Go to the Facebook homepage. Log into your account by typing your email address and password into the space provided and clicking the button marked “Login.”

Navigate to your Facebook fan page. Look the fan page over to make sure that you meet the prerequisites for having a custom vanity URL. You need to be an Administrator of the fan page and the page must have a minimum of 25 fans.

Go to the Facebook username menu by single clicking in browser’s address bar to place the cursor in it. Type “facebook.com/username” and click the “Enter” button. Note that you should actually type the word “username.” Do not substitute this with your personal user name.

Review the username menu screen. The screen is divided, with the top half devoted to your personal Facebook page, and the bottom half devoted to the fan pages of which you are an Administrator. Look over the page and familiarize yourself with the layout.

If you have 25 or more Fans get this done!

Click the drop down menu on the bottom half of the screen to retrieve a list of fan pages you administrate. Click on the page for which you wish to create a custom vanity url.

Choose a unique url. Type the address that you would like to use into the box provided as “facebook.com/myname,” replacing the “myname” portion with the actual name you would like to use. Click the “Check Availability” button to confirm that the selection is not already in use by another fan page, then click “Save” to complete the process.

Just remember: names will be given out on a first come, first served basis. Certain exceptions will be made for public figures and trademarked names, but that’s probably not an option unless your name is Madonna

Check out Appbrain

For example small applications (Networking 2.0) for iphones translate Google Business Listing & Google Maps and translate that information on the fly to direct a user to the top BBQ listing along a freeway and then the user is directed to their restaurant choice.

Where to Eat? Finding restaurants using GPS

There are two take home messages from an application like this. First you need to continually work on being on the top 10 box of Google maps.  In this example the iphone application starts with a list of the top ten BBQ restaurants that the odds are great that the user will select from.  The second point is that the Top 10 lists are not perfect as the #8 choice is not even a restaurant.  This shows that developing this information is still in its infancy and you, as a smart restaurateur, can quickly get on this list, as it may not be very competitive.

The other finer point is that as a restaurateur, if you really want to work on this aspect of your advertising you need to make sure that you are categorizing your business around the list of options in the GPS software.  In this application the list looks like this:

Restaurant Categories

I have not researched if most of the applications use the same catagories, but I would bet that the developers of these applications are not trying to change the world on the data side, but like most databased applications are looking to use standard data-sets, that Google and other large search engines supply.

I thought it would be useful to discuss how all the Guerilla Marketing tools come together for the local bike shop. The example below was for the promotion of a bi-annual bike swap meet.

Bring new Customers to your Shop

Results:
More than 200 people came to the swap meet. People traveled up to 100 miles to participate. Present customers were able to sell old bikes themselves or consign bikes to the shop for the day. For the day (Sunday) sales were up almost 100% compared to the average Sunday during the Fall season. ~50% of the customers that consigned their used bikes to the shop used the cash toward purchasing new bikes over the next 10 days.

Tools used:

Shop Newsletter – Shop has a monthly news letter where the Swap Meet has been highlighted each month. A special short newsletter was sent on the Friday before the Sunday Swap meet. This special newsletter had a 30% increase in opens compared to normal monthly newsletter (38% compared to ~25%)

Consignment Used Bikes – The week before we took in an extra 10 bikes to increase our listing of used bike on Craigslist. Each bike listed on Craigslist had an image Ad discussing the Bike Swap Meet. Traffic from Craigslist for the week before the Swap Meet increase over 300% and equaled the normal traffic to the shop website from Google Search (~1,500 unique visitors).

Craigslist- Listing of a “Free Swap Meet” was promoted in both the local craigslist and the three other surrounding local craigslist areas for two weeks prior to the Swap Meet.

Shop Blog – Increased posts about the shop and new products coming from Trek. Unique visitors to blog were up ~50% for the week and traffic from blog to website increase ~20%.

Facebook – Event was placed on Business page and individual Facebook page over the two weeks prior to the event.

Twitter – Event was “tweeted” from the shop twitter account day before the event and then retweeted to several other twitter accounts – This activity was tracked to ~4000 followers.

Google Analytics – All internet activities were tracked for next day information of what was working and what was not working

Background:
This was the third swap meet for the bike shop. Other than the promotion effort outlined above there was no additional advertising money used for the event.

Conclusion:
The swap meet continues to be a great event to both drive existing customers to purchase new bikes by selling old and bring new awareness / new customers to the shop. The use of Craigslist was amazing for both the promotion of the swap meet and awareness of the bike shop.

Creating HTML newsletters & emails should always be created to communicate with your customers. They are a greater effort and should be sent from a provider that can track clicks to understand customer interests and effectiveness. Keep your newsletters interesting, short as possible and deliver greater content on your website. HTML communication should always drive customers to your website.
Click here to get a list of providers of Email Marketing Providers

Constant Contact is more mature having more templates and a better html editor.  It is more expensive, but if you are new to creating emails and want to have the best tools possible this is the one to go with.

MailChimp is not as robust, but does have a starting free version for less than 500 contacts and 3000 email sends.