Digital Dogwhistles: 'Location Aware' Social Media

More than once last week at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, I'd be sitting in a restaurant or in a hotel lobby with some colleagues when suddenly, nearly everyone within eyeshot would stand up and start moving toward the exits, simultaneously. My colleagues and I would do the same and usually end up a few blocks away, with everyone who'd just left.

But this wasn't the usual conference "pack" mentality. This was different: our smart phones were running the show, telling us when to leave, where to go, and who else we'd likely be seeing when we got there. We had, in other words, already "gotten the memo." And for many cramming the bars and restaurants post-panel sessions in Austin, SxSW provided a first chance to try out location-based social media services like Foursquare and Gowalla on a larger scale and experience the sensation of location-awareness first-hand. The potential for social action groups -- to organize volunteers and not just partygoers  -- wasn't lost on the activist crowd.

[New York Times writer David Carr had the same sensation at SxSW, writing in the Times today that "it was striking to see the digital location effect in the wild, with people reacting to an unseen dog whistle and moving en masse, on command."]

How do location-aware social media work? Once you arrive at a location, you "check in" and see a list of people who are already there; Foursquare was ranking the most popular locations by the number of check-ins during the conference. Local merchants were handing out digital, branded "badges" to those who showed up -- and free beer or other perks were being given to those who showed up the most often. Twitter launched a location-aware app during the conference and Facebook will soon follow suit.

Location, simply put, changes a lot -- from marketing to social action. Merging location information and the Web means that most of us can walk around with a smart phone in our pockets that not only tell others where we are but also plugs into the Net to share that information, merge it with online databases and spit out who else is in the immediate vicinity that we might know.

But location-aware services -- though still a relatively new form of social media -- are doing more now than simply testing organizers' ability to move a crowd [see my earlier story on these pages about the latest location-based startups]. They're also testing new ways to help charitable causes organize groups to give money or time to a cause: following the Haiti earthquake, Loopt announced that for every user who checked in from a Panera, Chipotle or a Whole Foods, it would donate $1 towards Haitian relief, with 50 cents going to the Red Cross and the rest to Doctors Without Borders. Not to be outdone, Gowalla donated $50 to the Red Cross for every user who checked in from one of three locations in San Francisco at certain times.

CauseWorld, meanwhile, is a location-based social network that hands out "Karma Points" each time a user checks in at a participating location. The free iPhone and Android app lets users convert their Karma Points into real dollars and donate them to to a list of causes that corporate sponsors Kraft Foods and Citi have designated. The CauseWorld community has, so far, earned $6 million worth of Karma Points for the homeless in Haiti.

There's no question that there is more opportunity for these digital swarms to move groups to benefit social causes. Backers say CauseWorld is an example of how brands can combine social media with cause marketing in new ways to deliver new value to customers and employees, alike. No doubt CauseWorld is just the first of such initiatives.

Are you part of any new projects that use location-aware technology-for-a-cause? How would you rate the potential for location-aware media to promote social action? Employee and consumer engagement? Let us hear from you.