Tweetdeck

According to Mashable, The Social Media Guide, Twitter saw a 752% growth in 2008. It’s no wonder everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon.

There are many benefits that come with proper Twitter usage:

• Reinforce your brand and increase awareness by linking your Twitter account with all of your other web outlets.

• Check your Google Analytics; Twitter is a direct source of traffic.

• Network with like minded professionals, potential customers, and other local businesses.

• Tweets are now indexed in Google; we smell potential for organic Google traffic!

What a lot of people don’t realize are the practical uses of this valuable tool. Many businesses recognize the potential with this platform and yet after creating an account, have no clue what to do. It’s important to know about Twitter etiquette, hashtags, practical applications, and more.

Before getting started, there are a few things to remember.

Does your Twitter engage your customers?

The first instinct of many business owners using Twitter is to just spam deals and promotions thinking it will draw in more customers. Steve Schwartz, the creator of the How To Use Twitter for Business Video Series, makes a good analogy. In Part One of Steve’s Three Part video series, he says to think of Twitter like a cocktail party. You wouldn’t stand there yelling out promotions for your business, but you would engage people by talking to them. That leads to the three steps of successfully using Twitter for business which are Listen, Follow, and then Engage.

The first thing Steve’s videos recommend is to install a third party platform to manage your Twitter account. We recommend TweetDeck or HootSuite; the video refers to TweetDeck however, which makes it more convenient to reference. Tweetdeck makes the Twitter interface much more user friendly, it’s free, it automatically shortens your URLs (good to stay within the 140 character limit), and it links your pictures to a hosting service. Everything mentioned here is further elaborated upon in Steve’s awesome videos.

Tweetdeck Interface

A few more things to remember that will help Twitter success include:

• Make your Twitter profile design and name similar to your main website’s design; this is important for branding.

• Advertise your Twitter on your web site in a visible location, as well as for your blog and other social media sites.

• Consider making your updates cross platform, so all of your profiles are updated at once.  There are trade offs to this approach, however, so make sure that it’s the correct approach for your business if you pursue it.

Once you jump start your Twitter account, the next step is to measure it’s impact. There are many analytic software programs out there similar to Google Analytics. I’d recommend checking out Quantcast or Twitter Analyzer.

Once you get some followers and become more comfortable with the tweeting lifestyle, you should consider other third party applications. Here are a few you should check out.  Please comment with any others you find!

• Klout – You can measure your Twitter influence with your Klout score, see what people are talking the most about, and keep an eye on trends.

• TweetSpinner – This site offers effective tools such as profile rotation, anti-spam software, Customer Relationship Management, scheduling with automatic updates, and much more.

These basics will help you capitalize on Twitter and in time you’ll see the benefits that social media can deliver.

Business Blogging in Context

I started writing in this blog consistently around February of last year. I’d just come back from my first Inman Connect and figured I had some perspectives of value to share. When I’m blogging I’m getting paid, so it’s important for me to be able to articulate the business objectives for blogging to the guys that sign the paycheck. Here’s what they are:

1. Blogging is something that we recommend to clients for their own marketing efforts. I wanted to be sure that Union Street Media is walking the talk and actively engaging and utilizing this medium. Even though I had been blogging before doing this blog, this is was a learning objective.
2. Our team has a wide variety of skills and experiences to draw upon that we can share with a larger audience. Having an outlet to practice sharing this is an immense opportunity (anyone see Gary Vaynerchuk at this year’s Inman Connect?). This is a staff development objective.
3. There are several questions that the sales and support staff get asked on a regular basis. This blog has helped to share knowledge with our clients as well as help prospective clients understand what we offer. This is a support objective.
4. By using analytics to see what people find interesting, I’m able to further inform product development decisions and make our core products more interesting/valuable to our customers. This is a business intelligence objective.
5. This blog links to other blogs and information sources frequently. This is a conscious decision to help insert our brand/thinking into conversations where we might be relevant. The blog is only a piece of the “participate in the conversation” strategy (along with social network participation, commenting on other blogs, etc). But it’s an important piece. This objective is aimed at increasing brand awareness and exposure.
6. If all of the above objectives are being met, then Jonny and Spencer in sales should be having “warmer” conversations with people. This is a sales objective.

