Creative writing can be an incredibly challenging mental activity (and physically, depending on how much coffee you’ve had). This doesn’t just apply to novelists or marketing copywriters either, it can affect anyone who is actively required to generate content. And yes… this includes blogs. TRUST me.

Coming up with a new idea for a blog post each week is not as easy as it may seem, which is something we have admittedly been slacking with here at Glacier Digital HQ. The last few months we have experienced some growth and have only squeezed out an average of 1 blog post per MONTH. This is one of the reasons this exact blog post has been written. If your business already has a blog or is planning on proceeding with one, updating it once a week on average is industry-wide best practice.

Why post once a week?

Unless your business is completely dependent on online ad-driven traffic generated by frequently updated content, posting an article on your blog once a week should suffice. It will compliment your business’ activities and will provide your customers with something to look forward to on a Friday afternoon (which, is the optimal time to post).

What do I talk about?

You would be surprised at how much your customers DON’T know about your business and your ongoing activities, in and out of the office. This includes industry news, tips, opinions and just about any relevant events or information available online. A great technique which can help generate ideas and catalogue them more effectively, is to create a list of topics, whether as draft posts in WordPress or Blogger (or whatever blogging platform you use), or even good old paper and pen *gasp*!

More often than not, I will revisit an old topic that I jotted down during a brainstorming session and see if any ideas stick. Sure, there are times that I find myself starting at the keyboard, sometimes with my head in my hands, frustrated that I can’t get a specific sentence to sound…. just right. That’s when you look at it from a different angle, work on a different paragraph, or work on a different post entirely.

PLEASE… let your customers talk!

Taking the leap into social media is a big deal for many businesses, there is no doubt.  However, one of the worst decisions a business can make is shutting out the ability for users to provide feedback, whether it’s good or bad. This goes for not just Blog comments, but Facebook and other tools that have discussion or commenting systems built in. Worried that you will get a LOT of bad feedback? Well, instead of denying customers the right to ask questions and vent their disapproval, perhaps you should ask yourself why they have these concerns (or better yet, ask the customers!!). One of the many benefits of social media in general is the ability to bring the conversation down to a more personal level. Don’t give customers the “corporate cold shoulder”, let them feel as if you are attending to their issues in a way that makes them feel like a priority.

Blog writing is still writing, regardless of your opinion. Sure, sometimes facts and data are provided to fuel the content, but it is still written… by hand… by a human. As long as that’s the case, there will always be the possibility of “Blogger’s Block”.

So, unless you’ve been completely disconnected for the last few weeks, you will have likely heard about Google+. This is Google’s latest attempt at breaking through in the very competitive and rapidly expanding social media realm. It’s not their first attempt mind you, but we won’t go into too much detail about Wave, Buzz and their other… let’s call them.. experiments.

They have quite a lot more invested in this project though, and have gone as far as planning to rename the incredibly popular Picasa and Blogger websites to Google Photos and Google Blogs, respectively. Last time we looked this change hadn’t gone through, but it’s planned to happen during the public launch of Google+, since it is still in invite-only beta stage.

Getting an invite however, is as easy as asking one of the over 20 million current users (as of July 19th, 2011)  for one of their unlimited invites. I had approximately 50 coworkers, family members and friends up and running within a few days. NOTE : In fact, leave a comment on this blog post and I would be happy to extend an invite.

After 10 days of frequent use, I have had a great deal of fun using Google+ but it’s not perfect. Here are some of my Pros/Cons.

Great features of Google+ 

• Integration With Other Google Tools.
  When you  want to share a video on Facebook, you need to either have the link ready, or upload the actual video to Facebook. With Google+ it not only features the option to add a video link, but you can also search and post directly from Youtube, or add videos from your cellphone (provided you are using the Instant Upload feature).
  
• That Amazing Notifications Bar.
  The updated toolbar that is present in nearly every Google tool has deep integration of Google+ Notifications. Not only can you check your Google+ notifications while reading your Gmail, but you can comment or +1 the comments without having to visit the Google+ site itself.

