Never Ending Thoughts…

As Facebook comes closer to going IPO (or as the rumors say closure itself!), one thing is clear that both businesses and people alike keep on forgetting the fact that when it comes to business and marketing there is no “one size fits all” solution. Yes, Facebook has done a whole lot (well much more than a “whole lot”) in connecting people and truly open the channels innovation when it comes to giving a more social aspect to the World Wide Web, it still is not a perfect solution. In this article we will cover what really works well on Facebook. Our intention is to help the reader and not get overly fascinated about Facebook. Yes it’s good, but it’s not good for “everything”!

Informal is the new “formal”

Facebook is excellent in initiating small informal product reviews and get genuine feedback about your products and services. If done in a controlled and very well moderated manner, it can help you get in touch with not only your customers but your customers’ friends! and that’s the beauty of it. The key is not only in having a “company webpage” on Facebook, but also have all your marketing and sales executives create a professional version of their portfolio on facebook. People associate with people much more than they associate with a “company”. For example, if Tom works at Coca Cola, Tom’s friends would be more interested in giving him some feedback about Coca Cola’s new Advertisement they saw on TV than directly going on Coca Cola’s site and commenting over there.

“Advertising” is the last thing you should do

Facebook is all about “word of mouth” and not “word on the billboard”. Furthermore, you’ll soon realize that “google like ppc advertising” will turn out to be just overly expensive on Facebook. The reason is simple. People come on Facebook to talk with their friends and not to listen to marketing presentations. They are not interested in hearing what you are good at; but they are there to listen to their friends and if their friends liked what you sell, then in fact they might try it too even if they don’t want too! For example, imagine that you are selling custom T-shirts. The best way to spread out a viral news about your promotion will be to spread it through your friends instead of advertising. Avoid paid advertising on Facebook; there are far better and cost effective ways to spend money if you have to.

Use it to listen not to tell

Facebook is a great platform when it comes to listening to what your customers are talking about. Not only your customers, but your prospects; people who are using your competitors products and so on. It can be far valuable source for you to be able to learn what your competitors are doing and thinking than trying to push more of your own ideas over to your followers. Imagine trying to do this same thing “the traditional way”. You’ll have to set up seminar, perhaps join a committee and even then it’ll be really hard to bring in all your competitors to that forum. However with Facebook it will be very natural and transparent.

So what’s next? We believe, most certainly you’ll have a Facebook business page already. Go ahead and ask your staff to be more interactive and make use of Facebook to spread and share information. Use your company page more of like a billboard and nothing more than that. The more “friends” you can make, the more successful you’ll be; and the age old statement “friends cannot be bought” still holds true in this era of Web 2.0!

In this blog we will discuss some of the reasons why people tweet their blogs and one cool way to do it with Java.

Why tweet your blogs?

The reasons are many. To count a few:

1. It helps spread the word about your blog to a wide set of audience.

2. Tweets have an inherent tendency to spread easily and so they are a perfect tool to spread some viral news.

3. Short texts can be written to create curiosity amongst the reader and make him not only click a link and read the blog but get involved. That’s why SMS’s are so popular!

4. Good tweets can always help you build a good group of members for your blog!

5. And, last but not the least: tweeting is free! Who doesn’t like any free way of promoting anything?

So how it’s done?

Unfortunately many people don’t know that twitter APIs are very well maintained and if you spend a day understanding them and writing your own twitter bot you can save 100s of dollars that would otherwise go in the pocket of companies that sell so called “twitter bots” for ridiculous price.

Prerequisites

Although twitter APIs come in almost any programming language, in this tutorial we will focus on Java. All you’ll need is basic understanding of Java and any editor of your choice. We are not going to discuss how you are going to install and configure JDK or install the editor or the whole App end to end. We are assuming you have gone through the good old “HelloWorld” sample of writing a web application or anything of that sort for that matter. Now that if you know all that stuff and really want to know how to automate twitter from your blog, you may proceed to read further; otherwise, take a step back and first go learn Java!

