149 South Champlain St, Burlington, VT

I recently came across another powerful use that Twitter provides people with last week. It not only provided an awesome place to network, but it supported a new local business. Last month, I began to see a trend start to rise with something along the lines of this: #btvfall2009tweetup. Curiosity got the best of me, and I started researching what this was all about. Turns out, a new local bakery, August First was hosting a “tweetup”. A tweetup is a gathering of people who use the social-networking tool, Twitter. The event was organized through Twitter by using a third party app, twtvite. This application allows you to organize an event by giving details such as directions to the event and a yes/no/maybe RSVP option. This had been the second invite I had seen in about a month and I was ready to join in on the fun.

The event was organized by John Connors (@JohnCVermont) who specializes in Information Technology at Saint Michael’s College. Upon arrival, I was handed a badge with my real name and twitter user name on it so people would know if we had crossed paths on Twitter previously. Surprisingly, most of the faces in the cozy bakery were familiar. Everyone seemed very content with their coffee in-hand and talking technology. August First was a great location to have this event with their welcoming environment and their variety of tasty treats.

I will now be making an effort to attend every tweetup I can, not only for the geek-talk, but for great time all around.

If you’re on Twitter and want to see what’s going on with the team, you can find us on our Twitter List here. Also, you can follow August First here.

Cheers,

Matt Sisson

The news was rolled out by their founder here and you can learn more about what WellcomeMat does here and even see a few of our in house offerings on our Union Street Media channel.

We would be interested to hear from anyone that has used this application and their thoughts on its effectiveness, however  the app is currently usable only on the iPhone 3G.

Amongst the candidates that ran for office, I publicly supported a moderate independent candidate named Dan Smith.  Unfortunately, he didn’t win.  However, Dan did do some pretty cool stuff on the web much of which involved the use of video.  Using the new $229 HD Flip Mino Video camera, Dan’s staff videoed a number of local supporters, myself included, and uploaded the videos onto youtube.  They then embedded the videos in his site (which is still online, but may not be much longer).  This was pretty simple to do, easy to publish and unique with in the campaign.

So what does this have to do with selling real estate, promoting your company, product or service?  A lot.

I’m a believer that device consolidation will eventually lead to your computer (or iPhone) being the one tool you use to access all media, including television.   At this time, however, video still has a little bit of the “wow” factor still left in it online.  Imagine a new visitor coming to your site and hearing from your clients, on video, talking about how they benefited from working with you?  It would be unique, compelling and not that hard to do.  I’ve mentioned the idea to a number of our real estate clients of videoing a young couple just after they have purchased their first time home.  Hearing them describe how you helped them find, negotiate and close on their home would be compelling.  Unlike a video tour of a home, which I also recommend, a video testimonial has a long shelf life on your site.

We have a couple of clients who have been progressive with their use of video, such as Dan Cypress and Jessica Bridge at RE/MAX North Professionals.  Jessica, who also endorsed Dan Smith, is photogenic and Dan knows how to do a thing or two with iMovie.  However, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to put together a great video about the Vermont Required Consumer Information Disclosure and post it on your site.  All it takes is a little initiative and a investment in a Flip Video Camera.

Please share links with us in the comment section below if you have posted cool videos on your site.

You’ve probably seen the little orange icons and “subscribe to my feed” buttons on sites you’ve visited (you can see some over to the left of this blog post, in fact). You might even have read articles where people argue about things like RSS and Atom and so on. Maybe you’ve heard of things like Google Reader. This is an article written to help you start using RSS feeds to help your online marketing efforts.

What’s an RSS Feed anyway?

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. It’s simple for web geeks. Don’t feel bad if it doesn’t sound simple to you. Here’s how it works:

Contemporary websites hold all of their text and other content in a database. When a program called a web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari, for example) goes to a web page address the website software (sometimes referred to as a Content Management System or CMS) takes that text out of the database and formats the text into a web page.

