Dear @GetGlue & @Foursquare When I Check-In, Respect My Privacy!

As many of you know I am a fan of the check-in social networks such as Foursquare (where I am a Level 2 Super User). I check-in to GetGlue on a regular basis for shows and movies and more and I have ordered my stickers more than once to be sent to me in real life.

 

However, one of the issues I have with these sites is they seem to lack respect for our privacy in some of the simplest ways. The services all ask you when you check-in what other social media services you’d like to post your activity to – such as Twitter or Facebook. (This, of course, assumes you’ve connected the accounts to each of the check-in services.) The problem with privacy occurs when I uncheck those boxes asking if I want to share to Facebook and/or Twitter. Often times, GetGlue and Foursquare just straight up don’t listen.

Now, I don’t mean the actual check-in itself is sent to the various social networks but it is often the case that things within the GetGlue or Foursquare ecosystem as a result of your check-in are posted directly to Facebook or Twitter without your consent.

Social Media Day Toronto #SMDay #SMDayTO – WHAT A NIGHT!

Last night, as I have mentioned in previous posts was Social Media Day across the globe. I was once again in charge of organizing the event in Toronto. This year, I had the one and only Michael Nus aka @MichaelNus on Twitter co-organizing the event with me. The official Meetup.com page from Mashable showed that we had 384 people attending and Tattoo Rock Parlour did indeed get PACKED. In fact, we had the 5th largest meetup for Social Media Day in the world!

 

Thanks to Rebecca of Epilogger for making the awesome poster at the top of this page! I know how hard you worked on it via numerous discussions we had about it.

For a couple of other resources other than what I write here you can check out Epilogger‘s coverage of the event at this page (available for a limited time before the beta test begins) courtesy of Epilogger and see the whole story! There is also my co-organizer, Michael Nus’ blogs’ coverage of the event at http://www.michaelnus.com/socialmedia/social-media-day-toronto/.

We had special name badge sticker name tags from StickerYou (@StickerYou) which looked awesome, were made of vinyl, stuck well, and didn’t leave sticky crap all over our clothes – especially my nice sport jacket!

We were one of the only cities in the world that had Social Media Day recognized by our city, and as such were recognized in an article on Mashable.com here at http://mashable.com/2011/06/30/social-media-day-cities/. We got a letter from the Mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, congratulating us on coming together on this special day.

We had 3 different speakers from such a variety of different outlooks it was great to hear and see. We had the social media “Lady Blogga” Casie Stewart (@CasieStewart) talk about building your personal brand.

We had Professor Robert Kozinets (@kozinets) chair of the marketing department at York University’s Schulich School of Business give us an academic look at the whole internet and how social media is rooted in the message boards of the 90s – Star Trek message boards were mentioned!

We had Michael O’Connor Clarke (@michaelocc) a man who builds and executes social media programs these days and joined his first social network in 1997, started blogging in 2001, joined Twitter at launch, and was one of the first 1,000 public users on LinkedIn took us into how to use of social media for business and how so many companies are doing it wrong with his hilarious look at the right and wrong way to use social media. We also had DJ Jeff Button (@DJJeffButton) play us some good networking music (he is also in the picture below with Michael O’Connor Clarke).

I wish I could give a better detailed description but I was so frazzled running around I didn’t have enough time to really listen.  One really great thing and at the same time not so great thing about the entire event was it was PACKED.

In fact, it was so packed that people who checked in on Foursquare earned the SWARM BADGE if they didn’t yet have it. I, myself, had 35 friends checked in on Foursquare with me last night. Is it a reasonable goal to shoot for the Super Swarm Badge (250 people) next year?

You might remember my post on planning a good event from earlier this year – well I tried to cover all of those. However, I once again learned A LOT. I learned that while each and every one of my tips held true, there is so much more that comes into play. I will take these new learnings and improve my next events – and probably write a blog post with more details of the new learnings at a later date as well.

Please be sure to let me know what you thought of the event and of any way I can make it better next time.

