ReachCustomersOnline.com

Local Hero

Posted by TimSlavin at August 7, 2004

Hi and welcome back. For the past four or five weeks I took a working vacation, mostly in Northern California. I got about three days off, including a nice long day at Marine World in Vallejo. It's odd being a parent and knowing that animals should not be caged, particularly killer whales, and having your kids begging to sit in the front row so they can be splashed.

I did begin posting again this week and found a small but interesting set of items. The most interesting was Yahoo: Trying to Be a Local Hero. One of my business concerns is figuring out how to connect local businesses with the customers who walk into their offices and shops.

It seems like an easy thing but it's not. Email works the best because it requires human interaction, the business person has to ask for an email address and their customer knows what to expect. However, some number of people do not want to give out personal information. They do want some sort of search engine, a way to find a phone number or directions. Yahoo!, MSN, Google, and others are trying to make it easy to search and find local businesses.

Other good stories this week were Dropdown Lists with CSS (excellent set of free code, lots of different looks), Shields Up: Free Testing of Your Computer Vulnerability (useful test of your computer's weaknesses), 3,007 Marketers Reveal Search Marketing Costs, Clicks, & Conversion Results (good SEO/SEM result data), News Map: Scan Stories Visually Based on Popularity and Age (neat way to scan online news), and Websites About E-Learning.

Thank you for visiting and reading! If I can do anything for you, please let me know.

Tim

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