I was in Florida recently for a Real Estate Barcamp and while there I got to meet many old and new friends.  I don’t necessarily go to these events excited to learn new things.  When I do learn about new products, techniques and such that is a great by-product.  The reason I travel to the events is to grow the relationships with my social media sphere of friends that I have either met before in person or maybe have not yet met.

In Florida, one of the great people I got to meet for the first time was my friend Chris Griffith, aka @twitterzilla.  I have known her for a while and have followed along her blog for what seems like an eternity.  She was one of the first people I read when I was just starting to understand social media and at the time learning how to use it for real estate.  She was always one who was a straight shooter and would just tell it to you plain & simple.  But also had a heart of gold that would help however she could.  Well, yesterday I received an envelope in the mail.  You can see below the rest in this video:

With the advent of Facebook as a keeping-in-touch tool for (just about) everyone over the past year or two, I am often surprised by how much my friends and acquaintances remember about my status updates and my life in general.  It often serves as a conversational shortcut, keeping me from the necessity of catching everyone up on what I’ve been doing, even when I haven’t seen them in months.

Conversely, I think some people expect me to pay attention to each of their updates.  Herein lies the challenge. 

“I don’t know if you saw it on Facebook or not, but we’re expecting another baby.”

“You probably already know this from Facebook, but I quit my job.”

And so on.

Well, frankly, I haven’t always done a terrific job of keeping up on news from my friends and family on Facebook in the past, but I found a way to change that, and I wanted to share it with you.

As with most things that are worth doing in the social media world, this is a little bit time-consuming to do on a regular basis, but I can assure you that it’s worth the time if you take a few minutes each day or even weekly to spend on this technique.

Before I give you this tip, I guess I should take a minute to explain that “EdgeRank” is the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine who shows up in your “News Feed”, which is the default page that you see when you first log in to the network.  This is dependent on three distinct (and somewhat complex) factors; for a full explanation, you can see a terrific article on Techcrunch here.

So, how can you easily manage to interact with a large number of people while still paying attention to their updates (i.e. taking this out of Facebook’s hands and controlling it yourself)?

First, in the upper left hand corner of the page, click on “Friends”:

After that, click on “Status Updates”:

As you might well imagine, this page will display ALL status updates for ALL of your friends.

This is a great place to scan updates quickly to see what your friends are up to, and to interact with them.

My only caveat about doing rapid-fire responses on this page is to be prepared for the onslaught of replies.  You might consider changing your Facebook settings so that you won’t have to deal with emails from that.  Just a suggestion. 

I hope this is helpful.  I found that it expanded my Facebook horizons quite a bit, rather than depending on their news feed algorithm.

If you have any questions, let me know.  Also, we provide coaching on this stuff and we can help you to develop a solid marketing strategy for your business.

This past week I attended a Barcamp where a good friend of mine, Paul Chaney asked the question, how can Businesses capitalize on these new geolocation services like FourSquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and the newest player Facebook Places.  We had a great discussion regarding the subject.  Here is a brief video with my takeaway/idea on how to optimize on Geolocation Services.

If you are unsure how to create Facebook Ads that will target specific things like I talk about, feel free to contact us and we can assist you in building a solid marketing campaign on Facebook.

We all know that one great way to increase traffic into your site is to visit other people’s sites and leave valuable comments on specific topics.  Leaving those comments shows that you care about whatever the topic might be, or you are able to share your knowledge answering a question that someone posed in a blog post.  The other benefit is that some will allow you to get a backlink to your site which can help with the SEO end of things on your site.

So how can you find new blogs that are sharing information that will be helpful to your business or be great to connect with?  One way I like is using Google Blog Search. I can quickly type in any subject I care to read about & find some of the most recent posts on that topic.  Here is a brief video that will show you just how easy it is to find plenty of great blog content to read as well as some really awesome bloggers to connect with:

So get searching for other blogs and start connecting today.  The power of these types of connections can be great for your business while also being a wonderful source of knowledge. The best part of this technique is that it only costs a little bit of time and energy to accomplish which is wonderful if you are optimizing a blog on a budget. I know when I started into social media a few years back I would start each morning by reading anywhere from 1-2 hours other people’s content.  I would make a dedicated effort to leave valuable comments that would encourage the writer to want to connect with me.

