Shopaholics Beware - You're About to be Blipped!

What are you doing, when are you doing it and how are you getting there? It is an undisputed fact that today we are more connected than ever before to our friends and strangers from across the globe. Since the emergence of the Internet, we have more free access to news stories, information and social groups than ever before. Not only do we use the Internet to search for information, but we use it increasingly to communicate with one another.

Our obsession with sharing our woes with the sometimes unexpecting public began through the emergence of blogs. On a daily basis, bloggers can log-on and update their audience with the most intimate and often boring aspects of their day-to-day life, an undeniable cheaper alternative to therapy. Although still prevalent in society and increasingly more important in providing alternative news from the main-stream media, many blogs focused on the mundane aspects of the average were replaced by the use of Facebook. Facebook, provides the opportunity to provide updates more frequently to audiences and allows followers a one-stop-shop to be updated on the lives of all of their friends instead of visiting multiple blogs daily. The need for a more frequent, fast-paced social medium was desired and that desire was met with the creation of Twitter. With the opportunity to Tweet what you’re currently doing on your smartphone, audiences are kept constantly informed with your where-abouts and interests.

Just Tweeting what you’re up to arguably left too much to the imagination as indicated by Lisan Jutras in her news article in Sunday’s Globe and Mail. To make one’s life even more transparent, the new fad of geolocation allows social media users to indicate where they are at any given point in time; some would argue this is even slightly creepy. Not to fret, if you’re itching to share your global footsteps with the world, you two will have the opportunity to use this feature on your very own Facebook and Twitter accounts very soon.

All kidding aside, geolocation does have great potential to be beneficial to PR practitioners. With knowing where people are, where they’re going and what they’re interested in, we can better determine our audiences and focus our PR efforts more directly. Similarly, the newest personal-info disclosure service to surface the wire has the same potential to help PR practitioners better define their audiences. Blippy is a service that connects one’s credit card with their Twitter account. Whenever an individual purchases something, their Twitter status is updated with the vendor and amount spent. Why would anyone care and how does this help PR practitioners, you ask? Well, Blippy will let people’s friends know what their friends are interested in, what they are purchasing and perhaps where they can score similar deals. In the bigger picture and in specific why this matters to the world of PR, as written in a Tech Crunch article, “Many of the great businesses of next decade will be about making information about of our behaviors more visible”, according to Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter, and this is precisely what Blippy will allow businesses to do. Blippy has the potential to determine customer desires, trends and perceptions; potentially we will be able to reach the right people with the right information more effectively and frequently.


For many, a service like Blippy is divulging too much personal information to too many people. Have we gone too far or is the sharing of this information a benefit to users and PR professionals alike? Will you be Blipping?

Want more information on Blippy? Check out the video below!