See Carolina Connect 2010 for more info.

Thursday! Thursday! Thursday! Bryan Freeborn brings the blitz. One day only! Get the blitz “bestowed” upon ye. Special appearance by Go-Go the Gorilla.

He, Bryan, not Go-Go, is a firehouse of ideas, all good, and this is your chance for some free goodness. He offered to buy an Ideation Blitz shirt for me and I turned him down, to my everlasting regret. And I don’t even wear t-shirts. That thing turned out sweet!

May 13 at The Renaissance in downtown Asheville. Come an’ get it!

“I— Am— Sil-ho-uette Man, In-ter-view-ing peo-ple as fast as I can…”

First time I’ve used the Flip camera in the conference room at the new office. Now I know. Don’t sit in front of the windows, too much backlight. I had a great meeting with Eric and Trevor at Lab Escape. They are from a software company, based in Asheville, that makes “heat map” products.

“Lab Escape provides information visualization solutions for businesses seeking to better understand their data. Our products include our Tree Map, which shows trends and highlights anomalies, and our Data Map SDK, which provides support for building your own data maps.”

It’s an interesting business with several big name clients. I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to say beyond that but when I say big I mean el grande. So if you’re wrestling with great gobs of data, trying to make sense of it all, check out their heat map software.

Heat maps can help you visualize:

“Sales Performance
Risk Management
Market Share Analysis
Asset Management
Market Basket Analysis
Network Monitoring
Investment Performance
Budget Analysis
Portfolio Management
Performance Tracking
Trend Detection
Opportunity Analysis”

That’s all for now.

I recently spoke to the incoming class at the business incubator here in Asheville about creating content to promote their businesses. This video shows the mind map I used in that talk. There are a lot of benefits to creating content for your site, no matter type of business you have. The ideas presented here are things anyone can do to get started.

Download the entire interactive SEO Content Creation mind map.

Let me know if you want info on a particular topic.

My first meeting was with Stephen (fellow cyclist!) who has had a successful promotional products business for several years but more recently moved into the incubator to take advantage of some of the great resources available there. To get into the incubator you don’t have to be a start-up, just a business with plans to grow and create jobs in the area.

I also met with David of Horizons Wealth Management. His company provides fee-only financial advice. I was a long-time employee at The Motley Fool (Fool.com) and we were big advocates of fee-only advisory services. No conflicts!

Everyone I’ve met with recently at the incubator is interested in social media marketing as a way to drive more leads. I plan to put together some videos with actionable steps for various things like Facebook Fan Pages to Twitter to LinkedIn. Stay tuned. Of course, I’ll take requests if there’s a topic you want to know more about. Just let me know in the comments.

Barry of Golden Needle (GoldenNeedleOnline.com) and I discussed everything from social media (Twitter, etc.) to SEO for their sprawling site. They sell acupuncture, herbal and medical supplies.

I also met Steve of Spectralight Images, LLC who offers 3DS Max online training. His company is developing new ways to deliver training for some very sophisticated software.

And Angela has a really interesting business model that I wish could tell you about. Her business is launching soon. More on that one later.