Week in Review is the New…

Another week come and gone. Some great tools, thinking and trends this week.

Google Insights is the New Secret Decoder Ring

Sellsius lays it down. Lots of posts on the interwebs about this but I like Sellsius’ best because it has the screencaps and the tactical focus.

IDX Search is the New Steak Dinner

Brian Boero sets the table for understanding why brokers should be able to perform well in the face of listing aggregation.

Website Testing is the New Fruit Fly

Jeff Stibel, writing in the Harvard Business Review, outlines the way that good online marketing happens.

Bigfoot Press Conference is the New Volcanic Keyword

It is, after all, Friday. Also, don’t forget the Times article.

Bringing the Olympics home: 5 blog post ideas for Local.

With the Olympics going on right now there seems to be a lot of Olympic-themed blogging going on. This is probably great for being current, but maybe there’s ways to think more long-term on this. After all, the Olympics happen on a regular basis (every two years: Summer then Winter etc) so there could be a fireworks-like advantage to blogging about the games.

Let’s combine two ideas: Current Events and Local

Blogging about current events is always a good idea. It lets people know you’re listening and can add some context or value to the conversations that are occurring every day. When those events repeat on a regular basis this gives us some added incentive to write about them because there’s a predictable pattern to the number of people giving attention to the topic. Today I’m going to use the Olympics as an example.

Being “local” could mean the obvious: write about your nearby geographic zone. But it could mean your special niche or directly relevant topic. Today I’m writing mostly for my real estate readers so I’m going to be using the geographic kind of local.

And let’s also make it relevant

There are lots of ways we could try to stuff the word “Olympics” into an article. Then we’d get a lot of traffic looking for generic Olympics information and those visitors wouldn’t be happy and then they’d go away. Not much point in that. Let’s make articles that are Olympic-themed but also provide value for the people you most want to serve. In today’s example I’m using real estate buyers/sellers/watchers. But I bet you can synthesize this into your own industry.

Olympic-themed blog post ideas for Real Estate “Local”

• Any Olympic athletes grow up, live or train in your neighborhood?
• Any Olympic training facilities in or near your neighborhood?
• If someone wanted to train for the Olympics in your neighborhood, how would they get started?
• Any team leaders, coaches or trainers for the Olympics active in your neighborhood?
• How about Olympic gear and equipment manufacture or purchasing options? I can tell you from experience that getting a properly set-up biathlon rifle is not something you can do anywhere.

Notice how all of these ideas involve connecting a current event back to your area and gives some insight, context and value to someone who is truly interested in the Olympics. Also notice how it will help you position your neighborhood in relation to the Olympics and athletic competition. You might get a long tail conversion, but at the very least you will be adding good content about your neighborhood to the web. Search engines like this very much.

The strategy here, as you might guess, is to get the attention of readers both now (current event) and in the future (people who will make decisions based on how your neighborhood relates to the current event). This is an example of a content-planning strategy that makes use of the long tail marketing concept.

Examples of good Olympic blog posts:

Zillow, making use of it’s position as an aggregator of information, tells us about the state with the most Olympians in the 2008 Olympics. Talking about the state and cities brings us some local aspects, talking about the Olympians inserts their brand into the current events conversation. They even provide some additional value by linking out to the source that identifies the home of all the Olympians.

Feeding a small tidbit of news/gossip, The Real Estate Bloggers, lets us know about Olympic hero Michael Phelps’ recent condo purchase. Olympic content? Check. Local information? Check.

Perhaps taking a tip from Zillow, Lynne Pope further segments that California list down to the athletes that are in her market area.

Might be time to get ready for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

This blog post is dedicated to my colleague Scott Nellé who wanted to skip work today so he could watch the basketball game.

Week in Review: August 8

Welcome to the Takeaway edition of Week in Review.

Social network use and age

A hat tip to Nick Bostic who highlights the results of a recent AARP study on social network use among older Americans.

Takeaway:

Just because your newest hire is fresh out of college doesn’t mean they should run your social media strategy.

Walking the hyperlocal talk

Ben Boero gets down to the nitty gritty on what “hyperlocal” is really about. As an added bonus, be sure to read his last paragraph which gives you some tangible action ideas.

Takeaway:

If you really do know the neighborhoods you serve, you can probably do much much better than just recycling that stale Schools data on your site.

Heard about “duplicate content?”

We can never state enough how important it is to make original, useful content. Rich Jacobson, the Active Rain Community Builder lays it all out in black and white about what is plagiarism and what is attribution.

Takeaway:

Use snippets and link. It makes you look smart. Plagiarism doesn’t look smart.

The full service real estate firm

As part of his ongoing series on re-envisioning the real estate business Notorious R.O.B. gets very in depth about what service should really mean.

Takeaway:

Data is great, but will anyone ever enter it so we can get a 360 view?

Social media participation

Something appears to be wrong with Bad MLS photo of the day so here’s a great piece from the Onion. If you don’t like the Onion then best to skip this over. If you do like the Onion, don’t let their scathing irony and satire prevent you from participating in social media. Local idiot to leave a comment on the internet.

Takeaway:

It’s Friday.

Now that Vermont might get the iPhone, VREIN pros get ready

Joel Burslem gives an awesome quick-take on five applications you can use on an iPhone to enhance your real estate business.

Redstone Vermont

Redstone Vermont, a commercial brokerage that also handles development and property management, launched with Union Street Media’s real estate web design services. Their site includes featured listings, integrated search capability, one-click searches, integrated Google maps and our content management system.

New Real Estate Social Media Adoption Survey

CREST, which recently released results from its first survey, apparently believes that no moss gathers on a rolling stone. They have prepared their second survey. This time focusing on social media and widgets.

If you are a real estate pro with any sort of web presence at all please head over there and take the CREST Social Media Adoption survey.

Your customers in their own words. Setting up GA Keyword filters.

One of the things I talked about at the analytics panel at Inman this year was “reading your customers’ minds” via the keyword reports. One of the audience members from the panel asked me to explain how to set up one of my branded or non-branded keyword reports in Google Analytics (obligatory schilling: USM clients often have this set up for them from day one). I’ll give the step-by-step at the end but first let’s catch everyone up in case they missed the Inman panel. Read more

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