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Social media monitoring firm Sysomos is launching a free location-based monitoring service today it’s calling FourWhere. The tool mines publicly available Foursquare data (tips) and mashes them up with a Google map of the location you’ve entered. There’s no sign-up or account required. It’s just clever link-bait and enthusiasm-building from one of the emerging players in the social media monitoring market.

My first reaction to this was, “Can’t you just search for a location in Foursquare and get the same thing?” Apparently not. Foursquare seems to offer only the actual location (e.g. – “Toast, Louisville, Ky.”) not the area. (A search for “Louisville, Ky.” produced next to nothing.) If FourWhere provides that, it will be an improvement over what is available.

I got a sneak peek and logged in. You pick a location on the map, right click and choose to show venues or comments. What you get is an immediate scan of any Foursquare info in the immediate area. This is extremely useful if you’re looking for recommendations and referrals and, if FourWhere catches on, or similar services emerge, it makes a business’s use of location-based services all the more important in their social media marketing activities.

According to Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal, the service will soon add information from Yelp, Gowalla, Twitter and other social sources. Now that would be pretty compelling. Keep an eye on it to see what happens.

To their credit, Sysomos has sold itself as offering geo-targeting for quite a while when other social media monitoring services have shied away from it. Offering geo-location for blogs, Tweets, Facebook posts, etc., is not an exact science. You can’t use IP address information to do it. DirecTV satellite users in, say Iowa, still register as being from Los Angeles, for example. So there has to be some public data mining and matching to know a certain blogger hails from Louisville. If you’re using machines to do it, it’s tough. If you’re using humans, it doesn’t scale.

Now that location-based services are offering more data (until recently it was pretty much Yelp and a couple review sites) the Sysomoses of the world are jumping on offering that information up in useful and compelling ways. We’ll see how well it works. Kudos to them for jumping on the opportunity.

For more on Sysomos, check out my review of their offering from November of 2009 when they added Facebook data mining to their Heartbeat services.

And when you jump into FourWhere, come back and tell us what you think. I’m sure Nilesh and gang will be monitoring what you have to say. It’s kinda what they do.

I know that sounds arrogant. I don’t mean it that way. Whenever anyone mentioned competition at a company I worked at, I scoffed. I always have. Someone told me once that it’s impossible to look behind you and still race forward at top speed. I believe fear paralyzes companies.

I believe in co-opetition.

I’m not advocating ignoring your competition… every company should understand the advantages that they bring to the table. More important than your competitive advantages, though, is whether or not there’s a match between those advantages and the actual needs of the customer. I’m growing my business from scratch right now and in the first days I took on every job I could just to ensure I could stay afloat. In hindsight, that was not a good decision… I could have referred many of those projects and the clients would have been just as happy, maybe happier.

My focus now is creating partnerships with large agencies, public relations firms, and continuing to increase the relationships I have with very large clients. This week, I’ve referred two good prospects to my competition. It was the right thing to do. I can’t provide these relationships with the attention they deserve and I don’t have the resources to ensure their success… so why would I risk my reputation on it?

Here in Indianapolis, there are a great group of talented people that can provide similar services that I provide. Companies like ExactTarget, Right On Interactive, Compendium, and a number of web design and development agencies have products and services that I could provide… but I won’t. They have investment, infrastructure, customer support and resources that I don’t have. That’s better for the customer.

On the Social Media side, there are quite a few of us in town… all of whom I believe are my friends. As we approach some of the large corporations in town, each of us will bring our own perspective to the table. I’m not concerned about competing with them on this level. Again, I’m more concerned that the company gets the right resource. If I refer them and it’s a success, we all win. I look great for referring them, my competition gets business, and I’ll get the first call on the next opportunity, too.

Recently, a (huge) local company gave me the runaround to pressure me into providing some free services to them. I simply referred them to a colleague who first checked with me. When that back-fired, they came back to me and I let them know I wasn’t interested.

On the other side, there are a few agencies in town that now proudly wear the monikers of search engine optimization or social media expertise. Although they added no one to their staff with that expertise, nor have they had any results with clients in those arenas, they continue to prey on companies looking for those services. They’re opportunists, providing every service that anyone cares to ask about. I don’t like what they’re doing and I speak out against them as often as possible.

If you’re looking for a search engine optimization provider, do some searches and you’ll find who is winning search. It’s that easy. If you’re looking for a social media expert, attend some regional events, check out who started the successful regional networks, and observe who has the large followings. It will become very clear who has the expertise and who doesn’t. The opportunists leave a trail of tears.

I don’t believe I have competition. My job is to see if I’m a fit for the pain that the company has. If I’m not a fit, I’m moving on. That’s why my engagements are growing, I’m getting more time to work on things I enjoy, my clients are seeing the results they want, and I’m happy… and still broke .

What do you think? Do you really have any competition?

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization.

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