Nashville.com continues a series today titled, "... meets Google.” The premise? Simple. We have a quick conversation with the decision makers, founders, entrepreneurs that guide an enterprise photographed by Kerry Woo. Woo serves Google as a Nashville based Google Trusted Photographer for the Google Business Photos project producing 360º Interactive Images and Point of Interest Photography.

When a local business introduces Google360 into their marketing mix, they enter a world of open invitation and transparency. Their inner workings, at least the inner workings of their work space, are exposed. We thought it would be an interesting project to feature these forward thinking businesses on Nashville’s World Wide Brand on the web, Nashville.com.

Today we visit with Rustici Software’s Jeffery Horne. Rustici Software is located in Franklin, TN.  

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(N) What does your establishment find most attractive about doing business in Nashville?

(Jeffery) Nashville is one of the most creative cities in the country. Couple that with the quickly growing tech/software community that Nashville is really becoming known for, and it’s easy to see why Nashville is the perfect city for a software company like ours. The quality of creative and tech talent that you find in here is just unmatched.

Nashville is also very different from other cities with respect to our sense of community. Nashville people and Nashville business have a general love for helping each other out. Anyone is willing to meet with anyone for the sake of strengthening the Nashville tech community ties. It’s a mentality that you just don’t find in other cities. 

(N) When you decided to do the Google 360 Virtual Tour, what was your goal? What would you want people to see when they discover your profile?

(Jeffery) One of our goals is to let potential employees be able to do an extraordinary amount of research on our company before coming to talk to us about working here. We want candidates to be able to look around the office, get themselves acquainted with it, and realize, even more, that this is a place that they want to work.

We even played a little game with our virtual tour. We have a trophy called The Donnelly Cup (it’s reserved for whomever is last place in our Ping Pong rankings.) We hid The Donnelly Cup in two separate places in our Google Virtual Tour, and we told job candidates that if they can find both of the trophies, we just might fast track their applications. Also, we just have a general ethos of openness at Rustici Software. Sharing who we are allows us to better connect to our customers, which is great for business because (we think) we’re pretty likable people. 

We also like that the Google Virtual Tour is something new and different. There aren’t a ton of companies that are doing this yet. Right now, a virtual tour (especially for an e-learning software company) is pretty unexpected. We like to use the unexpected to delight our customers and potential employees.

Read the rest of Jeffrey Horne's thoughts here at Nashville.com

View the Google Virtual 360 Tour of Rustici Software here (and hunt for The Donnelly Cup)