Welcome to SourceCon:

SourceCon

Sourcing News and Knowledge – Beyond the Obvious


Articles tagged 'Foursquare'

Industry News, Social Media

Foursquare’s New Privacy Updates Aren’t Really… Private

by on Sep. 21, 2011

No comments

foursquare logo

I’m a fan of appropriate use of Foursquare. That means not connecting with people whom you wouldn’t be at least a little excited to entertain at your house at some point in time. Back when LBS’s started becoming the latest thing (within the last couple of years), lots of people expressed concerns over privacy issues with checking in at home or potentially opening themselves up to cyberstalking.

Argument aside that 1) these are opt-in services and no one is being forced to download them, register, and check in everywhere, and 2) you shouldn’t connect with people whom you don’t know thus allowing them to track your every move in the first place, I can see some of the issues with privacy, particularly when it comes to those who are confident enough in their connections to check in at home, at their kids’ schools, and so forth.

Earlier this week, Foursquare made some positive changes to its platform by adding a layer of privacy to home check-ins. According to its support forum:

Many users like to check in to their homes on foursquare!

To make sure your home venue is private to you and your friends, choose Home as the venue’s primary category. Doing this will ensure that only you and your friends can see the address on the venue page; everyone else sees a zoomed out map with no map pin (rather than the real location). If a Mayorship, badge unlock, or check-in is shared to Twitter or Facebook, the venue URL will include a map without a specific location for everyone.

Once you’ve created your home as a venue and categorized it as Home, you’ll also have the option to edit or delete it by going to its venue page at foursquare.com and clicking “Edit Venue.”

The actual privacy of this, however, is questionable — as I discovered when I experimented with my own first home check-in.

Keep reading »

Industry News, Social Media

Facebook Launches ‘Places’

by on Aug. 19, 2010

1 comment

photo

We wrote an article yesterday on location-based services, and a new one has just been added to the mix: Facebook yesterday announced the launch of its long-awaited Facebook Places LBS at a press conference. They have outlined how to use this new feature in a blog post that went up yesterday as well. With Places, you can tap a “Check In” button to share your physical location with your Facebook friends. Your check-in will then appear on that location’s “place page,” on your profile, and in your friends’ News Feeds. Your friends can also tag you as being with them, after which you can remove that tag–similar to the way Facebook’s photo-tagging feature operates.

Using this new feature requires using a version of Facebook’s iPhone application or logging into its touch.facebook.com smartphone site on a phone that supports GPS auto-location. On the site, you should see a “Places” tab on its home page. The feature will be rolled out over the course of the day by regions. (as of the posting of this article, it doesn’t appear to be working yet in the Pacific NW)

Some are calling this new service a ‘Foursquare-killer‘, even though Facebook has partnered with popular existing LBS services including Foursquare and Gowalla. Places doesn’t appear to award badges for that extra competition of trying to become the ‘mayor’ of a particular location.

The advantage of Places from a recruitment standpoint is that people who were stepping gingerly into the world of social media by joining Facebook have just been thrown into the world of LBS by the Facebook developers. People will able to easily check into venues like, say, their places of employment, and as a result they will be leaving ‘breadcrumb’ clues of their interests and hobbies as they go through their days and check in at various places. This has been an interesting method of data gathering and profile development to me ever since LBSes hit the scene. As Leena Rao of  TechCrunch shares,

“With these sorts of incentives and a potentially hot new feature that will be put in front of hundreds of millions of Facebook members, what advertiser and business wouldn’t want to create a Places page? Many businesses have already been flocking to Facebook as both and advertising and marketing platform, and now they can have their address, map, phone number, PLUS all the public social activity that is going on at a location. A merged Places page will include a considerable amount of information, including the number of check-ins, who checked-in to a place, number of Likes, the Places’ Wall, and more.”

A cautionary tale to those who will try this out: be conscious of your check-ins. You are responsible for your own actions. I wrote an article a couple months ago about the outcry of privacy issues with regards to LBS – but those issues lay mainly in our own hands. Be selective of who you connect with, and take full advantage of the privacy settings that Facebook allows.

What do you think of the new Facebook Places feature? Do you feel it will prove to be helpful with sourcing candidates? Share your thoughts below in the comments.

Keep reading »

Social Media, Technology & Resources

Location, Location, Location!

by on Aug. 18, 2010

2 Comments

zubed21

LBS (Location-Based Services) are the new ‘black’ when it comes to shiny new sourcing tools. Everyone (including me!) talks about how we can (and should) be using services like FourSquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Yelp, and Britekite to enhance our mobile recruiting activities. Some have even talked about using these types of services for putting pins on locations where companies have job openings. In fact, many folks in our industry have written about the significance of this:

Let’s take a look at a location-based resource that was designed specifically for recruiting: ZubedJobs, a product of Zubed.com.

Keep reading »

Technology & Resources

HootSuite For Sourcing

by on Jul. 15, 2010

2 Comments

IMG_0917

For anyone who hasn’t heard of HootSuite, it is quickly becoming one of my favorite social tools for sourcing. To provide some background on what HootSuite is:

“HootSuite helps organizations use the social web to launch marketing campaigns, identify and grow audience, and distribute targeted messages across multiple channels. Using HootSuite’s unique social media dashboard, teams can collaboratively schedule updates to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, WordPress and other social networks via web, desktop or mobile platforms plus track campaign results and industry trends to rapidly adjust tactics.”

Sounds like just another social media tool to be awed and amazed by, right? Not quite! There are functions built into HootSuite that are very handy for us researchers and sourcers. This week, they released some new functionality that will be quite helpful as we continue to work on proving the ROI of our social technology use.

  1. Consolidation. You can connect several social channels to HootSuite and monitor updates from a single location. Currently available are Twitter accounts, Facebook profiles and pages, LinkedIn, MySpace, PingFm, WordPress, and just added this week is Foursquare. (more on that later)
  2. Search. HootSuite has several different methods of search and monitoring – you can search with keywords, search by hashtags, or monitor public or private Twitter lists. The keyword search supports Boolean, so for those of us who have set up Boolean searches to monitor Twitter, this is an easy way to monitor right within a Twitter platform for easy follow-up and response.
  3. URL monitoring. HootSuite uses both ow.ly and ht.ly for standard URL shortening and sharing links. You can monitor clicks of these links through HootSuite’s metrics, which can be viewed either online or through their mobile app. Recently they’ve also added the ability to incorporate your own shortened URL (similar to what bit.ly Pro is allowing) so if you want to use your own, like resr.ch (sorry – I own that! :) ) you can set it up through HootSuite. This is a great feature for tracking interest in shared job opportunities or interesting links.
  4. RSS. You can run RSS feeds through HootSuite to automatically share when you’ve published a new blog post. A great way to automatically distribute your new articles with your networks. Or if you have a feed you just like to share, you can run it through here as well.
  5. Insights. Have you seen the new tab called Insight that appears when you click on a Twitter name? This provides you with a collection of information about that person gathered from other places on the Web. Things like job history, photos, location, and other social networks to which that person belongs. Right now, there doesn’t appear to be an opt-out to hide this information, so take advantage of it while it’s available!
  6. Geolocation. There are two parts to this – one, HootSuite recently added functionality to conduct location-based searches based on your present location. So, if you’re looking for potential candidates near you, you can do that. As mentioned earlier, HootSuite recently integrated with Foursquare, so you can follow the updates of those you’re connected with from HootSuite. This does present a cautionary message though – be careful about who you connect with – even if you choose not to share your location, if you are connected with someone you still show up in their update stream.
  7. Collaboration. You can invite others to collaborate on any of your social channels. I do mean any! You can create teams of people to tweet from one Twitter account, to post on a Facebook page, or to update locations on Foursquare. Think of the recruiting implications of having a team Foursquare account – if you work for a company with multiple locations, you can share job opportunities that are geo-tagged and easily findable by others near you. Pretty slick!

By the way, HootSuite is completely web-based too so you don’t have to download any desktop applications. This is great also for when you can’t be at your own computer – you can log into your account from any location. HootSuite’s basic functions are completely free. Some of the more robust features do have a fee attached to them but they’re totally worth it. As well, there is a lite (free) mobile app and a paid mobile app that’s only $2.99. Currently they are available for iPhone and Android devices, and the Blackberry app is coming very soon.  If you’ve been struggling to find a way to show ROI for your social technology use, this is a really good place to start. Check out their blog and take it for a spin!

Do you have a favorite social collaboration tool? Share in the comments below!

Keep reading »