Add Patch.com To Your Social Media Toolbox

If you are a small business, restaurant or service provider, then you need to add Patch.com to your social media marketing toolbox.

What is Patch.com?

According to the Patch.com website, “ Patch is a new way to find out about, and participate in, what’s going on near you.”  Essentially, it is a hyper-local city-specific online resource for local news, events, discussions, photos and directory for business.  The Los Angeles Times carried an article titled “Trying to Patch into the hyper-local news market” that provides a good overview of Patch and there is more on their About webpage.  Patch.com is now owned by AOL and each local Patch.com site has a local editor who oversees the publication and is responsible for creating content with the help of volunteer citizen journalists.

Patch.com has been rolling out local “patches” since 2009 and the map below shows where Patch.com is available.

In Manhattan Beach where I live, we have been lucky to have manhattanbeach.patch.com for more than a year now.  Even though we have two very good weekly newspapers (The Beach Reporter and The Easy Reader), Patch provides a valuable service that goes beyond the weekly print publications.  For example, our Manhattan Beach Patch often breaks local news stories before they are reported by other publications and they do a great job of covering local sports.

How Can Patch.com help promote your business?

Patch has several ways to promote your business.

Claim your listing – Each local Patch has a section called Places where local businesses are offered free listings.  Most of the directory has already been completed with rudimentary information about local businesses.  To maximize their profile, business owners should claim their listing which will let you update and add additional information or pictures too.

Add events – You can also add events to a business listing.  Are you having a special event in your restaurant this month?  Are you sponsoring a charitable event?  Patch lets you easily add events that can be tied to your business listing.

Advertise on Patch – Finally, Patch offers paid advertising for local business too.

Encourage reviews and ratings – Patch users can also rank and rate businesses listed on Patch.com.  So make sure to remind your customers that you are on Patch and ask them to rate you.

What does a Patch.com profile look like?

I am actually taking my own advice and set up a business profile on Patch.com last week.  As I am an independent consultant without a real address, I was not automatically added to the list of businesses in Manhattan Beach.  So, I submitted my information and created a listing for my consulting business.  Now that the listing has been activated, I can add photos, videos and PDFs to my profile too – plus the listing uses SEO-friendly URLs as well (http://manhattanbeach.patch.com/listings/the-humbarger-consulting-group in my case).

The Humbarger Consulting Company on Patch.com

Work-Beach Conundrum

This sign is on a fence near my house in Manhattan Beach, and it’s a great thought to share on a beautiful and lazy Spring Friday.

A Philosophical Quandary from Manhattan Beach

Is it really a choice?  See you at the beach!

What’s Your Twitter Grade?

Are you Twittering yet?  If you are and you’re competitive like most people, then you’ll probably want to find out how you stack up against others. 

Internet Marketing Company Hubspot offers a great (and free) tool called Twitter Grader which lets you grade yourself and others.  You simply type in your Twitter username or the name of someone else and in a few seconds, you get back a report that assigns a score based on some secret algorithm that must look at the number of Tweets, frequency of Tweets, number of people following you and number of followers.

My Twitter Grade is 99 out of 100 which puts me in the top 17,001 of all people who Twitter.  In Manhattan Beach where I live, I am actually #3 on the list of Twitter “elite”.

Twitter Grader - Tom Humbarger

There is also a new feature which lists the top 50 “Twittering” cities and the Twitter elite in each city.  This is a great way to get connected with the key people who use Twitter and a way to build the number of people you follow in your field or in your community.  You can also search for other locations and locate people where you live.  Another nice feature is the list of suggested people to follow and the ability to view a user’s history of followers and followees over the last 6 months.

Twitter Grader - Top Users in Manhattan Beach

The interface is very clean and easy to use.   Check it out and see how you stack up!  You should also check out the HubSpot marketing blog as it has many great tips on the use of internet marketing.

25 Things You May Not Know About Me

25 Things You May Not Know About Me

My friends Heather Strout and Derek Showerman recently wrote blog posts on the “25 Things You May Not Know About Me” – and Heather ‘tagged’ me on her blog to add my own 25 things.