After doing this for just over 6 months I had over 400 people subscribed into my old blog with great amounts of traffic coming daily from those subscribers.  In addition, the posts were averaging around 20-30 comments.  These people were not just finding me in the search engines, but they were mainly coming from the comments I left on their site.

Engaging the writer and other commenters

This part can be rather difficult at times.  You have to be creative in thinking of ways to get the original writer of the blog as well as those who are commenting on the post to want to first read your comment and then secondly want to either reply to you or visit your site.  This is a very delicate line to walk.  If you go overboard in your comment, you might offend the originator of the post.  One thing I would never do is leave a link in a comment, unless the writer asks specifically for that.  If you think you have something that could help, send them a quick email with the link. Adding a link is widely recognized by most bloggers as a non accepted practice as well as highly discouraged.  The writer has worked hard to get a reader to their site and they don’t appreciate someone trying to push them away to another site.

You also want to keep from sounding like a giant sales pitch.  The minute someone feels that, they will automatically categorize you as a spammer which could result in being banned from a site completely. The final thing you want to skip are canned generic responses like: “Great post I really enjoyed it and look forward to future posts of yours.” This shows lack of interest and that you are only there to hopefully get exposure for you and your blog.

So what should you do? Start by adding value to the conversation.  This might mean that you need to spend some time reading through all the comments before posting yours.  If you can either answer a question, or supply additional information on a topic the commenters and writer will pay attention to you.  The most effective thing you can do when commenting is to leave a genuine caring response that shows a level of interest on the subject.  When you read about someone’s question about what is the best Twitter Application for a Blackberry and you can share what app you are using, they are more likely to come over to your blog and read your post on Twitter Applications.

So give Google Blog Search a try and start connecting with great blog posts on just about any subject you wish!  And let me know in the comments below what you are searching for!

I work daily with clients assisting them with using social media for their business successfully. One of the first things I try to do is teach that while it is important to use the mediums properly to reach out, it is even more important to have systems set up in place to monitor your business online.

Monitoring your business online? Yes, you need to know what consumers are saying about you, your company, products, & services. You can really impress your customers when you are paying attention to what they are saying and responding appropriately.

So how do you go about this? Well, there are actually a few very simple ways to accomplish your monitoring. The first, is through Google Alerts. Google Alerts allows you a quick and simple way to set up automatic notifications whenever the search engine picks up that term.

So, you would want to set up alerts for your personal name, your brand name, business name and any other ways that people may refer to those things your either produce or provide. This way you know whenever consumers reference your product or service, you know what is going on.

This is important for a plethora of reasons. First, say a customer writes a blog post about how wonderful your product is. If you took 30 seconds after receiving that blog post to go visit the post and leave a simple comment thanking them, you have instantly taken that person from being a happy client to a fan for life!

Or, on the other hand, you had a client that wasn’t very happy with your product and decided to blast your company publicly in a blog post. When you see the post hit your inbox you can quickly begin the resolution process to correct whatever issue they may have.

A story that recently comes to mind is about a friend of mine who had some issues with a mobile phone company. They were completely untruthful with him and promised things that they would not deliver then. After several calls ending in pure frustrations, he finally turned to his blog and wrote about his experience. Within 48 hours he had people from this company contacting him and working on fixing the issues.

How did this company know about it? I am sure they had some sort of an alert in place to notify them whenever someone wrote about them.

Other than blogging, another way people enjoy voicing their opinions is through Twitter. They will send out tweets that their friends will then see and start discussions about how this company was terrible or really great with helping them with whatever they needed.