If I had to give a narrative version of the bullet list above I’d say something like: We blog to increase client satisfaction to the point where people feel comfortable and happy recommending us as a resource for online marketing in the real estate space and beyond.

Without giving away the magic numbers and secret sauce, it’s fair to say that in the past year the Union Street Media blog has accomplished the majority of these goals:

• We can train our clients on successful blogging practices based on our own experience
• Several members of our staff have contributed posts or insights to the blog in the past year
• Existing clients have commented and sent me thank yous for posts that have appeared here
• Several product development ideas have been refined/initiated based on analytics data
• This year at Inman Connect far more people knew who we were than last year (I was a presenter and panelist this year, for example) and we were also given an entrepreneurial award by our local Chamber of Commerce that cited our growing national exposure
• I don’t have hard numbers on blogging influencing sales, but I have often overheard the sales guys referring potential clients to various blog posts during calls

What brought people in last year?

At the end of the day, a blog is just a pile of content; posts and pictures and pages. Which pages landed new visitors? Excluding the home page (which always brings in the most) here is what attracted people to Real Estate Internet Marketing by Union Street Media last year:

• A post I wrote early on that examined changes to Craigslist’s HTML policies and Criagslist user sentiment on those changes.
• An article about tying web analytics to print advertising.
• The Twitter for Business resource.

That Craigslist article was written months ago. But it still gets regular traffic. It’s an example of a content asset: something I wrote once which continues to draw in visitors without me doing anything further. Granted, those visitors aren’t as likely to convert into sales as other visitors. But they do help spread the brand to a relevant audience and provide a ready illustration about content as an asset.

What topics were popular?

I’ve done quite a bit of tinkering with the blog categories this year. But they do vaguely map to a content description that helps me understand what my visitors find broadly interesting. The categories that had the most views were:

• Data
• Technology
• Internet Marketing

Granted, this is swayed somewhat by the number of articles in each category. But it’s still useful information and I can dig deeper if I need to and make a views per post per category table to help level the playing field. I’m probably going to break up the “internet marketing” category this year as well. I mean, everything on this blog should relate to internet marketing, right?

What did people say?

As many of you know, I run a survey on the Union Street Media properties. The survey is provided by the folks at iPerceptions and is called 4q. I don’t separate out the blog from our main real estate web design site (maybe I should, but we need goals for this year right?). But I can look at data for people who indicated that they came to the site to read the blog. I got a lot of comments about what you all found valuable. Things like:

just came upon you as i was visiting other inman connect material. i enjoyed your content and found it valuable. thank you.

I found lots of detailed information that will help me upgrade my social media marketing strategy.

It always offers helpful information and it’s clear you have a good grasp of your topic. My problem is always finding the time to implement your suggestions!! [note: You can always talk to my friends in the sales department. ]

amalgamates information for me so I do not have to go looking for the latest and greatest…

Looks like we’re doing a pretty good job on this front. Those are some of the many complimentary comments of folks who were able to do what they came to the site to do. But some of people weren’t able to accomplish their task. These people tended to be shy and not give me much feedback. The only one related to the site itself that we got all year was “Couldn’t find it.”

It’s true that if you arrive at our main site getting to the blog is a little trickier. I have to confess some evil marketeering here. If someone is on the main site, where I want them looking at ways to hire us or have us build a website… I’d rather they stayed there and picked up the phone. But this coming year, based on this person’s feedback, I’m going to experiment with being a little less evil and A/B test promoting the blog on the main website to see what happens. Using feedback to take action. Yeeha!

In raw numbers from the 4q survey, the blog has an 87% satisfaction rate. That’s pretty great with room for improvement. My favorite place to be. Which brings me to….

