Jeremy Blanton

Business Opportunity, or Business Abuse

I get emails every day asking for links to a site, reviews of a product, and endorsements of other things. Most of the time I simply click delete and don’t even read them, but since I recently started a site that gives reviews of products, I now pay a little more attention to these things.

Yesterday I received one that I’ve seen before, but never really took the time to read through the whole proposition. They title the email “partnership opportunities” in which they share how my site is just what they are looking for. They “chose” me as a potential “link partner.” Now, you may think I should be excited that someone wants to do link exchanges with me, but as most of you should know by now, reciprocal link exchanges bring little to no value anymore to the search engine rankings of your site.

This letter though unlike many others takes their useless things they will give you in exchange to a new level. They go on to offer you 500 Facebook fans, 1,000 Twitter followers, or 5,000 YouTube views.

At first thought you may think, this is awesome! 500 more fans on my Facebook page would be great! Another 1,000 followers on Twitter? Awesome! But before you go & start linking all over your sites for the exchange, stop and ask yourself this question: Are these new fans going to be people actually interested in my product?

My guess is that the answer will more than likely be no. When companies guarantee you a certain number of fans, likes, views, or followers, they normally are purchasing these from sort of bogus company. The people who will be joining your page are probably spam accounts that were set up by some people in another country that are being paid to simply sit there all day and click like on pages with their hundreds of fake accounts. The likelihood of one of those people contacting your for business is slim to none.

So in closing, while their email seems like it might be a great business opportunity, take the time to think things through and you will quickly realize that they are simply trying to abuse your hard work with search engine rankings on your site to push their business higher. Make them put the same good SEO practices in place that you have implemented into your business that made them find you in the first place.

Developing A Successful Mousetrap

Conferences, Social Media Speaker

I am truly blessed to travel the country as a social media speaker and participate in some amazing conferences. One of the benefits is getting to make friends with awesome people from around the country. Some of my favorite people in the world will be joining me in Tampa, Florida on August 6th for a wonderful evening event that I would love for you to join.

During the event we will be discussing ways to make your business profit from using online marketing. There will be presentations like Mastering Facebook in 20 Minutes a Day, Becoming a Twitterqueen, Apps that make you more productive and more. I will closing the event with a presentation that will help to bring all of the different strategies, concepts, tools, and apps together and have it make sense. The title of my presentation is “Building a Successful Mousetrap.”

During this session we will discuss the importance of a good website that you own instead and how you can use the power of all the social networks to drive traffic to your site and convert it into transactions.

Check out the below who some of the awesome speakers are for this event:

Mike Mueller is a former Mortgage Banker, Mortgage Broker turned “Tech Geek” who specializes in Social Media. He is a nationally recognized builder of engaging Custom Facebook Business Pages and WordPress blogs.

Mike writes AreWeConnected.com, a blog dealing with social media and technology. He publishes articles in the San Francisco Examiner and the BusinessWeek Exchange. AreWeConnected is listed in Alltop and ranked by AdAge. He has been interviewed and quoted in articles for BankRate, Scripps, the San Jose Mercury News and others, (including the front page of The Wall Street Journal for writing mortgage related Haikus).

Cyndee Haydon is a straight talking full time Realtor® with Charles Rutenberg Realty, Inc, in Clearwater Florida specializing in the “bluest backyards”. She uses technology especially video to leverage the ability to connect with their ideal clients. They have successfully grown their real estate business 356% over the last 4 years. http://www.sandbarstosunsets.com/

Craig Grant, “The Real Estate Tech Guru”, is one of the TOP Technology and Marketing Instructors around delivering over 100 speaking engagements to over 5000 REALTORS each year. As his motto, “Advanced Real Estate Technology Instruction at a Pre-K Level” states his job is to make the confusing world of technology EASY and FUN for everyone! Craig was the 2011 Chairman of Education & Technology for Florida REALTORS®, Member of their GRI Task Force, member of REEA & a Top Technology & Marketing Consultant for REALTORS®. http://www.reti.ws/Craig_Grant/

