Continuing the Proximity Marketing Tutorials Series, today I've put down a few ideas for proximity marketing in public areas.

The below are examples I thought of that could be used in public areas, but also have more specific applications. Here goes:

The most obvious example I believe for tourist information is a map of the city. The first thing any tourist will try to do is find their way around.

Services such as providing directions through interactive mobile applications that guide tourists around the city, are still sparse around the world -- I've posted before about a couple of such attempts I came across.

To my knowledge, however, there does not exist a full implementation of such a service, even though there is clear value. The only inhibiting factor is making it easy enough for people to use, but for me that is mainly down to the implementation.

And I think it is certainly worth doing this, even if only to be the first to have done it.

In tourism-related services there are plenty of other obvious examples, with tourist guides being the most prominent, I believe, example.

On top of location information and directions - mentioned above - tourist guides also provide tourist attractions information which can be provided exactly at the specific time needed. You are looking at a statue or monument at your desired tourist destination, and all you have to do is pop out your mobile phone in order to find out more location-based information.

It is important to note that it is the tourist that controls the flow and amount of this information. S/he can request as much as s/he needs - no more, no less.

Beyond tourism-related services, the habitants of a town or city can also benefit from proximity marketing services in public places.

It is a relatively straightforward - yet very powerful - service to give out, and it can be free, or subscription-based, location-based public transport information. I'm sure everyone using public transport to move around the city will need at some point to find out when the next bus is due, or how to get from A to B.

Drivers would particularly enjoy this one. Rather than relying on radio stations to inform you, simply subscribe to the service, which automatically picks up information from the proximity marketing installation around the city, and forms live traffic patterns in every part of the city, without the need for someone to be there in order to report it.

This is certainly not straightforward to implement, but I think it has plenty of potential.

This is a great way to generate profit from a proximity marketing network installation. Such a network creates ad space, which you can sell, period.

If you give people useful and interesting services (i.e. motive to participate) you will have your audience, and marketers will surely follow to advertise to that audience.

I thought this could be used in all sorts of places where you would imagine it would be useful to leave notes. Monuments and tourist attractions immediately spring to mind, and also places that attract large (mainly young) crowds.

I'm sure there's plenty more - just use your imagination.

Don't mean to state the obvious here -- internet-based chat and dating services (part of the social networking phenomenon) are hugely successful.

Why not take this into the real-world through proximity marketing? It would allow for more direct communication and it would also be easier to meet people in person when you are in an actual 'chat area' rather than a virtual chat room.

It would be interesting though to see whether something like this would work, because I believe a big factor of its success is the fact that people can hide behind their monitor, in the safety of their room. Still, I think it has very good chances.. and there are already a couple of real-world examples I know of, though I don't know much about how successful they are.