To Share or Not to Share

In a digital world of endless integration, it is not a difficult endeavor at all to connect your entire life to either Facebook or Twitter. Check into that cool new Thai restaurant on Foursquare or Facebook Places? Share with your friends! Watching an exciting Game 7 of the NHL Eastern Conference Finals? Broadcast it to the world via GetGlue. Take a great picture on your iPhone 4 while walking home from work? PicPlz and Instagram make it simple to post that shot to seemingly every service in the world -- Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Posterous -- with one button.

What, though, is too much information? Isn't it slightly bizarre to know so much about the minutia of the daily lives of people you haven't physically seen since grammar school 20 years ago? Or, worse, what your co-workers are up to during a night of drunken debauchery? We see complaints all of the time by Facebook and Twitter users that, in particular, relentless "check-ins" serve as the dividing line between keeping connected and TMI.

Without sharing, though, what is the point of using a service such as Foursquare otherwise? Both the popular location-based application and its more popular-culture-oriented analogue GetGlue boast tremendously improved abilities to explore venues and interests based on location and prior activity, and provide an intuitive mechanism for sharing reviews, thoughts, and more within the platform.

But is that it? I'd wager that most of us started using the programs more to selfishly (even if unintentionally) broadcast details of our travels. And, in essence, is still what business and marketers are not-so-secretly wishing we do. It's one thing to check into the season finale of House, MD -- and to leave a pithy review in the interst of being named "Guru" of the program -- but the real value is in the simple share to other platforms. Word-of-mouth marketing has become one of the new great marketing paradigms, and to a business, the value of knowing your friends are somewhere watching the latest television program (and, by implication, enjoying that show) is often just as valuable -- or perhaps even more so -- that any :30 commercial spot (certainly considering the relative lack of cost of having someone do your dirty work for you).

I know that, if I were the account manager for a top brand at some global integrated agency, I would love it when people shared their check-ins to any and all social platforms they use. So, in the interests of being a better marketer, I resolve to once again start sending more of my checkins to Twitter (for now). Anecdotally, the volume of sharing hasn't adversely affected my follower count in the past, and my more obsessive side will relish having a more detailed record of all of my activity in one place. I am such a generalist as it is, in terms of what I discuss and post online, that I doubt anyone will be adversely affected. Perhaps even someone will learn of something cool I've discovered and relish the opportunity for discovery.

Word of mouth, baby.

Comments

[Jeff Briscoe]

Must say, I get slightly disappointed with myself and others when the 3rd party check-in is posted to Twitter w/o an additional comment. In other words (just my own theory) if checking in at a venue or show, unless the thing itself is super cool (sports stadium, etc), leave it simply on the location based app. But if you work in a comment or analysis (of any sort, even a trivial one) then it's appropriate to share on a social platform like Twitter. Like my own exciting life - I check-in at a gas station and use it as an opportunity to bitch about the price of gas or rejoice that it came down 2 pennies. Thoughts?

[GeekSoapBox]

I think that is a very fair and decent game plan. Probably the best "compromise" between sharing too much or not at all. Sometimes I'm standing on line somewhere or with intermittent Internet access, so writing a pithy comment may not be possible in the interests of "getting it done," but all in all I agree.