Social Media Advisors

We are Social Media Advisors, a Social Media Speaker, & Custom WordPress Site design.

Blogging Challenge? You Are ON Mike Mueller!

Social Media Advisors

April Blogging Challenge

This was the status update from Mike on Friday March 30.  He placed out a challenge to his friends to see who would want to join him in a blogging challenge.  Not only did he challenge his sphere, but he also thought it would be valuable to mention me specifically.

Blogging Challenge When I started my blogging career back in 2007 on my first blog, writing a post each day was never an issue.  I would write a new post every day and sometimes even more than one.  However, over the past few years as business has increased, the ability to write is sometimes difficult.

In the past month alone, I was out traveling as a social media speaker three out of the four weeks of the month.  So, creating great new content every day is not always easy. While doing this every day is going to be a rather difficult task, I am not one who likes to back down to a challenge.  To answer your challenge Mike, here’s a video response:

So Mike Mueller, Your Blogging Challenge Is ON!

As an added bonus, Mike & I have placed a wager on this challenge.  If we do not complete our 21 posts during the month we must dress in a chicken suit and stand on the street corner!

Social Media Speaker Presentations for @ColdwellBnkr #Genblue

Conferences, Social Media Speaker

#genblueI love it when I have the honor to go and talk at conferences as a social media speaker.  This past week I had the pleasure of traveling to New Orleans, LA to talk at the Generation Blue Conference put together by Coldwell Banker.  The event is affectionately known as #GenBlue.

I spoke at this event last year and it was definitely one of my highlights.  So, when Coldwell Banker called to see if I was interested in participating again, I jumped at the opportunity.  Because of my high ratings on last year’s surveys, not only was I asked to come back and speak on social media, but they wanted me to do twice as many presentations as last year.

This year I spoke on three different topics which are described below along with a copy of the actual presentation for you to view:

Social Media Speaker Presentations

 

The first topic that I discussed as a social media speaker was titled: “How To Build An Online Following.”  In this presentation I shared what the top sources of traffic to my website currently are, and gave some basic statistics on who is currently using social media networks.  I finished this session by diving into 9 tips to help agents grow an online following properly.  I shared how I’ve used social networks to build my online community to over 22,000 followers.

Building an Online Following for #Genblue

 

The second presentation I gave was called: “50+ Tools To Enhance Your Social Media Strategy.”  In this session I shared the various social media tools that I use on a regular basis to help manage my social media marketing.  This presentation is one of the more popular subjects that I give as I travel the country as a social media speaker.  I have affectionately sub-titled this presentation, “Shiny Object Syndrome” as it contains so many tools & gadgets that you can use each and every day to enhance your social media strategy.

Genblue 2012 50+ Tools To Enhance Your Social Media Strategy

 

The final topic I spoke on was on the last day of the #GenBlue conference and was aimed towards brokers/managers/owners.  The title of this sesion was:  “Social Media & Today’s Consumer- Future-Proofing Your Business.”  I started this session with a quick overview of social platforms and the amount of people using each network today.  Then I shared with the managers/owners some direct quotes from various real estate agents from around the country and what they want/need most from the leaders in their companies.

There were two resounding things that agents wish their managers would do a better job at.  The first is to stop telling agents how important social media is when they are not using any of the tools on their own.  They want a manger to begin leading the way by using the various social media tools first.  The second thing agents want from their managers/owners is to have someone begin teaching them the how-to not just give the overview anymore.  Agents want the managers/owners to start hiring experts & professionals to come in and give them solid advice and step by step consultation.  The saying You can’t be a prophet in your own town was made more than once by both those surveyed before and during this presentation.

Social Media & Today’s Consumer- Future-Proofing Your Business

 

The GenBlue Conference ended with awesome presentations from the NY Times Michael Zimbalist.  Michael shared on new technology they are working on to change the way consumers engage with media and marketing.  Then there were stellar presentations by both Google+ and one of my favorites, YouTube.  Patrick from the Google real estate team shared some amazing statistics and really solid advice on how agents should begin to use video.  He gave very simple easy steps to follow to start you in the right direction as a successful YouTuber.  Just like last year, Generation Blue lived up to the hype and delivered a ton of very valuable information to those in attendance.

If you have an upcoming event and would like to hire me as a social media speaker, feel free to contact me for availability.

Arguing With Idiots

Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors

I ran across this statement from my friend Amy this morning and it simply made my day:

Amy ChorewAmy Chorew – @amychorew
Do not argue with an idiot.  He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience

Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed a definite increase in trolling and confrontations taking place on various social networks.  I’ve watched friends “debate” with others on Twitter for hours over something that really didn’t make a difference.  I’ve watched others go after each other in Facebook Groups for 150+ comments that totally go off course from the original post/question because of a single statement made by someone.