As a business, you MUST have someone monitoring Twitter and keeping track of what others are saying. While there several ways to do this, one of the ways I like to do this is to set up certain searches inside my twitter application of choice, Tweetdeck. I used to do community management for a large real estate corporation called ActiveRain.  At the time they had well over 150,000 members from around the world.  So, one of the things I did daily was monitor what our members were saying on Twitter.  You would think the typical term I would put in would be ActiveRain.  But, the company had created a feature that thousands of it’s members use to automatically post their content into twitter as soon as they hit publish.  I didn’t need to have 2,000+ updates showing up in my stream.  SO, what I had to do was be a little more specific with my search setup.  The phrase that attached to the auto post was “Just Posted on ActiveRain” so to build a real time search that would monitor the company name without the automated feed, I created a Twitter search that was Activerain -”just posted”.  This meant the search would look for ActiveRain but would ignore any that had the term with just posted in the phrase.

By monitoring the term I was able to provide a great level of service for new members who had just signed up and were completely lost.  Or just being able to give an added level of support by saying “Hi, I am Jeremy the community builder, let me know if I can help out.  These members that just joined and tweeted 2 minutes ago were already receiving customer support from the top level available in the organization and were blown away.

The reason this post today came about due to a recent experience I had with Target.  My wife who is now 8+ months pregnant asked on her Facebook profile:

Explain to me this… Our local Target has over 13 handicap parking spaces ( I lost count at 13), and even on the busiest day I have not even seen half of them full. Yet EVERY time I am there there are a ton of pregnant ladies or moms with small babies. So why don’t they make some of the parking spaces close to the doors into “New or Expectant Moms” spaces?!?!?

See, my wife is now 8+ months pregnant and had visited the local Target to make some changes to our baby registry.  She had my 2 year old daughter in hand and 107 degree heat index that had to walk from the farthest point of the parking lot over to the entrance.  When I saw her post this, I left a comment saying I knew they were on Twitter and would send them something to find the reason why they set things up this way.  When I sent my tweet, I watched several of my friends start a conversation around it wondering the same thing.  I know there were at least 15-20 tweets all targeted to them all revolving around this subject.  10 days later and still no response from Target.

Granted, maybe the company is huge in size.  But there still needs to be some sort of monitoring of this.  Corporations like ComCast & Best Buy do this phenomally.  When their clients ask a question or place a complaint, their team is quick to respond and assist in any way possible.  Normally within a few hours.  By doing this, consumer satisfaction goes through the roof, customer support calls go way down and business production increases.

So, take the time and set up ways to monitor your online business.  Besides, who wouldn’t want to know what people think of you?

This post was inspired to day by my journeys into a website and the tweet that followed.  I was visiting a link a friend sent about a place he was published on a photographers site.  Being the good friend I went by to try and leave a comment of encouragement for the new blogger and for my friend.  I was greeted by some obnoxiously loud music that almost made my eardrums bleed.  I then tweeted:  “I’ll say it once again, please disable auto play songs & videos on your site!”

I am sure you remember back in the day when Conan O’Brien had his infamous standing skit “In the Year 2000.” We would sit and laugh at that show as it poked fun at the future and things we would expect when it got here. Wondering would the internet survive the Y2K bug.  Then the year 2000 came and left us quickly without much fanfare.  We move forward and in 2003 came along a site called MySpace.  We all rushed and created our account & started gathering friends as fast as we could.

We visited a friends site & grew an instant case of envy as we saw how much cooler their MySpace page was than ours.  We began searching for free Myspace themes to “Pimp my Profile.” After giving the page a new look, we had to have our favorite song rocking out on home page in order to have a certain level of coolness.

Fast Forward to Today

Unfortunately some got stuck in the mid 2000′s where it was not only acceptable, but was the “in thing” to have music and video players automatically start playing when a page loads.  This style of doing online business is becoming more & more an bad practice.  Before I continue, please don’t feel bad if you have an auto player running on your site.  I am not talking to just you.  I’ve seen major businesses like MLB.com use this tactic and it just drives me nuts.  Whenever I am in the initial consultation for building a new Custom WordPress Site for a client, I explain the negative effects music and videos that start playing automatically can be.  Most never realize it until I mention something.  Remember, you only have one chance to wow me, so make it the best!  If I get blasted by audio off the bat, I am gone for good.

