Social Network Marketing with LinkedIn

There are all kinds of social networks on the web. Facebook and MySpace get a fair amount of attention. But there’s also the one that’s primarily for business: LinkedIn. How can you use LinkedIn for your marketing efforts? After the break is Guy Kawasaki’s slide deck telling you how.

Perhaps not every one of these points is directly and obviously related to real estate internet marketing, but enough of them are that I think you’ll enjoy this. Many of his thoughts can be translated into other social network sites as well.

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8 Halloween Blog Post Ideas for Real Estate Bloggers

Every now and them when I’m giving a real estate blog training to a client I’m asked how it’s possible to keep coming up with posts. I think we all face a certain amount of fatigue now and then. Luckily for real estate bloggers, local events are completely fair game and in the realm of usefulness.

So, in the spirit of my “why blog about the fourth of July” post… here are some real  estate themed Halloween blog post ideas. Try one or two of them out before, during and after Halloween. Get your real estate bloggin’ ideas after the break. Read more

4 Ways to Use Google Earth for the iPhone for Real Estate Internet Marketing

By now you’ve already heard about Google Earth coming to the iPhone. And yes, it’s awesome and fun and cool. But you’re a marketer at the end of the day so you’re looking to find a way promote your real estate or other business online using this newly enhanced tool. Before coming up with some internet marketing tactics that might be appropriate for the Google Earth-enabled iPhone, let’s look at a few concepts related to this combination of mapping and mobile technologies. Video after the jump.

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Swimming in January

In the 1930’s, my grandfather was a member of his local polar bear club.  When asked what it has been like to be in business during the last couple of weeks, I’ve thought of him jumping in the freezing cold water in January.   This economic climate isn’t comfortable, but it has a way of invigorating the senses and washing away complacency.  There will be a feeling of accomplishment when we’re all dried off.  However, we still may be a long way from the warming hut.

It’s not trite to say that those of us under 80 have never seen anything like this in our lifetime and it’s anyone’s best guess as to where it will go from here.  The peanut gallery will entertain an ongoing discussion of how much worse it will get.  This exercise is guestimation, at best.  After hearing NYU’s Nouriel Roubini discuss his prognosis on the future at last year’s Real Estate Connect, one person commented “Well, that’s why they call economics the dismal science.”  The economic tsunami will take out both good and bad companies but there are ways to improve your chances.  While it may sound self-serving, leveraging the power of the internet to grow your business is at the top of the list.

This will be the first recession of the Web 2.0 era.  The Internet today is a very different beast then it was in the days of the dot-com hangover.  More people are online then ever and they use the web for a broader number of services than in the past.  The acquisition cost per client on the web is still lower then offline media.  Campaigns can be made much more precise.  All the results of internet marketing are trackable thanks to tools like Google Analytics.  As a result, when deciding where to trim advertising budgets, business owners are more likely to do it offline.  I believe this trend attributed to Google’s revenues increasing in the third quarter.

Part of my cautious optimism is anecdotal.  Several of our clients have told us that they’re reducing their overall spending but are increasing their internet marketing investment.  We will be releasing a new internet marketing package in November at a discounted rate to help those clients who are committed to internet marketing.  Please contact me if you’re interested in learning more.

Finally, over the last couple of weeks I have been asked by a number of business owners, clients and friends how Union Street Media is weathering the financial storm.  During our staff meeting last week we outlined how we’re preparing to address some of the challenges that we’ll likely face over the next couple of months.  Thanks to our strong growth over the past five years and a prudent, old yankee financial management strategy, we feel we’re well positioned for what may come our way.  We look forward to seeing you in the warming hut!

Inman Internet Marketing Webinar

Joel Burslem is hosting a webinar on inexpensive marketing strategies. It’s free. It’s on October 29th. You should attend.

Google Analytics Update: Your Internet Marketing Animated

Google Analytics is updating. The stuff they are adding to the tool is bending my brain. For those of you who are diving into your own analytics in support of a data-driven internet marketing strategy you will be very very excited. For those of you not in this category perhaps it is time to start.

And, of course, if you’d rather be taking care of the core aspects of your business (selling real estate or service or products) then be happy that your internet marketing team can now dig a little deeper and tease out a little more insight from Google Analytics.

This video example shows how you can look at the performance of a keyword for your website, tracked over time. How is this useful?

• Quickly show relationships of valuable keywords
• Show how value changes over time (perhaps in relation to market events or your own marketing efforts)
• Show how customer interest changes over time (again, perhaps in relation to events or your own internet marketing)

I should note that this is just one of several new features that are being rolled out. And not even the juiciest (advanced segmentation is the juiciest or maybe the API or maybe…).

Canadian journalist covers Union Street Media

Yesterday Union Street Media was visited by several journalists from outside the United State.

One of them, Brian Jackson, took an interest in Union Street Media’s custom web-based time tracking software referred to as Ogre. Read his article over at itbusiness.ca for his take.

How are your real estate customers using social media?

Forrester research has recently updated its social media customer profiling tool to include data from 2008. Many of you in the real estate business have probably been hearing about blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed and other social media technologies for some time now. Some of you are even using social media tools to enhance your real estate business.

But the questions always remain: Are my customers using social media? Am I speaking into a void? I thought only teenagers used blogs

The Forrester Technographics Profile Tool

There seems to be a lot of information, both anecdotal and research-based, that talks about what specific tools or even kinds of tools people are using online. This makes sense because technology vendors need to demonstrate their relevance. There’s less information, however, about why people are using technology.

