SocialMadeSimple, making social media easier for real estate professionals

While at a Tweetup last night in Cambridge I ran into the people behind SocialMadeSimple and had the opportunity to hear a bit about their solution.  This video, from their website, hits upon many of the key points.

Those of us that work extensively with social media often forget that most people know little about how to blog, tweet, etc…, and/or are fearful of getting started.  SocialMadeSimple is working to eliminate the pain by for a very large niche, real estate and mortgage professionals.  They are taking a big picture approach and helping these people by:

• Providing strategic plans to guide users at all levels of comfort.  Starting with a plan is critical to success.
• Creating the accounts, if not already in place, to support social media activity.
• Providing education on the tools.
• Providing a library of content.  Many people sit down in front of their computer and have no idea what to write. Fresh content is added to their library providing professionals with articles they can simply share or comment upon depending on their comfort level.
• Grading users.  Goals are only useful if you are measuring how you are doing against them.  This grading system keeps people, and entire organizations, on track.

SocialMadeSimple is a  new company but they are already gaining traction.  They recently signed a deal with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage of Southern California and Arizona, giving more than 6,500 agents in that area access to their solution.   I’ll keep an eye on how they progress, stay tuned.

John

Related Articles

• SocialMadeSimple Inks Deal with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage of Arizona and Southern California (prweb.com)

PostRank Connect

Image via Wikipedia

I learned about PostRank Connect at the recent Monitoring Social Media conference in Boston and decided to give it a try as it meets my key criteria:

• It promises to provide me with insights about my content through the PostRank Analytics application (free, for now, when you sign-up for PostRank Connect).
• It promises to connect me with brands that could lead to mutually beneficial relationships.
• It is FREE.

How do you sign up?

Navigate to the sign-up page and enter standard information like your username, password, and location.  Now identify your content sources, your blogs and your social media accounts.  Important points:

• It is critical that you identify the attributes of your blogs as you set them up, making it easier to do the matching of brands and influencers.
• When you identify your blog you must also prove ownership, like you do with Google Analytics and other similar tools, by either adding a page, an image, or making a networking change through DNS.
• When you add a new contact source you can link it to a Twitter account.  Ideally you should also be able to tie in Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and any number of other accounts as well.
• To achieve the best results you should use Google Analytics to your site.  This will enable you to see how engagement and traffic tie together.

Alright, what else?

Well, return to business as usual for a couple of days, running any planned campaigns or just letting the sites run as you normally do.  After a few days log back in, select the My Sites tab and then click upon the View Analytics button.  I set this up for a brand new community that I am very slowly tweaking and very slowly rolling out.    When I view analytics for this site I see the following:

You can view, side by side, the page view information and the social engagement information associated with this site.  If you scroll beneath this first chart you will also see all Facebook status updates and Twitter messages that are related to content or pages you are tracking for this site.  By default all blog posts (tracked via RSS feed) are tracked.  Other content must be added manually as part of the setup process.

Deeper analysis?

You can click upon the Analyze menu to download a CSV file which I am, at this point, unimpressed with.   You are not given the option to choose a date range or fields to include in the CSV file and the data, at least for my test site,was not useful.  I am looking for, and hoping to see, PostRank put a lot more into the reporting for this solution.  This offering is not significantly more powerful than Google Analytics alone.

My verdict?

The product is easy to set up and requires a minimal effort to interact with.  If you are already making use of Google Analytics and investing in Twitter and Facebook than you should give this product a try.  If you are not using Analytics, however, I would not both using this product.

John

Related Articles

• Analytics For Social Media (outspokenmedia.com)
• Social Graph, Influence and the Social Web | PostRank Blog (postrank.com)
• Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement? (adamsherk.com)
• PostRank adds Google Chrome extension and soft launches new service, PostRank Connect (techvibes.com)

Is social media a good platform for political debate?

Image by Premshree Pillai via Flickr

 

With a great deal of fascination I watched, and lightly participated in, a Twitter-driven debate between many of the mayoral candidates in Calgary.  The event, called Twibate Tuesday, brought together most of the candidates into a virtual room (Twitter) where roughly every ten minutes a new question was asked by the moderator, Calgary Politics.  I love the concept as it provided potential for citizen interaction.  

