Introducing the Newest Facebook
Facebook is officially six years old. The social media Web site that started out as thefacebook.com and only catered to college students has grown leaps and bounds over the last six years and just reached a new mile stone: 400 million users.
In honor of its birthday Facebook launched a redesign focused on helping users better navigate the site, find new games and applications and communicate more effectively with friends. 80 million users have been upgraded and the rest will see the new homepage in waves over the next week.
Navigation on the new design has changed drastically, now all of your most important links in the left navigation. This bar includes your news feed messages (inbox), photos, friends, bookmarks and a new applications and games dashboard.
Communication on the new design is easier than ever with three new icons that update in real time. You won’t have to refresh to see who has added you as a friend, sent you a message, or receive a notification. All of that information updates automatically and can be found in the upper left hand corner.
Chatting with your friends is now easier than ever. All of your friends that are online will appear in a bar on the left hand side. By simply clicking their name you are able to start a new chat with them.
News Feed and Live Feed are still a part of the new Facebook design, but they have been renamed to Top News and Most Recent News.
mRELEVANCE Invites YOU to New Homes Camp
Mark your calendar for the South’s largest real estate focused technology conference. REtechSouth takes place March 25 and 26 at Gwinnett Center. Best of all, there is still time to buy your ticket, but don’t wait long the conference sold out last year. Carol has a discount code, so make sure to use it: REtechSouth Discount Tickets!
mRELEVANCE is proud to sponsor RetechSouth’s New Homes Camp on Thursday, March 25 from 9:30 a.m. – noon. Featuring Carol Flammer, Meredith Oliver, Mitch Levinson, Tice Burke and Paul Chaney, this special focus section focuses on how to use blogging, social media and other tech tools for a competitive advantage.
Whether you are a home builder, developer, marketing director, new homes sales agent, broker or are simply interested in learning more about the new homes industry, this is one adventure in new technology that you don’t want to miss. Don’t forget to bring your business card for raffle prizes to be given away throughout New Homes Camp.
Take Aways include:
• Positioning your blog as the engine of your social media program
• How to sell to the savvy dot com consumer
• Interacting with consumers through Trulia Q&A and your Trulia blog
• How to position your social media content to show up higher in the search engines
• How online conversations can lead to building long-term trusted client relationships
• The most commonly used social media tools for engaging customers
Here is the content schedule for New Homes Camp:
Forget the Bling: It’s Time to Blog
There’s more to social media than Facebook, Twitter, Posterous and Linkedin. While these sites are certainly “hot” today, don’t get distracted by the bling-bling of sites that you don’t own. Find out how to make your blog the engine of your social media program for an effective tried and true strategy that will take you from 0 to 60. Carol Flammer, author of Social Media for Home Builders: It’s Easier Than You Think shows you how your blog will power the social networks and make your entire program easier to manage and get results!
Selling to Dot Com; Follow Up Until they Buy, Die or Get a Restraining Order
It’s five o’clock…do you know where your Web site leads are? How well do you convert your eLeads into eSales? This seminar is for sales agents who want to: 1) Improve follow-up response time and frequency, 2) Set more appointments with eLeads and phone calls and 3) Convert more eLead appointments into eSales. Fast paced, fun and content rich, Meredith will give you six strategies to help you respond better, quicker and faster to your walk-in traffic and Internet leads. Stop sending massive eblasts that get little response and leaving boring voicemail messages! It’s time to put the fun back in follow-up! Learn how from Internet marketing expert, Meredith Oliver!
Beyond Listings: Interact with Consumers on Trulia
You’ve claimed your listings on Trulia, but have you looked beyond that? With 6 million users a month, how can you interact with them so that they know about your homes and communities? Tice Burke, Manager of Strategic Partnerships will show you how to meet buyers on Trulia. Learn how to engage your next buyer through Q&A and launch your Trulia blog – It’s Free!
The Intersection of Social and Search
Google is working to make search more social. What can you do to optimize your social sites to show up higher in both the search results and the social search widget? How do you know where you should be, how to optimize your status and how to know it is working? Mitch Levinson of mRELEVANCE will help you learn how social media sites can help you control what consumers find when they search for your company and communities.
The Digital Handshake: Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business Using Social Media
Even today’s most successful businesses are seeing shrinking returns on their advertising and marketing dollars. The Digital Handshake explains why advertising and marketing are losing their effectiveness and how to solve the problem using social media to corral elusive consumers. It explains the best practical business applications in current use and how you can use them to ramp up your business. Using case studies gleaned from real businesses, author Paul Chaney shows you how companies both large and small can tap social media to mitigate market changes and reap valuable business benefit in the real world.
Is Social Media Worth the Cost?
Q: How is social media marketing is perceived within your organization at budget time?
A: Exciting news, companies are starting to understand and incorporate social media marketing! Almost half of the respondents said that they see social media as an effective marketing tactic and intend to increase their budgets conservatively.
In addition, 7% of respondents said that they plan to liberally increase their social media budgets in 2010.
It seems that the companies who are investing time and money into social media are getting results on par with what they invest. The 7% of organizations who have a strategic social media strategy in place are seeing measurable ROI, which is why they are willing to spend more money. The 49% who are taking baby steps into the social media field are seeing equivalent results. Those who are investing little to no time into the medium are seeing the results of their efforts.
As social media continues to grow, it will be interesting to see how people’s attitudes and opinions change throughout the year.
Where do you stand on the Sherpa chart? Are you interested in changing your position? If you want to invest in a social media strategy that will produce results, contact an mRELEVANCE team member. We would be more than happy to walk you through the process and make sure that you see a return on your investment.
