Main and Me is the fastest, easiest and FREE-est way to put your town online in a day so online shoppers will know what’s for sale in the brick and mortar stores around them–and stop defaulting to Amazon every time they buy a pair of shoes.

To that end, one of the best ways to begin putting your town online in a day is to organize a photo mob as follows:

If you are a downtown executive director:

• Notify your merchant members in advance that on such-and-such a morning, a photo mob of volunteers will be coming around to “put your town online in a day.”
• Explain that Main and Me is free and there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by allowing respectful volunteers to snap photos of storefronts and approximately 20 photos of merchandise in each business

If you are a photo mob volunteer, “Snap, caption and check in” photos:

• Snap flattering photos of each store’s facade, and up to 20 individual items inside that store.
• Click here to see examples of both storefront and item photos
• Return to photo mob headquarters & download your photos to your laptop computer
• (for the tech-inclined: make uploading faster by using Photoshop to compress photos to 800 pixels wide/high)
• log in to mainandme.com, click the ADD button, then caption and check-in photos (i.e. name them, price them, describe them, and tag them with relevant search terms) then follow the prompts to create new–or add photos to existing–stores in the database.
• at the end of the day, invite merchants to visit and claim their newly-minted, FREE store pages

If you are a merchant:

• follow the link to your page (provided by the photo mob organizer) then claim your newly-minted page to edit, describe and tag photos to maximize their SEO (search engine optimization)
• share links to your page with your customer email list so customers can begin adding things from your store to their seasonal wish lists and registries.

For more things you can do to leverage the power of Main and Me, click here.