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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

The "In" Thing of Checking In


You will normally see this checking in phenomenon in a number of social media sites. You’ll primarily see a number of check ins in restaurants, hotels and resorts. People are fond of documenting these events on a day to day basis. This social media phenomenon is exercised by your typical high school students, young professionals, grown women and men. There is primarily no limit to this check ins, as long as you travel and dine in to different locations then you’ll have the privilege of socially announcing your whereabouts.

This is commonly practiced using an application either on your mobile phone or computer. What you will primarily do is to create an account with that application and then you can go and tag yourself to different locations that fit your daily roaming. One of the popular location based social networking sites is Foursquare. This location basically uses the GPS locater of the device and the computer network. The entertaining aspect of Foursquare is that they can actually crown a user as a “Mayor” of a certain place or establishment. This will primarily depend on your frequency on the said place for about 2 months. One of the perks of being a Foursquare “Mayor” will depend on the establishment’s guidelines, some restaurants actually have special promos or discounts for their crowned Foursquare Mayor.



Another good benefit of Foursquare check in is people are accounted for majority of the time. This is if the user is telling their location truthfully. Because some users do apply Foursquare mainly for bragging intent, these people who are not really dining in any posh restaurants or hotels but actually just passed by the area. They do this because checking in for them is a new way of branding themselves properly in social media. For them there is a class structure that is happening when you attach yourself to high class establishments.

This is the type of thinking that made people think twice about posting their whereabouts in social media sites, people do not like to be branded as such. So, the action that people took to prove the fact that they are indeed in that area is to post a photo along with the check in status. This is their way to further strengthen and establish their check in post. In this day and age, it is normal to associate ourselves with these establishments but we still need to put in mind the truthfulness in it and to often exercise our privacy privilege; people need not know your most intimate check ins.