  

• Already A Google user? You’re Ready To Go.
  I have been a Google user (or… Google super nerd, Google Poster Boy, etc., depending on who you ask) for as long as I can remember. My phone is running Android, I have been using Gmail forever, my Contacts have been stored on Google’s servers since I got my phone, my Calendars, both personal and professional are, well…. you get the picture. Anyways, upon setting up my Google+ account, I was greeted with a list of contacts taken from my Google Contacts, making it very easy to invite everyone. My Picasa photos were automatically linked up to share, and I can only imagine what else will be enabled in the coming months.
• The Mobile App Might Be Basic, But It’s Already Great
  Last time I checked, mobile usage is growing. Having an app to compliment the great online service seemed obvious and Google doesn’t disappoint. Nearly everything you can do on the browser version can be done on the Google+ mobile app. In fact, the ability to have photos, videos and chats are makes even more sense on a mobile device, while you’re out and about.

Room For Improvement 

While not so much technical aspects of the service itself, there are potential roadblocks that could severely hinder any possibility for future success of Google+.

• Where is everyone?
  At last count, I had 75 people in my circles, however it seems as if only 3 people are actually using it. Don’t get me wrong, I am completely thrilled with every word they type (Hopefully they are reading this), but it would be nice to see a more engaged group. I’m sure this is something that will happen over time but it puts a damper on an otherwise very solid platform.
• The big blue elephant in the room.
  With Facebook amazingly continuing to increase its userbase to now over 700 million, it seems that nothing can possibly get in its way. Google doesn’t just have a hill to climb, it has to find a way to catch up with a speeding train with no signs of slowing down.
• No Business Support (Yet.)
  There is an ‘entity’ request form available for businesses, but until then there is no sign of how the business accounts will appear to the public. One of the issues I’ve found with Facebook is the occasional business account that posts dozens of times a day, cluttering the news feed (my apologies if you feel that way about us!). Keeping business accounts separate is a great idea.

If you’ve read online offers peddling any number of ‘enhancing’ pills, NBA swag or opportunities to purchase only the most affordable iPads online whilst perusing a forum or the comments section of a blog, then the purveyor of said website is probably in need of some measure of controling spam. The common go-to controls for such precautionary measures are called CAPTCHA, or their adorable little brother SAPTCHA.

CAPTCHA is an absurd acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart” and in its essence is a humanity test; kind of like the one administered in the 1982 movie Blade Runner, but with considerably less suspense. The hope behind CAPTCHA is to stymie a spambot by confounding it with a question or task that rudimentary bot software can’t figure out, but is still something a human with fully-functional fuzzy logic can solve easily.

The most typical implementation of CAPTCHA is through a slightly obfuscated pictorial rendering of a word, such as this disfigurement of my native language below:

I have a few issues with CAPTCHA controls and I suspect most people do as well, upon reflection. On more than one level, they’re kind of offensive. Visually, they’re ugly, and they confuse many users new to the Internet (such as my wizened parents). They rely primarily on visual perception, so people with disabilities are dependent upon developers implementing the responsible version of the CAPTCHA control (such as the Internet’s most popular CAPTCHA tool: reCAPTCHA).

So. Is there a requirement for CAPTCHA or CAPTCHA-like controls on a website at all? Think about this for a moment.

• People hate CAPTCHAs
• Bots hate CAPTCHAs (they’re irrefutably effective…for a while)
• They add another layer of frustration between “spam intention” and the successful “delivery of spam”
• They ruin the design of a page and are a general annoyance for all involved

So when, if ever, does one actually use a CAPTCHA control?

Here’s my best answer:

You use them in a “lesser of two evils” kind of way…and every conditional point here is a potential deal breaker, if it doesn’t check out:

Implement CAPTCHA in any instance where: the number of users on your site, who you may potentially lose because they are offended by spam, is greater than the number of conversions (where conversion is measured as the accepting of user-based website content contribution(value)) your site stands to lose due to CAPTCHAs road-blocking said ease of content contribution delivery.

Or in a less wordy way: use CAPTCHAs on user creation forms or in public forums and then ONLY when that forum allows anonymous posting. Otherwise don’t. You are not a focused target for spammers.

If you roll a CAPTCHA onto a site for any other reason you are potentially limiting conversions and weakening your ROI. Period.

Do not use CAPTCHA on:

• Login forms
• Email forms, where the email is delivered to a single business representative (i.e. NOT a mailing list)
• Authenticated user accounts
• When you have a moderator vetting value from trash before content is published to a user base.

My main point here is that CAPTCHAs have very limited applications to begin with.

But it gets worse.

