Did you know? It’s easy and free to customize your company’s Google maps listing (the listing that occurs when someone searches for the address of your business in Google maps). You can even incorporate photos and videos to tell potential customers more about you.

Step 1: Log in
To create a customized listing in Google Maps:
- Navigate to http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter
- Log into your google account
- Click “Add New Listing”

Step 2: Create Listing

From here you will have the option to specify Company/Organization name, Street Address/City/State/ZIP, Phone, and Email address. As you type, the preview window will show what the listing will look like. Click Next.

Step 3: Claim your Listing

If Google has a listing for your business already, you will have the option to add your listing or claim the current listing. To claim the listing, click “Claim” and follow the instructions. Google will call the listed office phone number and you will answer and type in the pin number listed on the screen.

Step 4: Pimp your Listing

Once your listing has been verified, you will be able to specify additional information. (Remember, once you tie the listing to your account, you can edit the listing at any time by logging in).

You can add a Category (this is an auto fill field), Hours of operation, Payment options, Additional Details (such as parking instructions) and up to 10 photos and 5 videos.

For our listing, we incorporated some images from our RD2 Flickr group. Still working on videos… though there’s always this one.

Results

The result:

Once you submit, you can edit at any time and view some basic stats on your listing by logging into the Google business center.

What a beautiful sight to behold. Why, you ask? Well naturally due to the prospect that the new iPhone will be added to the store today.

The Apple World Wide Developers Conference begins in about 10 minutes (12 CST). Hopefully Mr. Jobsy will have lots of cool new Apple devices to talk about, most importantly the 3G iPhone.

Head over to Engadget for live updates. I would take on this task but I have another job I must attend to. After all the news breaks be sure to come back and let us know what you thought of the keynote and if the 3G iPhone will have an impact on the way websites are designed for mobile devices.

Monday productivity is sure to drop for the next couple hours.

- Eric
- Out

It’s a slippery slope, with potholes, rusty nails, and a sundry of other snags ready to pull you into CMS bliss or hell. Truth is, there’s no perfect match. Even when strategically aligning your team and goals within a framework for decision making, there’s somewhat of an art to the selection of what fits and what does not.

Having recently launched a couple of new community websites, I find myself reflecting on the pains of the past when watching and assisting people we work with as they begin deploying their content. Jeremiah wrote this timely post making a call out for the peeps in his community to share horror stories as well as share their ideas for future-proofing their CMS systems. So, while I had CMS on the brain, Jeremiah’s post inspired me to go with this one…

Generally (very generally) there are two big camps you might find yourself in when evaluating your approach to a Content Management System for your organization. We could split this beyond just two camps, but I think we generally do a pretty bad job in our industry of simplifying things, so I’m trying to simplify. The two camps I am referring to are:

1. Open Source CMS
2. Enterprise-Class Package

This consideration is where the first big mistakes are made. I find myself in a lot of discussions where the words “Open” and “Source” conjure up a few preconceived notions. Let’s address some of those with respect to the first one of our camps:

Open Source is not limited to the Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP stuff that we keep hearing about. There are plenty of open source applications out there that are even of the Microsoft variety. That’s right, I just used the “M” word. There are many who are already squarely locked into a Microsoft infrastructure and there’s no getting around using something that will integrate well with their existing enterprise systems. And, that’s perfectly fine. There are solutions available such as DotNetNuke, Rainbow and Umbraco.

If you’re in the Open Source camp, Microsoft technology lies beneath a number of options that might fit within your technology stack. If your search moves you away from the Microsoft technology set (for reasons such as cost, integration or consistency with your enterprise road map), you may be in the confusing space where the lines blur between countless Web 2.0 applications. Danger ahead! Some of these applications can, and very well may be, like heroin — One of the great things about all of the applications you may find yourself looking at is how these low cost, easy to build, sexy looking applications satisfied some immediate needs, and even helped build amazing communities to boot. In many ways, these applications helped to build working business cases for companies to think in a more sophisticated way in how they engage their communities. So, what’s the problem with all of these shiny, bright colored applications? Nothing at all — They have helped to democratize (oh my gawd, I can’t believe I just used the most overused phrase on the web) the way we think about the web… about igniting communities and stimulating many millions of conversations. While so many of these applications satisfy the urge to be more socially compliant, they are fundamentally split from the business models of many online commerce models. In the plain-est possible speak, these are the applications that excited and inspired us about the power of going social… they validated the concept and value of community… and now corporate officers are taking it seriously — really seriously. What does that mean? We now have challenges on our hands of integrating these applications into the enterprise. We’re going from a bunch of successful experiments to a market who takes this seriously and now wants it to fit inside their enterprise.

So — When picking a winner, some of the old methods still apply. Evaluating your solution and applying just any Web 2.0 approach is a “top down” way of thinking. Don’t get me wrong, I love the bling, bling social stuff… but it’s generally “bottom up” thinking that goes the long haul.