How do we do better in 2009?

The goals of the blog this year are pretty much the same as they were last year. And there are some changes in store. In particular I’m hoping to feature more voices from the Union Street Media team (do a better job at objective #2). I’m using some of the deeper analytics on content from last year to help set up a more formalized editorial calendar for the coming year as well.

But you can help me out, too. If you read this far down the page I’m guessing you care enough about this blog to take part in its direction. Leave a comment to tell us about the best thing we published this year. Or if you’re shy, send us an email. What worked and what didn’t? What topics do you want to know more about? What topics do you want to know less about?

I hope you found this little review useful and wish you the best of luck in 2009!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

There’s a lot of talk about using social networking sites in online marketing. We often hear how having a profile at one or several social networking sites is a requirement for any sort of serious internet marketing initiative. Especially in real estate, where personal relationships and sphere of influence are recognized aspects of the marketing process.

Hopefully, you know a few things about the demographic that you work with in your business. If so, then you might be able to make use of the information in this Rubicon Consulting report: “Online Communities and Their Impact on Business. Part Three: Web Community and Social Life.” The report is the result of survey information given to 3,036 web users in September 2008. Some of the data points that jumped at me along with a few cobbled together thoughts and reactions after the break.

Who is using which social networking sites?

• MySpace and Facebook are about tied by resondents in terms of profile use.
• Those aged 31 and up are as likely to use MySpace as Facebook.
• Those aged 40 and up are more likely to have no social network site profile.
• LinkedIn usage peaks in the 31-40 age demographic, though still well below Facebook/MySpace.
• Twitter, though very small compared to other services in the report, has about twice the profile use of Second Life.

How and why are they using social networking sites?

• About half of the users ignore invitations to join new sites.
• 30% feel strongly that they have not made new friends through sites.
• Respondents felt satisfied with their social networking site experiences.
• But they don’t feel that social networking sites played an important role in their social life.
• And they don’t feel that social networkings sites were important to their business life, either.

How good is the data you’re gathering?

Here’s where it starts to get really intriguing, especially if you are using the web for online marketing in a lead generation business like real estate:

• About 12% of respondents across all age demographics reported putting incorrect information in their social networking profiles.
• About 25% of respondents give “false personal information when registering to use a site or download something.”

That second number, the ones who give false information to use a site, gets higher the younger the audience gets.

What sort of things are they falsifying? Here’s what the report says:

The personal information that’s most likely to get falsified is (in order): Phone number, mailing address, name, and e-mail address. Users are much less likely to falsify non-contact information such as sex and race.

Some conclusions about online marketing and social network sites

None of this is going to be too earth shattering but I figure I should say it anyway.

Unless the younger users have a change of heart about falsified data and/or the services become more worthwhile, lead generation businesses using content as a hook (I’m looking at you registration-only MLS boards) will have to make some significant changes.

I hear a lot about Facebook in many marketing circles. I don’t hear as much about MySpace. Both sites are about the same in terms of users and engagement. Seems like some opportunities may exist here.

They aren’t joining new sites, they don’t think the sites are important to their business or their social life. Yet they are satisfied with the sites. What are they really doing with the sites that makes them satisfied? Or is their satisfaction barrier fairly low, such that being a peripheral feature of their social or business life is satisfactory enough?

If you liked this post you may also find value in my review of Forrester’s Technographic Profile Tool.

Image by forteller.ipernity.com via Flickr

Real estate is local. This is a phrase that’s heard all the time. Understanding “local” is a big part of getting marketing right whether your message/conversation is online or offline.

Maps are excellent tools to understand what “local” is. Adding a layer of relevant data on top of geographic data can be the starting point for developing powerful insights into what changes may lie ahead, what audiences you might want to serve more aggressively with your real estate internet marketing, where you might find those audiences and so on.

I’ve dug through the archives of this blog to find past posts about maps and data, for all of you new readers (and old readers who might have missed something previously).