Despite their limited practical application, CAPTCHAs are less and less viable with each passing day. Since, theoretically, CAPTCHAs are only routinely beaten by a human, all spammers need do to subvert the system is apply an abundance of (presumably affordable) human brainpower. Enter India.

A 10-second Google search will reveal “DeCaptcher” and “Death by Captcha”, which offers an army of human CAPTCHA solvers to you for as little as $1.39-$2.00 USD per 1000 CAPTCHAs, with typical response times in fewer than 30 seconds. For “numbers people” these services also offer reporting on failures, redeemable for credit; however, success rates are typically so high that most do not bother with this, erm…courtesies.

These services work really well with the most common types of CAPTCHA on the Internet, namely reCAPTCHA (remember them?), with slightly lower success rates on some more difficult CAPTCHA styles such as the kind used on the Wikimedia sites.

See where this is going?

I look at the rise and fall of CAPTCHAs as akin to Steve Jobs’ recent denunciation of MobileMe (to be superseded by iCloud). It’s an inevitable replacement to a languishing predecessor. CAPTCHAs had their time when most spam was being blocked successfully; there was a short period where we tolerated the inconvenience and CAPTCHAs enjoyed a bloom of adoption. Then the global economy kicked in and it became affordable for humans and bots to work together in relative harmony whilst spamming the planet: a marriage, of sorts, between the application of human intellect and the toilings of a looping subroutine…each fulfilling their collaborative role to annoy the world.

If you’ve already taken the leap of faith into the daunting, scary world of social media, then you will know that not only is it a very busy environment, but that it can suck a LOT of time out of your busy day. Not only do you need to think of something engaging to say, but you need to figure out the best way to get your message out to as many people as possible. All the while, making sure you don’t bombard your audience with 50+ updates a day.

Whether it’s to discuss industry news, some great new tool or technique you’ve discovered, or even to liveblog at a press conference or tradeshow you’re attending, the world of social media continues to offer a fantastic way to connect with your audience. That audience can consist of existing customers or subscribers who are eager to hear what you have to say, but it can also be those sitting on the fence wondering if they should take that incredibly important ‘next step’.

When I say next step, I am talking the conversion of interest to engagement. That could mean your Facebook page receiving a new fan, your Twitter account receiving a new follower or a retweet, but at the end of the day, your ultimate goal is a sales lead. This is what everyone hopes to achieve from social media, but it’s how they manage, interact and engage with their audience that determines if it will pay off in the end.

With so many avenues with which to reach out to customers, it can be difficult to choose which to use. There are the staples: Facebook, Twitter and to a lesser extent LinkedIn and Foursquare. But there are others that may appeal to your demographic. For instance, if you are in the entertainment industry, Myspace or Stumbleupon might be worth looking at. If you are in the news or media industries, aggregation sites such as Reddit or Digg would be highly beneficial. The point is, there is something for everyone, but not everything will work. Stick with the basics first and branch out as you see fit.

Management

So… you’re social media campaign is now underway. You’ve got a few blog ideas ready to go and have a handful of Facebook fans and Twitter followers (so what if most of them are colleagues and friends at this point). Now what? Litter their walls with non-stop information? Sure, unless you want them to actually read and share your posts.

Scheduling, or at least timing your posts strategically will help ensure you get the most eyeballs for the buck. Late Friday afternoon is statistically the busiest period of the week, but you can’t always hold your breath until then. To start, sticking to 2 or 3 Facebook updates per day will suffice, and the same goes for Twitter updates. You want to display to your audience that your identity has a heartbeat, but isn’t going into shock.

Once you get into a rhythm, you might become overwhelmed with the number of screens open, and go cross eyed looking at statistics from a handful of different sources. This is where social media management tools come in handy. There are a handful of them available, and range from free, to ad supported, to freemium, to enterprise level.

• Tweetdeck.
  A fantastic desktop application tool (and Google Chrome App) that allows for the posting of Facebook (Profile and Page), Twitter (multiple accounts),  LinkedIn and Myspace status updates, and even Foursquare geo-location updates. The ability to integrate with Bit.ly (for shortening URLs and tracking interactions) and to schedule updates for future, timed posts is also available and is very easy to implement. It is also available for nearly every mobile device.
• Hootsuite A very robust web-based management tool, mainly web based (with a mobile app). Highly customizable stream views, and built in monitoring/tracking with custom reports.
• Seesmic
  Very similar to Tweetdeck, featuring web, desktop and mobile based management, it streamlines the social media implementation process. Depending on your UI preference, you may prefer this over Tweetdeck.

