The first Meetup for TIMEOC is tonight! Did you RSVP yet? (http://www.meetup.com/timeoc)

There are four sections to the meetings, including INTRO TIMEOC, TALK TIMEOC, FREE TIMEOC, and IDEA TIMEOC.   For tonight’s FREE TIMEOC we are going to discuss Google Earth and how to geocode addresses so you can turn them into pins for a map.  This can be useful in several ways, including visualizing where your customers are located, where prospects are located, where “holes” in your prospecting areas are, where your friends are, etc.  All of the tools are free so it also might just be fun to play with!

The instructions are found here: http://processtrends.com/pg_google_earth.htm

A couple of things I needed to do to make MapExcelData.xls work:

1. On the Geocode Config tab, be sure to fill out the Location of googleearth.exe correctly.  I changed the default to:

C:Program FilesGoogleGoogle Earthclientgoogleearth.exe

2. On the KML_details tab, I changed the Filepath to:

C:Documents and SettingsjduncombeDesktopkml_DEMO.kml

The geocoding service can be a little spotty, so here is some other free/paid sources to use if you need a backup:

http://geocoder.us/

http://onemarco.com/2007/06/03/geocoding-with-the-google-maps-api/

http://batchgeo.com/

Good luck and be sure to post in the comments if you have questions or success stories. See you tonight!