Foursquare and other location-based services hold tremendous opportunity for media companies willing to get on board with an unconventional approach to interaction while it is still in its infancy. Following is a very basic overview of these services, including a glossary and tips for those who may not be familiar with these tools.

What are location-based services?

These are any programs or applications that take advantage of the mobile web and GPS capabilities of certain mobile phones to create an interaction based on a user’s location.

An Overview of What’s Out There

Foursquare is a popular location-based app that combines elements of Twitter, city guides and computer games. Users “check-in” to locations via a mobile app, alerting their friends as to their whereabouts and earning points, badges and special offers from local businesses.

Gowalla is the next closest competitor, though it operates on a slightly different system. Here’s an excellent comparison. Gowalla’s best asset is its “trips” features, which lay out a group of destinations in a particular city for someone to trace the path. This has huge potential for media and the travel industry.

Twitter added geolocation to its tremendously popular service earlier this year – and in mid-June they unveiled Twitter Places, which has venues targeted by geolocation that users can append to tweets. One leg up on the others is a feature  where users can explore recent tweets and other venues in their Places location.

Keep an eye on Twitter in this space – they have a lot more users than all the others combined, which could really push geolocation services further into the mainstream.

You can also never leave Facebook out of the equation. They are constantly developing new features to take on other social media – and word is they’ll be launching their own location-based features this summer.

There’s also MyTown, which isn’t as widely used, but has a unique focus on the gaming aspect of these apps. MyTown has a touch of Sim City and Monopoly in its gameplay, allowing users to accumulate and spend virtual cash to buy and rent property.

Early forerunners to these apps are Loopt and Brightkite, which were mobile apps/sites for early adopters of smartphones to find one another. Problem was – there weren’t all that many of us to make it very interesting. Loopt has recently added new features to become more focused on recommendations. Brightkite has, for the most part, remained without a focus on gaming, existing for more of a bare-bones check-in to alert friends as to your location.

Glossary of Common Terms

Check-in: This is where you tell the app where you are. You can check-in from just about any kind of venue – hotels, restaurants, stores, attractions, intersections, etc.

Shout: A tweet-esque message accompanying a check-in on Foursquare (though Gowalla offers something similar). This can be sent out to Facebook and Twitter if you have it set up that way.

Tip: User-added advice that pops up when you check in to a venue on Foursquare. This is what makes Foursquare useful, so tip often!

To-do: Like a tip, but more of a note to oneself.

Badges or Pins: Certain patterns of check-ins can lead to a user earning these virtual rewards.

Trips: Gowalla offers a collection of venues one can check into on an organized tour of a city. You can create these yourself or take public trips.

Mayorships: Some businesses offer exclusive offers for the user who has checked in to their location the most on Foursquare – aka The Mayor.

Do’s and Don’ts of Location-Based Services

Don’t check in at home – not only is it cheating, but it can be dangerous. Don’t check it at someone else’s house without permission and really, don’t check in anywhere you think it might not be wise to share (like where your kids go to school, for instance).

Don’t broadcast your location to Twitter or Facebook unless it’s actually interesting. At least include a shout or message if you intend to share your location beyond the service.

Don’t cheat. Foursquare is a game people take seriously, so don’t check in as you’re walking/driving by a place or otherwise stack your stats.

Note: That said, you can go to m.foursquare.com to leave shouts if you aren’t on the scene but want to update users as to what’s happening at a location. This is good for breaking news when you aren’t on location.

Do know that it isn’t for everyone. If you don’t like people knowing where you are, don’t use it. If the only places you regularly go are your home and workplace, Foursquare isn’t made for you (and that’s OK).

Upcoming: Using Foursquare in journalism

Intro to Facebook for journalists (and any professionals): A guide that explains the basics of Facebook with a glossary or terms and a look at demographics.

Setting up an All-Purpose Facebook Account: Setting up a Facebook page you can easily use for personal and professional contacts.

Sharing Your Content on Facebook: Using your newsfeed to promote content, blogs and social media accounts.