There’s content: the information in the database. And there’s presentation: the formatting and design that shows the content, font choices, colors and so on. Sort of like the separation of church and state.

RSS feeds just give you access to the content without the presentation formatting. An RSS feed is just a way to get at the content without all the formatting and design. Keep your church and pick any state (or keep your state and pick any church, if you prefer).

So why would you want just the content, without the formatting?

There are a couple reasons why you’d want to have access to the content of a website without all the formatting. Here are a few:

• Display a list of headlines from another site on your site
• Access the content from something that isn’t a web browser (like an iPhone app)
• View content from your favorite websites from one place without having to surf to each website individually

To start with, it’s the last item on the list that matters most: view content from your favorite websites in one place. If you are staying up to date on the topics that matter to you via online resources, then you probably have three or more websites that you visit every day. A piece of software called a “feed reader” will load all of the content you choose into one interface.

Without a feed reader, you have to load up each page (along with the images, ads and other things which slow down the page loading time) then find the new articles and then maybe read some of the new articles. With a feed reader, you open the feed reader and all the headlines and articles are in one place for easy reading. It even lets you know if you’ve read it before.

Ok, you know everything you need to know about feed readers. Let’s use RSS to improve your internet marketing.

Internet Marketing Basics: Use a Feed Reader to Listen

Listening is probably the easiest and most important marketing activity you can perform online. You can listen to potential clients, your industry peers, critics, competitors anyone who publishes online. Let’s go step-by-step and set up a feed reader.

1. Go to the Google Reader page (http://reader.google.com) (yeah, there are other feed readers and you could try them all out, but today let’s just get started).
2. Log in if you already have a Google Account. If not, follow instructions to sign up.
3. Awesome, you have a feed reader. Bookmark the page your feed reader is on.

Now you need to put something in the reader. Go to three of your favorite sites and click on the add to reader buttons. Don’t forget to add the Internet Marketing for Real Estate Feed. Have you added a couple sites to your feed reader? Now go check what it looks like. You’ll see the headlines and if you click the headline, the article expands.

Internet Marketing Basics: Use a feed reader to participate

It’s good to participate in conversations surrounding the topics related to your business. It helps people become familiar with you and your company. More importantly, if you are commenting on stories and articles that your audience would find useful, the readers who find you are pre-qualified in that they have already exhibited interest in your topic.

Do one of the following at least a couple times a week, to help increase your participation:

• Leave a thoughtful, useful and on-topic comment on a blog post you find via your feed reader
• Add at least one more site to your feed reader
• Find three different articles on different sites about a related topic, mention them on your own blog or site

Using a Feed Reader to improve your internet marketing

If you’ve made it this far, you have a feed reader bookmarked and you’re using it to make meaningful connections online. There’s a lot more you can do, but you’ve gotten started and that’s what matters.

Image by dklimke via Flickr

Trying to decide which little video camera is the one to use for your online marketing efforts? The Flip is always talked about. But what’s this Kodak thing? Luckily, someone has done a side-by-side comparison of the Flip Mino HD and the Kodak Zi6 by rubber-banding the two together and wandering around his house.

Check out Blankbaby.com for the comparison shots (with audio comparison as well) and then you’ll know which little easy camera you need to make your internet marketing videos.

Image by plemeljr via Flickr

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.

Local without the hyperbole

For some time, internet pundits have been talking about “local” and when no one seemed to respond then they started talking about “hyperlocal” (when driving gets dull try hyperdriving!). The concept of Local is about delivering results when knowing about location increases the relevance of the results.

The real estate industry is an obvious example where information is more valuable when it’s location-aware   than location-numb. If you know about the schools/neighborhood/employment/scene etc then you know something valuable to anyone looking to buy or sell real estate.

But real estate isn’t the only industry where local information or knowledge is valuable. Any physical-only business should be firmly woven into the internet representation of a locality. Think about restaurants, car dealerships, news outlets, museums and colleges etc etc. I could go on and on. But all of these things contribute to the quality of “local” and can benefit by being present in the digital representation of a locality.

