It seems every major corporation and conglomerate has grokked on to social media as a broadcasting tool.  As a result, there’s a drive for businesses of all types and sizes to make the leap from ‘broadcasting at’ to ‘communicating with’.

It’s a great idea for businesses and entrepreneurs to get inside the minds of their followers and fans.  You have access to a wealth of feedback and inside information about your services through the eyes of your actual clients.

Having said that, if you operate in a town like Nanaimo with only 80,000 people you’ll be facing some challenges before a social media campaign starts working for you.  Here are my ten tips for making social media work in a smaller market.

1) Tweeting is a luxury that you probably can’t afford.

Twitter is cool, but there isn’t much to be gained beyond the glory of tweeting.  Realistically, you just won’t get a huge amount of followers, those followers won’t convert to business and unless you’re really active, most of what you say will get lost in the crowd.  If you have a small hotel or restaurant you may see some success by posting ‘web only’ specials.  I really only recommend it for businesses with 50 employees or more, or those who are already spending a lot of time marketing their business online.

2) Blogging is still awesome.

Blogging is still a great way to generate content, build links and boost your search rankings.  Most hosting accounts come free with WordPress or some other blogging CMS and support text, images and videos.

3) Lifestreaming is the new blogging.

I could dedicate a whole post to this.  Lifestreaming is a new way of documenting the activities surrounding your life using a chronologically-ordered collection of information.  For instance, I have everything connected to my WordPress Blog including my twitter feed, my deviantART account, my Facebook fan page and my LinkedIn profile.  I get good, link rich content and a free post every week with links to my activity around the web.  Watch out for more like this in 2010, as the trend will be to invent new ways to aggregate everything for me in one place. It takes a bit to wrap your mind around it, but a good place to start is here.

4) Facebook fan pages.

Don’t link to your personal Facebook profile for business use unless they’re inseparable.  Creating a fan page allows you to have the same posting and communicating ability, but limits customers to only seeing business related content, not your cousin Judd’s halava recipe.

5) Social media is the tortoise, not the hare.

Slow and steady wins the race.  A new friend here, a new connection there.  Unless you’re Gary Vaynerchuk, you should just be content to spend no more than an hour a day on social media marketing campaigns.

6) Examine your goals before diving in.

Different social media campaigns can get different results.  Blogging will increase rankings and SEO, but isn’t always a great sales tool.  Twitter may give a temporary boost of traffic, but the effects aren’t long lasting.  Flickr is a great way to share photos, but won’t generate much for new business.  You can increase chances of conversion with custom landing pages and links, but these strategies are usually beyond the purveyance (and budget) of most small business entrepreneurs.

7) Maybe you don’t need it at all.

Ignore all of the networks, TV shows, superstars, pundits and adverts and examine what your actual market is.  Are there any other general contractors on Twitter?  Are there any CGAs with Facebook pages?  What % of people in Nanaimo do you think are on Twitter?  What’s the dialogue like for the average entrepreneur?  If you don’t see anyone doing it in your industry, don’t look at it as an opportunity to reach an untapped market, because it probably isn’t.

8) Try before you buy.

Organization and timing are very important and it will take you several hours to set up the social channels so before you commit to branded social media pages, launch a test campaign and see how you feel about the results.  A simple one or two week campaign in the beginning is a great way to gauge the response of your customers to this type of marketing

9) How will you inform people?

If you build it, it will sit there.  That’s my new motto for 2010, because it’s not enough anymore to just build a site and profile.  Conventional SEO (page titles and content) are just a foundation these days and unless you are alone in the market, are probably not sufficient to build up decent rankings.  Having a twitter page and a Facebook page will not entice people to communicate with you, you have to work it and continually provide value.  Asking people to join is a great way, if you have a newsletter list.  Advertise on your web site, and incentivize people who join and follow you with exclusive promotions.

10) Who dares, wins.

It’s not that the internet is dominated by 17 year old’s with a penchant for lolcats, it’s that the internet is dominated by 17 year old’s with a penchant for lolcats.  Edgy content wins every time, so you’re better off having a video of a car driving through your front widow or a faux haunting than you are having walkthrough tours of your custom built character home.  I’ve often said that a great social media campaign is one that gets people who would never use your product or service to talk about it.

That about sums it up, of course it’s up to you to decide if social media marketing is right for your clients.  Be organized, be daring and you could be the next willitblend.  You never know!

