I think it also comes down to definitions. So, let’s say you consider location based marketing any marketing that drives you to a physical location, then you can start looking at a Facebook status update that highlights a local restaurant’s daily special that you view on your smartphone’s Facebook app as a location based marketing service.

Over the long haul we believe that most location based marketing will not really involve check-ins at all and will come in the form of status updates and location based search. When you widen things out just a bit you can see that many more people are probably receiving and acting on location based marketing activities already.

Thanks,

Ed Loessi

Co-founder – CMO

OfferedLocal

http://www.offeredlocal.com

http://www.twitter.com/offeredlocal

Again thanks for adding to the discussion!! Always nice to have other local experts like yourself contributing.

I think the long term results of the SEO campaign will determine whether keyword domains are valid for a company’s marketing. As with most components of onpage optimization, this is just a piece of the puzzle that contributes to good onpage optimization. Of course, without good content and the other pieces, a keyword rich URL can become useless.

If I was a business and was not able to get a good keyword rich domain (for whatever reason), or a keyword rich domain didn’t fall into my branding guidelines, I would focus on keyword rich URL’s within my site. They can often have a powerful effect on search results.

- Kevin Hayes @kevinhayesca.

Good research.

http://www.Cellphoneshopper.net

Good point! Thanks for taking the time to comment Bill!

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This post was mentioned on Twitter by Roger: [blog post] B2B Social Media Marketing: Branding or Lead Generation? http://ow.ly/162pA6...

FYI though I totally don't think No 3. will fly with employees and lastly it to me would feel untrustworthy if an employer asked me to keep my profile quiet.

Something amusing to consider, if everyone were asked to commit to point No. 3, what would the impact be on the social web? What would be the value of Twitter then? Also you could possibly spot the unemployed people in your network because they would be the only ones allowed (no corporate oversight) to post/tweet publicly.

Hehehe. George Orwell – 1984 anyone?

The difficult part is in deciding WHAT to measure. Measuring ROI directly to the bottom line from soft activities, that's next to impossible. But with a little creativity, measuring increased customer satisfaction, positive interactions, increased word of mouth, etc. makes finding an indirect link between online activities and an increase or decrease in a company's sales pretty simple.

What Dell has done with social media and their online Twitter sales is a great example. I don't think it would be fair to say that Dell made $3M because they started posting deals on Twitter. I do think it is fair to say that sales from the Twitter feed were certainly enhanced because of increased visibility of good customer service. Again, there is no way to measure exactly what that impact is, but there is certainly enough data available to make a strong case for the fact that Dell's online customer service efforts had an impact.

So, to measure or not to measure? That isn't the question. What to measure? That's a better one. We may never know the direct correlation of our soft activities, but being able to back them up with goals and measurements of success is an invaluable part to evaluating our efforts and moving forward. How does Lionel Menchaca expect to improve Dell's performance and customer service efforts through social media if he has no benchmarking or ways of measuring success? He can't.