Companies have been quick to realise the potential of this technology with Starbucks, Debenhams and others offering loyal customers who frequently check in to their stores, rewards such as a free cup of coffee.

It’s potential gives a whole new meaning to the supermarket loyalty card.

But with such power comes responsibility. It might be great for a free latte, but at what price to your privacy? There is a big worry that you don’t know who can read your information, as to where you are. Accept a friend request in Foursquare without due care, and you are potentially opening up your personal diary to a complete stranger.

But many say Foursquare’s primary motivation is growth, and not the privacy of its members. They need a critical mass of users to make the service more useful. Critics point out that a warning of the risks should be prominently displayed to users when they set up their accounts.

Foursquare has recently reached the 2m users landmark, and this figure is growing all the time. The issue with location-based information, is that it exposes a new layer of personal information if you like; our exact physical location at anytime, anywhere.

So the decision is up to you. If you want everyone to know exactly where to find you, then Foursquare is perfect for you. Our advice is this..only accept friend requests from friends. And make yourself fully versed on the what this all entails and the risks that it involves. Participate in online communities of course, but with care.

From the index of over 10 billion images in Google’s databases, Google has cross-referenced images as often as possible in order to more thoroughly identify what’s in the picture.  For instance, if you post a photo of The Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, but do not label it (even with a descriptive file name), Google will likely figure out what it is by comparing it to other photos of the hotel that have been labeled.  This is also true of many other types of images, even down to sub-species of animals.

When photos are displayed on the Google search, they pop up as a box over the top of the original page they’re on and this box has other information about the picture.  It tells you the size, weight (file size), any image information embedded (titles, photographer, usage rights, etc.) and gives you its best-guess if there is no labeling.  You can also use that image as the basis for a new search to find more like it.

You can even specify a color you prefer when searching for an image in the Advanced Search area.  So if you’re looking for Volkswagencars , but only want to look at red ones, you can include that and Google will do its best to only return red VWs. Now that is pretty neat!

All in all, there are a lot of cool new things in Google’s new Image Search.  It’s now become on-par with Bing and then one-upped the competition.

Employees will waste time with social media:
Many large corporations block their employees from accessing the Internet altogether. Others try to block employees from accessing personal email or social networks like Facebook during work hours.

With the advent of smart phones, internet access is available to workers everywhere – and employers can’t stop them from accessing the Internet.

The value of workers of having internet access – in terms of research, communication, and speed – is far greater than the threat of lost productivity. Companies like Best Buy, Dell and many others have increased not only customer satisfaction, but also sales, by having hundreds, and even thousands, of employees monitoring and resolving complaints and issues in social media.

Companies have a right to make policies and rules about personal use of the internet, but blocking it during work just doesn’t make sense.

What if people say nasty things about our brand?:

Most people exercise common sense, when reading reviews. That is to say, any obviously vindictive and negative comments will simply be ignored.

And besides, complaints may very well mean that there may be things you need to change about your brand. In that case, you should thank them for letting you know what they are. Then you should make changes.

If you have built an online community that includes people who don’t hate you, that community will rise to your defense and they will handle the problem for you.

We’ll lose control of the brand.

Every person with a computer and even a tiny skill level has the tools to make their opinion about your brand heard by other people. They’re already talking about you.

You cannot control the message in the internet Age. You can affect it, but you cannot control it. Your workers are talking about you in closed Facebook groups designed to keep you out so they can talk about you in peace. Your customers are emailing, Tweeting, Facebooking, and that old standby – calling – their friends about their experience with your brand. You don’t have control. You might as well join the conversation. At least that way you can influence what is being said.

Employees will give away corporate secrets on social networks and that will help our competitors and affect the stock price.
If you don’t already have a social media policy, you need to create one.

If you don’t trust your employees to talk to customers, or to represent the brand, you need to look at 1) your hiring practices, 2) your training practices.

The truth is that there are more emerging media success stories than there are failures.

