It's funny to see where your own social networks will take you if you follow them and take the time to get to know interesting people. One of Cognitive Metaphors' mascot projects is for a guy I met through my neighbor whose wife was the realtor who sold us our house. After getting to know me and my moonlighting entrepreneurial tendencies, my neighbor introduced me to Tony Euganeo. Tony works for the US Postal Service with my neighbor on the hardware side - think mail sorters and huge machinery. Tony's got a side business which he is passionate about providing locksmith services for classic cars, particularly for Porshe's. He loves the internet and was an early adopter of selling his services and restored locks and keys on EBay. He's also what Malcolm Gladwell of Tipping Point fame would call a Maven. He's very well connected and respected within the Porsche community. I met Tony two years ago and we became fast friends. Along with my friend Brad Smith, we've been trying to cook up the technology to support some of Tony's ideas for providing and collecting hard to find content for the classic car restoration community. Tony didn't have a website set up when we met but had previously owned a domain name www.lockandkeyid.com. I set him up with a website that had his basic information and a scanned key chart of keys that matched old porsches. The site sat around for a while and we coded away in PHP on some ideas for a lock to key to car model information management application. Two years into it and not much is out there. People who knew what we were doing started to ride us pretty hard. What can I say? Life is pretty busy sometimes and it's hard to build that sense of urgency needed to go after the opportunities that life presents. Where does the sense of urgency come from? Tony E. kept telling us that there was a market out there for his stuff. He could imagine a whole car restoration social network that would come, contribute to information, read information, and even spend money on his site. I've focused much of my career on business intelligence and not web development so my web development coding skills until recently have not been enough to build things quickly. I'm working on that. In the meantime, I decided to clean up Tony's site with some newly acquired knowledge about CSS. I also added some Google Analytics tags. In my old job, we used a more expensive tool called Omniture that ran on the same principles of adding tags to your code that told a host server about visits to your site. Google Analytics right away helped us to see the opportunities that Tony E was talking about. Take a look at the map of visits for Jan 2007. World wide baby! I've been reading a book on Google Analytics (Wiley) lately. I've also read a chapter of search engine optimization in Google Hacks (Orielly). Here's some guidelines I found through Digg or Slashdot that made sense to me from Scoreboard-Media: click here. This one on Web Monkey is pretty good too: click here. One of the key points in all these articles is to be who you say you are and let your content reflect that. Well, if you take a look at what Google Analytics is saying people search for to get to Euganeo's site, you see "Porsche Locksmith". How simple is that? In fact, when I search for Porsche Locksmith on major search engines, the little site we put together with some services information, EBay rankings, and a Porsche key blank chart is consistently in the top 5 and in many cases number one or two. That's without paying a dime to Google or anyone help for a higher ranking. I'm encouraged to build on what we've got here. Brad is a great PHP code slinger and I'm getting there with my Ruby on Rails skills. Throw in a little more web analytics and business intelligence, add in some great content from Tony E and his Porsche enthusiast buddies, and you've got yourself something. Hopefully, we can make it go 'poof' as Tony E likes to put it. If the early signs with very little content are an indication, the only thing that is stopping us is getting incrementally more pertinent information out there along with some social network/community type tools ala discussion boards, mailing lists, ecommerce, etc.