FortiusOne’s CEO Sean Gorman, Ph.D. discusses how the company uses social media to share advanced geospatial technologies to the market. Sean is a recognized expert in geospatial analysis and virtualization and was honored this year with Bisnow’s Top 35 under 35. FortiusOne was also recognized as one of the 100 “Most Promising” companies driving the future of technology.

FortiusOne spun out of George Mason University in 2005 to provide next generation location intelligence. How? By connecting the powerful analysis of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with the open and intuitive GeoWeb. In other words, we provide the ability to make better decisions based on statistical data using an easy, fun interface similar to Google Maps. In fact, it is our mission to bring geographic data and analysis to the mass market. Traditionally such tools and data have been bottled up in proprietary desktop software that requires a trained professional to utilize.

One of the big challenges in achieving our mission and helping enterprises make better decisions with geospatial data is education. The value proposition of geospatial data requires an understanding of the ease with which data can be visualized and analyzed. This provided a great opportunity for the company to leverage the Web for direct marketing to achieve our objectives. To accomplish this we utilized two big assets: Our blog (Off the Map) and our public technology demonstration site, GeoCommons.com.

GeoCommons is a crowdsourced repository of geospatial data where anyone can quickly make a map and add their own data on top of it. There are over 6,000 datasets with 200,000 attributes to map ranging from IED attacks in Afghanistan to the census of India to carbon emissions in Florida. Within the GeoCommons destination we offer Finder! for locating and organizing geospatial data and Maker! for creating interactive visualizations of the data on maps.

The GeoCommons site serves three primary functions.

1. A tool to collect geospatial data around the globe
2. A Web scale demonstration of the technology
3. An application to generate leads and educate the market on our capabilities and value proposition.

In order to maximize the power of the GeoCommons site we leverage our blog to drive traffic and generate leads within target verticals. We do this through two different angles:

• Breaking news stories; and
• Use cases for verticals we are selling into.

Most news stories have a geospatial aspect to them, so as stories break we find relevant data and post up maps providing new insights on the event. For instance, during Hurricane Ike we generated maps illustrating the potential impact on oil wells in the Gulf and refineries on shore. The Discovery Channel and ABC News picked up on the work and used the data for their broadcasts.

The second way we leverage the blog is to convey uses cases relevant to validate our target markets and generate feedback from the market. For example, we’ve been investigating financial services as a possible target market and generated a use case showing the impact of the Wells Fargo-Wachovia merger. This not only generates leads for us but helps the team validate a new market and test the viability of technology and feature set for it. Further, it builds a growing library of uses cases and value propositions that we can refer customers and prospects to as the company grows.

As the Social Web evolves there are ever expanding opportunities to tie viral direct marketing into your operations. For instance we recently added GetSatisfaction.com to our tool set so we could collect and organize feedback on our products more effectively. Now we have a live and growing repository of bugs and positive accolades about GeoCommons. While all these tools are effective it takes a solid integrated strategy for them to succeed, otherwise organizations run the risk of wasting resources without a solid return on investment. It also critical to keep your strategy nimble, so you can adapt to rapidly evolving technologies. Definitely don’t be afraid to scrap something if it is not working or requires lots of resources. One of the beauties of Web 2.0 is the speed with which services can be set up and taken down, so never feel locked in to one way of accomplishing a task.

If you would like to learn more about GeoCommons (great for mapping out your customer demographics and direct marketing efforts) and the services provided by FortiusOne, check out http://www.geocommons.com and http://www.fortiusone.com.