The Village Blog…

I am a member of a networking group called BNI – International which is a networking and referral group that I attend weekly to give referrals to my fellow group members and if I am lucky get a referral or two as well.   Every meeting two of the members get to present a topic of choice to help educate and let their fellow members better understand what the presenters business does.

Last week it was my turn so I thought I would discuss something I am spending a lot of time on with my customers which is Social Media, and in particular facebook and twitter.   So with that plan in mind and only 8 minutes to present something, I narrowed the discussion down to just facebook fan pages.   So in preparation of this presentation I decided I would do some research on facebook by industry segment to understand  just how many fan pages existed and collect a rough “idea” of just how many fans these pages industry segments had.

With searching facebook by segment and just looking at fan page counts and approximating numbers of fans it was easy “at a very broad stroke” to see what other companies were doing on facebook.   I did not spend really anytime trying to find local Rochester companies but just get a sense of what was out there.

Here is a brief example of what I observed:

• Investing – 2 pages, 2500 fans
• Lawn Care – 500 pages, 100’s fans
• Electrician – 77 pages, 100’s fans
• Mortgages – 350 pages, 100’s fans
• Heating and Cooling – 486 pages, 100’s fans
• Banking – 247 pages, 1000’s fans
• Insurance – 500 pages, 100’s fans
• Attorneys – 1300 pages, 1000’s
• Home Renovation – 916 pages, 100’s fans

With this information in hand I asked the group of 22 professionals if they had a facebook fan pages (I already knew that answer)  and only two members had a fan page!    When I reviewed this information and handed out examples of fan pages in these industry segments, you could see the rooms reaction change as I discussed what other businesses were doing on their fan pages and pointing out just how out of touch most people were in the room with their customers.   It also didn’t hurt my presentation when the heating and cooling guy chimed in (who had a fan page) and said “Yeah – Skeeter’s right I put a fan page up not too long ago and have already gotten several new customers because of this!”

So my question to you the reader is this?   Do you have a fan page to represent your business?  If the answer is no, then why not?   We are at a very unique and wonderful time  with regard to Social Media.   As a business you can take advantage of the fact that the conversation with your customer  can now be one to one, instead of the old days of a monologue discussion (You shouting out your message).    From my perspective, I would rather my company/brand be included in the conversation (good or bad) verse not being talked about at all…

What are your thoughts?

Skeeter Internet Marketing, Social Networking Add new tag, facebook, Skeeter Harris, Social Media, Social Networks Work

Introduction
First off, let me congratulate you by saying Welcome, Bravo, and Thank You for wanting to actively engage your customers! There are over 300 million subscribers in facebook, with approximately 3 million members becoming fans of pages like yours daily!   There isn’t a better time to start two way conversations with your customers, and let them talk to you and about your business.

So what can I expect?
Well depending on how you use your new fan page will ultimately determine how many and how frequently your customers or potential customers think of you and your business. A fan page is all about giving, it’s about opening up and sharing information about your business, providing insights into the people behind the name, and providing compelling content that makes people want to come back and see what’s happening in your business. By providing some or all of the above to your fans through social networking sites such as facebook or twitter you open the doors for a more intimate customer experience, and an enriched relationship which will generate increased business exposure and ultimately revenue.

How do I get started?
Here content is king – Think about your business and all the aspects of it, now with that in mind, content is: photographs, video, press releases, new products, events, and discussions. With continual and fresh content you elicit conversation, interest, and will engage your customer.

Where do I Update facebook?
There are several areas that you can update your fan page, however the most common are:

• Wall – What’s on your mind?
• Photos – Either new albums or new photos
• Events – Activities you want for fans to know about or participate in
• Discussions – Questions and Subject Matter Expert Content
• Video – Product reviews, How-to,  Commercials

Challenges
Often when I complete a facebook deployment for my clients a common challenge that I run into is Now What? While companies excel at both sales and marketing strategies bridging the gap between these common practices and how to use the facebook Fan Page seems daunting.    Because of this uncertainty I guide clients by developing both tactical and strategic plans to update facebook, and will create new content and manage the fan pages for them.   Listed below are only 5 of over 20 guidelines and thought provokers that I use with my clients.

Update Guidelines and Thought Provokers

• Update your Fan Page at least once a week, preferably 2 – 3 times a week
• Showcase new products by posting pictures on your wall with descriptions
• Create Events to add excitement about your business and send out updates to fan
• Create “facebook only” promotions to drive fan membership
• Add company announcements, press releases, articles to your wall.

