Location technologies are transforming how we experience, navigate, and ultimately better our world. From the global to the local, here are #10Ways geolocation is a positive force for good.

Social media has changed the world. It has revolutionized communications on a global scale, and the transformation continues with every status update, blog post, and video stream. The global citizenry has become a global network.

Since becoming widely adopted just a couple years ago, social media has supercharged social action, cause marketing, and social entrepreneurship. Indeed, the true value hasn’t been the technology itself but how we’ve used it. Today, a second wave of innovation is defining a new era and setting the stage for change over the coming decade.

Mobile technologies will extend the global online network to anyone with a mobile device while enabling countless local networks to form in the real world. We’ve decentralized media production and distribution. We’re doing the same for energy. And we’ll continue this trend for social networking, social action, and commerce.

The combined forces of smartphones, mobile broadband, and location-aware applications will connect us in more meaningful ways to the people, organizations, events, information, and companies that matter most to us—namely, those within a physical proximity of where we live and where we are. Can location-based services (LBS) change the world? Here are #10Ways:

1. Checking in for Good: If Gowalla and Foursquare have taught us anything, it’s that people respond to simple incentives. By offering badges, mayorships, and other intangible rewards, millions of people are checking in to the places they go. Apps like Whrrl take this a step further and enable like-minded “societies” to form on a local basis. The next step is for these apps to add greater purpose by encouraging more meaningful checkins and offering corresponding badges and stamps, thus mapping the cause universe. Or for a dedicated app to be developed that rewards conscious consumption, social responsibility, and civic engagement. Yes, the CauseWorld app features a cause element, but it’s not about cause-worthy places.

2. Eating Locally: Sustainability demands that we source our food as close to its point of production as possible. Many so-called locavores subscribe to the 100-mile diet, which requires that one “eat nothing—or almost nothing—but sustenance drawn from within 100 miles of their home.” Given the difficulty of accessing and verifying this information in order to live by this standard, there’s a geo-powered Locavore app. It gives you info on in-season foods, those coming in-season, farmer’s markets, and links to recipes. This rather simple app is clearly just the start. In time, location-aware apps will guide us not only to the grocery store or farmer’s market but through them. All the while identifying foods based on our particular diet or sensibility.

3. Political Organizing: In the next presidential election, politics will not only be local but location-enabled. We saw the power of social media in Obama’s 2008 landslide victory. In 2012, location-based apps and technologies will play a central role in how campaigns are organized, managed, and ultimately won. Much of this will be visible through mobile apps and location-aware browsers. Activists and volunteers will be more empowered. Voters will be more engaged in the moment, right down to casting their votes. Behind the scenes, though, we’ll see massive new sets of data available to campaigns for targeting, empowerment, and optimization. The party, candidate, and/or cause that has the best handle on geolocation will have a measurable advantage. (The Elections app will soon be updated for 2010.)

4. Finding Green Businesses: The web has effectively replaced the paper Yellow Pages as a way to find local businesses and services. However, this “stationary web” experience is quickly being supplanted by the mobile web and mobile applications, which give us access to this information when we most need it. The Yelp and Around Me apps are popular ways to find restaurants, coffee shops, or hotels wherever you are, but what about green-rated businesses? Greenopia has transformed its printed, local guides into a dynamic, nationwide mobile application that lets you find local, green-rated businesses in any category. No more paper and a much better experience. The Green Map app is another that facilitates discovery and connects us to local green environments.

5. Traveling More Efficiently: We’ve had access to GPS navigation systems and static traffic information for some time, but only now are we seeing the full potential of these technologies. With access to more detailed traffic information that is specific to your route and updated in real time, we can minimize congestion and maximize traffic flow (as much as physically possible). The new turn-by-turn MapQuest 4 Mobile app is a good start, as you can get traffic alerts specific to the route you program. However, user-generated information from apps like Trapster and Waze can crowdsource more specific details, such as whether to avoid an intersection due to a toxic chemical spill. Or, if you want to avoid automobiles altogether, Google Maps makes it easy to use public transportation and take a bike.

