How to Prepare for Location Services

Buzz is building again for location-based services (LBS) with the emergence of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, in particular in the form of the Apple iBeacon. Added to technology such as ultra-wide band and WiFi tracking, LBE continues to make it inevitable that location will be an important part of the digital marketing mix.

Even if you do not have this technology in place now, you can lay prepare today for LBS. Having the ground ready means when you need to make the case for LBS implementation (or respond to the demand for it from the C-suite) you will get there faster. Here's how.

Maps

Underlying location visualization: maps.

While at Newbury Networks providing LBS for asset tracking and network security, one of the biggest hold-ups we had for implementing our system was what one might think would be simple: getting our hands on maps.

Even teams with strong understanding of their inventory and their network topology could not readily supply maps for their space.

Time and again, we would wind up grabbing fire exit plans from the building and scanning them. This would lead to low-resolution base images that did not scale well for zooming in to detailed spaces.

It does not have to be this way. Reach out to your facilities management people and get maps that can be used for LBS.  

Here is what you want out of your maps:

• The maps should be to scale, not simple schematics. You can always produce a schematic if you need one.
• The maps should include the scale so that if your LBS needs to calculate and use distance it can
• The maps should be in some kind of scaled-vector graphic format, such as that used by Adobe Illustrator. This allows for zooming in and out without losing image quality.
• The maps should be a simple black and white (most likely the contrast will be turned down for a washed out background in any case). Let the LBS systems do the work of defining boundaries, areas, and highlighting and labeling them. That's why you have them.

Keep them handy and up to date for any changes in floor plans.
 

Named Spaces

Another surprising delay to rolling out LBS is that no one knows what to name spaces on a map. If you are doing asset tracking, it is important to have a named location that people can easily understand.

But what is that naming convention? Do you have room numbers available? Do people know them? Do you do it by department, function, nickname, geography?

It depends on audience.  Your inventory and sticking team may know things by bins. Your IT team may know everything by a floor plan and corresponding network drops. And your customers may know department names. It is rare that anyone realizes where the southeast corner of the building is.

When you get your maps, take some time to add some place names.

My suggestion is to use named locations that cover the broadest possible audience.

In a retail setting, it may be tempting to use department names (Men's, Housewares, etc.). This is fine if those are unlikely to change. Avoid place names based on inventory or other features that change over time.

Oh, and those place names? Add them to your scaled vector graphic with a new layer so that your base image stays as clean as possible, and so translating them will be easier.

Add Location to Your Data

So now you have location names. Start using it wherever possible.

You may not be using location data yet. But when you do want to use it, having a way to join your data will be critical.

This is the same issue you may have seen in the past with things like email merges. You cannot make use of what you know from catalog sales and merge it with your subscriber base if email is not in the direct mail database.

Start doing this now. If you have an inventory database locations, be sure they correspond to the names you created for the maps, or at least have a new column with the friendly name.  For instance, your inventory may go right down to the bin. Whereas there are tens of bins in one of the named locations you created for your maps. Then add a column with the friendly location name or build a look up table of detailed location to the friendly name that contains it.

That way, in the future, when you want to send a coupon to a customer based on location, you can direct them to where the item can be found. Or when you want to alert loss prevention team to a device being unplugged, you can point them to the spot on the map where the network drop sits.

Prepare Now

These simple steps - collecting maps, producing a convention for your names spaces, and using location in data now - will let you accelerate your location services project.

More importantly, the exercise of naming spaces and adding location to data will start you thinking about how your customers, and your internal staff, can benefit from location services. Which is the whole point in the first place.