Foursquare, journalism, and a sense of place

I have a confession to make. I live a secret life. By day you know me as the mild-mannered professor of journalism, helping guide young ones in the formation of their journalistic skills. But I have an alter ego.

You see, I am the mayor of Coppee Hall.

For the uninitiated, I’m talking about Foursquare, a mobile Web application that uses location-based systems to let you “check in” where you are using an application on your iPhone or similar smartphone device. If I had to compare it to something you already might know and use, it’s similar to Twitter except that rather than tweeting about what’s in your mind or what you are doing, it’s simply a status message about where you are.

My goal for this post is to sketch out some ideas in hopes that you’ll add yours at the end of it. I’ve been fooling around with Foursquare the past couple weeks after Mashable recently noted it was the social media offering worth watching in 2010. After using it for a while, I am seeing some of the huge potential it offers both fans of social media and journalists. And I see a lot of potential for it in terms of journalism education, as it offers a new way to tell stories and add to the record.

In fact, the designers have made it such that your check-ins via the Foursquare app can be linked to other social media you already use, such as Facebook or Twitter. When you check in, the application generates a boilerplate status message that tells people where you’re at. On Facebook, it adds a little Google map so you can see the location visually.

Checking in is about as easy as could be. When I load the Foursquare app on my iPhone, the applications triangulates my approximate location via cell phone towers and then suggests places to check in that are nearby. When I got to work today, for example, it suggested the University, several buildings on campus, and a bunch of local businesses.

To check in, you simply select one of the locations, press a button, and it’s recorded. My check-ins can be seen by friends of mine I am linked to (when you sign up, it gives you the option of adding friends similar to Facebook by searching e-mail addresses, Twitter friends, or Facebook friends). If I link it to my other social media accounts, that check-in will be viewable there as well.

People ask me (OK, well, my wife asks me) why in the world a service like this would be useful. And on the surface it seems kind of silly. Nobody really cares where I am at the moment, and there doesn’t seem to be anything useful about this kind of thing to folks who cannot look beyond what they see in front of them (i.e. an “I’m at Coppee Hall” status message on Facebook).

Truthfully, the designers probably saw the same thing in terms of burnout potential, which is why they created badges. You earn these things by doing something, or sometimes a lot of something. The first badge you earn is for your first check-in. To date I’ve earned other badges for 10 check-ins at different venues, 30-check-in updates in a month, and one for being at a place three times in one week. You can earn a “Gym Rat” badge for going to work out a lot or other less charitably-named badges for going to your local watering hole a bit too often.

The badges aren’t worth anything per se, but they tap into that need to collect things that my generation tends to have, something my colleague Bob Britten explained so well on his blog. This is how my generation is wired to play games, so the badges have some type of intrinsic value. And they also are a type of status symbol; wouldn’t it feel good to be known via your badges as someone who works out a lot?

The mayorships are part of that as well. I wasn’t kidding when I said I was mayor of Coppee Hall, the building where I work. You earn this title by checking in at a location more times than anyone else in the past two months (provided you have a photo uploaded to your profile). Right now I’m mayor of three locations, including my local CVS pharmacy. Yup, I’m a big shot.

Being mayor is one of the more fun things about Foursquare, and people do guard the title with their life. My friend Jen who was a fellow grad student at MU got into an interesting conversation with a few of us on Facebook concerning Foursquare and said she is obsessive about her mayorships. Using the application’s “Shout” feature, she even sends out a blast to her constituents telling them hello every time she checks in to her favorite fiefdom (the local library), and that message gets posted on the venue page and via Twitter (if anyone’s listening).

A Foursquare check-in has about the same kind of value or power as an individual tweet, which is to say very little. As with most things that are forward-thinking about social media, the power is not in the individual message but the sum of messages in aggregate. So beyond being mayor and earning badges, what is Foursquare good for? There are two big things that stand out to me: business potential and journalism potential.

The business one, we’re starting to see that more. Businesses are seeing the value of being listed. Every time I check in at a venue I am in a sense advertising their existence to my social network; that’s credibility and advertising you can’t buy. So good businesses figure out ways to reward people by offering discounts for check-ins or free food for their mayor. There’s a good deal of logic here. More check-ins means more social advertising.

But the business end also has some cool other features. When I check in to some place, I can add a tip (pictured) about the location. At a restaurant, I added a tip about a particular dish I like. At work, I put on there to be ready to walk up hill, which Lehigh U folks obviously know but a visitor might not. It’s a really cool way to socially share local knowledge about a place, but all that knowledge is user-driven to the degree that people using Foursquare make use of it.

While you can see these tips on the venue’s page, you also can surf for local tips aggregated regardless of venue based on your current location. So when I load the app and my location gets triangulated, I can click on the tips menu at the bottom and it will aggregate tips for any place near me, regardless of location. It’s a really useful feature if I was, for example, in a random place and looking for a new place to eat that I hadn’t tried before.

I say it all the time, but one of the great things about media is serendipity, the process of coming across things you wouldn’t expect to find. Aggregated tips based on where we are is serendipity at work, allowing me to explore my neighborhood or current location in more interesting ways.

OK, so it’s good for business, and good for those of us who want to discover things in our city or neighborhood that we don’t know about. By itself, that is super useful because it acts as a type of location-based wiki where users add to the record about a place and help us define that space with a little more context. This is what I mean by Foursquare, like Twitter before it, being more than the sum of an individual check-in. Sure, nobody cares that I’m at CVS, but there is value in me adding tips that the lines seem especially long during certain times of the day.

That’s where the journalist’s role comes in. Foursquare is a platform full of journalistic potential because adding information to the record is what we do. Did a local business fail a health inspection recently? Right now we put that in the newspaper, which people are reading less, or on a Web site, where people don’t know how to find it among mountains of information. There is value in journalists adding news and verified information to the record (including links for more information) that would enhance a person’s knowledge and ability to experience (or avoid) a place.

So journalists can add tips, but they can also be part of projects mapping out the community in general. One of the nice things about Foursquare is that you can add venues if the one you’re at isn’t on the check-in screen. The app makes use of Google maps and you can type in what you’re searching for to get its suggestions, but sometimes you just have to enter the name and address of the business. This would be a wonderful role for the journalist, to help map out our communities and provide some of those tips and details along the way that help add to the narrative. Everything on Foursquare is, in the end, driven by its users.

At its best, news provides us with a sense of place about our surroundings by telling us things about the places we live that we might otherwise might not know about. For someone like me who is living in a new home and city, Foursquare has been an interesting way to explore my own neighborhood. When I am at home I can see all the businesses and places I didn’t know about because it doesn’t fall along my usual driving or walking patterns. When there is information that is value-added by professional journalists or citizen journalists, I get to know my community better.

I am working on ways to get something Foursquare-like into the classroom, maybe not this term but next fall. If we were to treat the app as a wiki platform, my simple idea would be to award points for value-added information. The goal would be to map different sections of our community over the semester, adding as much detail and information as possible.

There is value in this stuff. It might not win us a Pulitzer, but it would add to the larger community narrative and help us better understand our surroundings amidst a busy, busy world. In the end, that’s a big part of the job.

How do you see yourself using Foursquare in a journalistic fashion?