6. Scanning for Ethical Products: With online shopping, we’ve become accustomed to reading reviews and making comparisons before we buy. This can now be done in the physical world through games like MyTown and services like Stikybits. By scanning a product barcode using a smartphone camera, you can unlock a treasure of additional information (not to mention deals) that can help with your purchase. This might include where it was produced, how far it traveled, the reputation of the manufacturer, chemical contents, carbon footprint, or the full lifecycle analysis. Location-aware applications can also transform commerce itself by giving us better access to local inventories and locally-produced goods. Whether it’s fruits and vegetables or books and electronics, if something can be found within blocks of your current location, it makes no sense to ship it from afar.

7. Networking Neighborhoods: One of the hottest categories in geolocation is neighborhood networking. The vision for many of these apps is to strengthen the very fabric of our communities. With DeHood, you can keep track of what’s happening in your neighborhood, share your favorite places, and grease the wheels for actually meeting people. After all, if you’ve made contact through the app, it’s a lot easier to say “Hello” in the real world. Blasterous is another that lets you share information locally, whereas BlockChalk does this on an anonymous basis. Finally, NeighborGoods uses your street address to facilitate one-to-one borrowing and trading of useful stuff. In the end, making connections with your neighbors can lead to safer, more productive, and more sustainable communities.

8. Tracking Environmental Disasters: The size and scope of environmental disasters appears to be growing. In 2008, we had the Tennessee coal ash spill, which was billed as “the largest environmental disaster of its kind in the United States.” And that was before we realized it was three times bigger than originally estimated. More recently, the BP oil spill set daily records for “largest environmental disaster in the U.S. ever.” In each case, geolocation technologies can be used by engaged citizens to monitor and track the effects. They can be used by response teams to coordinate containment and cleanup efforts. Ultimately, these technologies can be used to accurately measure the size and impact of a disaster in order to better understand its damages and costs.

9. Viewing the World Through an Eco Lens: Augmented reality (AR) follows geolocation as one of the hot trends in mobile technology. It enables you to view the world through a smartphone camera (or similar device) and see layers of geo-specific content or information. One of the most popular apps is Layar, an augmented reality browser/platform that lets you choose specific data layers or experiences. The potential for green- and cause-related content is tremendous. You might view green-rated businesses, LEED-certified buildings, or virtual GHG emissions as they enter the atmosphere. Combined with smart meter technology, you could see the most efficient and inefficient homes around you in real time. And for the cynics among us, you could view our mountains, forests, rivers, and oceans as they once were…before the effects of climate change and so many environmental disasters.

10. Capturing the Moment: Better access to information about what’s happening around us—right now—can dramatically improve quality of life. This sense of “geospatial awareness” is possible through today’s smartphones, whereby a piece of content or information—a moment—is captured and preserved based on the unique time and place in which it occurred. It is essentially to document spacetime. Protests, natural disasters, sporting events, parties, political crises…real-time information about anything happening anywhere at any time, as well as the history of what happened. This will take several years and a number of different applications to realize. In the end, though, it will revolutionize how we access and consume content. It will complete the democratization and decentralization of news and information…based on time and location.

Cautionary note: Privacy is the single biggest issue in the LBS industry. It’s important to understand what information you are sharing with regard to your location and with whom.

Author’s note: We’ll be hosting geolocation events for Social Media Week in Los Angeles this September. This is the third in Max Gladwell’s #10Ways series of distributed blog posts. It was published simultaneously on as many as 300 blogs.

Earlier this month an event was held to celebrate the program and generate content and discussion. The results were modest despite some smart people working hard to activate the offline participants into online action (tweets, blog posts and video/photo uploads). Two weeks later for the same cost, I launched a blogger engagement program. Here are the results about a third into the program.

Here’s why we found better success:
1. I worked with bloggers that I had a personal relationship with (borne from a professional one) that I knew would produce not only volume, but meaningful volume (subjectively determined by how captivating the post is + engaged readers are through substantive comments).

2. I worked with those same bloggers from the beginning to develop the program (they were invested –> excited –> stronger results).

3. The program we developed incentivized both bloggers and their readers to participate in a co-creation project that promised to produce a solid takeaway that the client can further merchandise.

