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Deconstructing real estate marketing

By Gahlord Dewald, Tuesday, November 17, 2009.

There's an app for that.

It seems that every other week some new piece of must-have-or-you'll-be-left-behind technology comes along. There's all the stuff to manage social media and social networking initiatives. There's all the reputation-management stuff. Then there's the search-engine optimization (SEO) stuff.  more...

Shorter URLs and real estate SEO

By Gahlord Dewald, Tuesday, November 10, 2009.

One of the tricky parts about using social networking sites for marketing your real estate business is that you don't make the rules about how they work. For example, one of the most ubiquitous features of social networking sites is "status updates." These are blurbs of text that tend to be updated frequently and let the rest of the social network know what you're up to.

The length of status updates tends to be limited, usually 140 characters. This is great, except when you want to publicize a link via your status update. Let's look at how two powerful marketing tactics can collide and then use a tool to do something about it.  more...

Google's got social game

By Gahlord Dewald, Tuesday, November 3, 2009.

Google has added a new tool: Social Search. Accessible via Google Labs, Social Search provides results culled from the searcher's social media graph.

Just as there are separate tabs in the normal Google search for images, blogs, video, etc., once you opt in to the Social Search experiment you'll see a new tab for social-enhanced search-engine results.

For now, I'd consider this tool pretty bleeding-edge: the requirements for opting in, creating a Google profile and logging in to your Google account will curb the initial group using this tool.  more...

Your own real estate 'best practices'

By Gahlord Dewald, Tuesday, October 27, 2009.
Flickr photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/aeu04117/2572084141/" target=blank>aeu04117</a>.

The Web is awash in articles and blog posts with headlines like "The Five Best Practices of Twitter," "Seven Facebook Page Dos and Don'ts," "25 iPhone Apps You Just Can't Do Without!" and "10 Things You Need to Do Right Now If You Want to Eat Lunch at the Cool Kids' Table."

If you read enough of them, they start looping back on themselves and you notice that items listed in one person's "15 Most Awesome Techniques for Converting Leads via Twitter" is listed in another person's "12 Examples of Horrible Social Media Backwardness."

What do we do with all that? Well here's what I do. I don't believe in "best practices." That's right. No best practices for me.  more...

A search index for the distributed Web

By Gahlord Dewald, Tuesday, October 20, 2009.
Lijit screenshot

The distributed Web is here: blogs and guest posts scattered throughout the Web; comments on all of those posts; Twitter posts; content-specific networks like Flickr and YouTube; and so on. As you participate and engage with your audience on sites that you don't own, your content and thoughts become literally scattered.

Lijit (www.lijit.com) is a tool that indexes your content and surfaces it to site visitors by way of a widget (yes, they stick with their naming convention and call it a "wijit"). So if you want to provide your audience with a way to search through all the stuff you've posted or commented this tool might be just the thing.  more...

5 reasons you don't need Web analytics

By Gahlord Dewald, Tuesday, October 13, 2009.

That's right. I'm going to change my tune and tell you why you don't need Web analytics on your site. If you, your site or your online marketing fit any or all of the following profiles, feel free to ignore your Web stats and never again worry about a unique visitor, bounce rate or goal conversion.

1. Your site is about personal expression
Is your site primarily about you, your brand, what your company does, or how you do what you do really well? The only time you mention someone other than your company is to say how much better you are than that other someone? Congratulations, Web analytics probably isn't for you.  more...

Sidewiki: The Web is my social network

By Gahlord Dewald, Tuesday, October 6, 2009.

Google has recently released a new feature for those who have the Google Toolbar installed. It's called Sidewiki. Using this new feature, visitors can leave comments about your site in a sidebar (the Sidewiki).

For example, someone looking for real estate information in your area is able to leave a comment in Sidewiki detailing what they think of your site and how it works. This sort of thing has been done in the past, but none of the past versions were done by a company with the clout of Google.

Overall, this brings up a few interesting thoughts. Sure, Google bills its ability to allow users to add "helpful information" to Web sites "right in your browser."  more...