More resources on Facebook you should check out:

• Search Facebook status updates at Openbook or OpenFacebookSearch
• Mashable’s Facebook Guide for Journalists: An excellent look at using Facebook for finding leads, effective sourcing, ethical issues and more.
• Facebook Demographics and Statistics, 2009-2010 (iStrategy Labs)
• Ways to get Facebookers to Read Your Story

So this isn’t a social media policy. It isn’t sanctioned by any bosses or lawyers or governing bodies – and I think it’s just right. Take that for what you will.

10 Social Media Guidelines to Live By

1. Follow the Golden Rule with social media content. Don’t use anyone’s stuff without getting permission and giving credit – you’d want that, right?
2. As with anything else, make sure you verify news from social media before running with it (or even re-tweeting it). Think of social media as a tip generator, not a reporter.
3. Make corrections quickly – and don’t try to hide them. Your Twitter/Facebook followers will notice – and they will quickly forgive mistakes so long as you are transparent.
4. If you don’t know something, just say so. It’s OK – and someone may have the answer you need.
5. Always remember: The Internet is public and permanent. Everything you say – even what you think is private – could be found and documented. Act accordingly.
6. Furthermore, if you wouldn’t say it on air or in a story, don’t say it at all.
7. You don’t have to get special social media accounts just for work. Many journalists (myself included) use one account to span both worlds. Not everyone is comfortable with that, so it’s your call.
8. Even if you have separate social media accounts for work, keep your profession in mind. To the law (and to readers and sources) you are always a journalist in everything you do.
9. Friending, liking and following may sound like chummy words, but these are things you need to do to get info from sources on social media. If you think it might make you look biased, put a notation on your page/bio that says why you do it.
10. Immediacy is part of the fun and news value of social media, but no post is so urgent as to not need a second look. Read and think before you post.

For weeks I’ve been thinking of writing one of these posts on Four Square, as everyone else has, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it.

While I have been dreaming up some ways my paper can use geolocation services in regards to marketing, branding, advertising and repurposing news content, I simply cannot bring myself to suggest that newsroom personnel omgjusthavetobedoingthisrightnow. No, just no.

Sure, it’d be great to have reporters go out and leave tips, links and trivia all over town on FourSquare, but  I have to consider how much I’m willing to give up for that. I don’t know what it is like at everyone else’s newsroom, but I don’t have extra people waiting around for work to do – and frankly, I’d much rather have an online update from the courthouse by 10 am than a bunch of tips on where to find great public art on Four Square or Gowalla.

We in the social media cheerleader camp need a reality check sometimes. I’m frequently the one saying “We’ll find time, just don’t say no yet”, but as I’ve found myself stretched to run the news site and tweet and send email alerts and monitor traffic and and and – I know we can’t say yes to everything anymore. More importantly, we new media snobs shouldn’t feel as if we’re dinosaurs because we aren’t here, there and everywhere on every social network.

Case in point: Right after Google Buzz launched, Old Media New Tricks (who I love, by the way) was on the case, telling us how papers should get their Buzz profiles set up and hop to the status updates. While I don’t blame them for suggesting it (they do need to get blog readers after all) I had to question it. Not every newsroom can afford to have a staffer who can send status updates to a myriad of services all day. With the still-limited spread of Buzz and widespread popularity of Twitter, why divert our already-stretched resources there? It simply fueled the notion we social media types tend to have that says, “Well, this is out there and someday you’re going to look dumb if you weren’t doing it a long time ago.”

I recently attended a presentation by some incredibly talented social media gurus in my local network and one part of their message especially rang out loud and clear to this harried soul: Pick a few social media practices that work for you and do them well.

We as an industry should take that to heart.

Every newsroom should have a goal in mind for their social media use – and then should pick and choose the right tools to best go after that goal without sacrificing what’s important. Consider how seamlessly a social media practice will fit into the newsroom’s workload – and consider if a new idea is worth taking a staff member away from this task or that task (if that’s the case).

It isn’t always a good investment of your limited resources to chase every social media rainbow that comes along – picking just a few is more than OK.

