All posts tagged location

So earlier today I ranted about loose connections on location based services and individuals using them. People befriending people/loose connections on foursquare/gowalla are a pet peeve, but businesses misusing location based services is a slightly more annoying and disappointing to be frank. I expect lots of people to take the plunge and try things out, but i also expect companies to do some research before risking their brand and social capital blindly.

So how should a business be using location based services?
If you’ve got a physical presence, you need to claim your venue. Most services offer a means to do so. Yelp, foursquare, and a bunch of the others which are centered around venues, or where actual locations are the “social object.” Businesses with physical presences should be treading lightly into these waters for now. They should be offering discounts for checking in, for mayorships, for regular patronage. These things build brand capital with your customers. If the deal is enticing enough, you can draw in people who would otherwise be ignoring your business. These tools are here for you to put names/faces to your largely anonymous customers you’ve been either serving or hoping to serve for years. Thousands of articles are out there discussing the basic tips for building up your LBS presence, and they all boil down to the following: offer something compelling, and reward your regulars. Those are tips that we should all be following in general.

How businesses should not be using location based services
If you run a physical business, please please please don’t create a regular human account and send people friend requests. Your business isn’t MOVING anywhere, you can’t check in at other places, you’re basically just wasting your social capital. I’m going to call out one of the local newspapers for sending me a friend request and befriending 44 others, but having 0 check-ins, 0 activity. I can understand if they were doing this to secure a username, but if that’s your objective, grab the username, and keep it quiet until there is a tangible use for it. Don’t waste my attention capital sending out friend requests to people when there are no communication tools built into foursquare that you can use yet. [edit: I spoke to them after, and that is exactly what they were doing, securing a username. So they get a pass for now. ]

So don’t waste your social capital. If you’re a business owner and want to be active in foursquare, do it as yourself for now, or claim your venue. Otherwise you’re just missing the point.

This is actually one half of the rant I want to spew, the other half is how businesses are misunderstanding the true use of Location Based Services. I’ll post that later today. This rant really covers only the following tools: Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Latitude. Why am I not going into Loopt or Brightkite or any of these other LBS services? Well they aren’t as exciting to me, and there is only a small amount of time for me to get my point across.

So first up, let’s talk about the privacy issues surrounding LBS. I’ll assume you are familiar with Twitter and Facebook at this point, and the privacy implications therein. So in those big social services you are sharing your thoughts, free speech, thats great. However that doesn’t really get any more intrusive than doing what I’m doing right now, publishing my thoughts on a blog. The dynamics might be different, but the idea is the same. I’m publishing words for the world. Location services have shifted the message from being about what you’re thinking to where you are doing that thinking. There is an important safety issue to take into account here, especially as your network grows, and your checkins get publicized (strangers might not see them on your 4SQ page, but they see them when you cross-post to twitter). Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not even touching on the “please rob me” site that shows when people check in away from home, that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms.

Oh yeah, did you know foursquare shares your phone number with your new “friends” ? Maybe I should go through with my plan to only accept friend requests from cute women on foursquare… hmm.

Beyond the safety issues inherent in all these services, is the quality of the connections. I have a substantial twitter following compared to the average user, but I don’t want them knowing where I am all the time. Those are loose connections, loose bonds. Very few of the people I follow/follow me on twitter are my real friends who I would want to hang out with in real life. Actually it may even be simpler: I have no interest in knowing where some random person from twitter whom I’ve never met is going tonight. So I ask you, why would you want to automatically connect with all your twitter or possibly facebook friends on location based services?

Real friendships = real trust = safe for LBS/interesting to follow
Loose friendships = no real trust = not safe for LBS/uninteresting to follow

Maybe I’m missing the point, but I welcome you to correct my viewpoint. Unless you are an event promoter, why would you want/need 5000 people knowing where you are going (cough Scoble cough).

So if you take nothing away from this post, please don’t take offense when I don’t accept your foursquare/gowalla/brightkite friendship.