I cannot forget the amazing sponsors we had who made the event possible. After one of our initial sponsors backed out these awesome folks stepped in and were just amazing to deal with every step of the way. Thanks to Rogers Canada we had a free Galaxy Tab courtesy of the good folks at Canada’s reliable network – Rogers – to give away! A lucky guy named Somu Mondal @somumondal won it because we entered his name into the draw for engaging and asking a question of one of the speakers. Here he is below with his prize (picture courtesy of Shanta aka @TantienHime).

A huge thank you to every single one of our sponsors. I have listed them all below along with short blurbs taken from the Meetup.com event info page and I hope to work with all of them again soon. I cannot stress enough how grateful I am to them for agreeing to help us pull off this event and make it amazing.

I know this all sounds like BS and me just trying to promote the sponsors but it really isn’t and here’s why: One of our original sponsors – who reached out to us, by the way – said they were totally on board and excited to join in to make an awesome event. We made some arrangements based on the idea that we had this sponsorship and they promptly backed out at the first mention of an aspect not to their liking in regard to the event. This is why I am so truly thankful to every single one of our sponsors who I mentioned below and strongly encourage you to give their links a click or three. I don’t know if I am going to piss someone off by writing what I did above but I revealed no names for a reason and told the truth about the situation as I experienced it.

Without further ado here, listed below, are our awesomazing sponsors.

Rogers: 

We are really excited to announce that ROGERS (@RogersBuzz) played a huge role in sponsoring the awesome of Social Media Day Toronto 2011. A giant of Canadian Telecommunications Rogers has exploded in social media helping customers and giving advice across all platforms as well as their usual, traditional means which they, of course continue. Check em out at http://social.rogers.com/

INK Entertainment: 
INK ENTERTAINMENT (@INKevents) sponsored us and that is how we have the amazing venue of TATTOO ROCK PARLOUR (@TattooRock). Check em out at http://www.facebook.com/INKEntertainment and http://www.facebook.com/TattooRockParlourTO.

Specific huge thanks to Maria @mariapie Pielarska – for setting everything up and connecting us with the right people over at INK. You rock.

Toyota Canada: 
@ToyotaCanada wished everyone a happy Social Media Day! They invited everyone to come hang out with them on Facebook & Twitter and at Social Media Day, IRL (in real life). They’re easy to find, just add “/ToyotaCanada” and there they are – ready to connect with you. But don’t forget to use our favourite hashtag, #ToyotaLove. They also had these really awesome 2 GB USB Bracelets to give away to anyone who liked them on Facebook (and they had a computer there to do it!)

http://www.twitter.com/ToyotaCanada
http://www.facebook.com/ToyotaCanada

Saatchi & Saatchi Canada: 
At Saatchi, they’re in the business of building Lovemarks. Lovemarks are brands that inspire loyalty beyond reason. They think Canada is itself a #lovemark. On Canada Day they wanted to spread the #canadalove and got that virtual love going.
Like them on Facebook at /saatchicanada

http://www.Facebook.com/SaatchiCanada
http://www.Saatchi.ca/
http://www.Twitter.com/#!/SaatchiCanada

Popchips: 
POPCHIPS (@PopchipsTO) hooked us up with some deliciousness at the event, I am sure you all couldn’t wait to eat some of their amazing and healthy chips. We knew many of you love em so we brought them along for the ride! I was totally right about this too! Those things went so fast that I didn’t even get to have any!

Check em out at http://www.facebook.com/Popchips.

Putting Edge: 
Everyone’s favorite local mini-golf spot, PUTTING EDGE (@PuttingEdge) has thrown down with free rounds of putting action! Not only do they have awesome courses but they are all GLOW-IN-THE-DARK! The PAR-fect place for a date with that special someone, or some quality time with the entire family.
Check em out at http://www.facebook.com/PuttingEdge

W00t! I’m Officially A @foursquare Superuser! Thanks @BrianG416!

Just got this email in my inbox at 8 PM tonight EST. The message inside reads as follows:

Thanks for wanting to be a foursquare Superuser. You made the cut! As a Superuser Level 1, you can help keep foursquare venues organized. You’ll find your new tools at foursquare.com/—-secret stuffs here–.