Matt Cutts is the head of the Google Webspam Team, and for a long time has been the lead evangelist/spokesperson for Google and their products via his blog.   I tuned in today to see if I could glean anything new and stumbled on a recent repost of the state of the index speech from Pubcon 2009.

Some great tips about using the Google Wonder Wheel for keyword research, cool developer tools and  (most importantly in my mind) verbal confirmation that Meta Keywords aren’t used by Google for anything (yay!).  I admit that it’s been so long since I’ve seen a picture of Matt I didn’t know he shaved his head. I’m thinking that he’s starting to look like Jeremy Schoemaker.  Check out the computer generated rendering above.

I won’t rehash the whole thing as Matt has done a great job of articulating the finer points.  It’s worth a watch, because if I learned something – it’s almost certain that you will too.

I just watched The Big Lebowski again.  It’s not for everyone; it did terribly in the box office back in 1998.  Now, it has a massive following worldwide.  There are festivals, message boards, even a recognized religion with an official website for followers of dudeism.

The Dude talks of takin’ it easy, man.  What will come will come, and when it comes – you just take it and move on.  It’s a philosophy that has served me exceptionally well during my years in marketing.  There’s a lot of literature out there talking about what works in marketing, where it works, what doesn’t work, what works to what degree.  There are hundreds of discussions debating the validity of one method over another.

Debating the validity of one method over another is, well, kind of pointless and not dude-like at all.  Everything works.  If it didn’t work, it probably wouldn’t exist.  There are varying levels of effectiveness, though I don’t think one can debate what that is without trying it.  It’s a marketer’s responsibility to learn and experiment with whichever disciplines they want to specialize in, because when you can prove your answers to the questions of viability it’s easy to get work.

If you don’t know the answer to a marketing question, it’s ok.  Have a seat, take a sip of your white russian and think about your options in terms of  time, money and risk.

If you have the time, you can do the thing yourself.
If you can’t do the thing yourself, you’ll need to scrap the idea or pay someone else.
If you find a cheap and fast solution, it will be accompanied by a massive risk.

There’s nothing wrong with risk, or spending time or money.  If black-hat SEO didn’t work (cloaking and scraping for example) people wouldn’t keep doing it.  Sure, it’s insidious, but it works.  It works most effectively when seasoned hatters sit at the helm of the spam-train.  It works least effectively when you have to search for “how to do black hat SEO”.  It will probably destroy your brand and your reputation, but it definitely works to generate revenue.  White hat SEO takes a long, long time but there’s virtually no risk and the payout always happens, eventually.

This is where Dudeism is helpful.  There is a path of least resistance, and there is a path of utter improbability.   The path of utter improbability contains great treasure and great rewards but is a hard and dangerous journey.  The path of least resistance is cool, meandering, easy and breezy but the pay is terrible.

What about you?  Would you rather take massive risks for a possible quick payout?  Would you rather pay for perfection?  Or take the time and do it yourself?  Whichever you choose, the Dude abides.

As the marketing arm of the Extreme Website Makeover project, it’s my responsibility to arrange and organize the marketing and SEO for Robbin’s Wreaths.

Since I started looking at Magento last year, I’ve been extremely impressed with it as an eCommerce solution; I really thought it would be a great tool for Robbin’s Wreaths.  The eCommerce framework is sound and there seemed to be a lot of extensions and add ons for it.

I say ’seemed’ because I didn’t really spend a lot of time looking at it; probably an hour all told.  Knowing the the design for Robbin’s is on it’s way, I decided to have a look at the SEO options for Magento.  Thankfully, the kind folks at Hosting Nation allowed me to use their Magento demo to experiment with the options available.

I have to give a tip of the hat to Yoast, who did this amazing article on SEO for Magento.  If you’re a novice, the steps might be a little daunting.  I’m a salty old SEO dog though.  I’ve done SEO for Joomla and Virtuemart.  I’ve done SEO for WordPress and other custom PHP sites, even coordinated on a strategy for a giant .asp eCommerce site.

This is the first time I’ve ever done SEO for Magento, or used the system at all. I’m going into it virtually blind, counting only on Yoast’s tutorial to guide my way.

Step one: Configuration

This part is simple.  Once logged into the admin area of Magento, I follow Yoast’s steps to set global configuration and SEO settings.  Next, he recommends canonicalizing your domain – basically redirecting the WWW to non-WWW version (or vise versa).  No problem there, I can just refer to my URL Canonicalization Script and copy the rules over to a new file.   I continue with the tutorial and complete the configuration by installing the two extensions Yoast provides for meta management.  The whole process has been a breeze up to this point, much less complex than installations I’ve done with other content management systems.