The Start of a Series
So it is with this facebook Fan page article in mind, I will be releasing a series of screen casts that will talk through these guidelines and show you how to apply these techniques to your own facebook fan pages.   Each screen cast will be approximately 3 – 7 minutes in length, and be designed as something you the reader can review and apply these technique to your own fan page.    I welcome your feedback, suggestions, and ideas and look forward to getting to know you and learn from you my reader.

Skeeter

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In honor of Rochester’s 175th Anniversary, the City of Rochester and the Veterans Outreach Center will present a special Veterans Day Concert featuring the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and special guests under the direction of Principal Pops Conductor Jeff Tyzik.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to shoot the GigaPans for this historic event in Rochester, and want to offer a special thank you to Gary Walker from the City to take the time to explain what a GigaPan is and introduce me to the audience. The picture below represent the GigaPans I was able to capture for during the event and if you want to create your own snapshots you can click on them.

Click to go to RPO Veterans GigaPan1
Click to go to RPO Veterans GigaPan2

If you want to take your own snapshots, the screencast below will provide you an overview of what to do and how to share them with friends and family.

If you attended this event, I hope you enjoyed it and this two photographs will provide a special memory for you and your loved ones.

Best Wishes,

Skeeter

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Whenever I go out to shoot a Virtual 360 Tour, the elements when shooting that I pay close attention to are accuracy of focus, proper exposure, and placement of the equipment. This is critical so that when the 12 photos are stitched together the software produces a flawless panoramic photograph that can be viewed giving the user a “of feeling of being there”.

Some examples of my more recent 360 Virtual Tours can be seen here:

• Vernon Downs Casino
• WNY Jellystone Campground

Shooting a GigaPan has some of the same challenges as a 360 Virtual Tour along with a few others.  First and foremost instead of 12 pictures a GigaPan ends up being several hundred photos.  As a result of the large number of photographs that must be taken,  a motorized computer controlled rotator must be used to both position the camera and actually shoot each photograph.  However unlike a Virtual Tour both the exposure (amount of light the camera sees) and the focus point of each picture ends up being set manually and fixed to the same settings for every one of those hundreds of photographs!   This is done to help the stitching software create the GigaPan.   Finally the lens is set to maximum focal length (Zoomed In) so that each picture is taken as close up as possible, which allows the “Snapshot” effect to work when you view the GigaPan on GigaPan.org.

In preparation of this critical photo shoot on Veterans Day for the City of Rochester, I spent the afternoon today at the Blue Cross Arena determining how best to configure the camera.   Also key here was to determine where the best vantage point would be to take this GigaPan, knowing the critical element of this picture really is YOU the audience!  So below is a video of my adventures today at the Blue Cross Area, and below that is what I produced as a result of my testing.

Todays Experience

GigaPan from Todays Efforts

I hope you enjoyed this blog post and I look forward to seeing you and hopefully “catching YOU in a little bit of history”, so that your families will be able to enjoy and share the experience too!

Skeeter

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Social Networking for business and how to use these tools to broaden your reach is a topic on many peoples minds as many companies strive to strengthen their brands and increase marketing presence!

Last week at Rochester Works, I had the opportunity to present this topic and how businesses are using Social Networks to reach their customer base.    In general companies are using Social Networking as follows:

1. Branding & Marketing
2. Sales
3. Customer Support
4. Research
5. Innovation
6. Crisis Management

An example of a local company that are using these categories is Kodak.  Under the direction of Rock Star CMO – Jeffry Hayzlett from Kodak utilizes a facebook fan page to draw over 15K fans to the company, along with many different twitter accounts.  The team regularly post tweets and facebook updates on their latest product commercials, ask surveys on which commercials should be aired first and conduct research on new products by asking followers on twitter to help name a new pocket HD camcorder!

When it comes to embarking on utilizing Social Networking for business it is key to develop a strategy and plan on how the business should utilize these Social Portals.  Anyone can setup a twitter account and start tweeting but key to success here is in the Art not the Science!

Click here for a copy of the Presentation, Twitterverse, and Conversation Prism

Skeeter Internet Marketing, Social Networking

Today I had the pleasure of speaking with approximately 45 people within the Greater Rochester community who have recently found themselves displaced from jobs and are in the process of trying to find new opportunities.

Participants from Introduction to Social Media for Job Seekers

The students were a pleasure to speak with and there was a lively set of questions and dialog on facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.   Attached is the presentation for those students or others that would like to have it for further reference.   We only had about an 1 1/2 to cover 2 hours worth of content,  however with the patience and understand of the class we made it through it!

Mac Village Productions offers training on facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter at different levels depending on the target audience.    We provide Social Media training for Public, Corporate, and Non-Profit Organizations, along with one on one consulting.