Check out the links below for how you can use your new powers for good.

House Rules: best practices for using foursquare as a community

Superuser guidelines: info on what kind of edits to make and how to use the new tools available to you

Venue Style Guide: official foursquare style for making edits and creating venues

Superuser forum on our support site: where our dedicated Superuser community chats about common questions and issues

Now get out there and edit that venue that’s been bugging you for months!

– team foursquare

I am very honored to be chosen to be one of the new foursquare Superusers. Thanks so much to Brian @briang416 Gonsalves one of the first completely random people I met via Twitter during foursquare Day 2010 – we never actually made it to the Toronto celebration but we did manage to meet. He was also the only foursquare Superuser I knew and he helped me in my bid to become a Superuser – support from an existing Superuser helped push your application to the top of the pile.

I first found out about the search by foursquare for more Superusers about a week ago when I read this Aboutfoursquare blog post, “Foursquare looks to add more superusers“. From there I went to the application page at https://foursquare.com/user/upgrade and applied. I also asked Brian if he could give me an endorsement and he did – which probably helped a ton so thanks again Brian!

In writing this article I just found out that I can apply to become a Level 2 Superuser soon too! Wow! I went to the application page when I was getting the link for above and it told me this:

Hi! You were just recently upgraded to a Superuser Level 1. Continue being a model user and you can apply to be upgraded to Superuser Level 2 after 6/19/2011.

Cool beans! I promise to only use my newfound superpowers for truth, justice, and the North American way!!! I will combat misnamed and misplaced venues! Mind you, do you know of any that I should switch? Let me know in the comments and give me some proof as to the veracity of your claims and I will do like the crew of the Enterprise D and “make it so”!

Audio Post

Foursquare Day Toronto TOMORROW! @4SQDayYYZ

Tomorrow is Foursquare Day!!! (OK, well technically it’s today. Sorry I’m so late on this I had Internet issues).

I helped a little bit on getting the City of Toronto involved and having Mayor Rob Ford sign a letter congratulating everyone for coming together.

Anyhow – this year is shaping up to be an uber-awesome for the Second Annual Foursquare Day in Toronto. Most of the details are available on the Meetup.com page located here: http://www.meetup.com/foursquare/Toronto-CA/88115/ as well as via their Facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/4sqdaytoronto and finally, via the Foursquare Day Toronto’s Twitter account here: http://www.twitter.com/4SQDayYYZ.

The event will be starting tomorrow at 8pm at the Firkin on King – 461 King Street West in downtown Toronto. Don’t be late because there’s going to be a Mill Street Brewery FREE tasting (of beer)!

Lots of giveaways and raffles and tons of superb awesome stuff going on!

There are some really great sponsors for the event including:

• LBMA (Official Media Sponsor) http://thelbma.com/
• Virgin Mobile Canada (Official Mobile Sponsor)http://www.virginmobile.ca/en/home/index.html
• Love Sewing & The Sewing Studio (same place mentioned in a previous post when I went to a Tweetup there) http://www.lovesewing.com/magazine/
• TIFF http://www.tiff.net
• Canadian Stage http://www.canadianstage.com/
• Mill Street Brewery http://www.millstreetbrewery.com/
• Chapters Indigo http://www.chapters.indigo.ca
• The Putting Edge http://www.puttingedge.com/
• iSkin http://www.iskin.com
• Evoke Salon http://www.salonevoke.com
• Rypple http://rypple.com/
• StickerYou http://www.stickeryou.com/
• MyCityLives http://www.mycitylives.com
• Institute of Communication Agencies / Advertising Week Canada http://www.icacanada.ca/ & http://www.advertisingweek.ca/

How To Cheat Foursquare’s Weekly Leaderboard (Good For Bragging Rights Only)

If you are a person who uses the popular location-based service (aka LBS) called Foursquare you may have noticed every time you check-in (+1 point) or check-in to a new place (+5 points) or add a new place to the database (+5 points) you get points. The more times you check-in each day (a day ends at 3:59am) the more points you get. So even if you have been to a place before if it is your 5th check-in of  that day you will get 1 point for the check-in with 4 additional points for the previous check-ins of the day.

