Web Analytics Training at EpikOne

On Tuesday, Jan 29th EpikOne will be hosting one of their excellent online trainings. I highly recommend it for people who are interested in deepening their knowledge of web analytics, usability, and online marketing in general. Check out Justin Cutroni’s posts on the Epik blog, as well, for some more background on these folks.

Fans Wanted

Union Street Media has a fan page on Facebook. If you are on Facebook, we would love to connect with you there. Pehaps this is something you might want to try for your business?

Flip Video Fun

We picked up a Flip Video camera this weekend. I wrote about this in an earlier post – these are $150 digital video cameras which are really easy to use. We’ll report back soon when we have had a chance to play with the camera and see what we think. See theflip.com for more info.

Real Estate Internet Marketing “Map”

During one of the final panels at Real Estate Connect in NYC I was sketching in my notebook the process of how users get to websites, and what we ultimately want them to do when they get there.

I took a few minutes to draw it up when I got home, and this is what I came up with. It’s far from complete, but seems useful in explaining how firms like ours use “web 2.0″ technologies to get traffic to our client’s sites. I thought it might be useful in providing a visual framework to illustrate the process. Personally, I needed something to organize the constant flow of information, ideas, sites, tools, etc., that constantly cross my desk/inbox/RSS feed.

Do you think this is a useful and/or accurate way to represent this?

Vermont 3.0 Career Jam

Union Street Media is proud to sponsor the Vermont 3.0 Creative/Tech Career Jam.

Join the Jam’s Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=6871164116

Vermont is a great place for technology and creative businesses, and we’re delighted to support this effort. USM is also a member of the Vermont Software Developer’s Alliance, a group that is doing great work in the state.

Another Great Connect

The Union Street Media crew returned home from Inman Real Estate Connect in New York this weekend. We had a great experience there, as we did last summer in San Francisco. A group of five of us attended and focused on social networking, blogging, internet marketing, MLS issues, and much more. The panels were great, including an appearance by the ever-popular Craig Newmark of Craigslist.

One resulting inspiration was the Real Estate Internet Marketing Map that I sketched at the conference, and then gussied up once home.
After all was said and done, among the trends this year were video, of course, as well as “instant” response to customer inquiries. We added a plugoo chat widget on our site last night – if you come by, say hello. I do think we will see many more agents and offices implementing some kind of basic IM/live chat into their sites, and it’s something that we are beginning to recommend to our clients as something to strongly consider.

Also, we were intrigued by the inexpensive Flip video camera and will probably pick a couple up to start playing with.

It will be interesting to see how realtors and others use the social networking space in the coming year. Like blogging, this can be a good passive channel for attracting customers. However, we are seeing more and more active types of marketing on Facebook, like groups, fan pages, and of course, ads. At the San Francisco Connect in August you couldn’t go through a whole panel without someone saying ActiveRain at least once. By contrast you didn’t hear this as much at the NY Connect. Nevertheless, the ActiveRain community is still a great place to spend some time online.

Good article on creating an about page for your blog

I read this on RSSPieces and it’s worth sharing:

How To Write a Killer Real Estate Blog About Page

Has some good criteria and perhaps inspiration for creating an about page for your blog.

Web 2.0, Social Networking, Blogging, and Real Estate

In a recent post I included a link to a pdf of Web 2.0 companies compiled by Jamie Glenn of Trulia. Tonight I came across a similar list at the vFlyer blog.

We’re spending a lot of time at Union Street Media thinking about how to help our clients in the real estate industry leverage the new opportunities that are available online. This article at vFlyer does a great job of providing an overview of what’s out there and I highly recommend it as an introduction to all of this.

One of the resources mentioned is a real estate social networking site called ActiveRain. Realtors can set up a free profile there, connect with other real estate professionals, create a blog, and join discussions. You can visit my profile at activerain.com/andyvota and Union Street Media founder Ted Adler’s at activerain.com/tedadler.

There is a good overview of the site at activerain.com/action/default/welcome. One other bonus of being on ActiveRain is that the search engine pickup of the site is quite good — things posted there seem to show up on Google and other search engines very quickly.

Another post of interest is at Inman.

Participation in all of this new social media (blogs, social networks, wikis etc.) is difficult to gauge but several recent attempts have been made to try and measure audience participation. The latest is Forrester’s new Social Technographics report – which came up with this fascinating segmentation.

Coming up with good domain names

One really useful feature on LinkedIn in my opinion is their “Answers” section – where professionals can post questions and receive answers to them from their peers.

I was perusing the real estate and technology sections and came across this post about brainstorming domain names.

We’re commonly asked at Union Street Media about the whole domain name process – criteria for choosing a name, how to come with a name, and how to register it. The post above is a great resource for researching great domain names.

Real Estate Connect SF07

I just returned from San Francisco from the Real Estate Connect conference. It was an excellent experience and I was really impressed with Brad Inman’s ability to get at the core issues in a really thoughtful and provocative way.

Some of the great content can be found in the videos on InmanTV.

Real Estate Video by – Real Estate Blogger

Presentation material from several of the keynotes are available online. Jamie Glenn of Trulia gave a really interesting survey of 50 online marketing tools for real estate – from blogs and social networking to search. Check it out yourself at http://post.inman.com/t/72308/3721853/6051/0/.

Also check out the NY Connect in January of 2008.