Clients begin by telling Lab42 about their products and their target consumers. Lab42 then helps to craft a survey, with the option of focusing it based on gender, age, location, lifestyle and interests. Next, Lab42 takes the resulting survey to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and smaller niche social networks, using highly targeted incentives to garner attention and responses while consumers go about their day-to-day activities. Two packages are available from Lab42: a premium one for $ 500, with results in three days or less; and a preliminary one for$ 300, with results in 5 days or less. Custom arrangements are also possible.

It’s always refreshing to see services that have traditionally been performed slowly and expensively rethought and remade to reflect new technologies and new societal shifts. Perhaps this is one to try out when researching your next big thing…? Early feedback suggest that people enjoy giving their opinions and can share these with their friends, thus providing you with potential real-time feedback.

The button, aimed at children and teenagers, will help them report abuse to the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) and Facebook.

The launch follows months of negotiation between Ceop and Facebook, which initially resisted the idea. Ceop, the government law enforcement agency tasked with tracking down online sex offenders, called for a panic button to be installed on social networking sites last November.

Bebo became the first network to add the button with MySpace following suit, but Facebook resisted the change, saying its own reporting systems were sufficient.

This agreement  is the culmination of months of negotiation between Ceop and Facebook.

By adding this application, Facebook users will have direct access to all the services that sit behind our ClickCeop button which should provide reassurance to every parent with teenagers on the site.

By having a pre-packaged application that users play an active part in, it is hoped that not only will they be kept safe, but it makes all of their friends aware too, and acts as a viral awareness campaign.

In addition to the online reporting application, a new Facebook/Ceop page is being set up, with a range of topics that, it is hoped, will be of interest to teenagers, such as celebrities, music and exams. It will link these subjects to questions about online safety.

What do you think about us? Are you a parent? Will it give you more confidence in letting your children participate in social networking?

We think that any initiative that can create a safer environment for children to operate in, should be welcomed.

Your customers are no doubt hungry for relevant information for their industry and always keen to keep learning.  Through providing a useful newsletter with up-to-date articles that your customers will appreciate, and that will help solve the issues that they face on a day-to-day basis, then you will no doubt soon have a loyal and responsive customer base, providing useful feedback in real time.

By using Google Analytics, you will then be able to accurately measure who is reading your newsletter, and the articles that are generating the most interest. This will consequently enable you to hone your offering more closely to the needs of your customer base; thus creating a “virtual circle”

You could then take that a step further. By now you have a loyal following, and a good idea of their interests. You can then take this information, and promote an “event/seminar” to this database on one of the subjects. Depending upon the feedback your database gives you, you can then make a decision as to whether to organise an event or not. It has cost you nothing for the feasability study!

If there is sufficient popularity, you can go ahead to organise an event, and then you are generating yet more potential revenue streams; ticket sales, sponsorship, and advertising.

And now that the readers of your newsletter are closely defined in terms of interest, you are now in a position to provide “context based” advertising, offering discounted commercial solutions to specific problems.

My point is this: You have a database of customers/suppliers. They are all looking for relevant information. By creating a newsletter, that is genuinely useful to them, you can create a bundle of revenue streams to back it up. Your customers will appreciate it, more to the point, and you can engage in real time with them.

Take a look at Fresh Business Thinking; they have achieved this with great effect!

Both are incredible companies. There is no doubt about that. They have changed the world. But each has a profoundly different vision.

At it’s core, Google believes that at the end of all this, the world will be centred on computers, and computers will be doing everything. This may well be why Google has potentially missed the boat on  social-networking.

The Facebook model is radically different. As far as they are concerned, humans must maintain mastery over technology, rather than the other way around. The value of Facebook stems from the fact that people are the most important thing.

Facebook has come under so much scrutiny recently for its privacy-related initiatives. But under all that scrutiny, many of the founder’s objectives have been missed.

Facebook is all about transparency. It was founded on the premise that transparency will take over modern life. Indeed, you know that if you google your own name, you can’t always control what information is available on you in the public domain!

