Embrace the Geo-Tagging of Your Business

I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not but one of the latest crazes amongst smart phone users is “Checking-In” to the place at which they are located on sites like Facebook, Foursquare, and Google Lattitude. By tagging themselves as being at a certain location at a certain time, they can invite their friends to join them for a drink, meet up with them at the theater, or just to let their frieds know what they’re up to.

More recently these sites have allowed businesses to claim their locations on their sites and give people incentives for checking in to their store while they shop. For instance, if one of your customers checks in to your store while they are shopping, you could extend a 15% off coupon code. Why do this? FREE Advertising. These people are automatically getting your name out to a few thousand people at a time in some cases, and it costs you a little skin off the top of your profit margin.

With the most recent inventions from Google (namely social media statuses being posted in updates and instant search results) I would not be surprised if they find some way to add this new feature into the mix. Embrace it early, get creative, and get some free advertising for your business. This is just one of the ways that your business can help bring the online world into the real world. Very exciting stuff.