Tracking and ROI

After all of that hard work, it would be great to see how effective it’s been. Tracking, analytics and ROI measurement will be able to provide this. Making sure the tools necessary have been installed and are correctly tracking all available data is the first and most important step.

• Facebook Insights
  Enabled by default, Facebook’s Insights provide analytics and the data necessary to display the interactions between you and your Facebook page audience. Accounts are FREE (obviously).
• Tweetmeme
  Allowing users to quickly retweet your articles, blog posts or site content is possible by integrating the Tweetmeme button into your site. Most popular CMS systems have a Tweetmeme plugin available.
• Bit.ly
  The ability to track how many times a link you’ve shared is valuable, especially to gauge the clickthrough rate and effectiveness. Services such as Bit.ly also shorten a link, to make it easy to share and so it won’t take up as much real estate in the notoriously small Twitter update window. Example : http://bit.ly/iAYUzM links directly to this article. *ahem* Feel free to share! Also, bit.ly accounts are FREE.
• Sproutsocial
  A feature rich web based tracking tool. Integrate your Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and Foursquare account into one centralized system for very easy to view reports and statistics. The ability to manage multiple accounts is very handy as well. Accounts start at $9/month with a 30 day free trial.

Check out our other related articles :

• How to run a social media campaign in 4 hours a week
• No time for social media? Think again.
• How to build your social network.

It seems that whenever we are talking with new clients about the many, many benefits of social media, the biggest complaint we receive from EVERY one of them is “When am I supposed to find the time to update all that stuff?”

It’s as if we’re telling them they have to change professions and become writers!

Writing is definitely an essential aspect of social media (think about it : Blog posts, Facebook updates, Twitter… tweets, etc.) but it doesn’t have to be time consuming, or difficult. Here are a few tips to help you maintain a regular schedule :

1. Write A Blog Post once a week.
   Keep things casual. Don’t talk about yourself, instead, talk about the industry or recent relevant news and events. Also, if you already have a weekly or monthly newsletter, convert it into HTML, and boom…. you have a blog post.
   (Average time : 1.5-2.5 hours)

2. Promote Blog Post with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
   Using a service such as Bit.Ly, you can track viewer engagement with a link to your blog post, or virtually any other link you include in your Twitter post or Facebook post. Include a brief message describing what people should expect to see, and you’re off!
   (Average time : 0.5 hours)

3. Engage with community in any way you find relevant to your business.
   • Are you a retailer? Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla, Wagjag, or Groupon would be very beneficial.
   • Are you B2B?  Connect with potential customers through LinkedIn or Meetup.
   • Are you a service provider? Answer some questions over at Quora, Getsatisfaction, or the hundreds of other support blogs & forums.

   (Average time : 1 hour or… as much time as you can spare)

4. Are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare too difficult to manage?
   Use an application like Tweetdeck. Bam… Problem solved.
   (Setup time : 5 minutes!)

Now, not just anyone can write social media content, as the writing process is much more effective when it acts as an extension of the client themselves. Who better to discuss their product or service, than the very individual who live and breathes the company message and objectives. Your SEO provider is there every step of the way to guide you through the process and make it as streamlined as possible.

Is no one reading your blog? No one following your Twitter account or Facebook page? You can’t wait for them to come to you. Go after your audience, and prove to them that you have something they want, or better yet, need.

Please view our other related posts :

• Get Your Social Media Under Control!
• No Time For Social Media? Think Again.

One of the most common complaint from our clients is that they simply don’t have the time to maintain their corporate blog, Facebook page, Twitter account, moderate comments, search for new followers/fans and many of the other tasks associated with social media.

Who can blame them!?  It’s a lot of work.

My advice to them is generally of the kind, yet constructive variety. Something like this : “You need to try to put aside 2 hours a week, or 20 minutes a day to spend exclusively on your social media efforts. Put away your blackberry, turn off the radio/tv, and concentrate.”

What I would like to say, in a much more blunt manner, is along the lines of : “Suck it up! Do it, or you might as well hand your competitors the business because you obviously don’t want it.” Of course, it hasn’t come to that, and I hope it never will.

This diligent work, regardless of how many other tasks might be on the go, is what it takes to penetrate the market and capture the attention of potential customers. Frequency, relevance, and most importantly, captivation are what it takes to engage viewers and keep them coming back for more.