Step two: Optimization

Easy.  Navigate through the upper menu to the page, category or product you want to add keywords for.  Open the meta information screen for the project and add the keywords you want.  Save, and your titles are added.

Now, there are a lot more steps to optimizing your site laid out in Yoast’s post and I haven’t finished about 90% of them.  I did accomplish what I set out to do, check my options for Magento SEO and make sure I had it down before tackling Robbin’s Wreaths.  No problem, within 20 minutes I had my first title entered into the system.  The most amazing part is that I’ve never used the system before. Now that I’ve started, I’m really looking forward to more.  Thanks to Yoast, and Magento, this is going to be a pleasure.

Above: Verdana, Below: Georgia - which speaks to you?

Type speaks.  The typefaces you use on your website will change how users perceive and interpret information.  The last few years have shown some major advances in the ways we are able to use different fonts on our websites.  You can use the @font face syntax in your CSS files to load a font from a remote server (A List Apart has a great article), and companies like FontSquirrel go so far as to provide @font face kits, styles just need to be copied and pasted.

You can also try Cufón; Cufón consists of two individual parts – a font generator, which converts fonts to a proprietary format and a rendering engine written in JavaScript.  It’s meant to act as a simple alternative to sIFR, which is known to be complicated to use and configure.

But we’re not quite there.  Fonts are very heavily licensed, and though there are free fonts available for use – chances are that you’ll end up using one of the 8 core web fonts rather than trying to find a free font that’s easily readable.  Those core fonts are all owned and licensed by the Microsoft Foundry, which is why you’ll find them in your version of MS office. They are made of up of three serif fonts (fonts with ‘feet’) and five sans-serif (no feet).

Serif fonts:  Georgia, Times New Roman, Courier

Serif fonts are often claimed to be more easily readable.  In my mind they project a certain inherent seriousness and trustworthiness, like the voice of a newscaster.  That’s not to say they do for everyone, there’s no empirical evidence that serifs are easier to read than sans-serif and in fact, sans-serif fonts weren’t widely adopted until the 20th century. Serif fonts are most closely associated with news and information; I like Times New Roman for headlines and Georgia for text in this case.

Sans-serif fonts: Arial, Trebuchet MS, Comic Sans, Impact, Verdana.

Forget Comic Sans or Impact for general text, neither are easily readable at small resolutions though I find Impact works well for headlines.  For text, you’ll be choosing between Verdana and Arial most likely as Trebuchet MS can look nice, but can be tricky when users don’t have that font installed.  Given the choice, I would choose Verdana.  Created in 1996 for Microsoft, it’s one of the most commonly used and readable fonts out there – like the Helvetica of the web.

Don’t forget the spacing.

Whichever you choose, make sure you pay close attention to the spacing: that’s line spacing, letter spacing and word spacing.  Too close together and the words become hard to read.  Too far apart and you may have “rivers” running through your text.

For now, our choices are still limited.

While the foundries and the browser companies hash out issues of licensing more fonts for standard use on webpages, choices to users without a lot of CSS experience are still limited.  Just try to remember that it’s not about what you like, the goal of type is to make a thing easy and enjoyable to read.  Until next time!

The first of Watzlawick’s five axioms of communication is “One cannot not communicate”.  Because every behaviour is a kind of communication, people who are aware of each other are constantly communicating. Any perceivable behaviour, including the absence of action, has the potential to be interpreted by other people as having some meaning.

On the web, you are your website.  Your website (you) communicates with visitors, who in turn try and communicate with it (you again).  As in real life, sometimes there are breakdowns in communication, and the message doesn’t come across clearly.  Here are some things to watch for…

Too much wewe talk.  Not talk of small or diminutive things, or anything inappropriate – it’s talk about you.  Your company.  What you have done.  Why you’re great.  Why I, if I was smart, would buy from you.

This type of copy is a killer.  People respond more effectively to copy that talks about them, talks to them, solves their problem.  Copy that lacks a strong customer focus will lose visitors quickly.  If you mention your customers (you, your, yours) at least 2 times more than you mention yourself (we, I, company name), you’ll be doing well.  Don’t hurt yourself by checking manually though, use the We We Calculator from Future Now.  I scored 65% customer focused (alright, enough about me).  I challenge all of you to do better!

Too much jargon and meaningless corporate-speak.

