Location, location, location

Many people associate this phrase with how important location is to a piece of real estate. But this also could describe the next big trend in social media.

Combine the social sharing features of Facebook and Twitter with GPS enabled smartphones, witness the rapid growth of services like Foursquare and Gowalla, and it's easy to see how this trend is going to force brick and mortar establishments to pay attention to location based social services. More recently Yelp has jumped into the action announcing their own form of location based social activity.

The common function that all of these services share is the ability for a user to "check in" when they are at a particular location. Foursquare and Gowalla are using game style features. For example, each service awards badges for various achievements such as "checking in" to a location more than anyone else, or stopping in multiple locations in a short period of time.

Why should destination businesses pay attention? If one of your core business beliefs is that your customer is central to everything you do, AND you want to create engaging meaningful relationships with your best customers, then these location based services have the potential to now give you complete insight into who those customers are and what they think of your business.

I've only used Foursquare so far but in my experience the potential for businesses to leverage these tools is big, particularly for early adopters who can build influence before their competitors.

Obama's State of the Union on Wordle.net

I was introduced to Wordle.net from a school project my son was working on. Below is the top 100 words from President Obama's State of the Union speech on January 28, 2010.

President Obama's State of the Union top 100 words from Wordle.net

Inbound Marketing Book Review

I finally finished Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, though the length of time it took me to finish doesn't reflect at all on the quality of the book. Rather, my tendency to have 3 or 4 books going at any given time and my growing obsession with ultrarunning.

I've been following Hubspot as a company for a little over a year.  I'm a fan of the work they are doing,  the concepts they are teaching to small business owners and was privileged to do a guest post on their blog with Pete Caputa. Maybe more than any other company I know of, they eat their own dog food and as a result put out an incredible amount of content. Being a marketer myself who is 100% onboard with their philosophy (I've been called a DARC by my co-workers) and their willingness to share their content, I'm pretty sure I've consumed just about all of it (some of it multiple times).

This could be the reason that I was originally not that impressed as I read the first few chapters. I think I had set my own expectations that I'd learn something new and different from Inbound Marketing. This wasn't the case as I started the book.

However, as I absorbed the content of Halligan and Shah I started to gain a deeper understanding of the concepts and processes they profess. In the end, my opinion of the book was that if you are a DARC and familiar with the concepts of inbound marketing, the repitition of the material is helpful to sharpen your marketing sword.

Where is the big value? Their target audience - the business owner who has focused their efforts on outbound marketing efforts but now realize that their customer and the marketplace demands they must change. To this person, Inbound Marketing is a great resource to get not only the necessary foundation required to know the directional change that must happen in their business, but also the nitty gritty details that will set a business owner and their marketing team well on their way to, as the front cover of Inbound Marketing says: "get found using Google, Social Media and Blogs".

How my Sunday mornings have changed

Some of Google Reader FoldersToday was a pretty typical Sunday morning.  I got up early, went for a long trail run, had a nice breakfast (Superfood by Naked Juice, a scoop of Hammer Whey protien powder followed by a hot mug of green tea) then settled into do some reading.

Fifteen years ago my routine was different in so many ways. First, the idea of running 10 miles was completely foreign. Second, breakfast was lots of sugar, fat and caffiene. Third, the reading I did was to open up the Sunday paper. I read maybe one or two articles that kind of interested me but for the most part I just flipped the pages as long as possible so I could keep having more sugar, fat and caffiene while I skimmed.

When I went to read today I fired up the MacBook, logged into Google Reader and read about 25 news articles and blog posts from the 144 subscriptions I use to bring me the information that I find valuable and worthwhile.  The RSS feed from the regional paper is only for the towns I have an interest, the blog posts come from my favorite topics (triathlon, endurnace sports, social media and technology) and sources (Slowtwitch, Endurance Planet, Mashable, Seth Godin and Steve Rubel).

Needless to say, Sunday mornings are a whole lot more enjoyable!

Today's credit landscape, what's a small business to do?

I was fortunate to be asked by Joel Libava, the Franchise King, to do a guest post on his blog about the state of credit availability for small businesses today.

To read the full post, vist Joel's blog. He's got a great perspective on small business with a keen focus on the franchise space.