• Prior to its demise, Editor & Publisher had written about allegedly “new tools” the newspaper in Knoxville uses to police website comments. First of all, I find it alarming that anyone, particularly a publication supposedly in the know about our industry, would find this community management approach new or innovative. I say the system Knoxville has employed is a bare minimum for every site with comments. (For the record, my paper has had a nearly identical system for two years – and it isn’t even close to ideal.)
• To their credit, E&P also talked to working journalists trying out Google Wave in the newsroom. Also features quotes from a familiar source (shameless plug!). I’d link to E&P directly, but they have a paywall that makes their news useless on the internet. I guess even a paywall on your site can’t save your business model, huh?
• Econsultancy has created a helful look at search engine optimization for jounos. SEO is a strange and complicated business, but it’s worth knowing the basics if you want to get your content read by more than just your regular visitors. Everyone says the future (or, really, the present) lies in the power of search – so it’s good to know.

Social Media

• Despite what some curmudgeonly types say, social media is definitely not just for kids. Recent demo studies say senior citizens are making huge inroads into social networks like Facebook and YouTube. I’m hearing all of the time how we need to keep hold of our senior readers by focusing more efforts into print, but maybe we as an industry just aren’t giving them enough credit in regards to the Internet.

• Speaking of social media in the newsroom, Mashable thoughtfully put together The Journalist’s Guide to Maximizing Personal Social Media ROI. If you ever wondered why there’s a push to get into social media or what exactly you can get out of it, it’s worth a read. They have really good ideas for building a social media routine and establishing priorities for reporters and other news managers using social media in reporting/branding/aggregation.
• If you aren’t very familiar with the mobile social network Foursquare, here’s something of a guide to get started. Foursquare has a lot of potential for journalists, mobile reporters in particular. I hope to write about this a bit more soon.

Saving Journalism

• Robert Niles asks: What should the government do to help journalism? Niles really goes out on a limb to suggest that the government can help journalism not by funding it directly, but by changing the health care system and raising taxes on the wealthy. Sound crazy? Well, I don’t see your solutions anywhere.
• In case you’ve been living under a technology rock, Apple’s making a tablet next year. Everyone’s been expecting it – and it very well could be the turning point in this particular realm of technology started by the likes of the Kindle and iPhone. For once, the journalism would would be wise to capitalize on what could be the beginnings of a new technology shift and we ready with tablet reader friendly news. No guarantees it’ll work out for Apple or for our industry, but it’s worth a shot.

At one point not all that long ago, my Facebook friends were all people who I may not have considered “friends” in real life, but they at least knew me in some fashion. Whether we worked together at a past paper or went on the same school at some point, we had some binding life experience that brought us together on the social network. At the very least, we’ve met at least once – or maybe we follow one another on Twitter.

Lately, my Facebook friends are making me feel like just another number – even the ones who I consider real friends in the “real life network”.

A great deal of them are marketers – by profession, hobby or as a transitional job following a journalism layoff. Somehow, this means our Facebook friendship is little more than that of a spammer to spamee these days.

Every single day a Facebook friend of mine suggests I fan some client or employer of theirs. It used to be, I’d get fan suggestions about bands we both loved in school or groups based around inside jokes from “Arrested Development”.

Now, those same friends are asking me to fan companies I would have no obvious interest in (like Mommy sites), that are way out of my geographic area and aren’t even meant for people in my field (like political groups).

These former friends likely got their jobs based on their number of Facebook friends – and they spam each and every one of us with these stupid invites. I must have missed the marketing conference where they instructed everyone to sell their high school classmates, college friends and family members to anyone who shows them the money.

Social networking is supposed to be about connecting with old friends and making new ones. It can involve marketing products, but it takes individualized recommendations to be anything but spam.

I tolerate a lot from my Facebook friends – borderline-pornographic pregnancy photos, updates from parties I wasn’t invited to and constantly-shifting relationship statuses – but I won’t tolerate spam anymore. I’m going to start unfriending anyone who uses me to spam for their employers and clients. That’s not why I joined Facebook.

