Jeff Korhan offers three tips on how your company can one-up larger players in your market by doing something revolutionary: understanding your market better than they do.

Here’s the latest cool stuff we found online this week. Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

• A good national round-up of water headlines from @EwingIrrigation
• The difference between PR and advertising.
• The secret formula for great customer service.
• Jeff Korhan on personal vs. business social media accounts.
• Design inspiration from Burle Marx.
• Richard Restuccia will speak on how to green your grounds program next week.
• Stewcare has a pretty robust YouTube channel.
• Above: How Bill Murray, tuxedos and a network of chubby rodents made Groundhog Day a national holiday.

Here’s a collection of some of the best stuff we found this week. Enjoy!

• Ron Edmonds at the Principium Group has a good collection of major acquisitions from 2011.
• Cynthia Barnett has a new book on how we can fix America’s water crisis. (Via UTNE)
• Today is Epiphany, so you’re allowed to take down your Christmas tree. Here are a few ideas on what to do with it.
• 2012 looks bleak for consumer spending.
• ArtisTree supervisor exceeds customer expectations, refuses customer kisses.
• Jeff Korhan’s predictions for business and social media in 2012. (Better content, more videos.)
• Why marketing for small companies follows the “fake-it-til-you-make-it” model.
• Above: A good illustration of turf’s benefits from BASF TurfTalk.

Editor’s note: The L&L team will be out today through next Monday for the holidays. So, we’ve compiled a (mostly) Christmas-themed round-up for you. Enjoy!

• Jeff Korhan on why you should write every day, and how Stephen King can help.
• Davey launches a new mobile app to calculate the value of trees on a property.
• Woody Guthrie’s list of New Year’s rulin’s. (See related here and here.)
• Thanks to the crushing Texas drought, a mistletoe shortage threatens a loveable (if somewhat creepy) Christmas tradition.
• The year in photos from National Geographic.
• Seth Godin: “No one ever bought anything in an elevator.”
• When was the last time you saw a robotic chainsaw reindeer? That’s what I thought. (via @VoiceOfTreeCare and @husqvarnausa)

Above: Image via the wonderful Jessica Hagy’s Indexed.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project last week released a report on how consumers use the web to find information on local businesses.

Key findings from the report include:

• 47% say they rely most on the internet to learn more about local businesses
• 36% rely most on search engines
• 30% rely most on newspapers
• 22% rely on word of mouth from family and friends
• 1% rely on social network sites or Twitter

You can read the report summary here, or download the whole report as a PDF.

One thing that surprised me from the report was how low social media ranks. While customers might not seek out or use your Twitter feed or Facebook page to learn more about you all the time, using those platforms to create original content will improve your search engine rankings.

I asked some of our regular social media contributors to weigh in on the report, and here’s what they had to say:

Jeff Korhan:

This is interesting.  Seems a lot of folks trust search engines and media more than their friends (social media)!

One more reason for creating great online content – and getting it shared on sites outside of Facebook where it can provide search benefits.

Jason Cupp:

Very interesting.  I’m not surprised though.  Most “casual” social media followers don’t use the medium to the extent that it could be used.  For example, I recently tweeted (last weekend to be exact) “What is a great Sunday brunch location in downtown KC?” Since I have a lot of followers from the KC area, and have some SM influence here, I got some replied and ended up going to one of the places that was tweeted to me – and it was more than awesome!

SM requires dedication and time to build followers and influence and is an ACTIVE discussion online.  Without that activity, there is no reply.  Most don’t have any activity in their SM world – including Facebook.  That said, internet browser information is static.  You can instantly type something into a search engine and get a reply, so most people go to what they know best.

Unfortunately, those results are often biased by geographic location, number of reviews on Yelp, Google, and well as blog entries, reviews, etc.  It’s not nearly as organic as going to your “friends” for a referral, which in the landscape world, we all know is the best kind of business development tool.

Also, the cohort searching for you online, according to the Pew study, is likely female, college-educated and has a household income of $75,000 or more. Sounds like the target demo for most landscape companies I’ve talked to recently.

And, no surprise, nearly a quarter of respondents said they rely on friends and family.

So, it makes sense to continue to invest in online marketing and social media to promote yourself. But, at the end of the say, a happy customer is still one of your best marketing tools, however you reach them in the first place.

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