Wouldn’t it be fantastic to actually
SHOW your customers or potential customers
WHERE you are – without them having to find your contact details page on your web site and referring to a map book (
which they may or may not have)?
What if you don’t have a website, but you have email?
One viable way of letting your customers find out
WHERE you are is to use a
FREE piece of geo-location software – like Google Earth. You can create a location pin, and have it display in Google Earth.
If you don't have Google Earth, you can get it
here.
According to
Chikai Ohazama - Google Earth Product
Manager, "Google Earth is available in 13 languages and has been
downloaded over
350 million times by people from around the world. People tell us that the
reason they use Google Earth is because it covers the areas they care about with
high resolution detail -- whether it's Timbuktu, Cabo San Lucas, or Whitiangia, New Zealand. No other online
mapping provider in the world offers this global reach with sub-meter resolution
imagery. In fact, we cover more than a third of the world's land surface and
half of the world's population with this sort of "high definition" imagery".
Google Earth is a GREAT WAY for people to find you – BUT ...
It is not always easy to do. If someone hasn’t already submitted a location pin for your institution or school, then it can be pretty hard to find among all the other landmarks in your area
- especially in a large metropolitan area. It can also be a bit confusing to find your location when looking from above – from a bird’s-eye view things tend to look a little different.
What you need is a way to make YOUR institution STAND OUT from the crowd!
Even if a location pin has been submitted, chances are it is
very BORING, not giving much information. In part, this is because of the strict rules Google has about location pin submission to its forums that disallow advertising or self-promotion of any kind.
Google doesn't scan the forums that regularly, so it can also be a long time before the location pin gets registered on Google Earth.
What eventually results is a boring location pin that looks similar to the following picture: