One of the things I do for my day job is manage the sales of sponsorships, exhibit space and advertising for a non-profit professional society.  For a variety of reasons I’m often asked where our customers’ offices are located.  For instance my client might have a local event and want to target companies in that region for sponsorships.  Typically I just do a search of my database by zip code or state, which works fine for areas I’m very familiar with, but it’s tough for me to get a sense of how many companies we deal with in an area I’m not familiar with.  For instance I’m very familiar with the northeast corridor of the US so I don’t have a problem pulling the data together very quickly for a Philadelphia event, but I’m not at all familiar with the western US so I’m not at all sure if a company in Calabasas is a good prospect for a local event in San Francisco. 

Yesterday I decided to take some time and use Google Maps’ new My Maps feature and load in my vendor database. Note: I wouldn’t do this if you couldn’t make the map "private" so that it can’t be searched or found by others, but I can share the page with whomever I want which makes it a good collaborative tool with my client.  Since there are several hundred records in my database I decided to input only the exhibitors from this year’s conference to see if it was worth the effort.  After putting in the 60+ companies I looked at the result and was amazed to see how much it changed my perspective.  Not only did it give me a good sense of how my exhibitors were distributed, but it allowed me to zoom in on a city and click on the little balloons for each company and see who was in Washington or Philly or wherever.  Very cool.

I did a little more playing around and found out that I could download the map to view in Google Earth.  That caused me to remember an article in Business 2.0 about a company that allows you to "mashup" your own data with Google Maps via a free service called Geocommons.  I went to Geocommons.com and signed up for a free account, and then tried to upload a file but found that it had to be in KML format which I know nothing about (i.e. I was in over my head).  So I did a search on KML and found a website called batchgeocode.com that will take data from an Excel spreadsheet or any tab-delimited file and convert it to KML.  I used the site to convert my vendor data to KML and then opened it in Google Earth.  Voila, all of my vendors are now mapped on Google Earth and I can zoom in and click on the little icon and see all the contact information right there.  VERY cool and I didn’t have to actually type in all the data.

I’m sure there are applications for this that I haven’t even imagined, but if you give me enough time I’m sure I can find something totally ridiculous to do with it.  If nothing else I’m good at figuring out how to quickly turn the useful into the inane.