Yes, we all get it. Your company is poised on the edge of several strong vertical markets, and ready to leverage new media and web 2.0 technologies to blow away existing old world dynamics and surge forward with new synergies and exciting, action driven initiatives.

Except nobody (except for looney tunes executives who don’t know what they actually want) really talks that way, and nobody likes being talked to that way.  You would be better off to say “We like all the new technology out there and are looking forward to incorporating platforms like Twitter and Facebook and using audio and video on the web to allow us to communicate with our visitors better.”

Fight the Bull is an extension for MS Office (works in Open Office as well) that analyzes your content for heavy jargon and meaningless speech.

Too many typefaces.  There can be only one.

I’ve been reading about type lately, two good books – one is called “Stop Stealing Sheep and Learn How Type Works”.  The other is called “Designing with Type”.  I like fonts and typefaces, both are important to communication as some typefaces convey trust while other can convey doubt.  Without getting into it too deeply (because I will later), conventional wisdom tells us that we should use no more than three typefaces at a time.  One typeface for the main headline; one for the copy; one for sub headings.

The colours, ooooooh the colours.

Your main font should be one colour, something close to black or dark gray.  Your background should be slightly off white.  Line spacing and letter spacing should make your copy easy to read.  If you must use colours in your fonts, or on your website, use them sparingly.  It’s not a circus tent, after all, it’s your business and unless your business supplies flashing coloured lights and tie dyed clothing, you should probably keep it toned down.

If you can’t write, hire someone who can.

Some people are great writers.  Some people write by smashing their fingers on the keyboard in rapid succession.  At least, that’s what it seems like when I read some of the copy out there.  I’m always amazed by the care and attention people pay to the graphic properties of a website and to what lengths they’ll go to get something ‘perfect’ and how little they seem to care about their copy. Don’t spend $4000 on a website and follow it up with amateur hour copy.  A great writer will work with you to craft your site’s copy, perfect a tone of voice and attitude and, most importantly, make sure grammar and spelling are consistent and correct.

Coming soon = Leaving now

If you have a page that says “coming soon, please check back later for updates”, that tells me one of a couple of things.  First, that you wanted this great website and maybe underestimated the time an effort it takes to write copy.  If the “coming soon” persists, I’m going to assume that you no longer care about your website.  If that’s the case, why should I or anybody else care?

These leaps in logic may be fallacious, but perception is everything.  If you can’t finish them, hire someone to. If you can’t do that, unpublish them.  If you don’t want to do that, believing that the “content helps for search engine rankings”, I’ll be blunt and say, all you’re doing is showing people what looks like a strip mall with half the stores empty.  Empty pages, optimized or not, aren’t going to help you.

Anything else?

Plenty, stay tuned during communication week at Harbour City SEO for more communication tips and tools.  Ciao for now!

In the last post, I mentioned the importance of qualifying  your search engine marketing firm in various disciplines.  You wouldn’t take your car to a brake specialist to get the oil changed, and you shouldn’t go with a marketing firm that doesn’t specialize in link building or SEO.

To round up, today I want to talk about some qualifiers for SEO and Social Media marketing.  You should be asking questions of your SEO company, in effect interviewing them to get an idea of their qualifications before you commit to a contract.

If they specialize in SEO

SEO is made up of two distinct areas, on and off-page optimization.  On page optimization involves things like keyword research, competitive research, copywriting and content development and structure as well as an understanding of the technical requirements to set up and work with a variety of website types and content management systems.

Off-page optimization involves link building through various methods, like directory submission, link exchanges and content development and syndication.

More often, a firm will specialize in one or the other.  I, for instance, specialize in the on-page optimization strategies, though I am familiar with many of the techniques for building links.

When you hire a company to do your optimization, there are questions you can ask to find out exactly how qualified they are before handing over your dollars.

Q: Can you tell me about your background in marketing and SEO?

A: look for at least 5 years of experience in marketing.  For young companies with less experience, you can sometimes get a better price on SEO campaigns if they have the qualifications.

Q: What methods do you use for keyword research?

A: They shouldn’t just be targeting the most popular terms, but those that provide the most value and relevant traffic.  Look for an understanding of how keyword research works and how they’ll target the best opportunities.  Most firms won’t tell you everything, as they want to protect their trade secrets, but they should be able to tell you enough so you feel confident to buy from them.

Q: Do you offer full disclosure of all your methods?

A: Transparency is a huge deal in SEO, as the wrong strategy could get your site penalized.  If they don’t offer 100% disclosure, go with someone else.