Foursquare also has a Leaderboard for each city and among your friends (see below for a screenshot of the top 20 of Toronto’s current list). Each week at 11:59pm on Sunday evening Foursquare resets the Leaderboard. If you have been reading this article carefully you already know how to game the system. If not, don’t worry I got you covered.

Mr Francois G. at the top of the list got an average of 13.23 points per check-in this past week.

Because points build up over the course of a day which ends at 3:59am and the week ends at 11:59am it means there is a 4 hour time period early Monday morning (or Sunday night depending on how you look at it) when all your stops on Sunday at points to your tally for the new week which begins at 12:00am Monday morning because “Foursquare’s Sunday” doesn’t end until 3:59am. So if you have 15 check-ins from Sunday and you check-in to your 16th location on Monday morning at 12:15am you get 16 points for it being you 16th check-in of the day. This also means if you were to check-in to a new location you have never been to before AND you added it to Foursquare’s database you’d get +5 for each of those along with all the other points so that one check-in could end up gaining you 26 points while a lot of other people are sleeping or had lazy Sundays barely going anywhere. Check-in a couple more times and you’ll have 50+ points for 3-5 check-ins.

What is this good for? NOTHING. As far as I know, Foursquare has yet to announce ANY use whatsoever for the points. So, other than bragging rights to your friends which means taking a screenshot of the leaderboard Sunday night or even sending them a message right then to check out your total domination of the leaderboard which is occurring at that very moment you get nothing out of this ‘cheat’. This may be why Foursquare doesn’t really care about fixing this problem.

However, as I am posting this at 11:30pm Sunday evening now is your chance to take advantage of this for this coming week!

Will People Pay +$5 For A FourSquare Badge?

A couple of days ago it was announced that FourSquare had teamed up with GoGo WiFi (a company which offers in-flight WiFi) to offer their users a new badge to be earned on FourSquare – the Mile High Badge (see it below)

The Mile High badge available on FourSquare via use of GoGo WiFi

Now, I am a FourSquare user and I love collecting badges. I love that more and more companies and organizations are partnering with FourSquare to make more badges available as that helps make the game more fun. My question about this badge is rooted in this quote from the AboutFourSquare blog article where I read about this new badge: “The pricing for GoGo’s services vary from $4.95 for short flights to a $34.95/month unlimited option“. My question, as you may have guessed, is the title of this blog post:

Are people really going to be willing to pay $5 (or more) for a FourSquare Badge?

FourSquare is a game and right now badge collecting is a large facet of this game for a lot of people – especially those who don’t have many of their friends playing yet. To charge people to get a badge is slightly ridiculous and I personally don’t like the precedent it might set. I think the folks at FourSquare should be taking more time to figure out what use the points are going to be aside from being on a weekly reset leader board.

Not that I don’t think there is value in the service of having WiFi on a flight and then you can get this badge as a side bonus – especially as the majority of people who use FourSquare right now are the more tech inclined. I would totally pay for WiFi on a flight…except for the fact that there are now airlines who are offering this service for FREE! (Virgin America since May 2009). I think, in fact, I would rather the price was built in to my ticket and the companies offering GoGo WiFi could claim it as “free WiFi” too. (For all we know Virgin does that as well). For myself, if I am looking at any flight longer than the short hop from Toronto-NYC (1 hour) I would be willing to pay a little bit extra on my ticket for “Free” WiFi. Also, if a company did this they could probably get away with charging less per person for people to have WiFi on their flights because everyone on the flight is paying for it. This differs greatly from offering “Free meals” on a flight in that the WiFi signal is going to be there regardless of how many people are on the flight. You don’t ‘waste’ WiFi if no one uses it – unlike meals which if people refused probably (or at least I hope) went in the trash. AND because a very high percentage of people have cell phones which are WiFi enabled (BlackBerry, iPhone, Android devices etc) even if they don’t bring their laptops, netbooks, tablets, e-readers, etc with them on the plane they can still benefit from the WiFi by using it on their mobile devices.