What all you’ll need?

All you’ll need is RSS Utils (rssutils.jar) and a good twitter API for Java. We will focus on twitter4j. It’s the first one mentioned in twitter’s own documentation, is well documented and is even available in maven repository!

Pulling feed from your blog – using RSS Utils:

You can read how to use RSS Utils here: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javaserverpages/rss_utilities/

RSS Utils allows you to easily read your blog’s RSS feed. If you are using wordpress or any other famous blogging engine, most probably your rss feed url will be http://your-blog-url/?feed=rss

Then you can create a Java Rss object like so:

RssParser parser = RssParserFactory.createDefault();

Rss rss = parser.parse(new URL”<rss feed url of your blog>”);

And read all the items in its Channel object. Every item will give you your blog’s title, description and url. Using this you can create a string; truncate it to fit in the 140 characters because anything beyond that will freak out twitter.

Once you have the string to be tweeted, now comes the tweeting part.

Tweeting a message to twitter:

For this we will use twitter4j. You can read all about twitter4j here: http://twitter4j.org/en/index.html

Keep in mind that twitter doesn’t support Basic Authentication any more. So most of the documentation related to basic auth in twitter4j and most of the APIs related to that are now useless. They all are deprecated (or will be deprecated). If you still use them, twitter will throw an error telling you about the same. So directly move on and learn about the OAuth (point 7 on this page: http://twitter4j.org/en/code-examples.html). This example shows you how to register an application using your twitter account and how to use the secure token to publish a message.

If you get stuck anywhere, don’t hesitate to ask here! We will be more than happy to help!

cheers! and happy twitting/blogging!

Your website could be promoted simply by using social media. However, while people ad businesses usually create Facebook Fan Pages or Twitter accounts you could be a little more original. Maybe a good thing to do would be to create Linkedin profiles for your employees and thus help them to develop connections that would potentially advertise your company and businesses. Linkedin is a social media website that is usually destined for people, not for businesses. This is why it is not preferred for businesses to make their corporate profiles on Linkedin.

Another method would be for businesses to create Flickr profiles. This would help them by popularizing the brands. The companies would be able to post images on Flickr and by this documenting the company’s activity. You could post there pictures with your staff, with the main things that happen in your company and other details like that.

Linkedin and Flickr have the same potential that Facebook and Twitter currently have. If you combine different social media services you would most probably get the right solution for your website. Each website is different from the others. You might need different things or different solutions, however the principles remain the same. As an entrepreneur, you will need to have interest in developing the best products and services that you will be capable to sell. If you don’t have time to do the SEO yourself, it would be great to call some specialists.

Every time people launch websites, they need to find new ways to promote their “web creations”. Each webmaster needs to get a lot of traffic to its websites mostly because traffic is money, whatever other internet marketing specialists might say. Webmasters need to have a strong SEO strategy. This might take a lot of time, more than a SEO strategy.

SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization is pretty much the same thing as developing a long term strategy. It takes time to get all the needed backlinks that you as a webmaster might need. It is recommended not to do yourself the SEO. Any webmaster needs to apply all the newest methods and techniques that are available to use on the Internet. However, use only the “legal” SEO techniques and limit yourself to them. Also, do not send spam to people and businesses. This will only aggravate your situation.

Here is a good method of attracting traffic: run blog and twitter contests. Set prizes and other details that a contestant might need to know in order to participate to your contest.

It is essential to start and build your website from scratch. Why? It is simply better this way. When using pre-made platforms for your internet, especially open-source ones, your newly set up website will look pretty nice, but will have some internal flaws that will eventually cause you a lot of problems. The good thing with open source platforms is the fact that most of them where built and develop using powerful online communities. You will always find your needed updates and other plug-ins that you may want. Always try to buy your website platform or create it from scratch.

In the last blog article entitled “How businesses should use Social Media” (posted yesterday, august 30, 2010), we have discussed mainly about the advantages offered by social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube and how small businesses are capable to profit from this internet marketing method. However, today we will discuss about a similar topic: How can Social Media help Businesses in their quest for new leads.

