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| Mayor badge in Foursquare |
Earlier in my blog I took my stance on location based forms of social media. Although I feel like they are unsafe, I also know that people are really into the gaming aspect of it. In Foursquare, if you check into a certain place more than anyone else, you become the mayor of that place. Earlier this month in my Social Media Marketing class we discussed how people could cheat the system and check into places from their couch and eventually become the mayor of that place. I also learned from an article on
Mashable.com that people can also check into a place if they are near it instead of inside it. I bet you are thinking, "So what?" I would be thinking this too if I didn't fully understand the ramifications. The problem with this is that most businesses are starting to give mayoral discounts, and incentives to the mayor of their establishment so that more people will want to check into their location and cash in on the deals. Foursquare finally caught onto this and so they are putting the power of the highly sought after mayor badge into the hands of the store owners. Since Foursquare cannot fix this problem immediately, Foursquare knows that businesses using this social media platform know their regular customers. This means that business owners can now flag you on Foursquare and you can lose your mayorship. What do you think? Do you think this is taking it too far? Do businesses have the right to tamper with a social media game? I think they have every right to do this if others are exploiting this loophole to gain discounts and other incentives that they don't deserve at the companies expense.