4. The client was 100% behind the idea and was willing to try given the relatively low cost of entry.

5. I didn’t micromanage, but I dissected the results to find the source of small successes and worked with the bloggers to grow them to big ones. (See the second bump just before June 27th?)

These are a few tips from one very particular program. I’d love to hear yours.

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I’m going to ask a simple question: have your opinions of Pepsi changed since this launched? I’m going to say yes, but here’s what I need more of:

1. Stories from the grantees;
2. Stories from people who benefited from the grantees’ projects;
3. Stories about collaborations from people who met through this project; and
4. Stories from people who work at Pepsi and why this initiative is important to them, including CEO Indra Nooyi.
5. In general, real stories of how this is making an impact. The number of dollars given don’t do it for me. You can tell me that a school received a $1,000,000 donation, but I’m actually much more interested in how they spent the money and the eventual impact. (I know that having just started the community impact is TBD – just hoping it does come.)

Here’s what I need less of:

1. Emails, DMs and Facebook messages asking me to vote. (Who came up with the idea to allow people to vote every day for the same contestants? It just adds another level of headache to contestant’s and their supporters.)

(Full Disclosure: My Mom is a rabid Pepsi drinker and we always try to have some on hand when she visits.)

It seems odd to critique a program that just gave $5,000,000 to non-profits, but that’s exactly what I’m about to do. The Chase Community Challenge ended on Friday with some happy people and more controversy. You’re connected to the Challenge if you ever dated someone in high school who was a friend of a friend who went on to be the cousin of a guy’s college roommate who started a non-profit. Such connections earned you dozens of emails, facebook messages and tweets begging for your vote. As much as I appreciate Chase donating so much money to so many non-profits (100 were whittled down from 5,000) and as much as I don’t actually mind voting for people who ask me, there was a misfire here. The non-profits that enter these contests must be happy or things tend to go poorly. Remember: they’re more than purveyors of positive sentiment, they’re also the loudest when they feel wronged or unhappy. You have to leave them happy and moneygrabs aren’t the best way to do that.

That’s not to say these contests can’t be useful to non-profits. Those that could use both money and exposure get it. I didn’t know the “Feel Your Boobies Foundation” existed before the challenge. Not only do I now know they exist, but that they are headquartered a short drive from a family member that could benefit from their services. I tell that family member and offline action ensues. If they win money, that helps too.

The problem is that I see them becoming more and more less useful. Non-profits (and their supporters) are starting to show signs of VBCB (Vote-Base Contest Burnout). Do you know how hard it is for many of these (*generalization alert*) super nice, wouldn’t hurt a fly, non-competitive, non-profit leaders to BEG their friends, family and supporters for votes over and over again? The first time is exciting and exhilarating. The next time a little less so until finally it becomes a painstaking “I know I bug you all the time, but” email that scrapes the bottom of their social capital piggy bank. In the end, you run the risk of them not liking you very much regardless of the opportunity.

If you want to build actual brand ambassadors using this formula here’s one simple way these contests can evolve to bring all the good (and more) with less of the bad.

Don’t make it all about the money.

Only 2% of all Chase participants won money and that’s actually pretty high. Future contests need to start from the premise of “how do we bring value to the other 98%?”

You have to give people a reason to participate beyond the money. Better yet, don’t make it about the money at all. Until about a year ago I was the community manager at Ideablob – a vote-based contest platform that granted $10,000 a month, but also crowdsourced and encouraged new ideas. Actually, we were a crowdsourcing platform that used the $10,000 a month prize to encourage people to participate. A vote was great, but how about a piece of advice that could fundamentally alter the way I think about my organization or services? That’s priceless. We also worked hard to understand each participant and actively looked for ways to grow community through introductions between users or an industry expert. We wanted every user to feel like they were a part of a larger, valuable, energetic community of organizations working to improve some aspect of our world. We worked to grow their social capital, not just give them a reason to spend it. Whether they won or lost (*generalization alert*), they loved us for it.

