We've witnessed some interesting uses of Google Earth and Maps lately.  Most recently, Google released a holiday layer for Google Earth that gave folks a chance to find toys hidden all over the world.  They also released a geography layer that pulls information from Wikipedia and other information sources to make Google Earth even more of a learning tool.  The European Space Agency released a layer that adds many of its own high definition images of Earth from space to Google Earth.  KML made its way into Google Maps and allows for people to link all kinds of information and pictures to locations on the map.  And Pentaho integrated its extensive business intelligence information into the services to give business managers detailed intelligence on a geographic level.

In yet another example of the uses of Google Maps for businesses, the Google CPG blog has a post about a possible Google Maps extension for a marketing campaign by the California Milk Advisory Board.

The board had posted "Got Milk" signs at bus shelters around San Francisco and permeated the shelters with the smell of fresh baked cookies.  The idea was to combine people's reaction to the smell of cookies with the "Got Milk" signs.  Although the campaign had to be terminated after activists said "smell sensitive" people could affected, the folks at Google went ahead and create a demo map showing the location of all the bus shelters that were ripe with fresh cookie scent.

Sometimes a map might not seem like a no-brainer idea at the start of a campaign.  But once it enters the picture, such a map just seems to make sense.  How could you do something similar with one of your marketing campaigns?  If you have physical locations in addition to online ones, it could be as simple as a custom map of your locations.  It could be as ingenious as the cookie map or the Pentaho maps.

Google makes tools like Maps customizable so that companies can do these types of things with it.  Why not take advantage of the possibilities?