Skate where the puck is going.
My wife Tina is driving and I’m on what she calls “the working side of the car”. We are returning from the Colorado Auctioneer’s Association’s Conference in Denver. I was asked to come and present a intro. version of my Google Kung Fu class and a Google Kung Fu for Social Media class.
As part of my class I teach to do what Wayne Gretzky said and “Skate where the puck is going, not where it has been”. To many of us do that, we spend our time becoming experts at what used to work really well. I don’t want to be known as the foremost authority in newspaper advertising, or cuneiform for that matter.
What is your cuneiform budget?
What is your cuneiform budget?
I came across this article on our way home and thought in needed to be seen. Google + is slowly drawing us in as we can’t resist it. In my class I help the students understand the importance of Google Places, the integration of Google services like Youtube, Google Photos, and the myriad other Google services.
The truth is most of us have already started using Google + we just don’t know it. We use Google Places all the time when we want to find a hotel, or a restaurant, or fill in the blank (don’t kid yourself, Google saw you do that search and if you were signed in you can bet Google made a little note of which hotel you looked at last and if you clicked on their number). Google knows the kind of music you listened to on Youtube. If you doubt this go listen to a song by Pink on Youtube then go do Google search on the word Pink and see what comes up.
I use the email Google sent out when they integrated their 60 privacy policies into 1 policy that let people have a more seamless experience in my Google Kung Fu class. This article just backs up what I have been teaching in my class for a couple of years.
Introducing the Google Site: Command
Sometimes one is faced with a website that contains data that you would like to find but you do not want to go through every single page of that website to find it. Perhaps they have just taken a link down that points to the data.
Say you have a bully running a large on-line bidding platform and one of the auctioneers starts to ask to many questions like say Robert Mayo did when he asked very pointed questions of Proxibid.com (see my randomauctioneerthoughts blog for the questions). Further lets assume Robert now has been de-listed by said site (and he has.)
This is a good time to explain the Google Site command. If you are looking for data on a site (say the word Mayo) and you only want to look on one site, and not the entire Internet then you can tell Google ” look for this one word and just look for it here on this one site”. Here is the way the command is put together term1 term2 term3 ect… site:website.com. In our case it would read like this
Mayo site:proxibid.com or if you want to get more specific and find not just all of Mayo’s auctions but just the Bonnie and Clyde auction you would use this form Mayo Bonnie site:proxibid.com points you right to all the references to this auction that are on Proxibid’s website and only on Proxibids website.
You could also use this command to find other data on a website quickly. Say you were looking for a lawyer that represented a large company and that lawyers number would not be on an easy to access web page because the company would not want everyone to have access to the number. Lets say in this case that you knew the company was in Nashville (like say Fedex). You could Google Nashville area codes and you would find that the area code there is 615 then you could use the sight command to look at the company web site and return only the pages with the area code and the word president like this 615 president site:website.com. If you did that you might notice that most of the numbers at Fedex are not local so you might go back and search on Fedex and find that their company address starts with 942. You could string together any number of terms to limit the results of this search with things like the NOT, AND, OR operators so it might look like this
(942 OR 615) AND president -shipping OR -packing site:fedex.com this search gives you a wonderful result of 97 links to leaders over at Fedex with things like their wistleblower policy, their investor relations policy. Of course this search might be to limiting because it is asking Google to tell you about the president level at Fedex (which of course would include Vice Presidents) but it is asking to not get results with the word shipping and shipping is what they do over at Fedex, but you get the point.
Using a Google Fusion Table to Produce a Client Map
Google Fusion Table Map of Mound City Auctions Client Locations
You have a meeting scheduled with a big potential customer (in the auction world we usually refer to the seller as our customer and our buyers as our clients). You want to show this potential customer that your company has a farther reach than your competitors, and you wouldn’t mind throwing in a little razzle-dazzle for the wow factor. A Google Fusion Table is just what you need.
The first step is to produce a spread sheet with the addresses of the clients in it. Most of the time these type of records will come out of whatever software produces them in this type of format |123 StreetName | City | State | Zipcode | where the | symbol represents the cell edges in your spreadsheet. What Google wants for it’s fusion map is something more like what you would search for in Google Maps (like this) |123 StreetName City State Zipcode |
We will use Open Office Calc. for our spreadsheet in this example (if you do not own it you can download if for free here). Please note that there are wonderful forums for Open Office also on the link I posted and you can get help on almost anything you would ever want to do with a spreadsheet there.
- Open your spreadsheet of data in open office then save it as a .csv file by using File-> Save As and choose Text CSV.
- Open your saved .csv file
- Save a copy of this file under a new name just in case something goes wrong (you can always delete it later if everything goes great.) Better safe than sorry.
- Use this ”concatenate” formula as follows =CONCATENATE( A1; ” “; B1; ” “; C1).
- Insert a new column into your spreadsheet by clicking on the letter on the top to select the entire column and right click and select Insert Columns.
- Paste the concatenate formula into cell the top cell (where you want your address to be all put together) you will need the other data to be next to it. This example assumes your data is in Cells B1 and C1 but if it were in cells B1, C1, D1, E1 you would just modify it accordingly to =CONCATENATE( A1; ” “; B1; ” “; C1; ” “;D1). This will put a space between each part of the address.
- Insert a new column next to this data.
- Highlight your newly concatenated data by selecting all of the cells and copy it.
- click on the first cell and select File –> Paste Special
- In the Paste Special dialog box un-check formulas and check text.
- Once you have copied your data into the new column you can delete all of the old data.
- You might want to remove the house number from your spreadsheet to avoid exposing the exact address of you clients. You can do this with a find and replace where you find a 1 and replace it with a space character, repeat this with 2, then 3, ….I’m looking for a more elegant solution for this and I’ll post it here when I get a few minutes to come up with a better fix.
- You will need an Google account to do the rest of this so I’m going to assume you have already created one. If you have not go to Google and sign up.
- Sign into your Google account and and select Google drive.
- Click on the Create button and select More –> Table
- Select the file you just created.
- Select Visualize and Map.
- Wait for the Map to generate.
- Once the map generates you should change it to public by clicking on the Share button and selecting Public.
- Click on the Get embeddable link button to get a link to put into an IM or your website.
- Give my version a spin here.
- Let me know if you had any problems getting a map or got stuck on this tutorial.
Google Kung Fu and Website Karate for Small Business
Google Kung Fu
St. Louis, MO auctioneer and Google SEO educator Rob Weiman teaches about Hard Work you do with your empty hands to make your website stand out on Google search.
