As you may know if you have seen my Facebook page lately, I am off with a few friends on a long-anticipated journey we vowed to make this summer. Technically I am not working this week, but this is one of those jobs where it doesn’t really feel like work and the inspiration to write has struck as we make our way down highway 101 toward Los Angeles.
I am taking more than just the friends I have physically with me on our trip and that is made possible by social media. In a world where I can tether my phone to my laptop and get online as we drive along the coast, live updates of my trip just come naturally. I am using an android app called Trip Journal to document the drive down and hopefully most of what happens there as well. The app itself is amazing. It tracks us via GPS, then allows me to tag locations, attach media, and make comments on everything. Then it exports it to Facebook and now I don’t have to disappear the 9 days I am gone.
It’s actually funny, people may have a better idea of where I am this week than any normal week. Now, I have written about how important I think location is with regards to social media and the recent addition of Facebook Places, the continued growth of Foursquare, and the maturation of Google Latitude are pushing the space to new heights very rapidly.
I read an article about how your business can best benefit from the idea of location based social networks and as I have hit the road, I completely agree. Checking in and live location updates still are not things that come totally naturally to most people but as it continues to grow, businesses that start now are going to have a great head start.
I hope that you will follow along at least a little bit this week as I hit the road, attempting to take as much of what I do online with me and see first-hand just how the location game works in my life and how you as a business owner can move to take advantage of that.