Tools of the Times - Part I
When I stumbled upon this site and looked at the tool for a minute or two, I thought, “hey this could be interesting”. After I entered my email and fed it my contact list of 450 people, I went from interested, to amazed, to nervous, all in about 3 minutes. I think for what the tool was designed to do, it works well, and was nice to see people I never even thought to track down in mySpace or Facebook. It also felt a bit like I was intruding, since most of these people post to site not ever thinking that a tool like this would come along.
So whats the tool, and what does it do? You feed it a list of email addresses and it goes and searches 22 sites (everything from flickr, picasa, myspace, to your wish list at amazon.com) and brings you a list of your “friends” (or anyone you have an email address for) and their pictures, blog posts, twitter thoughts, and products they hope to soon buy.
The first thing I thought, is oh boy, I hope that at some point I didn’t add anything embarrassing to my wish-list on amazon. It was a brutal reminder that everything you post on-line sticks around for a very long time and can and will be found, even if you don’t intend it to. Don’t get me wrong, this is a amazing little tool they have going one here. It will consolidate my social networking for my business in ways I couldn’t have imagined just yesterday. You can enter yourself and track all of the places you network in one central hub.
I guess this is the way we are trending with the web. Web 1.0 connected information, web 2.0 connects people. Give it a shot and let me know your feeling on this tool and implication on privacy and your social networking plan.
Local Portals, Targeted Marketing, Amazing Results
Why you should use them to get local info, list your business with, and even own your own…
It started out as the World Wide Web. It was amazing the reach one could have, chatting to someone in Ireland, buying something from South Africa, emailing someone in New Zealand, all from your living room. Everything was about big, wide, and breaking down the invisible boarders of distance that have so long separated neighbors of the world.
Now, we are starting to see a trending back toward local and the community. Google, Yahoo, and AOL all have local portals and searches. Also, independent local portals are becoming big business in the web world. Why, because everyone wins. The people or companies that develop the site do so for branding, marketing, advertising, etc and the users get information on their local community quickly and easily, a service that even the biggest companies have a hard time providing. Why, because it is users of the local community portal that drive the content, and not even Google can keep up with real time information on every local community. It can be expensive to list with nationally based portals, so local small businesses can advertise for much less on a local, community based portal, sometime even for free.
At sites like UrbanaMD.info, a local Urbana Maryland community portal, all businesses can obtain their own webpage for free. This seem counterintuitive if the owner of the site hopes to make some cash, right?, Well, if you look at it, once again everyone wins. The more information listed on the site, the more end users, and the more revenue from advertising. Most of the time the owner of a site is a development company hoping to gain market share through branding - or a local real estate agent or mortgage broker hoping to gain community trust, appreciation, and recognition through providing a community service based application.
If it isn’t obvious by now, my company runs several of these sites, just recently releasing UrbanaMD.info. AT UrbanaMD Joining is FREE, Classified Ads are FREE and UNLIMITED, and basic Business Listings are FREE. Once you join, you will be able to post to the forums, add your business, check out our recipe Xchange, and even create your own “My Urbana Space” page much like MySpace.com. These are only a few of the things going on around here, and new things are being added daily. There are now over 160 local businesses and restaurants now listed under the “Our Urbana” Section
A site like this provides a public service and in using open source software such as Joomla, can be sold as a reasonable priced, pre-packaged application to anyone that is interested (contact us if you are). But this isn’t just a pitch; you should list your business with every local portal possible, getting your name out there as much as possible. But owning and operating a local portal can take your business to the next level.
Some more articles to mull over:
Promote Your Business through Local Web Portals
Local Portals Mean Big Business
Geolocal - Local Internet Marketing for Small Business
