In the last few months, we’ve had the privilege at Union Street Media of launching several new real estate websites. Many of these have been built on our new Enhanced and Premium platform, and we are excited to show these new and refreshed websites.
Peabody and Smith is a large and successful agency based in Northern NH and VT. After years of maintaining their functional website, it was time to make sure the site was not only found in search engines, but it also represented the professionalism of the business through a refined design. In this facelift, USM focused on clean design and images that complement the beautiful landscapes where Peabody and Smith sell real estate. We also included a sold property search, and a new map-based property search. We were happy with the results, but we were even more excited to get the client’s response: “We could not be happier! This is so wonderful! I was thrilled and showed the agents this morning, and guess what – not one negative comment, they LOVED it! You have done a great job, let’s keep proceeding forward. I am absolutely thrilled!”
Another longtime USM client, Debbi Burton, took advantage of our newest property detail view pages as we redesigned and widened her website to better portray her successful Burlington, VT based real estate business.
Blue Ridge Real Estate in Rutland, Vermont came to Union Street Media for a new website that would provide their customers with the most user-friendly tools while allowing them to drive the website process and update all of their content. They chose our Enhanced package.
If you’re using twitter you won’t get very far without seeing someone put a ‘#’ in front of a word or phrase. So what is this all about? Hashtags were created to be able to monitor trends and create a simple way to search for a specific event, area, service etc. Creating a hashtag is simple, but getting people to continue to use it is the tricky part. With the use of hashtags comes the ability to monitor that tag with ease. You can monitor hashtags in several ways using a program like Tweetdeck or by using Twitter’s powerful search engine. A useful way to monitor what’s going in town is to find the hashtag that corresponds with your area, in Burlington’s case, it’s #BTV. I find that monitoring that hashtag is these best way to keep an eye on all that’s around me in Burlington. If there’s something going on, someone will tweet about it. For instance, Grace Potter announced the morning of her CD release day that she would be putting on a free show on Church St. in Burlington. About two hours after she announced that on Twitter, the non-tweeps around me (a tweep is someone who uses twitter) found out. My point here is that news travels fast on Twitter, something like we’ve never seen before.
We began trending locally next to Burlington's hash tag #BTV
Last week I came up with the idea to play a little Twitter experiment. I wanted to try and get a hashtag that I created trending. By trending I mean that people continue to talk about that certain subject and use the given hashtag over and over again. Not only did I want to see people talking about something that was created here at Union Street Media, but I wanted it to be a fun, and be a great way to interact with the people and companies around us. The idea focused on taking a picture of your workspace whether it be of your own desk or a picture of your office. I grabbed an image I had previously taken and posted it with the hashtag #btvworkspace and also #btv to target the area around us. It caught on fast because people not only want to share what they have around them, but they are curious to see other people’s workspaces as well.
It wasn’t long before we were trending locally. We were completely satisfied and were extremely happy everyone was enjoying sharing pictures and talking about their offices. The key thing here was to be interactive with our followers and also pick-up some along the way. We were able to increase our followers by 8% and establish a better connection with our followers. The moral of the story here is that, if you want to be successful on Twitter, you need to follow trends and even try to start one of your own.
I recently participated as a judge in a video contest for students at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. The rules for the contest, sponsored by the Admissions office, were straightforward: Create a 2-4 minute video that includes three or more reasons why you love St. Mike’s (at least one had to relate to academics), and post it on YouTube. You can imagine the array of reasons that resulted!
Participating in this panel was a great reminder for me of how powerful video is as a marketing medium. As an Internet marketer, I have two main areas of focus: how businesses present themselves on their website, and how said website can achieve a high level of visibility. Video is an excellent vehicle for addressing both. Well-optimized videos can be very attractive to Google, and they are a great way to invite customers (existing and potential) to engage in your site and learn about you in a more interactive way than text and images allow.
So, let’s circle back to St. Mike’s. The panel was asked to judge seven student-created videos, all extolling the virtues of their cherished college home. Interestingly, a few very different approaches to the same challenge emerged.
Boiling it down, we saw:
Over the last month, we’ve launched some great new or redesigned Union Street Media websites, and they cover all of your bases. If you’re looking for entertainment, we have it with Top Hat DJ and the Collegiate Peaks Music Festival. Looking for the best in Vermont gifts? Marc Sheridan at Stowe Mercantile has you covered and can ship directly to you. If it’s commercial space in up-and-coming Winooski, VT, Winooski Falls is your pick. Of course, it’s no surprise that we have some wonderful options if you are looking for real estate. If you’re looking for the best in Burlington, VT real estate, check out local favorite Karen Waters. If going green with your Vermont home is a priority or you are looking to buy a rental, head to Bob Paroline’s Paroline Real Estate. If you need Upper Valley NH real estate, Vanessa Stone’s team can take care of you. Mack Realty Group is ready for you if you are looking in the Boston Suburbs. And, to make sure you have everything covered, we have Ben Bosher’s Benefit Design and Strategies for all of your insurance needs.
Not only do we have these great client updates to share, we’ll also be sharing a brand new USM website in the near future. We are looking forward to walking the talk even more and providing new and current USM clients with a more user-friendly and informative site.
If you live in the Burlington area, you know that Winooski has seen a huge transformation in the past few years. Overseeing much of the development has been the people at Winooski Falls. USM took all of the Winooski Falls sites into our content management system so the staff would have easier access, and we redesigned the Winooski Falls main website to show the diverse range of opportunities now offered in Winooski.
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.
We’ve all heard the old cliché “Write what you know.” I decided to take a different approach with this article, and address something I very recently learned and tie it into something I know well. As it turns out, remodeling a kitchen isn’t so different from building a new website.
Not long ago my husband and I decided to do a complete kitchen overhaul in preparation for putting our condo on the market. Out with the old tiling, the outdated cabinets, the stained countertops. It was time to make serious updates. Looking back, I see that I was actually in my element in this new experience. Let me demonstrate…. The basics: Remodeling a kitchen can take several weeks and can be a lot of work, but in the end should add significant value. …Which generally translates into monetary value. Ditto the website.
According to those in the know, a good kitchen design should not compromise the all-important work triangle between your sink, your stove, and your fridge. Similarly, flashy bells and whistles don’t belong on a website if they’ll render it uncrawlable by the search engines. Like a great website, a great kitchen is both beautiful and functional.
If you have employed the services of a an Internet Marketing firm, chances are they have advised you to start a Facebook business page, Twitter account and a LinkedIn profile. You might have a blog, too, videos, and a life to lead! That’s a lot to keep up with while juggling your day-to-day business operations if you don’t have the benefit of someone helping you manage all these accounts.
Here’s a few tips on how you can consolidate some of these platforms and seamlessly integrate them into your day-to-day operations.
Use what’s happening around you to write blog posts. They can write themselves: a phone call with a client, an internal memo, a conference you attended, your email outbox, etc. Blog consistently and have these posts automatically feed to your Big 3 social media accounts.
I recommend Twitterfeed for getting content out to Facebook and Twitter.
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
