after it starts adding some volume. He anticipates that the deals will be much smaller than Groupon-like deals, since they’ll mostly be tailored to bars and restaurants. Average deals might have 20 or 30 buyers. When New York is fully developed, additional markets may be pursued, perhaps up or down the East Coast, or San Francisco.

GroupTabs will obviously be limited to busy metro areas. Not many suburban areas will have 30 people ready to buy a drink down the street when they are gassing up or whatever.

The post GroupTabs: Check-Ins = Group Buying appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.