• WSJ and USAToday map the economy (this is an historical post, combine this information with your current understanding)
• New York Fed Mortgage Maps is kept current for some more recent real estate information.
• Hotpads has a real estate foreclosure map of the US. This post shows you how to access it.
• A mashup of all sorts of data from sources like the Census, FBI, etc. displayed on a map.
• Topographic maps with Wikipedia and Panoramio overlays in your hand with Google Earth for the iPhone. This is a how-to article for some basic ways to market real estate on the iPhone or iPod Touch.
• Real Estate Connect in 2009 will be focusing on “global” so why not start by understanding how social networking and media sites are used differently by a global audience? Understand the services used by your audience via mapping.

[This post is an example of a "forgotten in the archives" post as discussed in "Help Your New Readers Find Your Best Old Posts."]

David Wood writes on his blog about a Google presentation about use of mobile services. The presentation, by Sumit Agarwal who is the product manager for Mobile at Google, includes a lot of insight into Google’s approach to developing applications and is very much worth a read (especially if you’re into developing software).

But from a straight-ahead data standpoint here are some interesting revelations about the way people are using mobile devices and Google’s mobile products:

• There is latent demand of mobile users for carrying out search enquiries – a demand that i smolstly being inhibited by fear of high data charges
• Every weekend, the demand from mobile devices for map tiles reaches the same level as the demand from fixed devices.
• People seem to want to search for the same sorts of things – in the same proportion of times – regardless of whether they are using fixed devices or mobile ones.

This is the sort of thing to think about when looking to the future of human and computer interaction. Thinking about these data points leads to more questions and thoughts, of course.

People want to use data services on their mobile devices more

The primary barrier to people using data services appears to be price. This price will certainly go down in the future. Here are some questions to think about:

• How will this affect my marketing efforts?
• Will my current marketing efforts be sufficient in a world where mobile devices are used as often as large screen stationary devices?
• What will have to change and why?

On weekends, map-based services are used equally by mobile and desktop devices

When William Gibson said that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed I always thought he meant geographically (better cell phones in Asia, for example). But the future could be distributed by any of the dimensions, and here is an example of distributing the future based on time.

If mapping and locality are significant to your business, then you get a free glimpse at the future for two days a week. Make the most of it!

People aren’t different just because they’re sitting in a desk at work.

If people are searching for the same kinds of things from their mobile device as they are from their desktop, then perhaps some beliefs about “browsing habits” are either incorrect or changing. That and perhaps we’re carrying our work around with us all the time with our shiny iPhones and Android handsets.

For those who are afraid of change this last point is at least some solace: What you know about your site visitors now is applicable to a future mobile web world. People aren’t changing what they’re interested in, they’re just moving around while they’re interested.

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…).

Image by .mw via Flickr

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.

Image by alliance1911 via Flickr

[Update: link to the dashboard itself is fixed. Click here to just go look at the dashboard.]

As mentioned earlier, I’ll be on a panel at the Vermont 3.0 Creative/Tech Jam on Oct 25th at Champlain College here in Burlington, VT. I’m really psyched to be up there with David Gibson from Propeller Media Works and Frank Canovatchel (who, it turns out, was an advisor to USM developer Scott Nellé). Our topic is about building websites and I’m sure between the three of us we’ll be able to handle most any question that comes up. Read a little more about the conference and my fancy conference dashboard after the jump.

So… uh… 3.0?

Yeah, so the whole Web 2.0 thing is old as dirt and probably not helpful. And I won’t claim to have any special understanding into why this conference is called Vermont 3.0 but my guess is that it is tongue-in-cheek. What I do know is that everyone had a blast last year. And it was a great time for tech/geek pros to hang out, jobseekers of all ages to see what sort of tech and creative jobs were available in the Green Mountain State and for connections to be made. If you want some serious thinking about a “web 3.0″ you’ll have to read cleverer minds than mine.

Conference Dashboard?

