Facebook announced Facebook Places earlier this week. It allows Facebook users to check in wherever they are. This is something that has been going on for a while on other services (for example, FourSquare, Gowalla, brightkite, My Town, and Yelp), and millions of users use these services daily.
For the uninitiated, checking in simply requires you to open an app on your mobile device, use the GPS to determine where you are, and click on a button to indicate that you’re there. You can publish your location to a variety of places (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and add a comment or a picture if you wish. Some of the apps award points and honorary titles for checking in, and some merchants provide discounts to people who check in.
Location was important before, but it was only important to a relatively small, tech-forward group of people. (I’m the FourSquare Mayor of a Greek Fiesta. It’s oddly important to me.)
Facebook Places is location on steroids. Location is really important now because Facebook has 500+ million users. Location just went nuclear.
The big question is, will location matter to your practice? Yes and no.
You’re not going to see an impact today. But soon, it’s going to become really important.
Imagine this scenario:
A prospective client has called your office and scheduled an initial consultation. She has shown up and is sitting in your lobby waiting for her meeting. She’s playing with her phone (who isn’t?) and opens her Facebook app. Facebook realizes she’s in your office and offers to check her in. She declines, not wanting to tell the world she’s seeing a divorce lawyer.
That’s where the scenario stops today.
But soon (and this stuff is moving at the speed of light), she checks in automatically with a passive check-in application (it knows where she is and does an auto check-in when she arrives), and Facebook presents her with reviews and comments about your service (much like what she’d get now if she searched on Google Places). Instead of searching for reviews of your practice, she’ll receive them automatically on your firm’s place page on Facebook.
And—this is really important—the reviews she gets won’t be from strangers like they are on Google Places. They’ll be from her friends as well as strangers. She already trusts strangers more than you (according to a fair amount of market research), and you can be absolutely certain she trusts her friends more than strangers. By the way, she’ll also get ads from your competitors in case she doesn’t like the reviews and decides to leave.
Suddenly, reviews from friends come automatically as she arrives in a new place. It’s word-of-mouth on steroids. If they drug tested this “word-of-mouth,” it would be disqualified from the race.
How soon will this scenario come to pass? I don’t know, but it won’t take long, and it’s something consumers want. Consumers love sitting down in a restaurant and being presented with tips from their friends about what to order before they’ve even been handed the menu. Suddenly, the menu means something because you know your buddy had the fish here for lunch today and it was fresh and delicious. That’s valuable information. That’s exactly the kind of info they’re going to get about you. You’d better be fresh and delicious (or at least competent and personable).
What do you need to do? You need to stay focused on positive word-of-mouth. Deliver great service, care about your clients, and encourage the placement of favorable reviews (consistent with your state ethics rules). It’s more important than ever that you encourage those reviews—NOW.
Don’t be caught by surprise. Location is here, and it just landed in the hands of hundreds of millions of your prospective clients. Pay attention. The world is changing very, very quickly. Stay ahead of the curve. That’s what we’re trying to help you do. Execution is up to you.
Related articles:
Lee Rosen has practiced family law for more than twenty years. With three offices, 