The reality is that another group of friends invited you to a party and Bob won’t be there. Before we all used Facebook and Foursquare, making up stories about your VHS labeling adventures was pretty easy to do, but today it’s a lot harder to tell the perfect white lie because our lies can now unfold in real time on the internet. All it takes is one person at the Bobless party to know your identity on a social network and you’re immediately tagged with a beer in your hand, happy that Bob isn’t in your zip code. Even if you don’t check in yourself to keep yourself off the grid, it simply takes one tag to blow your lie sky high.

What can a tech-savvy person do in this situation? It’s hard to catch everything, unfortunately. The fact that Facebook doesn’t yet allow people to approve picture tagging is the biggest issue right now. There is the ability to tell Facebook to not allow friends to check you in with Places. However, someone could innocently say on Foursquare “At this great party with @<yournamehere>”, which gets sent out to Twitter. After that, your cover’s blown and it takes a bit more work to take those bits back since you don’t own the tweet or the Foursquare checkin. How do you politely ask someone at a party to delete a tweet because you lied to someone about where you’d be?

This isn’t to say that we should all become Spock-like and be honest all the time (“I simply find Bob’s company distasteful”), but the number of social media apps out there that broadcast information about us across the internet is getting more difficult to manage, even if you haven’t signed up for any of them. Could the lie be worth the trouble? Is social media an aspect of our privacy that we have to think about now?

Leave a comment or discuss this on our forums.

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Post tags: bob, Facebook, foursquare, gowalla, honesty, lies, lying, social network

I first signed up for Foursquare when it launched at SXSWi 2009, but didn’t use it much until I began my #WTFAmI cross-country road trips last summer. When Foursquare broadened it’s horizons to include Tampa in late 2009 I was ecstatic. In combination with my Starbucks ‘addiction’ I quickly realized the potential fun I could have with location-based social networks, the free WiFi I get as a reward for using my Starbucks Gold card, and my iPhone.

I’ve been a Starbucks reward card member since it’s introduction in early 2009 and the recent change to the current fee-free membership added extra bonuses to what I was already getting. Gold Card membership scores me sweet deals from Starbucks and now I’m scoring even bigger with Starbucks AND Foursquare…

…and so are thousands of other Foursquare “mayors” of Starbucks around the country.

Starbucks isn’t the only business getting on board to reward customers through social media, business of all types are doing it. I saw this first-hand when I was recently a charter member of the HQ team that planed the first international Foursquare Day. I watched brand  loyalty change in my community and shift toward embracing what existing, and potentially future, customers are already doing: Tweeting, Facebook-ing, blogging, and podcasting about every aspect of their life. Social media networks are potential gold mines for business and “word of moth” marketing has gone digital.

We all know it – some things just seem to “go together,” like ketchup and mustard… and Starbucks and Foursquare. It seems like a match made in geek-heaven!

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Post tags: 4SQDay, brand loyalty, delomni, foursquare, foursquare day, foursquare mayor, gowalla, LBSN, marketing, rewards, Social Media, starbucks

What’s great about the internet is that all it takes is an idea and a blog post for something clever to become global. That’s what happened less about a month ago when Dr. Nate Bonilla-Warford decided to create an event called “Foursquare Day” to bring traffic into his business. Within days, people picked up on the idea and it soon became a global phenomenon, getting the attention of BBC America, Fox Tampa, and even Ashton Kutcher. We interviewed Dr. Nate for Geekistry a few weeks ago. You can read the story about how Foursquare Day came to be here.

The idea caught on so much that Foursquare decided to make a badge just for today. According to the 4sqday.com site, in order to get the badge, you need to simply do a shout from the Foursquare app but what we’re not certain about is whether you need to add #4sqday to your shout to get it. I got mine using the hashtag. Other fun things to do include a puzzle finder in the Tampa Bay area, checking in at McDonalds, and swarm challenges.

We’ll be updating this article as the day progresses, bringing updates about how people are getting together to celebrate. You cal also check out the 4SQDay Flickr group.

Click here to see all of our Foursquare Day coverage.

Disclaimer: Geekistry is a sponsor of 4sqday.com, but we’re writing this because it’s damn fun geeky, social media thing to do….which is why we’re sponsoring it in the first place. -MG

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Post tags: 4SQDay, badge, delomni, dr. nate bonilla-warford, foursquare, foursquare day, shout, swarm party, tampa bay

Direct link

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Post tags: 4SQDay, delomni, dr. nate bonilla-warford, foursquare, foursquare day, Social Media

We asked Loren Brichter for a comment about why there’s no Gowalla support and haven’t heard back yet. We’ll update you as soon as we hear anything.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: atebits, badges, delomni, foursquare, geotagging, gowalla, Social Media, starman, tweetie