Prashant Patel » Social Media

Burglars love Foursquare (really… they do)

Prashant — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 18:09:19 +0000

Location based services (LBS) is seemingly the new trend for marketing and advertising. I’ve been playing on/off with Foursquare for a little while but it didn’t take me long to realize the real privacy and security concerns that I have with the service. And just like big brother of social networking, Facebook, recently saw a slew of negative press around its own privacy issues, Foursquare and other LBS services may get slammed eventually as well.

Sharing TOO much

The main issue that I hate about Foursquare? By checking into venues, they know my habits. They know when I go out, they know where I go, and can fairly easily extrapolate how long I am there (assuming I check-in everywhere I go). The last time I checked, I didn’t need someone looking over my shoulder and being able to see everything I do in real life. Granted, I believe that only fellow Foursquare friends can see your actual movement activity, I doubt many users think about this privacy concern or that Foursquare makes it blatantly clear that your movements are publicly displayed to your friends (and that you need to be careful who you add as friends on their service). In fact if you keep reading, you’ll see that many Foursquare users are not smart at all.

Are you prepared to get robbed?

Earlier in the year, I came across a website called Please Rob Me whose sole purpose was to address this privacy issue with Foursquare and Twitter. The website used Twitter’s public search stream and scanned it for location based tweets. Since these tweets are public to all, in theory a burglar could easily track your habits and rob your home. TechCrunch reported that you can also use the filter on top of the site to show when specific people aren’t home (by their Twitter name), or sort by location.

Please Rob Me says,

The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home.

Not so smart Foursquare users

You know what’s even more sad about all this confusion? When people add their home to Foursquare so they can get more checkin’s. There are a ton of examples of this going on within Foursquare and I think this is an area that Foursquare really should think about moderating somehow. Their service should be for real business venues, not private residences. Even more frightening, in some cases, many people may not even know their home address is listed on Foursquare publicly because a friend may have added it.

Think before you share

The bottom line is that you should all be aware of what exactly is going on with your information behind the scenes with you are using location based services. Personally, I only give up my location only if I have to. For example, I have a music app that I use for streaming radio on my iPhone and it for some reason asks me for my location upon starting up but it has nothing to do with the music. I think their sole purpose of collecting my location data is just for marketing purposes but in any case, I don’t want to give up my location to just listen to music. On the other hand, I am a little more comfortable to give up my location to Google Maps to get information about what’s around me because I trust Google’s policies a lot more than new startups such as Foursquare (although this may be debatable as well).

10 reasons why you need to care about social media

Prashant — Tue, 18 May 2010 16:00:05 +0000

Let’s get straight to the point shall we?

Social media is now the number one online activity beating porn & personal email (Nelsen Wire).
2/3 of the global internet population visits social networks (Nielsen Global Faces & Networked Places).
The time spent on social networks is growing at 3x the overall internet rate, accounting for 10% of all internet traffic (Nielsen Global Faces & Networked Places).
Online, including social media, has become the most influential source in helping consumers make purchasing decisions (Weber Shandwick Inline Research).
Millions of people are creating content for the social web.
The next 3-billion consumers will access the internet from a mobile device making it that much more important to focus on customer experience.
If Facebook was a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the World only behind China and India.
Twitter believes it will have 1-billion users by 2012.
One-way marketing has come to an end… it’s all about interaction—listen first, sell second.
In almost all cases, social media is free.

3.5 ways to fail with Twitter

7.5 Foursquare facts you need to know

Prashant — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 17:45:59 +0000

Foursquare is one the hot new social networking applications based on geosocial/geolocation/location based technology. The particular space they’re in is a very hot topic and given that smart phone demand has been on the rise like crazy recently, the potential is huge. Business owners should definitely keep tabs on this sector (location based services) because we’re talking about another way that can help make or break your company. I’m talking the potential to be as impactful on businesses as online business reviews on traditional websites such as Yelp, Citysearch, BOTW Local, etc. With that in mind, here are some fast facts about the hot new startup:

1) Founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai in March, 2009.

2) Crowley previously founded one of the mobile location based social networking apps called Dodgeball and sold it to Google in 2005.

3) Google killed Crowley’s Dodgeball project 2009 and replaced it with Google Latitude.

4) Foursquare started with a limited availability to 100 worldwide metros but expanded to a model to allow checkin’s from any location worldwide.

5) The Foursquare app is available on iPhone, Andoid, webOS, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile phones.

6) In February 2010, Foursquare established commercial partnerships with Zagat, Bravo, Conde Nast, The New York Times, and a few other companies.

7) As of early 2010, Foursquare had 450,000 members and in March 2010, grew to 500,000.

7.5) The town of Manchester, NH declared April 16th “Foursquare Day.”

As far as sector is concerned, there are competitors to Foursquare. Here are other geolocation social networking companies:

Do you use any of these services? What do you think of their potential?

3.5 ways to fail with Twitter

Prashant — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:11:19 +0000

Twitter is one of the ultimate social networking tools of it’s time. It’s so much more than 140 character updates about where you’re driving to, the lady who cut you off in line at the grocery store (who does she think she is?!), and random banter about horrible haircuts from the new barber in town. Twitter allows you personally interact with industry leaders who you haven’t had the chance to meet yet (networking), monitor what’s being said about your company and it’s services/products (online reputation management), build creditability, find targeted sales leads, and so much more. But with all that said, it’s all too easy to use Twitter incorrectly as well. If you find yourself not being able to build your Twitter followers up, here are 3.5 easy mistakes you could be making right now:

1) You’re inactive

No one wants to continue following you if you can’t provide anything of value. Whether it’s a crazy lifestyle that everyone wants themselves and accidently wants to hear about, or it’s good content and links, if you aren’t using your account, you have no value given to your followers. Tools such as Untweeps which will let Twitter users unfollow friends who don’t tweet often.

2) It’s all about you, you, you

You know the type, in fact you probably follow some yourself. All they Tweet about is themselves and to top it off, they don’t really provide anything of value. If you want to build creditability with your followers, network, and make new friends, it’s crucial that you engage with your audience. Ask your followers questions, give them feedback, do some retweets, or just say, “Thanks for that great link!” It’s not rocket science.

3) You can’t keep your twmouth shut

Depending on the audience you’re after, tweeting too much is just as bad as not tweeting enough. Just like email, no one wants their stream or lists spammed by any one person. Find a happy medium of tweeting especially if you are auto feeding your Twitter from RSS feeds.

3.5) You’re trying to please everyone

This is also another area of great debate but I think it’s worth mentioning. Mixing business and pleasure is sometimes a little tricky, too tricky if you ask me. Personally, I use my business Twitter account solely for business and my personal has a slight mix of the two. Granted, with my personal account I’ll provide personal updates as well as links to news people might find interesting, I don’t do any hardcore business work with the account. In reality, the main purpose of my personal Twitter account is for networking because for my truly personal updates, I use Facebook (privacy). That way I don’t need to worry about a random Tweet which clients might read and raise a red flag to. And with that said, I do have client’s on my Facebook account too, but only the clients who I truly call friends and who I trust 100%.