Marketing friends, I offer you an easy solution: Take ten minutes to set up friends groups in Facebook.

Go to Friends in the top menu of your Facebook home page and click on All Friends. On that page, click Create New List. Why don’t you be honest and name it the spam list? Look over your friends and select those to whom you actually want to market your product or business. Make sure your mom, your friend who now lives across the country and I are not on it.

Now when you send messages or invites, you can type in the name of that list and send it just to those people.

And finally, if you can’t make this decision about who to spam and who not to spam, maybe you shouldn’t be on Facebook at all. At the very least, you should do your real friends and family a favor and remove  all of them from your lists. You aren’t a real friend, anyway.

If any of those companies are like mine, chances are they have allowed staff members to create these fan pages using their own personal Facebook access. After all, it is the easiest way to do it. Chances are, these companies have also let go at least one person who created a Facebook fan page for their organization. Unlike user access to your in-house publishing systems and intranets, you have very little control over who has admin access to your Facebook fan pages unless you yourself created the page.

If the ex-employee in question as the creator and only admin on the page – there’s really nothing you can do except ask them to make you an admin as well. If they are feeling charitable, they might actually do it. But then there’s another issue.

As of right now, it seems there is no way to permanently remove admin privileges from the creator of a fan page. Tons of Facebook business users have been trying to get an answer to this issue to no avail. As of right now, whoever created your fan page, whether they work for you or not, has full control. If the employee parted ways with the company in a negative fashion, imagine what they could do: Post nasty or libelous status updates, send messages to all fans, delete the page altogether. Yikes, right?

Until Facebook decides to answer this long string of help requests, the best thing you can do is to not allow employees to create Facebook fan pages from their personal accounts. Instead, set up a universal staff account can be set up to create and administrate fan pages. That way a mere password change once an employee leaves your company will solve this issue.

Facebook has recently been called onto the carpet by Canada (the country!) for violating their privacy laws. In particular, the Canadian Privacy Commissioner took issue with the social network’s often confusing privacy agreement, their retention of users’ personal data even after they’ve left the network and how third-party apps use members’ private info.

Facebook agreed to implement changes that would affect all users, but would get Canada off their backs. After the changes take place, FB will change their privacy policy to better explain to users how and why their info is used – and it will require apps to explain the same each time a user accesses them.

And it’s a good thing too. Recently, the ACLU has been trying to raise awareness about Facebook quizzes. Sure, they might seem harmless – after all, you’re just finding out what Simpsons character you are, right? Wrong. Actually these quizzes, in particular, can find out a ton of info about you  – like your political affiliations, sexual orientation, religious background, etc. – based on fairly innocuous questions (not to mention the info they are allowed to pull from your account when you activate them).

It’s great that Facebook will be forcing apps to explain what info will be taken and how it will be used – otherwise, where could private info about you end up? In the hands of your employer? The government? A debt collector? The possibilities are frightening to consider.

Even with these changes, Facebook will continue to expand the info it asks users to give up in efforts to expand their “real time search”, which allows you to search the entire network, including news feeds, status messages, groups and more. Just over the past few months, they’ve instituted changes that, depending on your privacy settings, can make your info available to anyone (not just those in your network like before). Even if you’ve got your privacy settings where you want the, take another look to see what’s changed. Need help? Here’s a guide for arranging your privacy settings.

Aside from Facebook’s policies and your privacy settings, you should always ask yourself  exactly what info are you sharing when you update your status or share a photo? Just think – when you share on Facebook or Twitter that you’re going on vacation for two weeks – who might find that interesting? A burglar of course! It wouldn’t bee too hard to figure out where you live (especially if you’re in the phone book), or even what house is yours (ever posted a photo online that shows your home?).

Now that I’ve got you all freaked out (I hope), get back to work.

