7-Eleven, Home Depot, JCPenney and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf are building up their mobile and social efforts and incorporating location into the mix to drive consumer engagement.

The companies teamed up with MomentFeed to power their social marketing efforts at the local level. This partnership will help 7-Eleven, Home Depot, JCPenney and The Coffee Bean & Tea to manage their location data to minimize friction for customers.

?What these brands have recognized a long time ago is that all their customers are local, but until recently there hasn't been a scalable solution for national brands to act on that,? said Rob Reed, founder/CEO of MomentFeed, Santa Monica, CA.

?With mobile and social now transforming local marketing, a local strategy is viable even for global brands, and that's what the MomentFeed platform enables for brick-and-mortar brands of any size,? he said. ?We connect their physical locations with the online versions of those places across all the social networks by making sure the geocode of each location is accurate.

?This is a bigger challenge than most brands recognize, but it's a critical part of unlocking the value of local marketing."

Driving engagement
MomentFeed is helping 7-Eleven, Home Depot, JCPenney and The Coffee Bean & Tea remove a significant barrier to social-mobile customer engagement by correcting inaccurate geocodes and merging unauthorized duplicates on Facebook, foursquare and Google through its PinSync process.

Furthermore, the companies can manage their Facebook, foursquare, Google, Instagram and Twitter efforts on a local level.

This will help 7-Eleven, Home Depot, JCPenney and The Coffee Bean & Tea to serve different guest needs based on different local markets.

Additionally, the companies will be able to publish content accordingly through location-based channels such as Facebook Place pages and engage directly with consumers on a deeper level.

According to MomentFeed, changes in social media, such as the introduction of Facebook Graph Search and Google+ Local and the explosion of mobile discovery including Facebook Nearby, Google Maps, and Apple Maps have made it critical for bricks-and-mortar brands to start managing social at the local level.

"The opportunity for these brands is really to establish greater connections with customers and fans,? Mr. Reed said.

?By making sure the local pages on Facebook, foursquare and Google all map to the actual physical locations and unauthorized duplicates are removed, brands take the friction out of mobile engagement for customers,? he said.

?Our proprietary PinSync process optimizes the location data for search, engagement and discovery for 7-Eleven, Home Depot, JCPenney, and The Coffee Bean & Teal Leaf. And with MomentFeed, these brands can further maximize this engagement by responding to customers and share content to local pages in a scalable way."

Mobile capabilities
Mobile and social go hand-in-hand.

Therefore, marrying the two is essential for marketers to engage new and existing customers in an enticing way.

?New social capabilities like Facebook's Graph Search clearly signal how connected social and mobile now is, but what we find particularly interesting is how these new social media tools together with mobile discovery create new local opportunities for global brands,? Mr. Reed said.

?Social and mobile let brands reach consumers in the moment, defined as a specific time and place,? he said.

Final Take
Rimma Kats is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York