One of my readers asked me to look at  PlacePop, a location-based social app that aims to be a loyalty ‘punch-card’ for every local business in the world.  I certainly hope it is, or someone comes up with something like this as it plays into ideas I developed working with local restaurant chains like Havana Central and  Social Monitoring, fulfillment and customer service coming out of Social Media.

One of the problems was just knowing people are at your location (while they are there) or were just there or are coming soon – another, more difficult problem is acting on it once you know – that’s actually harder to do because you have to put systems into place (or have someone else do it for you) that can respond quickly – staff that can respond while they are serving customers for example, or systems that alert managers that someone is in the venue now.  Last week I wrote about what FourSquare was doing with RFID - but it might be a year or two before we see enough of those kinds of systems in local venues to make much of a difference (I guess it depends what one means by “much of a difference”).

It also is appearing to be more likely that I’ll be speaking about the communications of  this at Davos next year at the new Communications on the Top conference in mid February, 2011; the details are still being worked out.

( I always wanted to go to Davos for the WEF but must have somehow dreamed up Davos after the WEF – just as well, from what I heard the global elite are as clueless about where the world is going as the rest of us and Jeff Jarvis’s accounts from the WEF in Davos and Dubai the last two years strongly supports that).  Interestingly, one of the first things  the Keynote presentation at the Communications on the Top will cover is the feedback from the 2011 WEF.

What about Loyalty systems now?  What can you do even without FourSquare’s RFID and other attempts to wire up local businesses to geo-location services?   My take is that PlacePop has what it thinks is an answer. Julia Graham from PlacePop contacted me last month and asked me to take a look, and I’m just looking into it now.

… To put it simply, PlacePop is a location-based social app that aims to be a loyalty ‘punch-card’ for every local business in the world. The app is designed to be fun and extremely straightforward to use, but unlike other location-sharing apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla, PlacePop provides a purely social ‘loyalty rewards’ experience rather than a game. We are also creating an idea crowdsourcing platform for local businesses: users can suggest deals or offers they would like to receive (like MyStarbucksIdea or Dell Ideastorm – but for every local business in the world).

-  did sign up and noticed I could build my “place list” and add friends from other social networks I am a part of.   I just activated the iPhone app and checked into a local grocery nearby me.

I’m intrigued by the idea of it and what kind of analytics I can get out of it.  You can make notes about a place and the more you check in the more points you get.  What I don’t understand is how the place I checked into knows about it – but maybe that’s something that Julia Graham from PlacePop can fill me in on.

Also, it would be interesting if PlacePop could somehow link up with FourSquare – and then again, there is the analytics – what kind are we going to see – what sort of insights can we get from the check in behavior?    All good questions that I believe will be answered within Social Media Monitoring by the time I stand in Davos next year, or even before.

Oh yes, I want to be one of the forerunners that puts all of this together and makes something meaningful out of it – the challenge of any kind of  analytics – to make it more than reporting.

Meanwhile, I will have more to say about PlacePop once I have used it enough to feel comfortable giving it a full review.