Online Marketing Blog from metrocafe311

You leave your home. Turn on your phone. Get into work and turn on your computer. Sign into a social network.

What’s increasingly likely is you turn on your smart phone when you leave your home and sign in to your favourite social networking application straight away.

So are you actively promoting the fact that you are not in your house?

Please Rob Me is a website that was set up to promote the awareness of careful social networking. The website describes the problems with location based social media sites.

“The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the Internet we’re not home. It gets even worse if you have ‘friends’ who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the Internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That’s right, slap them across the face.”

They even go as far as to highlight ‘opportunities’ for potential thieves. These opportunities are live tweets from people having ‘Checked in’ on Foursquare away from their home.

Although the site makes a valid point, the reality is that we just have to be careful with our privacy settings. This is something that is highlighted again and again with regards to social media. The importance of privacy settings and understanding what and who can gain access to your information is a much broader problem. However, when you are engaging with social media so regularly and actively, it is something all users must be aware of.

Does this spell the end of location based applications? Absolutely not. Location based applications can be extremely beneficial to users. They are also a significant opportunity for marketers allowing brands to geo-target consumers. Soon, we will be walking down Grafton Street receiving offers from the brands we want to communicate with.

Please Rob Me have done brilliantly to raise the awareness of being careful online. Something we at metrocafe311, blogged about recently. There is, however no doubt that certain people wont be careful, adding ‘1 new opportunity’ for thieves in Ireland.

Visit Please Rob Me.

See the Coverage that his site has been getting.