Google is the de-facto digital representation of locality for most areas. When people want to know about a location they ask Google about it first. And Google has a variety of platforms for delivering that local information.

Good marketing is relevant

While “local” is an expression of information quality, “relevance” is perhaps more dependent on delivery. Are you getting the quality information you want when you can act on that information? If so, you’re getting relevant information.

The problem with relying on Google’s database for local information has been that local information is most relevant when we aren’t tethered to our computer.

If I want to gather more context from my immediate surroundings while I stroll down Church Street in downtown Burlington, I’m out of luck. With Google Earth for my iPod (Vermont still doesn’t have an iPhone… I know, it’s a real bother) I can pull in the WiFi, auto-set the location, and the resulting image will include Wikipedia entries and images by default. If I’m hungry I can search for a restaurant nearby and the search results will be overlayed on the map. If I’m looking for a condo… hmmm…

What about plain old Google Search or Maps? They’re already pretty much the same thing right? If I don’t care about physical space at all I’ll probably just use Google Search. Google Maps has the directions and streets for that specific sort of task. If I want a restaurant it will also show me the address. Google Earth doesn’t have the maps or direction-making capability. But it has photos and wikipedia for increasing local context. If I want to get somewhere I’m going to use Google Maps. If I want to know more about an area, I’m going to use Google Earth.

Using Google Earth, I can have local information delivered to me when I can act on it. It’s also a really fun delivery method so that helps too.

4 ways to use Google Earth in your Internet Marketing

Up to now I’ve focused on how individuals might be using Google Earth with their iPhone, concentrating on the concepts of Local and Relevance. How can you use this tool to market your business online?

Caveat: What follows are some nice untested tactics. Using these tactics shouldn’t hurt (in fact, you should be doing some of them already). But I wouldn’t replace a functional internet marketing strategy with the handful of tactics which follow.

1. Ensure that your Wikipedia entry exists and is up-to-date. Google Earth for the iPhone will show Wikipedia entries that are relevant to the section of Earth that is being displayed. A tip here: if you go in and create your Wikipedia entry with what sounds like a press release you won’t get very far. The editors are quick and thorough. Be certain to cite any and all claims you make and respect the Five Pillars.
2. Get your images of your business into Panoramio. By default, Google Earth will show little squares for images that are relevant to the section of Earth that it is displaying. Make sure your place of business is one of them.
3. Get images of your products into Panoramio. This might be easier for something like real estate, where the product might be a house or condo. But you can use this internet marketing tactic for other products as well. But keep to the spirit of Local when you do so: photographs of your product in relation to the landscape/locality. Show how your product is a part of what local means. Also, one picture isn’t enough. Lots of pictures. WIth tags and descriptions. And a Panoramio username/profile that also markets for you. This one will be hard for me as I’m a big Flickr fan.
4. Get to work on your plain old Google SEO. Google Earth for the iPhone or iPod allows users to perform a search that is limited by geography. Make sure that you are well ranked for the search terms that are relevant to your business.

These four tactics should tie into your existing profile-marketing, image-marketing, SEO and reputation management strategies. Any other ideas?

Image via Wikipedia

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.

Twitkit is a browser-based interface for using Twitter. Once installed, you can open a sidebar (via the Tools menu) that contains the public stream, your stream, you + your friends and anyone responding to you. It’s that last one that makes me like the tool so much.

You see, I have to admit that I don’t follow everyone who follows me. I’m just not that kind of guy. I try to keep the people I listen to fairly trimmed to those who talk about things I want/need to know. I also don’t always have the time to scan everyone’s twitterstream to figure out if I might like what they have to say. It’s my tactic for staying sane on Twitter.

However, sometimes people reply to my questions and I never hear them in my current Twitter app. Having a panel that just shows me who is replying to me in Twitter is the perfect tool for making sure I’m present when anyone talks to me. Whether I know or follow them or not.