The reason it bothers me is because I work from home most of the time.  So I normally have iTunes jamming you. And all of a sudden in comes this blaring commercial when I just wanted to check on a score of the game.  My good friend Ken Cook had a rather embarrassing story the other week that he shared on our weekly social media radio show.

Ken was in his office one day and wanted to check on something so he visited a website.  Now unlike me that has the luxury of working from home, Ken is in an office that is filled with other people and is normally on the quiet side.  The minute the page loaded it started playing a video commercial.  All of his co-workers were instantly greeted by a woman loudly proclaiming: “I sometimes have really bad diarrhea!” His co-workers who were engrossed in their computers and handling loan files stopped and all glared in his direction.  How embarrassing.

I shared all this to get to my point behind this blog post:

We are no longer in 2005.  Online practices that were acceptable then are not as well accepted now.  While you found it a good idea to have auto playing video & songs on your site, the general public has voiced their opinions and begged for you stop.  As an owner of a website, you are going to have constant changes needing to take place.

Right now we are in what is called web 2.0.  The season of social media is upon us.  Learn the correct practices for this season and implement them into your business today to have a successful online presence.  Also, learn what things are no longer effective and discontinue them immediately.  For some of you, this might mean an complete overhaul of how you have been doing things.  This could even mean building a new website to accomodate the trends of today.

Whatever you do, please do us all a favor and disable the auto play for songs & videos!

Most of my friends on Twitter know by now that I am somewhat of an addict.  (Remember, I took 2 full days & found over 125 different Twitter Applications!) I find myself at times spending multiple hour blocks of time on the site talking to new & old friends.  One of the ways I love to feed this addiction is by participating in Twitter chats throughout the week.  If you didn’t know, there are chats that take place each & every day out on the web.  You can see a pretty good list of those chats in this list.

One of my favorite chats is on a Sunday night hosted by Mack Collier called #blogchat.  I will give you a fair warning, this chat is not for faint at heart.  Normally there are several hundreds of people participating with thousands of tweets screaming by at the speed of light.  I have several who have asked me in the past how in the world I can keep up with such a wild ride.  I normally just give the standard answer of “I use Tweetgrid.” But I figured today I would share in more detail with a video of how to set it up for the best experience.

I made this quick video last Sunday evening while participating in #blogchat with Chris Brogan. I knew with someone as well known as Chris that this was going to be quite the wild ride.  Without this setup, I never would have made it through the chat.  While I know I missed a bunch, I know that I was able to participate and see much more by using this setup than if I had just tried using my standard Twitter plaftorm, Tweetdeck. Take a few minutes and watch to learn what I think is the easiest way to participate in a Twitter Chat:

So, if you have never participated in a Twitter chat, take a look at the schedule & find one that looks appealing to you.  Set up Tweetgrid and enjoy the ride! And keep an eye out for me in those chats, I’m @jb140.

Today is a very special day.  It is the day we get to celebrate the 40th birthday of my business partner, Jason Crouch.  I met Jason several years ago and I must admit I am very happy to have done so.   He is a father of four, a wonderful husband and someone I am proud to call a friend.

So, for his birthday today I tried to figure out what could I do to help make his birthday special.   After a long time of consideration & thought, I think I figured out a great solution.  Jason is someone who loves comments & stuff shared.  I remember him writing a post once titled: How to Get Over 100 Comments on Your Blog Posts – A Retrospective. The post became so popular that the network it was on had to shut it off after the post had over 3,000 comments.  It was something he was very proud of and also something he was very sad to see shut off. So for his birthday today, I thought to myself: “Why not try for something like that here?”

Our blog here on 210 has been pretty popular in the past. It has had a few posts with several comments and a few that have been Re-Tweeted and shared on Facebook 50-75 times.  So I thought, how cool would it be if we could share this post across our social networks over 100 times today and get at least 100 comments on it for Jason.  I think it would be a fitting present for him.

In case you wanted something of value, here are a few other interesting things that happened on this day in history:

• Today is the 229th day of the year.
• Davey Crockett, Sean Penn, & Jim Courier were also born on August 17th.
• On this day in 1982 the first Compact Discs were released to the public in Germany
• In 2008 on this day Michael Phelps won 8 gold medals.
• Jason Crouch Born

So, I know those aren’t really that interesting, but why don’t you put something interesting in the comments & share this already!