In the past, we have referred to Drupal VS WordPress. Reason for the comparison, is that WordPress is arguably a killer solution for a specific thing. If you want to build a great blog and have the ability to add bling, then it’s awesome. You can even use it for light weight content management. But, the mindset of WordPress is all about blogging — social — community. Drupal comes from a Content Management mindset. Even the tone and content created by the community is different in tone and approach than your typical community building solution. It’s got more of a content management flavor to it. Within the last few releases, Drupal has asserted itself as a CMS solution with an appetite to add community everywhere.

Drupal VS WordPress is a good comparison to make a simple point…although it’s shallow in the bigger picture of what’s really available and completely bypasses the important part of picking a winner — the process of picking.

If your enterprise is not ready to go enterprise yet, then you’ve got to be careful and not shortcut the process. Here are a few things to remember as you stand on the edge of what could be a very important decision. Even if you don’t plan to be at your organization after another year or two, someone will need to pick up where you left off. Here are some things to consider:

1. Think down the road of what the options could possibly be based on the IT roadmap.
2. Devour information about your systems, communities and other nodes on your enterprise’s system.
3. Involve your IT organization and push hard on integration points.
4. Even if it’s an experiment, can you or your IT peeps be nifty with migration regarding your chosen platform?
5. Understand the goals and objectives well enough to build a framework for decision making. Before you know it, you and your team will be adding hundreds of wishlist items to your next release. Have a framework for prioritizing and planning each one before you end up in CMS bloat.
6. If you follow an enterprise route for scalability purposes, remember that you will eventually run into cost and feature challenges (to name a few). Pound for pound, applications like SharePoint do not have the nifty Web 2.0 features built in yet (operative word, “yet”), but they will. You will be faced with lots of those “customize now - or wait” questions.
7. Identify the DNA of your solution. Is it really a community center, an extranet, an intranet, a marketing brochure, or all of the above?
8. Make sure your solution allows you to customize to your liking, and allows your orgainzation to rapidly learn how to easily publish content. Chances are, you’re not going to be granted a “call center for my new CMS” budget, so you’ll want to keep fielding the training calls to a minimum.

Going forward, we’ll try to share more about what we are finding. We’ll try extra hard to use plain speak (please let us know if we are being bone heads and pushing the tech talk). The big take-away is however, that jumping into what looks like shallow water can result in jumping right off the continental shelf. The most successful implementations we have seen always occur when the right planning is put in place. It’s never time ill spent.

No doubt you have seen one of 300 Jack in the Box commercials that have been airing for the last several years. My favorite, by far, is “The Intern” (shown below).

What you probably didn’t know is that they’re all produced by an agency called Secret Weapon Marketing. I’ve been a fan of SWM for a long time, and what’s great about those guys is that they devote all their time to enhancing the brand of only THREE clients at a time. It’s an unorthodox approach that I think could benefit many agencies out there.

With the recent increase of cell phone usage in the last decade, etiquette has pretty much hit an all time low. You have men on Bluetooth yelling at their wives while inside an elevator, people texting during meetings, and all sorts of other social transgressions. Below is a list of guidelines I’ve commissioned for you to follow while using a cell phone around me. Sure, I’m guilty of breaking almost all of these (except number one), but this isn’t about me — it’s about you.

1. The bathroom stall is not your personal phone booth.
2. When calling me, limit conversations to less than 30 seconds and only use critical keywords, like “Redbull,” “Videogames,” “Paycheck,” and “Free.”
3. Custom ring tones are a great way of telling me “Hey, let’s never talk.”
4. When texting, please wait 24-48 hours for response. Expect a one to two word response or an ambiguous emoticon.
5. Never touch my iPhone.

After almost 2 years of use and abuse, I dropped my SLVR L7 for the last time this weekend. For the past 6 months or so I had been considering a phone that could allow me to check email and other necessities (facebook included) remotely, but had never really had a reason to upgrade.

I got the SLVR before I had an ipod - in the hopes that its 100 song limit would be enough to satisfy my mobile music needs without giving too much support to Apple’s Digital Rights Management plans. I originally installed itunes solely because I got the SLVR, and I vividly remember the nervous feeling I got opening the program for the first time.

Those days seem long gone. The following picture of my old phone was taken with my new iPhone - making me 5th in the office to succumb to its appeal.

I have yet to make it through a week without hearing a, “Hey! Check this out!” from Ronan. He’s always experimenting with new web-based applications and tools so normally I (politely and tactfully) pretend I didn’t hear him.

Last week, however, he had included some very nicely annotated screenshots in an email and I asked what kind of screen capture tool he had used. Turns out there’s a hot little beta called Skitch, currently invite-only, from the crew at plasq.

This app allows you to quickly and easily grab screenshots, camera shots, or import existing images/PDFs and annotate them quickly and easily with a small but well-chosen toolset - I love the arrows. Resizing and cropping is a breeze, although I’d love to see them allow user-entered dimensions rather than having to click and drag. The final image can be saved to your Skitch user account (think Flickr minus most of the features), dragged into any application, or saved out in a variety of formats including PDF, TIF, and SVG.