Real estate analytics site leaves beta

By Gahlord Dewald, Tuesday, September 29, 2009.
Flickr photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/pikerslanefarm/3447778889/" target=blank>amandabhslater</a>.

Web analytics package Woopra has finally left beta, with nearly 100,000 installs. The analytics package (see Inman News) is popular in the real estate industry for its real-time data and, the big clincher: a pop-up chat window that the Woopra user can send to someone browsing their Woopra-enabled site.

So when someone is browsing your site, you can see this in real-time via Woopra. Then you can pop a chat window up and ask them if you can help them or if they have questions, etc. More on this later ...  more...

Tapping the 'Big 3' in social media

By Gahlord Dewald, Tuesday, September 15, 2009.
Flickr photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/sheilatostes/664714878/in/set-72157600126298397/" target=blank>SheilaTostes</a>.

Last week, I wrote about reasons to keep your blog going even though you hear the siren call of other social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

This week, I'll work the other direction: Reasons why you might consider expanding your marketing efforts to social media platforms that are outside of your control.

Real estate broker and blogger Jay Thompson, in a comment on last week's article, noted that blogging is social media.  more...

4 reasons to keep on blogging

By Gahlord Dewald, Wednesday, September 9, 2009.

It doesn't seem like so long ago that blogging was some crazy new technology that was really going to disrupt the status quo of content distribution. Now, in an age of Twitter gurus and Facebook experts, blogging seems almost as old and outdated as licking stamps. But I'd like to offer some advice on why you shouldn't neglect your blog.

This is not a "blogging vs. social media" column (though maybe I should've written one like that as comment bait). It's a simple reminder of the things that make blogging a useful piece of your marketing and business efforts.  more...

AgentWorld mashes up profiles, posts, ratings

By Gahlord Dewald, Tuesday, September 1, 2009.

While attending the Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco last month, I took a moment to chat with Tyler Kraemer of AgentWorld, a site that is building a list of real estate agents in the U.S. and internationally (international is in beta). A few things stuck out in my mind as being potentially useful for agents looking for an additional tool for their online marketing -- especially those using profile marketing.

First, a quick rundown of profile marketing: If you sign up for a service and there's a profile page, there's a good chance this profile page will show up in searches for your name. Search engines put up 10 or so links on their first page of search results.  more...

Decoding change in Google results

By Gahlord Dewald, Tuesday, August 25, 2009.
Flickr image by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/danardvincente/2512148775/" target=blank>Danard Vincente</a>.

You may have heard that search-engine gorilla Google is in the midst of an infrastructure change. As a company that generates revenue by serving advertising alongside its search results, Google has an interest in serving up relevant search results in a timely manner.

If it doesn't, then someone else will do a better job and searchers will go somewhere else. Then no one will see the advertising or click on it, resulting in less revenue for Google. It's a nice straightforward model.  more...

3 ways to measure social media

By Gahlord Dewald, Tuesday, August 18, 2009.
Flickr photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/sixteenmilesofstring/3509978889/" target=blank>tvol</a>.

There is a lot of buzz around social media. Buzz might not even be the right word. Cacophonous roar might be more appropriate. It seems as if everyone who was a search-engine-optimization guru last year is a social media guru this year.

A lot of the talk in social media is about the concept of engaging your audience. The theory goes that if you can engage an audience via social media they'll be that much more likely to do business with you.

But how do you really know?  more...

Real estate R&D made easy

By Gahlord Dewald, Tuesday, August 11, 2009.
Flickr photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/52581560/" target=blank>jurvetson</a>.

Your people and company culture matter more than the technology you use.

Coming back from Inman's Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco and putting all the information into practice can be daunting: Where to start implementing all the new shiny toys, the ideas and concepts shared by thought leaders, and the upcoming products and services coming from real estate technology partners?

Over and over again, in the hallways of the conference site and at lunches and in presentations and the Q-and-A sessions that followed, I heard individuals struggling with issues of permission.  more...

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