Q: What types of link building are you proficient in?

A: Ask for specifics, if it’s directory submission, link exchanges, content development or syndication.  They should be able to provide specific examples for each form of successful link building.  From most to least valuable (in my opinion) are: 1) Content development, 2) syndication, 3) directory submission 4) link exchanging.

Q: Can you give me some examples of websites you’ve optimized?

A: This is easy, they should be able to provide examples of work they’ve done AND be able to provide results for their own website.  Researching their website and the company will give you great insight into their business practices.  Ask for references too.  Make sure you Google their company, check out their links and check with companies they’ve worked with.

Q: What sort of guarantees do you provide?

A: This is a tricky question.  No SEO firm worth their salt will guarantee specific results unless you pay through the nose for it.  Every SEO firm worth their salt should guarantee an improvement in results and rankings for targeted terms.

If they specialize in Social Media

Social media requires a lot of ingenuity, great timing and the ability to develop enticing and engaging content.  If you can’t do it yourself, you may be able to farm it out to a third party who will work on your behalf.  That sort of marketing would be too costly for most businesses to outsource based on the time commitment alone.  If you must outsource here, or if you plan on hiring someone for an in-house position, here are some questions you should ask before committing to a contract.

Q: What sort of results have you generated for other companies using social media?

A:  For a small business, brand awareness is less important than actual traffic and new business.  Building social profiles and embracing web platforms are wasted efforts if they don’t generate the desired action. I would want case studies of businesses they’ve worked with in social media campaigns.

Q: Which social media channels do you leverage for your clients?

A: They should be able to answer with the main ones.  YouTube, Flickr, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Digg etc…

Q: Are you a power user in any of these networks?

A:  The social media networks are ruled by the power users, those who have spent hundreds of hours developing loyal followers.  Many power users are able to have a content item pushed to the forefront by tapping into their social networks, these are the people you want on your side when you have something ready to go viral.

Q: What benefits do I get from using your company to run my social media campaigns vs. running it myself?

A: There may be distinct advantages to using another company ranging from experience in creating successful viral campaigns to overall know how.  I would want an answer that spoke specifically to the benefits of using their company over doing it myself.  Time saved is NOT a good reason.

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There will be other questions you can ask, and I’ll post them in future updates as they come to mind.  To round up, you just can’t ask enough questions of your marketing company before committing to a contract.  If they don’t have the answers to your questions or aren’t willing to provide them, you should probably look somewhere else.

If you’ve just had some work done and want to know what the results are, drop me a line and I’ll check your existing SEO strategy and send you a brief report on my discovery.

I don’t want to sound like a nerd, (ok, maybe I do), but I was just reading a paper called ‘tagging human knowledge’ by Paul Heymann, Andreas Paepcke, Hector Garcia-Molina.  Because I’ve been speaking recently about categorization and taxonomy and their importance in defining relationships of things, I completely neglected tagging as a viable method of organization.  I didn’t forget about it, but I didn’t think it was as reliable as a system organized by taxonomy experts and librarians.

From the abstract

A fundamental premise of tagging systems is that regular users can organize large collections for browsing and other tasks using uncontrolled vocabularies. Until now, that premise has remained relatively unexamined. Using library data, we test the tagging approach to organizing a collection. We find that tagging systems have three major large scale organizational features: consistency, quality, and completeness.

In addition to testing these features, we present results suggesting that users produce tags similar to the topics designed by experts, that paid tagging can effectively supplement tags in a tagging system, and that information integration may be possible across tagging systems.

The conclusion?  In a nutshell, organizing content by tagging works as well  (if not better) than organizing content using library systems.  Furthermore, it turns out that non qualified, non-paid individuals were just as effective at organizing content ans librarians and taxonomists.

I used to think that tagging wouldn’t work, just because there were too many random factors when you ask a person without knowledge of a thing to categorize a certain thing (that’s what tagging is, essentially) and couple it with financial motives.  I still think commercial applications of tagging are too open to manipulation, but it’s good to know that the system works.

Applications for tagging in SEO

So here’s where I decide to start using tagging more effectively on Harbour City SEO.  Play along at home if you like.

1st.  Go to delicious.com.  Type in the main keyword you’re targeting into their search box.  I did “SEO”.  Then I look at the first page of results.  All of the sites on there are ones I’m familiar with and pace a certain amount of trust with, so I take down the details of the tags I see them using.

2nd.  Take the common occurrences of tags and put them aside.  I eliminated any tags that only occurred once.

3rd.  Take the remaining list of tags and insert them into your tag structure if you’re using WordPress or another CMS that supports tagging.  If you’re not using a system with built in tagging capabilities, make sure the keywords are somewhere on your page.

This is the list I came up with:

• google
• keywords
• marketing
• ranking
• reference
• search
• seo
• tips
• tools
• webdesign

I’ll be sure to include those tags for my SEO strategy, as they should help increase relevance for my topics and usability for visitors.  Sweet sassy molassey, I’m excited to finally be using tags with confidence.  How about you, are you ready?

A taxonomy is , in an oversimplified manner, a hierarchical organization and categorization of a subject.  The categories of this blog, for example, represent a basic taxonomy.  DMOZ, or the Open Directory Project represents a more complex taxonomy.

Categorization is important so we can understand how a thing fits in with other things around it.  The more we understand the relationships between things, the more we understand the thing as a whole, right?  Ok, enough rambling.  I bring this up because I often see SEO specialists calling themselves marketers, designers call themselves SEO specialists and a whole lot of other muddled definitions.  There’s no certification required in most of these disciplines, and sometimes none available.

But there are distinctions between disciplines.  People that perform well in some areas may not have any experience in others.  A branding specialist may not have any experience with public relations, programmers may not be able to slice a PSD.

Before you hand over a cent to a service provider, ask them these questions to make sure they’re spending their time, and your money, wisely.

If they specialize in internet marketing.

Internet marketing includes disciplines such as PPC management, affiliate program management, banner campaigns and paid link building.  It could include social media and content development and syndication, but I tend to look at those as separate disciplines.  If you’re looking for any of these services, there are a lot of questions you could ask to see if they can handle your needs.

Pay Per Click Q&A

Q: What sort of volume do you handle on a monthly basis?

Anything over $2000.00 would be a good answer

Q: How many clients are you handling currently?

Don’t want too many here, if they say “20″ – then it seems like they’re not committing a lot of time to you.

Q: Have you ever worked in this industry before? 

“Yes” would be good here.  If they haven’t, ask what similar industries they’ve worked in.

Q: Are you a certified AdWords professional?

This is a certification process for managing AdWords.  You have to take a test and score well.  You also have to spend a certain amount over time.

Q: What sort of results can I expect as far as increased clickthroughs and lower costs?

I can’t say this enough, ask for specific targets to be defined here.

Affiliate Marketing Q&A

Q: Can you tell me about the work you’ve done for other companies?  How have you improved their sales?

Look for an overall, sustained increase in sales.  Ask for referrals

Q: How long have you been in business?

5 years + in the affiliate business is a good benchmark.

Q: How many affiliates do you have in your recruiting pool? 

You want thousands, if possible.  Ask about some of the top affiliates in your industry.

Q: Which affiliate networks are you familiar with?

Shareasale and Commission Junction are the two top affiliates.

Banners and Paid Links Q&A

Q: Which banner networks are you familiar with?

Buysellads is popular.  Google AdSense and Doubleclick offer impression based advertising as well.

Q: Does your company provide creatives and tracking? 

Will you have to get your own designs done?  Will they create tracking links for you?

Q: What advantages are there to using banners and impressions?

Banners are great for branding, text links and paid links are great for SEO and traffic.

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In the next article, we’ll talk about SEO and Social Media.  Make sure you don’t miss any of our posts in this series by subscribing to our RSS feed.

Back in March of 2008, Time published an article titled How Google Earth Ate Our Town.  Big news for our “old coal mining town” of 78.000.  We had replaced San Francisco, the 13th largest city in the US as the capital of Google Earth.

I’ll let you read the article, because I want to talk about something different.  There’s a new feature that allows you to embed Google Earth into your webpage via an iframe.  It lacks some of the major functionality of the full version but it beats Google Maps hands down for a rich user experience.

In addition, Google has their eyes on the Island streets as they troll the towns from Duncan northward for street view footage.  While heading out to visit my folks in Duncan, I found myself driving behind a Google car on Herd Road – this was about a week before I read the article in the PQB News.

As a small business, you can use these tools to give out of town clients a better picture of your business.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words, it makes you wonder what an interactive 3D map is worth.

If there’s a downside to running Google Earth off of your site, it’s that visitors have to download a plugin (on demand) before it will work.  Since I have to do the same with Flash though, it’s hardly an inconvenience.

Visit earth.nanaimo.ca for the City of Nanaimo’s KMZ files.