More popular than Jesus?
In a recent article, the Burlington Free Press implored Vermont Realtors to embrace social media. When a mainstream Gannett newspaper tells you to do something, you know it must be widely accepted. But just how popular is social media?
There was a day when calling yourself “more popular than Jesus” could get you into big trouble. There was also a day when the Fab Four could threaten our morals and corrupt the minds of young people.
But now that the Vatican forgives John his brashness (they said they liked the beautiful music after all) and the Pope asks Bloggers to give the Internet a Soul, I think it’s safe to speculate that social media may very well be more popular than the Word Made Flesh.
Over the last month, the Union Street Media web development team has been hard at work launching a wide variety of sites for new and existing clients. After putting in hundreds of hours of our time and our clients’ time, we are pleased to add the following sites to our portfolio.
Author Stephen P. Kiernan came to Union Street looking to develop a website for his recent books as well as his B1 Campaign focused on community-based selfless action. With clean design, a blog with frequent updates, and user-friendly action items, Stephen is set to bring his message of change to a much wider audience.
Longtime USM client Omni Medical Systems needed a new website for their innovative bladder management system, Urincare. We put together an appealing site with e-commerce functionality so the could continue to grow their business online.
Real estate websites should be so much more than MLS information and a contact form. An effective real estate website should not only sell the services of the office or agent, it should sell their personality and their expertise in their market area.
To illustrate this, let’s imagine a person is looking to buy a property in your market area but does not have a particular affinity to any office. This person visits two different websites in their search process. Each of these websites is built on the same web platform, using the same basic functionality and layout. If the structure and functionality are all identical, the element that will distinguish one site from another is the portrayal of the agent’s personality, experience and knowledge of the real estate market. By giving people more information, you give them more opportunities to connect with you on a personal level.
I have never met a Realtor who got into the business because he or she lacked personality or an attachment to his or her service area. Connection and personality are what make a person a good Realtor to begin with. In today’s Internet-dominated real estate market, the motivated Realtor faces a new challenge: how to effectively convey personality and market area vision online.
Go for Bronze!
Yahoo, Bing, AOL, MSN, ASK?
None of the above. It’s YouTube.
As mentioned in my previous post, this past week was CollegeXTRA.com, Inc.’s 10th birthday. CollegeXTRA.com, Inc. is the corporate name of Union Street Media. As a celebration of this milestone, I’d like to share with you a few of the things I’ve learned over the past ten years.
Running a business of twenty people requires a lot of cash and none of it comes easily. Each month our sales team is responsible for generating well over a hundred thousand dollars. To earn that money, our web development team needs to produce the work, which requires our product development team to create a scalable architecture for the sites. Our internet marketing team needs get the sites up in the search engines so that our clients get the traffic to generate a return on their invest. Our support team needs to keep the sites live, handle incoming phone calls and help clients with updates. Our office manager extrodinaire needs to invoice for all of this work and then made sure we actually get paid for it. This is fun, challenging and inspiring, but not easy.
However, there are free lunches. I know because I used to buy them for people and now, on occasion, people buy them for me. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs requires that we eat. Every day. Often three times. I have used lunch as a way to get an hour with really smart people. Our awesome attorney, Peter Kunin, helped set us on the right course over many-a-$10-sandwich, which is less then his normal billable rate. I have had the opportunity to learn from successful entrepreneurs about the lessons from their businesses over a lunch, and applied those lessons to USM. After a trip to the Google Campus in 2008, I discovered that 110% of Google employees eat free lunch at Google every day (I really appreciated the free lunch even if the shareholders might not). So now we have office lunch too at Union Street Media every Tuesday. We get together as a group, share stories, ideas and hang out. It’s awesome.
Jim Shattuck, the Director of Career Services at my senior year at Middlebury College, had a simple manta: “Network, network, network.” Although I didn’t know it at the time, I actually honed this skill at Middlebury. Freshman year I found out pretty quickly that if I knew the person behind the bar at a campus party, I got my luke warm Natty Light faster. Today, I’m the most public facing employee at Union Street Media. I spend about 10% of my time attending business events in the community and volunteering on boards of other organizations. However, you can’t just take from your network. You have to give back to it. One of the things I like to do the most is connect people in the community with each other, whether it’s for business purposes or friendship. When people move to Burlington, I invite them to the office and share my knowledge of the area. They leave with a sticky pad full of names, emails and phone numbers from contacts at a company where they might find a job to the best guys fix-it-guy (Chris Labelle, 802-343-0269) and mechanic in town (Daren Smith, 802-660-3111).
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?
Search Engine Optimization
