Yelp not only helps consumers find appropriate businesses to fit their needs, but also just introduced check-in metrics to help businesses find out more about their consumers activity via Yelp’s mobile app. With the boom of geo-location applications like Gowalla and Foursquare, it only makes sense that Yelp keeps up. Yelp’s new checkin metric system will benefit businesses by sending them a weekly newsletter containing stats collected through their mobile app­–something Foursquare and Gowalla have yet to do.

Here is the information businesses will receive in a weekly newsletter:

1. Customer checkins
2. The amount of times their particular business has been viewed through the Yelp mobile application
3. The number of calls made to them through the Yelp mobile application
4. When people request directions to their business through the Yelp mobile application

How will businesses use this mobile checkin system to their advantage? Do you think other geo-location apps will catch onto this?

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Lauren S. Leighton is an intern in the Digital Innovation Group (DIG) at Engauge. She graduated from the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication in May 2010 with bachelor’s degree in magazines. She has interned at Marie Claire magazine in New York City, StyleHop.com and Atlanta Magazine. Lauren is also an active member of the Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association (AiMA.)

Follow Lauren on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

I’ve started using Yelp more lately, but in a way that is not jiving with my natural use of the web. See, I have three kids at home, one of which is 11 weeks old, so we’re not exactly searching for new restaurants these days. We have the 3 or 4 near our house that we like to go to on the off chance we find the 3 hours it takes to get all the kids prepared and into the minivan (yes, we have a minivan, what’s your point?). So pretty much, we’re not hitting a lot of hip scenes in Atlanta these days.

Oh, if you don’t know what Yelp is, its a restaurant user review website. Fun facts about Yelp.

But I’ve found myself wanting to update my Yelp account with restaurants that I’ve eaten at. It’s incredibly simple, the app is on my iPhone, I can take a pic or write up a quick summary and post it up there for all to see. So its easy, I gotta give ‘em that.

But this isn’t like me. I typically like the fact that content is out there but I’ve never really been one to update the world with what I think about, well, anything other than digital marketing and tech startups. So why am I posting to Yelp that a recent Starbucks I had some coffee at was “just far too dirty to get better than 2 stars“? Got me.

My hypothesis is that there’s a new society that we’re slipping into where most everything is being generated by “us”. And if you’re not contributing to this, then you’re not really a part of it. And somehow I’m feeling guilty about that and its time I started getting into the game.

I have a friend (you know who you are) who does the bittorrent thing and when he gets done downloading something he always tries to seed the content back to the torrent world. When I asked him why (because for the short period I experimented with torrenting, I tried to disconnect as fast as possible because I worried that the police would show up at my door and scare my dogs), he says, “it’s the right thing to do.” Kind of ironic when the whole practice of torrents is kind of/sort of/not really legal, but I’m starting to get it.

So if a Starbucks I go to is dirty, well I need to tell people about it so they avoid it or that Starbucks decides to clean its act up. Because if I don’t, all my Yelp friends (count ‘em, 4) might end up drinking over-priced, just-kind-of-average coffee in a dirty setting, and we can’t have that.

Oh, and if you’re Yelping already, become my friend already, I’m starting to get a complex.