*chart courtesy of MarketingSherpa
Your Business Location and the Web
How does your business reach consumers in the local community? Local search, of course! Every major search engine has some form of local search, and some can automatically determine your vicinity using your IP address.
It is extremely beneficial and relatively easy for today’s businesses to list themselves in Google’s local search. When Google searches are cross referenced with a location, such as a city name or zip code, businesses matching the search criteria show up on a map at the top of the returned search results. Needless to say, with the amount of people using Google to search the web every day, this free service is an invaluable tool for businesses. The debut of the “Near me now” feature of Google makes it easy for smartphone users to find places close to wherever they are at the moment they search.
All you need to get listed in Google’s local search listings is a Google / Gmail account, a business address and phone number. To get started simply visit Google’s Local Business Center and sign in with your Gmail account.
Similarly Microsoft’s Bing search engine has a Local Listing Center and Yahoo has a Local Listings Account Center. To use Bing or Yahoo, you’ll need a Windows Live ID and Yahoo Id respectively.
The popular social network, Foursquare, is another great way to promote your business location. The service is primarily for mobile web use and rewards users with points and badges for checking in at various venues with their mobile phone. To get your business listed on the Foursquare network, sign up for an account at foursquare.com and then visit http://foursquare.com/add_venue or add the application to your smartphone. Foursquare for Businesses also lets you create promotions for your business which are centered around use of the social network. You could for instance give some sort of prize to users on their 10th visit, or reward users for becoming the mayor (most frequent visitor) of your venue, click here for more information.
Another location centric service which also allows users to review and ideally recommend businesses to others is Yelp.com, the service has an application on each of the four main mobile operating systems (iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm WebOS, and Google Android) and has just updated it’s iPhone application to allow mobile check ins much like Foursquare. To list your business on Yelp visit their business sign up page.
Local search has been a big component of online search for quite a while, and the focus on local businesses is becoming even greater thanks to the rapid progress and increased use of mobile technology . The services listed above are great tools for helping potential customers navigate their way from cyberspace to your business location.
Let us know if you have questions! Call the mRELEVANCE team at 770-383-3360.
Top 10 IBS 2010 Take Aways
The International Builders Show is always a great adventure. I love the networking, the education and the exploration of walking the exhibition floor. This year was really special for me because it was like homecoming in many ways. It was wonderful to see old friends and make new ones. Unlike past years when budgets were bigger, many of my friends could not go to Vegas and that was sad. So this post is for all who went and those who couldn’t. My Top 10 IBS Take Aways:
- A sense of humor is an excellent tool to have in any economy. I absolutely loved the “Wonderful World” duet by Jim Suth and Jeff Shore. No doubt that these two had as much fun writing it and performing as we did laughing along.
- Leaders emerge and excel throughout change and hard times. Kudos to my friend Karen Dry who led the Professional Women in Building through 2009. Much like a butterfly coming out of its cocoon, she led the council through a name change while reinventing herself professionally. The team of women that lead this council are in a word “amazing.” I look forward to the leadership of Tammie Smoot, Kimmi Houston and all of the women in this organization.
- Styx Rocks! Their crystal ball may not be any better about forecasting the housing market in 2010 than it was in predicting anything in the 70s, but boy what a dynamic group. Their music has been with us for three decades and we treasure it — music that brings back memories.
- “All of the builders who are successful today are on social media sites.” While I absolutely believe this to be true, it was nice to hear fellow MIRM Dan Levitan state this during MIRM pro ed. My take away from this is social media has become mainstream and people get it OR they want to get it!
- Technology makes trade shows more interactive and more fun. Everyone tweeting at IBS, the smart phone IBS application, the Tweet Up and the overall increased interaction made for better communication during the show. Transcripts of tweets are still available, so check them out at http://wthashtag.com/Ibs2010 – make sure to sort by date if you pull the transcript!
- Red is the new Black. Melinda Brody, MIRM says the funeral is over, we aren’t wearing black anymore, we have a new attitude. In fact attitude was a recurring theme during the week with several sales trainers including Melinda and Myers Barnes emphasizing it.
- Your Web site is an active sales tool, not a passive brochure. Meredith Oliver, MIRM did a great job of demonstrating how to make your Web site sell, interact and capture leads. In fact, this was a HUGE theme at the show. Your Internet marketing needs to engage potential buyers immediately, be interconnected and encourage two-way communication. Meredith asks this question, “Does your Web site meet and greet?” She is absolutely right, your buyers meet you first online.
- When they come to your model they are a guest NOT a traffic unit. This from Kerry Mulcrone, MIRM. We need to think of people as people not numbers. This is so true! People buy homes on emotion and they buy from people they like.
- We like free stuff, especially food. The receptions, luncheons and giveaways on the show floor were a huge hit. I saw tweets about fresh salmon, cookies and ice cream (no, not at the same booth) and was even given an awesome ladybug balloon animal by Erik Cofield of BuildTopia (thanks Erik).
- Quality is more important than Quantity. This is as true of trade show attendees as it is of Twitter and Facebook fans and followers. A small group of the right followers is always more powerful than a large group of non-relevant people. Although attendance at IBS may not have been what it was at the height at the market, we are mighty.
As a bonus, here is 10+ from my friend John Palumbo, MIRM. He closed the Super Sales Rally with this statement, “2010 is the year we are going to take the home building industry back into the black.”
I keep remembering more and more people with great take aways from the show. I promised to stop at 10, so please add your top show take aways as comments. I’d love to know what you learned at IBS, who you met, what impressed you.
