Great news for Notice Technologies.  We were recently awarded our first Government 2.0 contract with Austin's SBDP (Small Business Development Program).  For those of you who don't know much about the Austin SBDP, it's a government organization sponsored by the City of Austin that helps promote ~250 unique Austin businesses in 8 popular "Small Biz districts".  Our task with this project is to conduct better internet marketing for the ExploreLocalAustin.com web site, which is a portal designed to give consumers more information about these businesses and their offerings.  It fits our core strengths in internet marketing, internet advertising, social marketing, and local online advertising.

This project is very similar in some ways to New York City's attempt to help promote local businesses.  NYCGo has actually already launched and its Twitter account has over 500 followers already.

We're really excited about this project because we're going to get a chance to learn more about local online advertising, albeit from a different angle… the Government angle.  We have spoken with a number of different companies who do a great job with local advertising — directory services, telecommunications companies, newspapers large & small, and perhaps most importantly small business owners themselves.  Government similarly has a role and we're starting to see experiments here in Austin, NYC, and a handful of other cities.  Lots of stakeholders are involved, yet nobody has yet solved the business issues surrounding modernized local advertising.

This project will be great for us.  We'll help the City of Austin solve its immediate needs to better market its ExploreLocalAustin.com web site.  We'll also be a lot smarter about how government fits into the local advertising game.

Onward!