And the “why” question is important because it helps us to determine which technologies are relevant for our customers. Identifying why people use technology helps us all develop better services and products. Understanding why people use technology brings us closer to understanding how they self-identify.

The Forrester tool helps you understand why people are using social media technology segmented by age, country and gender. Now granted, this is a pretty broad segmentation and I’d sure love to have more psychographic than demographic information. But even so the tool is great to get a start on clearing up misconceptions about what types of people use social media technology.

The identities that the Forrester Tool breaks down are (from most-active to least-active):

• Creators: The people who make social media.
• Critics: The people who respond and comment on social media.
• Collectors: The people who organize social media.
• Joiners: The people who sign up and connect on social media sites.
• Spectators: The people who look at and consume social media.
• Inactives: They don’t do any of this stuff.

For a better understanding, here’s a slide show:

Using the Technographics Tool to Improve Your Real Estate Marketing

Alright, you’ve gone over to the site, played with the pull down menus and seen the pretty charts. Lot of fun right? Well fun isn’t enough (especially these days) so let’s see what we can do with this kind of information to make your internet marketing more successful. Here’s a nice numbered-list to get us started

1. Identify your best audience demographic
2. Discover what your audience likes to do via the Technographic Tool
3. Make changes to your internet marketing that reflect what you know about your audience

Identifying an audience demographic

Hopefully you already know something about the sorts of people you tend to work with in your real estate business. If you don’t, then perhaps you might want to use MSN’s demographic prediction tool. This will at least give you something to get going if you can’t hire a demographics consultant just yet.

For this example, I’m going to use the demo prediction tool to look at the demographics for people searching for “Vermont Real Estate.” The tool tels me I’m looking mostly at a Female demographic aged 35-49.

Discovering what your audience likes to do

Using the information from step one, I fill out the Forrester Technographic Tool. The age demographics don’t match up perfectly so I choose the one that fits best: 35-44.

Turns out that, according to the Tool, my audience is using technology fairly average. They are most below-average as Joiners. They’re most above-average as Critics.

That’s nice. Now what?

Make changes to your marketing based on what you know

Ok, so the audience is unlikely to be Joiners and more likely to be Critics. Perhaps I will reserve some of the resources I would be spending on social networking sites (advertising and participating). Then I can take those resources and re-allocate them to online marketing initiatives which encourage feedback, ratings, comments and other participatory technologies.

Would I make changes to an entire business model based on data collected using MSN’s demo prediction tool and the Forrester Technographic Profile Tool? Nope. But I would use this to make tweaks and start deeper research into my audience.

The Tool is Updated: What are the trends?

Now that you have a sense of what the tool is and how you might use it to help out your real estate business, maybe you’re curious about trending of this sort of data. I heard about this tool being updated from Josh Bernoff (via Twitter of course) and he mentioned that the growth of social media adoption is in the 35-55 year old demographic.

Bernoff has a blog post outlining the changes between 2007 and 2008 in the use of social media. It includes a bar chart showing the changes in each of the categories. The biggest jumps are in Spectators and Critics. There is very modest growth in the Creators category. Here’s what he says about age demographics in his post:

Social activity is way up among 35-to-44 year-olds, especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content. Even among 45-to-54 year-olds, 68% are now Spectators, 24% are Joiners, and only 28% are Inactives.

This is important for anyone who continues to believe that their social media strategy should consist entirely of a Facebook “fan” page and should be run by the college intern. There are some great opportunities ahead using social media as part of your real estate online marketing plan. Do like Bernoff does and use data as your secret weapon.

Firefox Plugins for Real Estate: TwitKit

If your real estate internet marketing strategy incorporates social media, then chances are good you’re experimenting with (if not already obsessed with) Twitter. If you’re still shy about Twitter or don’t know what it is, check out the Twitter for Real Estate page. If you’re already Tweeting up a storm, let me introduce you to the fourth in our Firefox Plugins for Real Estate series: TwitKit.

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Track your search engine ranking improvement with a plugin for Firefox

Search engine optimization (SEO) is typically a pillar of any internet marketing strategy. Yesterday, I posted information about how you can save time assessing the effectiveness of your SEO efforts by using the Rank Checker for Firefox plugin. Another fan of Rank Checker decided it was time to make the search rank data a bit more visually appealing by creating a second plugin called Site Rank Reporter. It’s a handy way to visualize things, especially if you are charged with reporting to someone about the effectiveness of all your efforts to optimize your real estate web site.

The tool is quick to install, but comes with a few caveats.

1. It’s only useful once you’ve collected multiple data sets. SeoBook suggests several days of data, but that would only be useful if you were tracking your work on a blog site that is indexed daily and therefore has a chance to improve daily. More realistic for a real estate web site would be monthly data. You can put Rank Checker on auto-pilot and then visit the data in a few months.
2. Your .csv data files need to be named carefully, with only the date as the file name in one of these file name formats: MM-DD-YY, M-D-YY, MM-D-YY, or M-DD-YY.
3. You can’t muck with the data that came from Rank Checker. Make a copy of the original file If you want to play with the data in Excel.
4. The .html format of the data that you can save is nicely styled and saves you time from formatting the raw data in Excel.
5. It’s not possible to save the graphed data unless you take a screen capture. And that graph is not labeled with the keyword — it’s displayed above in a list field. To make the visual representation more useful, I hope the developers will develop an output that is labeled and can be downloaded as a .gif file. That way, the file could be included quickly in a PowerPoint or other report to the folks who are footing the bill for all that search engine optimization!

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