Actually, this turned out to be a fun exercise as I thought about the bits of my life that people probably don’t know about me:

1. I met my wife Nancy on a blind date and she is the best thing that has happened to me (and I don’t tell her enough how important she is to me).  We’ll be married 10 years in June and we share our anniversary with my parents.
2. I have 4 great children – Scott-18, Brian-16, Henry-8 and Kit-2, and I can discuss anything from college admissions and AP classes to Sponge Bob and diapers.
3. I was born in Toledo, Ohio (the Glass Capital of the World and home to the Toledo Mud Hens) and grew up in Oregon, Ohio (a suburb directly to the east of Toledo and not to be confused with the state of Oregon which is actually pronounced differently).  There was a Humbarger listed in a Revolutionary
   

   Toledo Mud Hens

   Regiment from Pennsylvania, but I haven’t figured out if I’m related yet.  My parents are still in great health, and my older sister Linda lives in Shaker Heights, Ohio and my younger brother Gary who lives in San Francisco.  As John Denver noted in his famous and hilarious song about Toledo, “Saturday Night in Toledo Ohio is like being nowhere at all” which pretty much sums up why I moved to Minneapolis after college.

4. My first job was as a paperboy delivering The Toledo Morning Times, and I also shelved books in the public library during high school.
5. I’m an Eagle Scout – and the highlights of my scouting career were the two high adventure trips I took (hiking at Philmont Ranch in New Mexico and canoeing in the Boundary Waters of Northern Minnesota and Canada).
6. I’m the Cub Scout Leader for my youngest son’s Cub Den – and I look great in my uniform.
7. I played ice hockey during the 6 years I lived in Minneapolis, and I’ve been living in California (either Hermosa Beach or Manhattan Beach) for the last 21 years where I dumped hockey for beach volleyball.
   

   Sunset at Manhattan Beach

8. I have visited all 50 of the United States – including those hard-to-believe-anyone-would-visit states like North and South Dakota.  I’ve also visited Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland, England, Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, Mexico and Brazil.
9. I am a huge fan of Natalie Merchant (with or without the other 9,999 Maniacs) and Nanci Griffith.
10. I also love marching band music because I played cornet in Bowling Green‘s marching band for 4 years during college (Go Falcons – Ay Ziggy!).  I am not musically gifted and constantly pissed off the music majors because I never knew if I was in tune or not – but I could play very loud.
    

    Bowling Green

11. My favorite all-time baseball team is the 1968 Detroit Tigers and I can still name the starting lineup.  The Tigers and Mickey Lolich won the World Series over the Cardinals and Bob Gibson in 7 games that year, but now I’m mostly an Angels fan.
12. I prefer a well-crafted micro-brew over any other adult beverage.
13. I’ve been a runner for 33 years – and have a best times of 4:41 in the mile and 2:04 in the 1/2 mile (but not since high school).  I also ran the Cleveland and Twin Cities Marathons, but I’ve retired from that distance too.  Scott, my oldest son, seems to have caught my running gene too.
14. My greatest athletic feat is swimming the 2-mile Pier-to-Pier swim from Hermosa Beach to Manhattan Beach (twice) because I had to overcome my Midwestern fear of unseen creatures and not being able to touch bottom.
15. I have never smoked pot – which probably disqualifies me from ever being President of the United States (until I decide to light one up).
16. I could watch M*A*S*H re-runs any time of the day and now that West Wing is in re-runs, the only must-see TV for me currently is This Old House and Top Chef.
17. My favorite movies are Bull Durham, Mystery Alaska and The Sound of Music – and I could watch them anytime too.
18. I was the drum major for my high school marching band and had to learn how to twirl a baton.
19. My family used to vacation for same 2 weeks every summer in the same cabin on the same lake (Big Manistique) in the UP (Upper Peninsula of Michigan).
20. I’m a CPA and still hold non-practicing licenses in Ohio and Minnesota.
21. Tony Packo’s Hungarian Hot Dog restaurant in Toledo is my favorite restaurant, but I only eat there when I visit my parents.  Tony Packo’s is in the same neighborhood that my mom and grandparents grew up in East Toledo, and Jamie Farr memorialized the restaurant in several episodes of M*A*S*H.  Whenever celebrities come to Toledo, they always swing by Packos to sign a hot dog bun and the walls of the restaurant are covered with signed hot dog buns.
    

    Tony Packo's in Toledo

22. I cut my own hair and haven’t visited a barber in 12 years.
23. I wear boxers.
24. My high school computer class used a teletype terminal and we stored our programs on paper ticker tape.  My first college computer class used IBM punch cards – and I got to use one of the first Macintoshes when they came out in 1984.
25. I’m turning 50 this year and my first memories are of the activities around President Kennedy’s assasination and funeral.  I remember being royally pissed off that my cartoons were pre-empted for round-the-clock TV coverage.

So, who else wants to share?