More cities and coverage in Building Maker

Hot on the heels of the new 3D buildings feature for Android, Google has now made it easier to add 3D buildings to Google Earth with the expansion of a few cities in their excellent Building Maker tool.

In particular, the coverage area for Fresno, Lake Tahoe, Austin, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Diego and St. Louis have all been expanded to allow you to model more of the sub-urban areas around the cities. For example, look at the map of Phoenix below; the blue outline shows the previous coverage, while the white outline shows the new coverage — a major increase!

phoenix-building-maker.jpg

To try it for yourself, simply head over to the Building Maker site and give it a shot.

Bradbury on First Things

“Notoriety and a fat bank balance must come after everything else is finished and done.”

–Ray Bradbury (1920 – )

American writer

We do well in our work by being valuable to someone else.

That’s it.

It seems to me that too many of us forget this too often… allowing ourselves to slip in and out of some state of ego-driven entitlement rather than obsessing over making good things happen for other people (so sad).

We need to get over ourselves and kick@ss for others. We do that and everything works.

The people at Netflix get it. They call it being a “stunning colleague.”

Don’t you love that… a stunning colleague? Aren’t stunning colleagues what we all want from the people we work with (and what we all want to be for others… yes, you do)?

We need to get tired of mediocrity and indifference and be positively surprising to our colleagues and customers (and managers). We need to encourage each other more.

How?

Stop seeking the complex answer and embrace the simple one. Handle what it is you’ve been given to do. Contribute your piece of the equation.

“You gotta take responsibility for the place you hold here.” – Oprah Winfrey

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Consumer Attitudes and the Recommendations of Local Business

Bightlocal has released their findings from their Local Consumer Review Survey 2010, Part 3.

The survey highlights some interesting findings –
27% of consumers have recommended a local business on Facebook – rising to 32% in female consumers & also in younger consumers (aged 16-34)
Reliability, Professionalism & Friendliness are the most important traits that lead to a customer recommending a business
52% of customers would more likely to recommend a business if it had a good special offer.
40% of customers would be more likely to recommend a local business if they benefited directly

You should visit the site for all of the information but here are some of the highlights that interested me.

Which of these local business types have you/would you recommend to someone you know if you had a good or bad experience?

The types of businesses that are most frequently recommended are those that are most frequently used.

In the last 12 months have you recommended a local business to people you know by any of the following methods?

People are more lilkely to use word of mouth and Facebook to recommend local businesses than a review site.

Would you be more likely to recommend a local business to people you know if they had a good value offer or discount?

Folks are obviously motivated by self interest.

As Myles points out the things that people find important to recommend a business have always been the things that they have found important. A business should be friendly, professional and offer good value in the form of incentives.

But the survey raises the question of how, when and where a business should engage in the process and what value reviews have. Hopefully more on that tomorrow.