After Chase finalist Jessica Rauch won $10,000 on Ideablob for The Generation Project she told Beth Kanter about her experience and didn’t mention the money:

“The website is such a great way to connect with entrepreneurs. We received some really great advice and encouragement and met a lot of people who want to help us develop our idea.”

That’s exactly how we wanted people to feel. Users had an intangible benefit from participating and their satisfaction meant we both benefited in the end.

So what do you think? Am I off-base here? Does VBCB exist? Please comment and let me know. Also, stay tuned for a post later this week on some things brands should keep in mind if they decide to dive into similar contests.

The model is simple: offer a huge cash prize to non-profits or social entrepreneurs who will then creatively, enthusiastically and relentless beat the bushes to win. It’s like creating a seemingly infinite amount of brand ambassadors virtually overnight. Chase competitors recently hit me up an incredible 9 times in one day via email and Facebook.

The question that haunts me (and one that the Pepsis of the world need to carefully consider) is whether people care more about Chase now than they did before the $5million was up for grabs. If the goal is to create buzz online then it’s probably been a success, but if the goal is more focused on their bottom line (like hoping people now or in the foreseeable future will choose Chase for their banking needs) then I’m afraid this will come up short.

Here’s a perhaps oversimplified reason why: of the “tens of thousands” of non-profits that competed in the Challenge, only a handful had any connection with Chase’s core business – banking. A quick scan of the $10,000 winners reveals groups like the “Cavalier Drum and Bugle Corps,” the “Phantom Regiment Drum and Bugle Corps,” and the “Feel Your Boobies Foundation.” I’m sure all are fine organizations, but why would Chase giving them $10,000 make me more loyal as a customer or motivate me to actually become a Chase customer? Wouldn’t a similar commitment exclusively to, say, microfinance organizations or New York City non-profits make more sense, though still only marginally interested in Chase? Without even getting into what I suspect is the main reason people choose their banks – convenience and interest rates – or the fact that hosting a free-for-all contest brings up problems like this, there is a huge strategic piece missing here. Unfortunately, that missing piece is critical if Chase hopes to receive a sustained, positive brand impact from their efforts.

Before succumbing to the economy, Advanta bank – a small business credit card company – developed ideablob.com as a forum for people to crowdsource new business ideas while competing for monthly $10,000 grants. As a special incentive, existing customer could win $20,000. Advanta generated an enormous amount of loyalty from existing customers and positive publicity in places that were relevant to our business, including  The Motley Fool, The New York Times small business section and the social entrepreneur-focused TriplePundit. We also partnered with Kiva during that time.

It’s very possible that Chase just felt like giving $5million away and was looking for a way to do it that was more engaging, fun and promised more publicity than just writing another check. Maybe they just wanted to give money away without worrying about “maximizing” ROI. If that’s the case, then I can appreciate that. As a business accountable to shareholders and one with some slip ups in the recent past I don’t understand it, but I can appreciate it.

What has been your experience with the Chase Giving Challenge? Am I way off base? Are you more likely to become a Chase customer because of the Challenge? If you’re a Chase customer do you think of yourself as more loyal now?

This is not a political post. Just a very humble “thank you” to the troops who sacrifice so much to do their duty as prescribed by the government of the United States. Fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters who have to say goodbye without the certainty that a commuter train will bring them back to their loved ones in due time.

I challenge myself to not forget their sacrifice and be reminded of it each day. I hope you will do the same.

This post was created as part of the USO’s Community Strong event at Fort Hood –a day for healing, fun and entertainment to uplift the spirits of the Fort Hood community in the wake of the Nov. 5 shooting incident. You can help show your support for Fort Hood and its more than 349,000 military personnel, family members, retirees and civilian employees by visiting the Community Strong website, Tweeting your support with the #CommunityStrong hashtag, leaving comments on the Official USO Blog and donating to the USO’s ongoing efforts to support our troops.

This post was created as part of a global groundswell of gratitude called TweetsGiving. The celebration, created by US nonprofit Epic Change, is an experiment in social innovation that seeks to change the world through the power of gratitude. I hope you’ll visit the TweetsGiving site to learn more, and to bring your grateful heart to the party by sharing your gratitude, and giving in honor of that for which you’re most thankful.