Take Note

• According to the internets, More Employers Use Facebook To Vet New Hires Than LinkedIn, hence why I keep stressing why you should A. Be on these networks and B. Be doing it well enough to not look dumb.
• And not that it should be news to anyone here, but Twitter is The New Way Mainstream Media Breaks News. I can’t preach it enough around my paper – let’s break news on Twitter first, then worry about the links. We do this at my paper every day – and sometimes I won’t even bother tweeting a headline if we aren’t first in our market or it isn’t original. The traffic from Twitter isn’t much anyway – so it’s better to be first than first with a link. Of course, we still want to be factual, too (that one’s for you, Bruce).

Keeping News Alive

• The Online Journalism blog asks if the (UK) Times’ Culture subscriptions is a potential model for charging for online newspapers. Why? It’s more than just a newspaper subscription – it’s a membership with incentives like ticket deals, exclusive access and more. It’s just one way to make a pay wall worth it if this kind of model would move to the web.
• Speaking of paying for news, a CUNY project sought to find New business models for journalism to answer, “What happens to journalism in a top-25 metro market if a newspaper fades away. Can journalism be sustained? And how?” There are four total – some of which have been panned and a couple of others that have real legs (though none are really earth-shattering).

Innovations in Social Media

• Mashable reports that our friends at TweetMeme are working on Retweetable Comments. Huh? You’ve seen on several blogs and articles where you can tweet article from a button, but this would allow people to tweet individual comments on those blogs. A very cool way to get comments to go viral (and encourage commenting in the first place).
• Speaking of Twitter, Patrick Thornton has been hard at work at Bringing engagement to an old, one-way medium. His marketing plan for a new novel is exactly what social media marketing should be – fun, creative and original. While his exact approach doesn’t exactly work for a news entities’ needs, using social media as a customer service platform is a must. Why else even be on Twitter if you can’t answer questions?
• If you haven’t checked it out yet, the Huffington Post has embraced the  age of “My” news with a new Facebook Connect hookup that allows interaction between Facebook profiles and user activity on their sites.  The sync is  a no-brainer for an operation of their kind – and a lot to live up to. Something like this takes a lot of work, but it would be great to see more news orgs (and yes, smaller ones) jumping into a forward-thinking arrangement like this.

• You have to read Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing from Bill Wyman at Splice Today. It’s an excellent analysis of How We Got Here from someone with perspective both inside and outside the news business. A lot of it we newspaper types know already – but a lot of it we don’t want to acknowledge is part of the problem.
• Part Two: On how the monopolistic mindset, terrible web design and a rejection of new technology contributed to the fall.
• Newspaper war raises a question: Who keeps the tweeps? – Once a reporter builds a base in social media – who owns that base? If a newspaper gets claim to/responsibility for a reporters’ tweets (which seems to be the case), do they also own those followers? In this case, at least, I say yes. but not always. Likely not the last we’ll see from this debate.

How-Tos and Ideas:

• 10 Things You Must Do to Earn Your Audience’s Trust – Journalism has lost a lot of public trust of late – so these lessons should ring especially true for us. With so many online tools at our disposal, we should be good at this (but we usually aren’t).
• HOW TO: Take Advantage of FriendFeed’s Unique Features – Now that Facebook has purchased FriendFeed, I’d expect more people to take not of it’s network-combining power. Here’s some need-to-know tips on it.
• 10 Creative Contests Powered by Social Media – Great examples from Mashable for innovative online contests.
• Add context to news online with a wiki feature – again, more good ideas for news and opinion content that goes beyond comments.

More Social Media News

• Industry Moves: National Geographic Gets A VP Of Social Media – Can anyone else just not believe that it took the Times and now National Geographic this long to get a clue?
• TWITTER ANALYSIS: 40% of Tweets Are Pointless Babble – It should come as no surprise to anyone who lives on Twitter (like me), that tweets are largely empty. The ones of merit, though, are really worth it.
• Facebook’s New Privacy Features: A Complete Guide – Facebook’s always changing their game up. They’ve recently made it so anyone can see public profiles. Here’s a guide to how to adjust your settings.

• Facebook: No Sponsored Status Updates Allowed – So Facebook decides to keep it real (so to speak) and ban sponsored updates. The real question is – when will Twitter follow suit?