What is worse is that the argument will escalate for hours on end with several others jumping into the disagreement adding their input which does nothing but fuel the fire of the idiot who made the first controversial statement.

Dealing With Idiots or Trolls

Here’s the thing that most of us normal rational people do not understand.  There are some people in this world that thrive on confrontation and attention.  They love the ability to ruffle someone’s feathers and get them worked up.  What makes it worse, is when we give them the attention they thrive on by engaging them in debate over meaningless things. All this does is make things worse for ourselves and others around that may get drawn into the debate in heat of the moment.

Remember, these people have experience at causing conflicts and they thrive on arguing with others.  So, the next time you encounter a situation like this, remember that no matter how right you may be, you cannot defeat an idiot as they will bring you down to their level and then beat you with their experience.

 

Battling Plagiarism Of Your Content With Proper Attribution

Custom WordPress Sites, Social Media Advisors, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials

Let’s face, not everyone learned the lesson back in third grade that stealing someone else’s work and calling it your own is wrong.  Either that, or people have forgotten it over the past few years.  Plagiarism of your content is something that happens every day.  Personally, I don’t have that much of a problem with someone sharing my content, as long as they give me credit for it and ask permission.

Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to give credit or even ask permission.  For the longest of times I’ve tried setting up ways to track things to find those violators, but have had somewhat a difficult time doing so.  I set up all types of Google Alerts, closely monitored my analytics and more, to try and monitor my online presence.  The problem that I ran into though is that these didn’t always pick up every occurrence and some wouldn’t remove the content without legal action which can be exhausting and expensive.

Giving Credit Where It’s Due

I’ve recently implement two different tools into my WordPress site to track my site & make sure that my content receives the proper attribution it deserves.  I feel it is only appropriate that if someone is going to use content that I have take time to create, I should at least be given credit.  There are two ways that most people will steal your content, so lets discuss solutions for each.

The first way, is some will simply push your RSS feed of content into some sort of content farm/aggregator.  These have also been called scraper sites.  People do this to constantly feed content to their site without having to do any work.  What I found to combat this type of theft is a WordPress plugin thanks to my friend Eric called Anti Feed-Scraper Message.  This plugin prevents your RSS feed from being copied elsewhere without attribution by adding a message and link to your original post that you can also customize.  Here’s what it looks like in my Feedburner Feed:

Anti Feed-Scraper Plugin

This automatically shows at the bottom of all my posts that are being fed somewhere via RSS.  So while it doesn’t prevent scrapers from taking my content, it at least gives me credit and a backlink.

The second way that your content is normally stolen is by someone who comes and reads one of your posts and decides to copy/paste over to their site word for word.  Or, maybe they read a line in your post that they want to just use in a post they are writing.  These kinds of things happen every day, and unfortunately most the time we are never even aware of it happening.

Tynt Publisher toolsA great new tool I just recently implemented onto my WordPress site here called Tynt, addresses this completed and provides you with some awesome analytics in addition to an automatic backlink to the original post or page of content on your site.  What is really cool with tynt, is that it allows you to set it down to a minimum of only 8 words copied to insert the tracking and backlink.  What I like even more, is that it doesn’t matter if the content is copy/pasted to another site, Facebook, or an email, it will place the backlink to the original content here on my site.

Test this one out.  I dare you to copy/paste any paragraph from anywhere on my site.  It will automatically add a backlink to here no matter where you share it.

Tynt also provides you with some really great analytics of your site and content that is shared.  It will show you how many times it’s happened, number of pageviews that resulted from it and more.  They also have tracking tools for social media that will show you how many times your content is shared via E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.  This data can be very valuable in helping you determine which networks are the most beneficial to your business and are working the most effective.

So if you are like me and want to make sure you get the proper credit for the hard work you put into your site writing new content, check out these two options and install them today.  As a side benefit of the proper attribution, you also will start to build some backlinks to your site that can really help with the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your Custom WordPress site.

Installing Tynt on your website does take a slight bit of technical skills, so if you need help with setting it up and installing on your Custom WordPress Site, feel free to contact me and we can take care of it for you.

How To Create A Home Page In WordPress

Custom WordPress Sites, WordPress Tutorials

Custom WordPress SitesI’ve found over the past few months of building Custom WordPress Sites that more and more people do not realize that a WordPress site is more than just a blog.  I also get asked many times each week how to add a home page to a WordPress site.

By home page, I don’t mean a page that says home at the top and runs all your blog posts on it, I mean a static home page like the one I built here.

I remember when I first tried to figure out how to do this it took me a good amount of time to figure out the settings and make a static home page.  Surprisingly, to create a home page in WordPress is not that  difficult of a task.  To show just how easy it is, here’s a simple tutorial showing you how to create a home page in WordPress:

So, as you can see, creating a home page in WordPress is not as difficult as it may seem.  If you need help with your own WordPress Site, feel free to contact me.