Team Blog

In a recent conversation with a local real estate agent about her business, I heard her utter a familiar line... "It's all about location! Location! Location!" She wasn't talking about my future housing needs.  Rather, she was commenting on all the changes within digital marketing that are affecting her business.  And, how consumers are increasingly using their mobile phones for Internet information - whether to find a new Thai restaurant, a local plumber, or, in her case, checking the listing information and mobile web pages of local real estate agents!

Location Based Services is the fancy term used to describe a host of new online services that aim to bring more information to consumers on their handheld devices and smart phones.  FourSquare, Twitter, Yelp, even Facebook Mobile, are all very popular applications that consumers (and, even your B2B customers) are increasingly turning to while on the road, to find the services and products they need.

The challenge this poses to many small business owners - and also, of course, the opportunity - is to make sure YOUR company, or product, is positioned in these new location specific marketing channels.  To make things a bit more complicated, many of these new channels do not support traditional advertising or have yet to make it easy to get your business listed.  Instead, small business owners must often earn their way in, usually by spending time communicating with their customers within each application.  This can be very time consuming -- not to mention frustrating -- accommodating all the differences within each channel: using short 140 character snippets on Twitter, posting 3 minute "How to" videos on YouTube, cultivating fans on Facebook!  While difficult and certainly not free when you think of your hourly worth, all of this social activity CAN build your business an asset for the future - a loyal, mobile-empowered audience of potential prospects and customers. But, often times, it can also lead to a confusing array of sites, applications, and services that need to be updated. 

My advice to my realtor friend was to think of her business as a hub of information - advice, tips, promotions or offers, (perhaps a little humor or personality to give it a personal touch!) - and to view the various Location Based Services as spokes with which to push this information out to her customers or prospects.  A few tools can help simplify this process (And here at WebVisible we are furiously building additional ones!) so you don't have to spend all your time updating one service after another.  One of my favorites is a company called Posterous (http://www.posterous.com), because you can use regular old email to send social updates (perhaps a coupon mention or update on your business) and it will automatically post to all of the other Location services.  This can be a first step in taking a 360° approach to your online marketing - and something I will discuss much more in upcoming postings!

- Alan Edgett, Sr. Director, Product