Online Tools that Blend Online and Offline Marketing Efforts

Marketers spend a lot of time on MySpace, Facebook and on their own blogs, wikis and podcasts to connect to other marketers and to potential customers. That’s all fine and good – it’s great, actually, but many marketers are exclusively staying online. That might not be so good. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, you want customers to come in and experience your store, right?

The best way to get online and offline traffic to your store is to use social networking sites and review sites that encourage people to comment on their offline experiences online. This can pull in both online and offline traffic by getting people intrigued enough to visit both your online and offline presence.

Chris Brogan, a social media guru, suggests three Web sites for promoting your business, especially for businesses with location- or niche-based products or services.

Upcoming.org: This is an event guide for the Web, but is locally based. You just search by your city and type of event if you’d like (social, education, comedy, politics and other categories). You can find networking events or you can add your own event to the calendar. You can also search by date and city if you know you’ll be in a city on a certain date, or just to see what’s available for the upcoming weekend or month. Upcoming is a branch of Yahoo!, so if you have a Yahoo! ID already, you just sign in with your Yahoo! email address and you can add events to your calendar. The nice thing about this is that you can add the event to your Outlook calendar or Google calendar – whatever calendar you look at regularly.

Yelp.com: This is review site that is also somewhat social, since you can link to friends and become someone’s fan. Brogan doesn’t recommend “stuffing the box” with your own great reviews, but suggests with some creativity you can get people to at least give their opinion about your product or restaurant. Some local businesses that don’t have a Web site are only found on review sites like these, so this site could be a great place to find local business prospects. I would think that it would be a great place to get some testimonials, too, if you can get the poster’s permission.  

Meetup.com: “Maybe it’s time for a little less face-to-screen and a little more face-to-face” is this social networking site’s tagline. People create groups that meet once a month, or at whatever interval the group chooses. I like Meetup since I’ve met some nice people through one of the groups, but I’ve heard that there are some Meetup groups that exist just to sell unsuspecting people stuff. I definitely don’t like that. But the potential for networking and word-of-mouth marketing is great with this Web site so I wouldn’t count it out. These meetings are for the most part informal, which is a nice change from stuffy networking opps. 

What other sites are out there that do well to blend online and offline marketing opps? Let me know of any other good ones that I missed.