This last week I’ve used Skitch in quite a few ways:

• During a competitive analysis presentation, I was able to quickly grab screenshots, annotate them with arrows, and drag the shots directly into Keynote without having to save each one out individually (behind the scenes Skitch actually does save them temporarily as *.pict files, so there’s no quality issue when moving from Keynote to Powerpoint or vice versa).
• When responding with comments to an image, Skitch opened the PDF file and let me comment directly on it. The end result was a clear and easy-understandable response that took a fraction of the time it would have taken me via email.
• Omnigraffle Pro and Skitch make a great combination - wireframes saved out in SVG or PICT vector format can be opened directly in Skitch, which I find to be much faster for resizing, writing callouts, and general notes on the original images.

What I can’t describe in this post is how unbelievably slick Skitch is in every interaction. From the tool tips to resizing and anti-aliasing, each task feels responsive and tight. This is one application that has already made its way into my box o’ tricks and will stay there well after the beta period.

You gotta pick your web platform wisely. Even though we live and breathe it every day, I am blown away at how complex the environment has become. The lines are blurred between content management, blog, wiki, personalization and more. Then you throw into the mix RSS, folksonomies, taxonomies, schmaxonomies, workflow, scalability, integration, API extensibility and so much more.

If I were you, would I even know how to ask the right question on where to start? Believe me, it’s tough enough to keep it all straight for anyone. You just have to ask yourself a few things:

• Am I a blog or a web site?
• If both, how are they positioned to my consumers?
• Where do I update my site now?
• Where should I update my content?
• Who contributes?
• Will I be interacting with communities?
• How disorganized can I really afford to be? None!
• How will my consumers consume my content?
• Have I really thought about how they COULD consume content?
• Which side of the new-web, old-web chasm am I on now?

I am scratching my head tonight because sometimes it is just darn difficult to get all of the points across in the least complex way. With the lines blurring again, we need to be super careful on the platforms we choose. I did not mention branding in my list simply because if the platform cannot render your brand online to the pixel, then it’s out. With so many platforms to choose from today, why sacrifice that one?

The bottom line is that so many of us do a great job talking to each other about what we do and why we think it is important. But, we have to speak in YOUR language. We are in business to serve you, and to be your coach when you need one. There are great things happening, but I question if we are getting caught up in the momentum and forgetting how to communicate to those who matter most? YOU, our customers in our industry. We need to help you ask the right questions and show you the right way to start. Sure, the technology is easier, faster and less costly than it used to be. But, the way your consumers are consuming (content) is much, much different than it was not so long ago, which in some ways counters easy, fast and cheap.

Drupal, WordPress, Social Text, Confluence, Mediawiki…. Dazed and Confused? You should be… because these are important decisions to be made.

Like a lot of what we come across, we search for nitche business purposes or meaningful twists on design communications and social media methods, practices and/or products to extend brand and help communities establish voice. Today I was talking about Twitter with some friends of mine that we work with. Like everyone else, they are looking for a meaningful spin on products like Twitter and how they could add dimension to their community. So, I am thinking about the Twitter phenomena as it lights up like a Texas prairie in a hot and dry summer…and I wonder what applications will be next and who will create them. Will we? I dunno… In another month or so we will reveal some pretty cool things that i am anxious to talk about…I digress.

The thoughts? Who is out there working on a filter widget, WordPress or Drupal plugin, or syndication method that will allow us to “tune in” or “tune out” to our Twitter community? When can we cast a wider net so we can add more “friends” to our Twitter profiles and then add tags, keywords, adjust sliders for content types, select drop downs or just create our own filters to key in on what our friends are doing that we are interested in? Hell, maybe we are talking “Pipes” here.

Don’t get me wrong, I love all of my friends dearly, but this new phenomina could drive the most stable person insane. So, how do we capture what is meaningful and relevant? How do we do this where it feels like we have “less friends.” When I go home after a long day at work and my wife wants me to have dinner with friends or has some social activity planned, my most common line is, “but I really don’t need more friends, so can’t I just stay home and relax?” This never works. And, don’t get me wrong, I do need friends, but I am more interested in how I can “tune in” and “tune out” to what is going on allowing me to look through a more community oriented lens at what is going on. Then, when I am interested, I can refocus my lens when I am interested. Maybe this can allow me to have a more meaningful dialog with my friends?? We can get right to the point and discuss what is relevant to what is exactly on our minds at the moment.

So, who is out there thinking the same thing? There must be some mad scientist working on this little concoction already…

pbwiki says that “making a free wiki is as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich.” Their recent step in updating their web editor is a step in the right direction for the wiki community. It’s still a nerdy little application but it demonstrates a few people thinking about the right things. pbwiki is worth a try for those just getting acquainted with the power of the wiki and is much easier to start than most. pbwiki is a hosted application but seems to have some horsepower. Looks like we can even add our own css.

Newsflash: Just as I was about to hit the submit button, I saw the post on the pbwiki blog about raising a couple of million bucks. Now we gotta sharpen our pencils and submit our wish list. Maybe now someone can de-nerdify wikis and make them work for my dad (a metaphor I use to relate to communications and technologies that need to pass the usability barometer….if they can be used by my dad, then they have a fighting chance!(I love my dad, but he’s not ready for most wikis yet))

Great work by the pbwiki team on this. And, by the way, the “nerdy” comment is a sincere compliment. Respect…