Here is the presentation from Todays Event!

A sincere thanks goes out to Hannah Morgan, Career Services Advisor for inviting me in to speak!

Skeeter Social Networking facebook, linkedin, Rochester, Rochester Works, Skeeter Harris, Social Media, Social Networks Work, Training, twitter

Earlier today, Skeeter Harris of Mac Village Productions was interviewed on News 8 news by Brian Neudorff on his upcoming educational seminar on Social Media called Social Networks Work! The event features local businesses (Kodak, News 8, Techrigy) speaking about how to best to use social media technologies such as facebook and twitter among others.

To see the interview click here

Click here to find out more information about this Seminar

Skeeter Social Networking Brian Neudorff, facebook, Kodak, News 8, Skeeter Harris, Social Media, Social Networks Work, Techrigy, twitter

Today at City Hall on Church Street Mayor Duffy greeted a large crowed including Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, George Eastman, and other honorable guests. To commemorate Rochester’s official day of incorporation in 1834 there was a with a super-sized 175 birthday cake at City Hall.

Mayor Duffy addresses the audience

You can see a photo slideshow of the event here!

Skeeter 360 VIrtual Tours City Hall, Mayor Duffy, Rochester NY, Rochester Virtual Tours, Skeeter Harris

Last Friday while catching up on news via my iPhone I stumbled upon an article that was published in The Patriot Ledger by Alex Veiga an AP Real Estate Writer titled “For Sale by tweet: Social networking to sell homes”

While Alex’s article spends most of the time talking about a few Real Estate agents promoting homes via Twitter it reminded me that what Mac Village Productions does for our clients is not widely adopted. WIth this in mind I thought I would take the rest of the blog posting to discuss some tips and techniques I use when making Social Networks Work!

When I use Twitter to promote my clients properties on Twitter I make sure I follow these simple guidelines. Make sure that you balance your property advertisement posts mixed between general tweet posts. In other words – “Be Real” do not only about promoting your properties, mix it up between tweeting about other things of interest such as news, hobbies and engaging in dialog with your followers. When you tweet an advertisement – connect a URL to it so that it can be tracked with analytics. I use a free service called “TR.IM” which will give you great usage reporting, and I attach the Virtual Tour to the tweet to maximize exposure. Finally to help other tweeters that are not following me I use hash tags such as #realestate or #crs

If your not already on LinkedIn, you should be! This is by far “The Professionals” version of Social Networks and can be used to connect you to other Real Estate professionals as well potential buys and sellers. There are several areas within Linkedin that you can use to promote yourself and your listings. One area that I use periodically is the “What are you working on now?” selection – This is a great area where you can tell people when you have a showing going on or a new listing. What is nice about this update field is that your connections automatically get notified to any changes to your status and people not linked to you will see these updates as well. Another great place to put your listings is in the discussion groups. There are many Real Estate groups established on LinkedIn, that you can use to post your listings. When posting a listing in these groups I use a short description of the listing that was created for the MLS and then add a link to the virtual tour as well. LinkedIn’s does an excellent job in feeding their content over to Google which will help you drive maximum exposure!

One other channels that I use regularly that are a little off the normal path however that drives great SEO results on your listings back to Google is YouTube. I know your thinking what could I possible put up in YouTube on a house? Well the answer is simple – take the photos of the house or if you shot a video tour of the house and create a short and simple movie of that listing! In YouTube there is something called a Channel – create a channel for your business and start to post all of your listing “movies” up on this channel. It is important to use keyword tag works such as the address of the property, Real Estate Agents Name, location, Brokerage Name. In the description of the YouTube “Movie” I then make sure I put links back to the Brokers website as well as to the “Virtual Tour”.

Well, there is a lot more (including facebook) that I could talk about here on marketing your listings with Social Networks and making them work for you but I need to save some of my techniques for my upcoming education event entitled “Social Networks Work”. This education event is will being held in Rochester, NY on May 20th, 2009. More information can be found here!

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As a direct result of many requests for having my Social Networking tips available for more then one day we are going to be re-launching this great service.

During these weekly tips you can expect to hear content on – Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Flock, Digg, and other technologies

Starting next week (on Mondays) you will be able to check back and see a new tips that will stay active for a full week. This will allow you to replay this tip and refer back to it throughout the week as well as allow others to discover these tips if they happened to miss a particular day.

I thank everyone for there feedback on this service and I welcome both your comments and suggested topics!

Skeeter

Skeeter Internet Marketing, Social Networking facebook, linkedin, Social Networking, twitter