I got this idea from Chris Brogan who got it from Christopher Penn. Chris P. started out with a sort of mashed together dashboard in iGoogle to help him monitor social media, competitors etc for his business. Basically just take some feeds that are relevant to your business (some news, maybe some Twitter search feeds, etc) and put them on your iGoogle page. Pretty straight forward and smart.

Then Chris B. the idea to make his own personal dashboard for conferences he’s attending. He’s got maps and weather and all the things Chris P. had but with a focus on an event not a topic.

Now I’m hacking that idea to make it open and public. So we have the event feed items, plus the public discourse feeds and user generated content feeds. And then I’m just making it for the purpose of being a public, semi-curated space for gathering all content that is created around the tech jam.

As we all know, what happens in the hallways is often as or more valuable than what happens in the workshops and panels. By making it public and known to people, the intention is for participants to self-organize around the event and those who can’t make it to the Vermont 3.0 Creative/Tech Jam can find a one-stop spot for getting a feel for it.

Take a look at the Vermont 3.0 Creative/Tech Jam Dashboard.

Making the Vermont 3.0 Creative/Tech Jam Dashboard

I chose Netvibes as my platform. Not for any particular reason. I don’t have a ton of experience in any of these personal start page services so I think I just went with Netvibes because I liked the layout. While making the dashboard I encountered a significant challenge:

There are tons of widgets for adding content, but they are horribly organized. Want to find a Twitter feed search tool so you can just show Tweets that are hashtagged for your conference? Try wading through the 1000 or so Twitter widgets, 10 at a time all named more or less the same thing, half of which work. Want a map for the event location? Again, four or five which are all named about the same and not all of them work.

I have a feeling the entire “app” and “widget” space is due for a significant UI overhaul because I have the same feeling when I’m getting apps for my iPod Touch (I am, in VT after all and we’re still iPhone-less). To make things simpler for next time here are the Netvibes widgets I used:

• Twitter Search (search for “twitter” when making your page… I couldn’t find a reference to this from the Netvibes blog. I used this
• The generic Feed widget. I used this to handle the blog search (for “Vermont 3.0″) and the blog feed of the official conference site.
• The HTML “essential” widget for the logo and link to the official site.
• The Weather “essential” widget to give the weather for the conference town.
• The Maps Search (you’ll have to search again to find it) to give the location of the event. I found the Yahoo Maps to look nicer than the Google one so that’s how I defaulted it.
• Then there was the media column with Flickr and Video search. Right now the Flickr is just set for VT until I can take some photos and tag them vt3 or something so there can be more specific images.

When you’re configuring your widgets, make sure there is a “save last search” checkbox and that you check it. Otherwise you’ll spend a bunch of time configuring your widgets only to have them default back to searching for something you don’t want.

As a first attempt at this, it’s a little bit of a mess. But I think it should work out alright. Anyone else doing this? Got some tips for using these dashboards?

Image via Wikipedia

Making videos for real estate is a time consuming process no matter how you look at it. And you want to be sure you’re getting the best results for the time you spend making, editing and uploading your property videos. Why not use analytics to listen to your customers and let them help you improve your real estate video mojo?

Google is now tracking “drop off” over at YouTube. I haven’t taken the time yet to play with this yet but it looks promising. Here’s why:

• See how long people tend to actually watch the videos you post: make your videos the right length.
• See if there’s a particular room/angle/whatever that tends to turn people off and make them leave: show only the stuff that works.
• See if actual video outperforms slideshow-style video: show the right kind of content.

Of course, the downside is that you have to use the miserable YouTube video compression etc. I think I know how Google is making this analytics tool work and it isn’t incredibly complicated. Perhaps some of the other Flash-based video distribution sites will start offering analytics as well.

Anyone out there using analytics with their real estate videos?

Also, it has my requested “time of day” style reports. So you can start to learn when people are paying attention to your Twitter posts

It does give you a slightly longer URL though (twurl.com vs cli.gs) so if you need every precious character then perhaps Cli.gs is the better choice.