Union Street Media Client Testimonial Video

One of the most rewarding aspects of working at Union Street Media is the clients’ appreciation of the work we do. When a client’s website performance increases, it is equally as rewarding to us as it is to them.

Recently we’ve compiled a video that highlights a few good words that some of our clients had to say about their experience with Union Street Media.

After you’ve signed up, check out all of Union Street Media’s videos and rate your favorites!

Twitter: Using Social Media to Increase Business Success

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.

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Changing Media Landscape

I had an interesting phone call from a longtime client yesterday who decided to stop advertising in his local print real estate monthly for the next four months and will instead be engaging our report, recommend, revise process.  “RRR” helps our clients improve the search engine placement of their web site and generate more leads from the web.  This client understands the shifting media landscape and I was pleased to see him make his marketing investments accordingly.

The upcoming Media Convergence Conference in New York City, put on by The Economist, launched a video called Shift Happens, that helps put these changes in context.  They posted a fascinating video about the event here:

My favorite statistic: The average American teen sends 2272 text messages a month.

With numbers like that, and the often quoted 2008 NAR study that shows 87% of home buyers use the internet when making a purchase, I wonder how much longer people will continue to disproportionately spend money offline?

Your Website is Running for Presidential Office

An online visibility metaphor

Presidential candidates travel the country to gain exposure and voice their platforms; your business should be traveling the Internet to spread the name and message of your business. In the political world we hear speeches, in the online world we read blogs. Just as your neighbor has an Obama ‘08 bumper sticker on his Subaru, a client of yours may link to your site on their Facebook page.

In the end the candidate with the most relevant policies, best speeches and most bumper stickers will usually take the White House. The website with the most inbound links and popular blog posts will rocket to the top of a Google search result page.

Step 1: Make sure campaign headquarters is staffed and ready. You want to promote a site that is appealing, useful, promotes your business objectives, and is full of good content. This is about the functionality of the site. It doesn’t matter how many people go to your site if it doesn’t convert them, a bad site with good visibility will promote your brand as “the guy everyone knows but no one uses.”

Step 2: Hit the campaign trail. Not only should you host a blog and post often but respond to comments. Be an authority! Be friendly! Be helpful! It is important to gain presence “on the road”; be sure to comment on related blogs, this will give you presence and help you start developing inbound links. As we all hear, inbound links are crucial to your internet marketing.

Step 3: Diversify, Web 2.0 style. Besides blogging there is a whole country full of social media voters. Get to know and use Facebook, Twitter, Localism, YouTube etc. All these keep your audience in tune with you and all provide inbound links as well. This is huge because as the demographic of social media users grows and ages more and more of your audience will be using social media tools. For some insightful tips on blogging as related to social media, check out Chris Brogan’s blog.

Online visibility is a cornerstone of your internet marketing, without it your website will fail to reach the critical mass required to make you President. Or whatever it is you’re after.

You can get more than leads from Twitter

Sometimes things don’t go right. And then people talk about how not-right things are. That’s pretty much life. On the web, you can add instant global broadcasting and a “permanent record” of sorts between the Google cache and the Wayback Machines and the various site-downloaders and mirrors. How do you go about making things right?

So let’s bring this into focus: Twitter has been dealing with this exact issue of late. Read more

A Web 2.0 Education in the Comment Thread(s)

[Please note, as this conversation has the tendency to get emotional and very technical at the same time, I would like to state up front that I do not take any specific or direct side in the discussion.

I can fully appreciate the dissatisfaction of those who feel they could get better SEO results for their association with Trulia. As an internet marketer, I can also appreciate the potential value that Trulia delivers in the form of customers who are fairly well along in their purchasing decision.

Which of those two is the most important can be measured (feel free to give me a call if you'd like me to assist you in this assessment). The answer would likely vary on a case-by-case basis and also over time.

The purpose of this post is to examine some of the tangential benefit of the broader conversation. One is practical and includes information on which you can act, probably today. This information is covered in my "first semester" below.

The other is more of a thinking and strategic issue surrounding online marketing, interlocking ecosystems of information and reputation management. This is where a lot of the heated discussions take place. While you read them here, however, please try to look beyond the specific companies and personalities and consider the systems (personal, technological and economic) involved and how they rely on each other.]

As I recently let loose in Twitter, there’s an entire education to be had in the comment thread on Galen Ward’s post about Trulia and their linking policy over at the Bloodhound Blog. This post was created to back up that statement. Consider this a pivot-table applied to qualitative data.

I’ve prepared a syllabus for you. Please note that not all of the answers to the exam questions will be found directly in the comment threads, but enough clues for you to determine the majority of the answers are present. Some questions (particularly in the second semester) will require creative thinking and problem solving extending beyond the comment thread on the Ward’s post. Outside resources are encouraged in all semesters.

• The first semester is a practical one, with hands-on worthwhile info on which you may be able to act. There are a few though-pieces in there, but it is primarily a “lab” class.
• The second semester is more of a seminar where you examine a controversial issue not for it’s controversy but for its structure.
• A laid back summer session has been assigned as well.

Enjoy. And if you post your answers to the exams publicly, let me know so I can send you a certificate of some sort.

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Last week: Lots of thinking on the interwebs

I didn’t get a chance to give a weekly overview of activity on the RE.web last week so I’ll do a quick rundown. Lots of deep thoughts were floating out there last week, the ripples are still spreading on some of them.

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Zillow on NPR

As I was driving home from biathlon practice last night I heard a good piece about Zillow on PRI’s “Marketplace” program. The program focuses on how the site is faring in the real estate downturn (very well, apparently). The link will take you to audio and text versions of the story. While you’re in media-mode why not get some historical perspective from this interview with Zillow’s Rich Barton from 2006?

If you’re new to Zillow or haven’t started using it yet, check out Maggie’s intro to Zillow post.

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?

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.