A new type of segment

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Properly segmented target market is one of the key elements in effective marketing. Without it, marketers won't be able to communicate with consumers due to irrelevancy of the message. However,it has always been a challenge for marketers to segment their target markets because they lacked sufficient time and information to go beyond simple demographics. But recently, a new beam of light for hope to segmentation has emerged: geo-networking mainstream.

With help from some of the emerging social networking services like Facebook, marketers will soon be able to find out current geographical locations of its target consumers in order to tailor their messages and communicate with them more efficiently and thus more effectively.

As a part of sharing their life stories, social network users will be able to "check-in" at the retail locations they are currently at to let everyone, including the marketers (intentionally or not), know where they are. Then the marketers will be able to communicate to them the most timely and relevant information that the consumer is more than likely to want to know about based on his/her location.

That way, marketers will be able to use "current locations" as a whole new set of segmenation.

However, there are still some obstacles to be dealt with before it becomes feasible for marketers. First of all, Facebook still hasn't announced officially its plan to offer geo-networking mainstream as one of its services. Without Facebook, other social networking websites with only about a million users are sort of meaningless when most marketers need to communicate with tens of million users. Also, there is an issue of trust and privacy with the kind of services. Obviously, users won't feel comfortable sharing their current locations (or any other personal information) with the "evil" marketers who are always trying to get to them and annoy them.

Nonetheless, it is good news to marketers that they will be allowed another segmentation option to help them communicate their messages more effectively.