Lesley Lambert offers 21 years experience in real estate, public speaking and training. Lesley has a degree in communications and was the recipient of an international award for coordinating media in real estate. In the course of her career Lesley has presented at international real estate conferences and state REALTOR associations, hosted a real estate television program, written articles for trade magazines and created marketing and PR plans for many individuals, companies and non-profits. http://www.lesleylambert.com/

Lynn Van Meter, is the CEO, Owner of Fiddlehead Marketing Advertising Public Relations, located in Spring Hill, Florida. She holds a Master’s in Business Administration, and a BA in Public Relations. In addition to developing marketing & advertising campaigns for businesses, her niche and passion is face-to-face marketing, spreading the news about businesses by shaking hands and engaging in conversation. www.fiddlehead-mktg.com

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How To Change Twitter Names Without Losing Followers

Twitter

As some of you may have already heard, yesterday I made the big switch on my Twitter account. I did this because my actual name had become available on Twitter. However, one thing I didn’t want to have happen when I changed names was to have to start all over. See, I’ve had my main Twitter account since 2008 and have built quite a large following there over the past several years.

So, I had to take a few extra steps to make this happen & I thought I’d make a simple tutorial to help others who might want to be changing their username and not want to start over. Here’s the tutorial:

One thing I forgot to mention during the tutorial that I feel is also pretty important. Once you have made the switches and have the new account active, I think another good thing to do would be to edit the profile on the secondary account letting people know that this is no longer your primary account and where you will be tweeting from for now on. You can see what I wrote in my profile above.

13 Reasons Why @JB140 is Leaving Twitter

Twitter

Well, the day has come. I never thought it would happen with my rather intense addiction to Twitter, but I have finally decided it was time for the resignation of JB140 from Twitter. There basically 13 reason for this leave, which I will get to in a few minutes.

Some might be wondering, is Jeremy going following the trails of some other social media people and taking a hiatus from Twitter? Not at all. Let me share what the thirteen reasons were for JB140 to leave Twitter. It’s actually pretty simple, my actual name, @jeremyblanton became available. When I originally signed up for Twitter in August 2008, I wasn’t very smart. The first username I created was MyrtleBeachBlog which fit well with my real estate branding at that time. However, once I moved away from selling houses, it didn’t fit well anymore.

So, I tried desperately to get my name at that time, but it was secured by someone already. I tried all types of variations at that time and almost all of them were taken. That was when my friend Jeff Turner suggested JB140 as a username. It was simple and easy to remember so I made the change in November 2009. So for almost the past three years I’ve used that Twitter username. While it was a great name, I always wished I could obtain my actual name on Twitter as a username.

Two weeks ago on our weekly social media radio show Ken had found a special guest who was the founder of a service called Knowem.com. It is a service that allows you to secure a username on hundreds of social networks that are out there for you. They will secure your identity if it is available so that you don’t have to do all the work yourself. On their home page however, they have a section where you can put in a username and it will give you quick results showing whether it is available or not on a social network.

Running the test quickly revealed that the username was now available, so I quickly ran over to Twitter and secured the username. I guess either the inactive account that was originally set up was either removed by Twitter, or the person that had @jeremyblanton changed it to something else. Either way, I thank him for doing so.

Today I made the switch and retired JB140. So, if you are used to communicating with me on Twitter as @JB140 it’s time to switch to talk to @jeremyblanton.

How Much Do You Pay For Your Online Reputation?

Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors, Social Media Speaker

This past week I was down in Miami presenting as a Social Media Speaker for the National Association of REALTORS® at their Tech Edge event. While there presenting, one of the sessions I participated in was a panel regarding your online reputation. Shortly after finishing the discussion I was checking my inbox and found an email that made me chuckle. The first line of the email was:

Google is now using business reviews to determine business ranking. People are trashing companies with reviews, Complaint sites and Blogs. We can help you defend your company by posting positive Reviews, Blogs and creating Websites to take over Search Results and control what people see about your company.