If a company cannot dedicate an individual to managing and maintaining their social media efforts (preferably in marketing or sales), then outsourcing the efforts is the only option. This option still doesn’t get them off the hook entirely though. Who is going to write the blog posts, or reply to a potentially angry commenter?

Only YOU know your business, and it’s up to you to back up your claims and your product.

Social Media is a highly interactive method of marketing, and unless you are on top of it at all times, you will find yourself left far behind with a mountain to climb instead of a mole hill.

Social Media is really nothing new. It’s been around as long as there has been something to sell, that’s needed someone to sell it.

Engaging with potential customers and giving them what they want, is much better than simply standing on a cliff yelling down at them, “Buy This! Buy This!”.

So where does television come in? Well, you may not have noticed, but for the many years that you were glued to your tv set watching The Cosby Show or Seinfeld re-runs, you were in fact watching hours upon hours of advertisements. These advertisements were not just thrown into the commercial breaks willy nilly. Market research was conducted, and in a way, aspects of social media were implemented to decide which ads would be shown during which shows, and at what times.

However, over the past few months, many people have slowly started to focus more on alternate means of receiving entertainment, which could mean big problems for television advertisers. This does however, offer huge potential for online, connected social media campaigns. The ability to tell friends what you are watching on your new device, or what you thought of last night’s episode of The Office while sitting on your couch, could give advertisers an incredible amount of data to use in order to deliver relevant, quality ads to viewers.

The alternatives I’m talking about are mainly comprised of what have been dubbed ‘set top boxes’, ‘video boxes’, ‘home media players’, etc. Everyone has no doubt heard of one or more of the devices, some of which are available, some have been announced and are releasing this year. They include, but are not limited to :

Apple TV

This is Apple’s take on online rentals, for your TV. Linking up to Netflix and iTunes is certainly a major plus for many, but with no internal storage, you are limited to renting or streaming. Also, Apple has a tendency for limiting what you are allowed to do with their devices, so unless you are willing to modify the box to accommodate your needs, you might want to look elsewhere. You can however, expect quality hardware and a user-friendly interface.

Boxee Box

The Boxee Box is a physical implentation of their long running media playback software, Boxee. Heavily integrated with the internet, it pulls information down for your media, and links up with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other social networking accounts. Its interface has proven to be a hit, as well as its compatibility with a range of video/audio formats.

Google TV

Not too much is known about Google TV yet, however the platform has an incredible amount of potential. In a similar fashion to their mobile OS – Android, Google is opting to integrate their software into hardware developed by other companies. The Logitech Revue will debut later this year, which will be powered by Google TV. Google has become a household name now, so it may ride that momentum into a lot of living rooms.

Believe it or not, the XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3

It’s been a long time since gaming machines were used purely for video games. Internet connectivity, media playback, social network integration, and even web browsing (on the PS3) allow users to gulp up as much entertainment as they can on just one device, and allow social media campaigns to engage an entirely new, specific type of audience.

Others include : TiVO Premiere, Roku, WD Live Plus, etc.

Search engines and SEO in general are changing on what seems like a daily basis. Algorithms are constantly being tweaked, and what worked like a charm 2 months ago, may be falling flat today. This presents an interesting mix of excitement and stress for most marketing companies, and I won’t lie… we are not exempt.

While I could talk all day long about what could help in the short or long term for a website’s online performance, it might be easier to list what NOT to do. We spend a lot of time researching, analyzing and scouring the web, and we’ve seen some questionable things, so here it goes…

What NOT to do with your website

• Make a site entirely comprised of Flash. Search engines don’t need to find your website.
• Rely on Javascript for all links. You should make it as hard as possible for a search engine to crawl your website.
• Ignore social media completely.  Facebook? LinkedIn? Pfft, they’re just fads.
• Stick with newspaper ads instead of a highly targeted PPC campaign. Proven results don’t mean anything.
• Keep content the same…… forever. Why do other companies waste time writing fresh content all the time?  So what if they are constantly ranking higher?
• Ignore analytics. You don’t need to know where visitors come from, or who is converting to a sales lead. That’s where those expensive newspaper ads come in handy…. right?
• If you DO end up optimizing your website, just do it once. 6 months later everything should hopefully be the same anyways.