Facebook is trying to build a safer, more trusted version of the internet. By holding people to the consequences of their actions and requirements to use their real identity.

But is it right for a company to decide on whether people should be responsible or not for their own actions?  Who do Facebook think they are some would say? There is now so much data that resides about us on Facebook. Should any one company control and aggregate so much information about its users? We do not even know how it will be used in the future. This can be quite scary for some people, and understandably so.

Facebook uses some of this data for its own commercial gain, by making it available to advertisers. Is this the right thing to do?

So many questions, and in truth, I still have not made up my mind. I am not sure that a world governed by computers is the answer. So Facebook. Its vision to empower the individual is an admirable one. If they can give us the tools to enable them to communicate more efficiently, then that is not such a bad thing.

But what scares me, is that all this power is in the hands of one organisation. Soon, they will have as much information on us as governments do!

Food for thought..and if any of you can see the end result, please do let us know.

Traditional advertising is not going to go away any time soon. TV viewing is rising in some segments of society, and its ability to engage is unparalleled. But mobile advertising, although multinationals have dipped their toe in the water, innovations such as Apple’s iAds, is set to herald a new era.

Companies such as Sears and Nissan, have already committed to spending $60m this year in Apple’s iAds. Adverts released by Apple have video and interactive components, which it hopes will combine the emotional punch of television commercials with the engagement of the best internet pitches.

Mobile devices now vastly outnumber fixed-line broadband connections. Mobile ad spending is forecast by PwC to more than triple from $2.2bn last year to $7.7bn in 2014, 0r 7.4% of total online marketing.

Consumers’ increasing appetite for mobile applications is driving online retailers to speed up their mobile marketing initiatives. Most retailers either already have or are developing a mobile strategy. One in five boasts having a fully-implemented mobile strategy in place already.

It’s imperative for online retailers to stay on top of what their customers want and these days it’s all about the mobile phone. Mobile commerce has tremendous potential and will no doubt grow to become a significant part of overall sales volume in years to come. whether to increase customer satisfaction, grow their brand or drive traffic and sales, online retailers are in this game to stay.

Mobile investment is modest now, but we see that it will pick up in the future, especially among the biggest brands that have already invested significant amounts in their mobile operations.

Have you bought anything from your mobile device yet? How would you feel about mobile advertising? Intrusive or useful.

Matt has the full details on phone your blog and I have to say the first time I saw that title I thought it would be a feature where it dictates a text entry to your site. What it actually does is still impressive in that it records your phone call, saves it as an audio file and auto publishes it to your site.

Now if only it could be expanded to become a way of generating a new podcast, it would be even more powerful. On the other hand I think drunken phone calls could become a whole lot more dangerous.

We think this fusion of loyalty rewards programs with location-aware social networking is smart – and an idea that is worth considering for brands with loyalty or CRM programs.  By ‘checking in’ to hotels, bars, stores and other destinations on location-aware social networks such Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Whrrl, TriOut, Loopt, Yelp and now Twitter, Google and Facebook, customers could earn reward points, bringing them to stores selling your wares, whether online or traditional.

For TopGuest, who are looking to become middleware between location-based services (LBS) and travel/loyalty rewards programs, their service is in preview mode, with a partnership with luxury hotel chain, Standard Hotels (reviews on TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and Cnet).  What’s appealing about the TopGuest service is it’s simplicity, there are no apps to download, you can just ‘check-in’ with your social networking site and start getting rewards.  Whilst there is a natural fit between an emergent category of location-aware loyalty rewards programs and travel, we think non-travel brands could develop similar services.

Imagine, for example, if Sony ran a contest during the World Cup in which people checking in to bars screening matches on Bravia TVs won reward points for the SonyStore (if they posted images of the match to TwitPic). Or if every time you checked in and picked up a car at Avis, points were added to your Avis First rewards program. Or, whilst following the travel tips of luxury brands on Foursquare such as Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs and Coach, you won loyalty points for following the tips and visiting stores.