Now, I’ve heard that some people pay companies for reviews in the past, but this was the first time I’ve ever received an email about it. This got me to thinking, how much would you be willing to pay for positive & very bogus written reviews of your company? My interest got peaked by this, so I visited the link in the email to look at their pricing. Here’s their monthly fees:

Twenty to One Hundred Dollars a Month? I was a little shocked by the amount of money someone would ask for a review to be written that isn’t even legit. Seeing this made me lose my cool for a few minutes.

Buying a Fake Reputation vs. Fixing The Issue

Here’s why I got so upset. To me, I cannot even fathom going to a company like this and spending that type of money to have someone else create fake positive reviews of my company and post out on the internet to try and cover up something negative stated about it. Instead of spending money to just sweep issues under the rug, I am a strong believer in simply giving great customer service, good quality products, and addressing any issues that may arise. I believe that before a company turns to spending money here, they should use those resources to try and address the complaints being made by consumers who had a bad experience.

In most instances, if you address a problem someone has, and fix the problem, they are more than willing to either remove their bad reviews, edit the negative review to state things are now resolved. Some will even be turned from your biggest complainer to your biggest cheerleader writing good things about how you fixed the problem and share it with the world as loudly as they shared the complaint.

How Do You Extinguish Online Fires?

Sometimes there are things that happen online where you wrongfully get attacked by others. What do you do when this happens? Unfortunately there is no magic answer to solve all cases. The one piece of advice that I would share with everyone is to make sure you don’t act out on emotions. When you feel attacked, your first instinct is to become defensive and emotional. I would always suggest you take time to calmly assess the situation before responding. Cooler heads will definitely always prevail.

While there is no magic bullet to extinguish an online fire, here are a few examples of disasters and how they were handled.

Community To The Rescue

One of my friends Ines, was attacked over a story that ran in her local newspaper. While she was excited of the great publicity both her & the restaurant she was discussing received from the news, someone who read the story didn’t feel the same way. They turned this great publicity into their opportunity to personally attack her and her reputation.

In this instance, she had a great community of friends online, that came to her defense. They began telling others on the post how great a person she was and how the accusations made against her were not warranted. It quickly became obvious to anyone reading the story that the attacker simply had a personal issue with Ines and that they were using this platform as a way to launch an attack against her. After time, the attacker finally quieted and the situation was no longer volatile.

Kill It With Amazing Service

The second example comes courtesy of my friend Bill Lublin. Bill owns several investment properties all around the Philadelphia area. One of the properties he owns was placed under scrutiny by someone and Bill was called out by name in the complaint. In this situation, it was best for Bill to step in, do some investigation, and respond publicly to the complaint on the message board. The complaints said that the property was not being taken care of, it was damaging values of homes around it, etc.

As Bill checked into the situation, he found that while his property is located in the area the complaint was filed, the unit he owned had been fully renovated, had a very good tenant in place and that the accusations were false. Before responding though, he sent someone out to the property to do a full inspection and make sure that there were no issues in his property. Once he had this information, he went to the message board and posted public responses regarding all the accusations that were made. After doing so, it was only a matter of time before the complaints were removed.

Address The Situation Personally

The last suggestion I would make for handling situations online is to address the complaint personally. By this I mean either calling the person on the phone or meeting with them face to face. Unfortunately too many times we try to fix things the quick and easy way through a tweet, email or text message and unfortunately our tone of voice and the reaction of the other person then get lost making it almost impossible to know what exactly the other person is feeling.

If we take the time and effort to make a personal touch to resolve the issue, it will go a very long way.

Buy The Bogus Or Manage Your Own

So in closing, there are basically two options you have available to you. You can either buy bogus reviews that many consumers will recognize as fake to cover up something bad. Or simply do the right things when it comes to running your business and address any situations that come up. Handle these complaints properly and the end result can be better than the original complaint!