HAPPY 40TH JASON!

photo credit

I admit it, I find myself being a Foursquare junkie at times.  Ok, all the time. Becoming a mayor is as addicting as chocolate to a pregnant woman.  Not to mention the badges that you can grab and how that will continue to feed my addiction.

Today I’m not getting into the ways to use Foursquare for business or why it is or is not a great place to increase your sphere of influence and grow a business.  Instead I just wanted to share a fun app I found that allows you to track your check-ins on a map.  I think this is a great way to help you promote to others places you feel are great places to visit.  Since I live in a resort area, I have people visiting all the time from out of town looking for a great place to go.  This map will be a great way to share quickly & easily the places I enjoy & frequent the most in my area.  That way they can check it out & see what I love to try out on their own.

In an area like Myrtle Beach, this can be really helpful for picking a restaurant.  Why you may ask?  Well, there are enough places to eat here that you could have 3 meals for a year and a half and never eat at the same restaurant twice. With all those choices, it is hard to know what is good and what may not be.  If someone sees I am a mayor of a local restaurant & have been there 5-10 times then they can easily recognize this must be a great place.  Check out my map below:

Jeremy Blanton’s Foursquare by WeePlaces.com.

You may not be a fan of Foursquare, but at least I see how an application like this connected into my account could be a benefit to others.  Not to mention it gives me great conversations on both my Facebook & Twitter accounts with friends.

This is the third post in a series about how to use Twitter to form relationships for business and personal connections (which could lead to business, too, right?).

One of the quickest ways for me to explain how to properly use this platform is to use a real-life analogy.  Pretty much everything you can do in person while networking can be done online now, with the notable exception of a handshake or hug.  Video conferencing even allows you to make eye contact with the person you’re getting to know.

If you’ve read Dale Carnegie’s classic “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, you may recall that the first of his “Six Ways to Make People Like You” is this one:

Be Genuinely Interested in Other People

In fact, if you spend your time asking questions of others at a networking event rather than talking about yourself, they will later describe you as one of the most interesting people they met that day.  Simply put, being interested makes you more interesting.

When I’m working with real estate clients or interacting at a networking event, I have used a “talk show host” mindset for years.  I ask questions and sincerely listen, in an effort to learn more about them and their needs.  If you want to see a true master of this craft, watch Johnny Carson via DVD or online sometime.  Here’s a link if you would like to see a good example of his skills in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu9cSMy-k4Q (interviewing a then-22-year-old Michelle Pfeiffer).

One of the other reasons Johnny Carson had such a long career was because he was a tireless promoter of others.  His show provided a stage for comics who were virtual unknowns and he could instantly put them on the map.  Over the years, he met pretty much everyone who was worth knowing in entertainment.

With that in mind, when you’re using Twitter or any social media platform, think about ways to help promote other people and their work.  If you retweet interesting and entertaining stuff, those whom you’re helping will take notice.  DON’T overdo it, however, because you want your efforts here to be authentic, not forced.

I tweet more than average.  Okay, I tweet a lot more than average.  I have over 29,000 tweets at this point.  That being said, I ALWAYS notice when someone takes the time to retweet what I have shared.  I try to remember to thank them each time, too, although I don’t always remember to do so. Consequently, I would be more willing to help someone that I already “know”.  Become a known entity.

As I mentioned before, this is the type of thing that will come in handy for you and your business in general, not just online.

In a nutshell, if you take the time to help others get noticed for their work, blog, event, or cause, and you will be noticed, too.  Don’t focus on the superstars exclusively – they have ample support.  Don’t forget to help the people that seem worthy of attention who don’t have a huge following already.  That being said, doing both will help in the long run.

Thanks for reading!

Here are the first two posts in this series if you’re interested:

How to Use Twitter – Tip #1 – Start or Join a Conversation

How to Use Twitter – Tip #2 – Panning for Gold Nuggets