Optimizing and Distributing your Videos

Pop Quiz: What is the 3rd biggest search engine?

Yahoo, Bing, AOL, MSN, ASK?

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Managing Your Online Reputation

8/10 consumers trust brands that offer reviews, especially if there are bad ones too!

Sounds like an odd thing to say but the reality is in the consumer-to-consumer marketplace, the truth surfaces about products, services, ideas, and companies. For instance, when looking at reviews for bed and breakfast options recently, some friends of mine showed up with a very bad review from a disgruntled customer. I wondered, how could this be? This place is gorgeous and the hosts warm and courteous. I wanted to find out from them what happened so I asked them. They had no idea about this review but had noticed a dip in their bookings and when they looked at the review, they quickly knew what was going on and told me the other side of the story.

The reviewer in question had failed to book through the proper reservation system and assumed they would hold a room for him for the same time each year that he had been visiting during leaf-peeping season in Vermont. As the hosts were not aware of a booking they of course gave the room out to another party who had booked properly. He was furious and called them to complain. A few days later, some deeply unpleasant reviews began to surface on Trip Adviser and their bookings dropped during their most important season. Once they had sourced these reviews back, they went on the offensive and reached out to other long term guests asking them to provide some fair and balanced feedback on Trip Advisor. They came flooding and started to push the bad reviews down  becoming clear to others that there was a malicious hijacker at work rather than a bona fide review(s).

The lesson from this is that you will get bad reviews from time to time – it’s the nature of people’s sensibilities. It’s healthy in fact as it allows you as a business to learn from your customers to make your business better, much like test marketing. However you must keep a close eye on any muckraking and manage your reputation as best possible. Unless people break codes of conduct, then it is hard to have conversations removed from your digital footprint, but you can contribute to the conversations and provide more of the type of content that you want associated with your  brand. Encouraging customers to do the same is key, as people love user generated content in a trust based community as the web is.

How can you monitor your brand?

Two suggestions:

1. Set up a Google Alert on your brand, which means that whenever you are mentioned in news, other blogs, customer reviews etc you get emailed a list of these results either daily, weekly or monthly to your choosing.
2. Search you brand in Google with Google Suggest and see what Google is suggesting as you type. You will see any bad associations and be able to investigate the search results.

The blogosphere is an open and often candid forum, so being able to smell a rat and respond can help restore that trust that might have been lost either fairly or unfairly, as in the case of my friends at the B & B. Strengthening your community in life and online will inevitably help you create a strong business.

Tell me your stories on this. How you have had to manage your online reputation?

Why Choose Responsibility Chose Union Street Media

Choose Responsibility is a nonprofit organization that stimulates conversation about the presence of alcohol in American culture; more specifically, they focus on how this affects young adults ages 18-20. They strive to empower young adults to make responsible decisions about alcohol in their lives.

The founder is John McCardell, former president of Middlebury College. John believes the drinking age should be lowered to 18 so young adults in the 18-20 age range don’t resort to dangerous measures to acquire alcohol. The idea is that by teaching people at an earlier age how to drink responsibly, it will lead to better habits in the future.

John came to us needing a better website, and that’s exactly what we gave him. Watch him talk about his positive partnership with Union Street Media.

Check out the Union Street Media YouTube Channel to watch other happy clients speak about their work with us!

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!

Video is the New Photo – WellcomeMat Video App

I’ve been a fan of WellcomeMat for a while now for it’s effortless ease of use, attractive interface and the fact it’s a dedicated real estate platform for video. The latest offering from them is an iPhone app that allows you to post  geo-coded real estate videos to WellcomeMat, Twitter, Facebook, Posterous and YouTube for FREE.

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.

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?

Real Estate Videos Work for Brian Boardman, Burlington Vermont

Union Street Media presented at the Coldwell Banker Agent Real Estate Trends & Social Media Seminar on the 16th at the Ethan Allen Club in Burlington, Vermont. Our presentation focused on utilizing real estate videos.

The presentation went very well. We received a great deal of positive feedback from participants from all over the region. Our friend and client Brian Boardman, a REALTOR® here in Burlington, Vermont chimed in to talk  about how a particular listing video help him get one of his high-end properties under contract.  It was a fun, engaging conversation!

Please contact us if you attended the session and would like a copy of our notes (or if you couldn’t make it, and would like a copy of our notes).

Brian Boardman on why he uses Union Street Media

One of our favorite lines from Good to Great is “be interested, not interesting”… so please excuse this somewhat self-promotional blog post.  It’s not our style.  However, we’ve been cooking up some new videos here at Union Street Media and have one we feel compelled to share.  Brian Boardman, the Owner / Broker of Coldwell Banker Hickok & Boardman and a longtime Union Street Media client, talked a little bit about why he’s working with us and we got it on tape!

Inspired by a few videos we saw on our semi-annual trip to the Inman News Real Estate Connect conference, we also produced a video biography of Brian to help introduce him to site visitors.  We launched a new site, www.agentsdrivinghydrids.com, to coincide with Brian’s effort to encourage REALTORS to drive hybrid vehicles this summer as well.  If you’re one of them, please let Brian know and he’ll link to your web site.

Real Estate Marketing Dollars for Print vs Web

Study into Real Estate Advertising

Disclaimer: we have a good friend that works at the Burlington Free Press and do believe there is a role for print in the real estate advertising model.

This blog article on real estate advertising in newspapers from a veteran media executive is a must read for REALTORS undecided about the ratio of print to web investment. The article states that 6 out of 10 real estate agents think newspaper advertising is useless. However, 80% still buy print ads often just to appease the sellers they are representing!  This is consistent with the anecdotal reports we’ve heard from our clients.

We feel that REALTOR are the expert in their field.  With their knowledge of the market and trends, they are best qualified to know how to market their properties and to whom.  If the high quality leads are coming from the web then this is the sort of quality control that needs to be measured and communicated to sellers.  One client of ours has recently started offering sellers $250 back at closing if he never has to run their house in a print ad.  Think that’s crazy?  Try pitching it as your next listing presentation.

Brian Boardman on real estate marketing

Brian Boardman, the broker and owner of Hickock & Boardman  and a longtime USM client, spoke to us recently about the growing trend of moving away from print to web to market properties.

Utilizing Google Local For Your Business

Search Engine Optimization is a time-intensive exercise. We regularly tell clients that search Engine Optimization is an endurance race not a sprint. You must work on your site consistently to make sure that you are accurately represented in Google Searches. This is because as we frequently tell people “No one can pull the strings a Google.”

This statement has one notable exception, the Google local listings. You have undoubtedly run across the local listings as you have preformed searched in Google when you search for a term with a location attached. For example lets say you search for “web design 05401″ you get a search page that looks like this:

The local listings are the ones that appear next to the map. You can have direct control over these listings. By utilizing Google Local listings you will give your business great visibility for people searching locally for your services. If you click on Union Street Media’s entry you are taken to a page that we have set up for our business that looks like this:

As you can see, you can literally write your own ticket in Google. You can add pictures, enter hours of operation in addition to many other pieces of information that will give your business visibility and attract attention. A great way to get a better idea of what this feature has to offer is to look at the Google Local Business Center Introductory Video.

Setting up your Google local account takes some work. There is a phone or mail based address verification check that you will need to complete but it is totally worth the investment of time. To get started click here to go to the Google Local Business Center.

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