Twitter is often compared to a cocktail party; loud, noisy, plenty of side conversations…. The debate was much the same.  Great questions were asked by the moderator, and by the participants, and by the crowd, but it was easy to get lost.  

So, how could this be made better?  Here are a few thoughts, let me know what you think:  

• Crowdsource the Twibate questions ahead of the debate.  Through platforms like Bubbleideas (yes, I do sell this solution) you can bring all interested parties together to generate the right questions.
  • Moderators can either pre-define questions or accept idea questions from citizens.
  • Citizens vote and comment on questions, enabling those running the debate to pick the questions people most care about.
• Use a Facebook page for the debate.  Keeping the debate between the debaters is critical.  Too often it was unclear which questions were being answered and unclear if every candidate answered each question. 
• Use Twitter as the debate back channel.  Citizens should be free to comment and interact with the moderator and candidates throughout the debate.  However, it is important that this interaction does not confuse citizens reading the responses.

When the debate is completed the entire Twitter stream should be posted to the Facebook page.  Citizens who missed the debate would be able to view both streams to get a complete view, one clean and crisp, one with all the noise of the cocktail party.

How would you approach a debate using new media options?  Would you use other approaches?

John 

Independent movies and Social Media

Low budget independent movies often struggle to find an audience beyond the friends and families of those involved with the film itself.  Thousands, perhaps millions, of directors, writers, and actors take part in these films, pouring in their love and passion.  I have to believe that many real gems are made even though few are ever fully appreciated.

Now, I am not saying Gotta Find Barry deserves an Oscar.  I haven’t yet seen it but the story line is definitely that of a light-hearted comedy that has the makings of a funny and relaxing night out.   Rich Camp is hoping that social media will play a role in building an audience for his movie, just as it did for his last independent film titled Lumberjacking.

Rich Camp is the owner of  Rich Camp Entertainment.  He is also the writer, director, and lead actor in Gotta Find Barry.  I chatted with Rich and David Graziano this week to learn more.  David is helping Rich with the social media aspects of the production (yes, he is also in the movie with a small part I believe).

In Rich’s last movie, Lumberjacking, social media was used to both build awareness of the production as well as to raise money to support the effort.  Through a mix of traditional and new media means they raised around $1000 for production and grew a Facebook presence of more than 1500 members.  Throughout the production of this movie they updated the Facebook page with information on what was happening with the movie.  For example, checking out a theatre, shooting this scene today, and on and on.  The Facebook community was engaged and Rich had an audience of 1000 or more people attend the movie’s showing.  Not a bad audience for a small film. 

For Gotta Find Barry Rich and David are making minor changes to how they are using Social Media.  For example:

• While they are still fund-raising on the site they also held a traditional fundraiser.  They used the Facebook page to promote the event, and had somewhere between 100 and 150 people come to the fundraiser as a result.
• While they have updated the page with information about the production of the movie they will deliver a trailer of the movie also.

Twitter is also getting use more for this  movie.  While they have been primarily pushing out updates about the movie they are soon going to launch an interesting campaign where accounts will be created for each the movies characters.  Each character will tweet out, conversationally, to other characters, using the personalities of the characters from the movie.  The hope is that people will get to know the characters, love them, and have even more reason to see the movie, translating those tweets into ticket sales when the movie premiers in Rhode Island this November.

Will the approach work?  Yes, the Facebook work is going well and this new Twitter experiment is something I love and feel strongly will work well for any movie or book release.

Oh yeah….  A couple of other points:

• The branding, the messaging, across all channels is in perfect alignment.  What you find on Facebook matches what you find on their website.
• The plot?  Two ghost hunters go to hunted house to find their old buddy Barry, who is a ghost, in order to hang out with him one more time. 
• No, I am not in the movie… Maybe I’ll have to audition for whatever movie Rich comes up with next.

John

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Infographic: Government 2.0 in Massachusetts

View this document on Scribd

An excellent video, Social Media in the UK in 2010

The folks at SimplyZesty.com have done an outstanding job with this video and you should watch it.  The statistic that caught my eye?  Users coming from Social Media sites are 10 times more likely to buy something on your site than those coming from some other place (71% versus 7%).  The Social Customer lives.

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.