…it’s not merely a business mantra, it’s the latest social media trend.

In the May issue of Her Nashville magazine, you’ll find a brief tutorial on location-based social networks Gowalla and Foursquare, which utilize GPS and those fancy smartphones to allow you to “check in” to places you visit, tell folks where you are, and post your thoughts along the way. Here’s a teaser and–of course–a little “surf with caution” reminder:

Both Gowalla and Foursquare give you the option to share your check ins and travels via Facebook and Twitter. I don’t do this, but you may want to. How much info you share and who your “friends” are is all yours to control. For these location-based networks — unlike Twitter, which is designed for stranger-to-stranger info sharing — I only friend my actual friends, but I’m sort of protective like that … with who knows my whereabouts at any given time.

Like most technological wonders, what the Gowalla and Foursquare creators conceived now makes up only a fraction of what they actually do. Just think about Twitter as geeks knew it in 2007 compared to Twitter as the world knows it today. What started out as an odd text messaging service known to a few thousand people is now a global, real-time, information-sharing phenomenon. READ THE FULL COLUMN!

I usually base my Chic Geek columns on reader questions, ideas from co-workers and/or brainstorming sessions with my husband, but no one has really asked me to write about location. In fact, no one outside of my geek friends ever mentions location-based apps, which makes me think it’s time I wrote about them.

If you fancy yourself on top of your social media game, you’ll need to be familiar with the location trend–and the exposure it can give to your small business, bar or coffee shop. Ya know, so you can say you already know all about this stuff when it becomes a household name.

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