1) Mobile Search

Google has recognized the growing power and widespread use of the mobile internet and is attempting to engage people on their mobile devices. Especially when it comes to searching for business listings, restaurants, or directions these are natural things to search for on mobile devices.

Each favorite place listing has a “QR” code attached that takes the mobile user directly to the businesses’ Google listing.

Great way to spur the use of mobile Google search.

2) Geo-location

Watch out. Google knows us early adopter folks are having fun with Foursquare, Gowalla and a few others. With Google’s favorite places mobile program they are setting the stage to create contests, coupons, and scavenger hunts with Google engineering behind it. This means amazing usability and simple design.

3) Augmented Reality

Imagine walking down the street and having a coupon code from Google pop up based on your mobile search for “ice cream” on Google Maps.

How about holding your phone up, and the places with Google business listings appear with a rating, user reviews, and daily deals?

While the Yelp Iphone app has tried to harness augmented reality technology, Google will definitely do it better.

4) Deals, Coupons, User Generated Content

Why do you follow a business on Twitter or Facebook? Generally, it’s to make yourself privy to special discounts, offers, and hear about brand happenings first.

So the Google favorite places program encourages businesses to create a profile where they can post coupons, deals, pictures and video. So for all us social media deal and contest hounds, will the Google favorite places program draw us away from following brands and businesses on social media profiles? Maybe.

5) Measurement

How do you measure mobile social media networking?

Well, while social media is amazingly important for branding, PR, and customer satisfaction, when it comes to pure social media marketing businesses want to see the bottom line. They want traffic, engagement, and sales.

With the favorite places business profiles, Google has made it easier than ever to track that “bottom line”.

It’s pretty easy to imagine a world where coupon codes, special offers and deals are integrated into your overall website analytics.

Imagine if you could tell a client: 240 people came to your store after finding your Monday special via Google maps on their  mobile phone.

While we can obviously track social media contests, coupons and interactions — a direct integration into Google Analytics could revolutionize the way we measure online marketing efforts.

These are just my initial thoughts after recieving the Google Favorite Places invite, how do you think it will impact online business marketing?

Personally, I am fascinated by social media measurement. Now, that may be the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written on paper, but it’s true. Social Media measurement is essential to ensure that our campaigns are meeting their objectives and that our clients are happy. Measurement allows us to troubleshoot, tweak, and drastically improve campaigns.

I was lucky enough to be placed on the social media measurement panel ( seriously, I was quite excited) and it was moderated by an extremely knowledgeable industry veteran: Tery Spataro. Tery has been involved in the social media space long before it was called social media, and has directed campaigns for Volvo and Hormel among others.

Tery had some great ideas, and I’ll run through them quickly:

1) Measurement starts with objectives. You need to keep those objectives simple and straightforward, set tactics to help you reach those objectives, and then define your metrics.

Defining metrics before determining an objective hurts any campaign. A client may tell an agency that they want 1,000 facebook fans, but is that actually an objective, or is it a metric? Isn’t the real objective to build engagement around your brand?

2) Benchmarks are important, and anything social takes time.

If you’re a business, you constantly hear the success stories of big brands with social media. While these stories are great, the reality is that social campaigns, like any WOM campaign, take time. It takes time to build relationships in real life, and, in a world where online networking reflects offline networking more and more, relationship building takes both time and effort.

3) Hard data does exist in the social media space!

Beyond soft metrics like engagement, you can redirect traffic from social sites to separate landing pages on your website with analytics installed. This allows you to see exactly how many visitors you are getting from a variety of sites. For those who are really interested in translating social media into dollars and cents, there is also the cost per acquisition model.

The cost per acquisition model refers to how much money you have spent to build up a certain number of followers, engagements, or friends. Think about it this way, if you spent $100,000 to build out a blog and aren’t getting traffic or readers, your CPA isn’t very good. However, if you put $100 into Twitter, and you have 100,000 followers, you CPA is something you should be pretty proud of.

My personal opinion:

Social media monitoring and measurement is increasingly important, but the measurement tools haven’t quite caught up to the soical networking technologies–yet. There are plenty of tools out there, blog monitoring software, Twitter monitoring software, and social conversation trackers. This data combined with traditional web analytics can give us a fairly complete picture of an online presence, but it still leaves something to be desired.

Think about the possibility for behavioral tracking with all of these social networks. The possibilities for data collection and measurement are endless, we just need to better understand how to collect and analyze data.

What do you see as the future of social media measurement? What tools are you utilizing now that are especially powerful?