Partner-marketing for smarter commerce

One important, often overlooked method is partner-marketing, where a retailer promotes products or services offered by other merchants. The main challenge in partner-marketing is to find partners, to determining whom a retailer should choose as partners among many choices.

A retailer can make use of rich information from mobile and geo-social media to find potential partners in a geographic region.

The explosion of mobile and geo-social media in recent years has led to increasing insights about consumers' footprints — which shops they visit, where they travel, and where they live and work. In addition, geo-social data also reveals which regional merchants are popular and why.

There is a series of partner-finding techniques that leverage geo-social data at increasing granularity and discuss analytics to rank potential partners.

Retailers can combine geo-social data with traditional data such as demographics, weather information, and their own marketing databases to personalize partner-marketing.

Source, further read:  J. Bao ; A. Deshpande ; S. McFaddin ; C. Narayanaswami : Partner-marketing using geo-social media data for smarter commerce