Gowalla and Foursquare have become popular geolocation “games” that basically make it fun for users to willfully share their GPS location with others using their cell phone. The sites leave a kind of recorded footprint that gives either the user or location more status on the respective sites, encouraging users to share their location more and more.

The problem with these sites comes when they automatically blast your location to folks on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms.

Problem: Anytime anyone shares their location without any other information that information is useless to your friends and followers. Regularly sharing useless information on social media channels can harm the level of trust and authority you build with your online social connections.

Solution: When you share your location in social media, add something meaningful like what’s happening at the location or how what’s happening impacts you or others in a meaningful way. Even mundane information can be meaningful to friends, but no one really cares you are at Starbucks. People do care if you got service with a smile or were cut off in traffic. Likewise, no one cares that you’ve become the mayor of the local library (Foursquare) or that you dropped a virtual box of cigars at a specific GPS location (Gowalla).

In fact, the more useless information that you allow to flood your social media channels, the more likely your friends and followers will ignore your updates. How often do you want to be ignored by your friends and followers?