Installing TwitKit makes your ears bigger.

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!

The folks at SeoBook have made our lives easier with a fantastic Firefox plugin called Rank Checker. I’ve been using this tool since July and couldn’t live without it. Even though it’s easy to install and use, SeoBook’s Aaron Wall has made it even easier by creating a 5-minute video to tech you how to install and use it. I highly recommend taking the 5 minutes to view it.

Five Tips to make Rank Checker even sweeter

1. You can cut and paste your list of keywords out of a spreadsheet and add them all at once, or you can type them one at a time.
2. Be sure to save your list of keywords to the preset folder. That way, you can run it any time you like with almost no effort.
3. You can simply view the results on-screen, but even better is to download the .csv (comma separated value) file.
4. Save that raw data file to it’s own folder as simply MM-DD-YY, M-D-YY, MM-D-YY, or M-DD-YY. (see tomorrow’s post to see why this is so important!) feel free to open the file in Excel and save it as a .xls file so that you can format and play with the information. Just don’t mess with the original CSV.
5. Plan to run this once a month for three or four months so that you can observe the impact of your SEO efforts (changes to content, meta data, and inbound link building).

This is the second in a series of five posts this week on cool FireFox plugins to assist in optimizing your real estate web site. Yesterday’s post featured a Firefox plugin for easily adding images to your real estate blog. Tomorrow’s post will examine a cool (but somewhat tricky) plugin that helps Realtors visualize and report on the data they get from Rank Checker.

Image by riekus via Flickr

Ever been to a blog and seen page after page of pure unadulterated text? You know, a giant wall of words pummeling your eyeballs? Since you’re here at the Internet Marketing for Real Estate blog I would guess that the answer is: Yes. But what about your own blog? When was the last time you put up a picture or a link to some relevant articles that are outside of your usual feedreader favorites?

Hopefully you’ve noticed that posts here have gotten a little more picturesque lately. And that is due almost entirely to a tool called Zemanta.

Adding pictures makes your blog better

When I’m talking to Union Street Media clients about blogging or content strategies I always encourage them to take pictures. Provide words and images that your readership will find useful or entertaining (or ideally, both). Everyone nods their head and agrees but when I check back in, it’s often a wall of words. Here are some of the reasons why people avoid adding images to their blog posts:

• “Taking pictures might be fun, but uploading and managing them is not fun and takes time.”
• “I’m not any good at taking pictures.”
• “I don’t have a digital camera.”
• “It’s a real chore to add pictures via the blog interface.”

So yeah, I love taking pictures and I love playing with technology. But that’s a part of what I get paid to do. You might get paid to do something else, like sell real estate. So I’ve been keeping my ear out for a way to make it less painful to add pictures to your blog.

Zemanta: Quick and painless pictures for your blog

I can’t remember where I first heard about Zemanta. It was either Chris Brogan via Danial Rothamel or maybe it was Jay Thompson. So hat tips to all those fine guys. Zemanta watches what you write in your Wordpress blog and comes up with some public, creative commons licensed images that you can use in your blog posts.

Now let’s get down to business and get some pictures on your blog. Here’s what you need to do (sorry that there is a little technical stuff up front):

1. If you don’t already use Firefox as your browser when editing your blog, start today.
2. Install the Zemanta Firefox plugin.
3. Log in to your blog and start a new post.
4. You’ll notice over on the side, there’s a new section for Zemanta.
5. Hover over one of the pictures and see if you like it.
6. If you like the picture, click it.
7. You’re done, the picture is now in your blog post.
8. Go back to step 3 and repeat.

Other than the installation the whole process takes about zero time. If you want to refine your options, there’s a tool to help filter down the images it shows (example: for my posts about business and Twitter, I filter by “bird” and then put a picture of a bird in).

If you want a little more control and are willing to do more work, I recommend checking out Mike Mueller’s post about how to use Flickr to find images people want you to share.

So there you go. I don’t want to see any more blog posts without a picture.