Once the <sarcasm> HTML tag has been created, this entire list would surely be contained in it, so my apologies.  Also, sorry about the <sarcasm> joke.

Anyways, this is just scratching the service of BAD choices. It was a lot of fun to write surprisingly, so I will definitely be doing it again. In the meantime, have a look at some of our other related articles :

- SEO Rule #3 – It’s Never Too Late To Promote
- SEO Rule #2 – Focus On Website Goals
- SEO Rule #1 – Content Is King

It seems that nearly everyone has a mobile device of some kind, especially ones that have online access able to view content and advertisements.

Why then, do so few people discuss mobile as a viable advertising vehicle? Could it be because of the much smaller viewable area on the device’s screen? Could it be because people are scared of using data on their mobile device, due to the potentially sky-high fees incurred by their mobile carrier? Or could it be that they simply don’t use their mobile devices for viewing media, content or other ad-supported material?

Whatever the case, mobile advertising is growing and is a very large part of the future of companies such as Google and Apple. Approximately $3.8 billion will be spent on mobile ads in one form or another this year, which provides a lot of opportunity for businesses.

This does not include social efforts, such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Local Mobile (organic) searches, Yelp, among other available mobile based services. As these services become more refined and widely used, additional marketing efforts and budgets will need to be allocated in order to capture the growing audience.

Solution : Start small. Make sure your Google Places account is setup.  Make sure you are on Foursquare and Gowalla. Then… setup a Google AdWords – Mobile campaign. Allocate a portion of your existing AdWords budget (you DO have an AdWords account, right??) towards the mobile campaign, and keep a close eye on it.  This shouldn’t be scary, it’s an exciting new way to connect with potential customers!

Here are some other related posts :

- Location Based Advertising, How Could It Go Wrong?
- Twitter Announces Promoted Tweets
- Online Advertising Vs. Print

One of the latest trends in online social activity has been the explosion of location-based search.  Whether it’s through Google search, Foursquare, Yelp, or the myriad other services available through a quick query to your mobile phone’s built-in GPS, tracking a user’s location is proving to be beneficial for both users and businesses.

Security and Privacy

The biggest fear of location based marketing is not a big surprise. Personal data, including the chance of an individual’s location being publicly spread, is highly sensitive and is still a very difficult roadblock for many online businesses to overcome.

A level of paranoia still exists for many people who still believe that “Big Brother” is watching them, and it’s sometimes difficult to prove them otherwise. (See the very highly publicized PleaseRobMe.com) What I try to suggest to these naysayers, is that companies want to know as much about their customers as they can, but they do not necessarily concern themselves with each individual’s activities.

In fact, the largest of all social networking websites, Facebook, is in the process of implementing a service which allows its users to enter their location into their status updates. This could be a boon for businesses as their locations may show up in searches and other friend feeds. Facebook has seen its share of bad press lately though, with a variety of privacy related issues, so this is an update that must be handled carefully.

Imagine searching for ‘Running Shoes’ in your mobile browser, only to be directed to the 5 nearest running shoe stores?

There are other websites, with questionable business models, such as Blippy, who have had some very unfortunate experiences. It’s a service where users can log their credit card purchases and share them with the world.  Why anyone would want to this is beyond me, but… to each his own. User’s credit card numbers were showing up in search results, with obviously detrimental results.

The Benefits

The biggest benefit of location features for users, at least for the near future, is mobile search. Imagine searching for ‘Running Shoes’ in your mobile browser, only to be directed to the 5 nearest running shoe stores? This effect can even be seen on your desktop or laptop browser, with your location being pulled through your IP address.

If carefully executed, location focused activities could create a substantial increase for local businesses. A fantastic example of this, taken from Report On Business magazine, involved an individual searching for a Christmas tree, using the search term ‘Christmas tree, palo alto”.  He was immediately instructed to go to the local Boy Scouts office, who were selling Christmas trees, showing up as  the #1 website in Google’s search results. The Boy Scouts hadn’t spent a penny on billboards or advertising, but due to a mobile location-based search, they were able to reach a customer who was looking for a specific product.

This is one of the millions of stories that have, and will be told in the months and years to come, as the possibilities for retailers and geographically targeted businesses are endless.

Some location based tools include :

• Foursquare
• Gowalla
• Blippy
• Facebook, Twitter and Google have some form of location based marketing either in the works, or in practice, with MANY more to come.