Currently, there is a common belief that social media is number one when it comes to speaking about emerging channels for lead generation (according to virtual events provider, Unisfair). As lead generation has become the biggest concern for internet marketers, nothing is as important as the role of social media and how it can aid lead generation. We talked in the last blog article how social media can provide efficient customer feedback and PR channel, however, not about how it can be an efficient method of lead generation. For example, if it is used correctly, only the use of Twitter as an internet marketing method could potentially grow your weekly sales by 100%, doubling your weekly sales.

Social media can help due to the fact that it is a great method of distributing content. Uploading the same content or info (such as news) on several top social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr or Stumbleupon, will most certainly enlarge your audience and more will know about your business, products, services and even about the new events where you and your company are implicated.

In addition, social media delivers trusted referrals. You start to develop virtual friendship relationships and people will tend to feel they know you somehow. If they will ever need a local advertising company to do some prints for them (say you are the owner of this kind of business), they will surely go and apply to you first.

The new social media websites help you to connect with local businesses. As a business owner you can connect with other local entrepreneurs and even start partnerships that will someday be profitable.

Social media is currently emerging as one of the most efficient lead generation tools. Why? Well, because it implies less costs than other (internet) marketing techniques and has an important impact on others perception regarding the business, products or services.

Numerous business owners have already heard about how social has the potential to help their businesses. However, they do not know for sure how all this can happen. Lots of business owners are interested in promoting their products or services and social media seems to be a good way to do this. There are numerous ways to advertise a product or service using this marketing method. It is important to understand the principles that stay at the basis of social media.

Social media is an extremely good way to connect people and businesses. Internet marketing is cheap and businesses are able to connect with other ones and with new potential clients at an ease of a click. How can businesses profit from social media and also how can their advertising campaigns have an impact? Well, we will all see in the following paragraphs how this is possible.

The first good thing is that businesses are capable to monitor conversations about themselves. Company owners can either use Google alerts to gather info about themselves from blogs, forums, news and other websites, or simply be interested to use Social Mention. Social Mention monitors more than 100 social media websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Digg or Delicious. Twitter Search may also come handy sometimes.

The other advantage of using social media websites is that you will always be updated with the most recent news and even keep up to date on the industry itself. You will not only keep up to date with all the news about your brand, but also about what really happens in your domain of activity, such as the latest news about your rivals or what your competitors have released in terms of products or services.

In addition, don’t forget about something which is quite important nowadays: Social media offers the opportunity of giving great customer service. You can be connected with your past clients, current customers or future ones. Also, as a business owner, you may also provide emergency updates when there is the case to do this.

Furthermore, you not only have the possibility to keep in touch with people and businesses, but you may also be capable to receive customer feedback and opinion. This is quite important in the case of any business. This is why it is better to stay connected on the Internet. This is one of the most common marketing techniques nowadays, so keep in mind to act accordingly.

Currently, E-mail Marketing remains the most used method when talking about lead generation. Most of the material that can be found on the web about lead generation is somehow related to E-mail Marketing. Few web developers are using social network services to generate prospective costumer interest. Today, growing a business over the Internet can represent a difficult challenge if there are not taken into consideration some alternative methods.

Social networks and their role

Social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter represent the cream of what IT experts now call “social media”. The great thing is that social media represents one of the numerous benefits of Web 2.0 technology. No one knows what the future of social media will be, but it is anticipated that communities will grow so much that almost everyone will have at least one account. Facebook recently announced that it has reached the number of 500 million members, however this is improbable, but it might happen sometime (there are some cities that have almost three times more Facebook users than actual residents).

Social networks have the ability to connect people all around the globe. Actually, in order to be right, social networks are known to bring together both businesses and prospective customers. Prospective customers can be convinced to be part of a community where ideas are exchanged. When this happens, businesses can be done.

Keep in mind the essential

Are there any things to keep in mind? Well, in order to be successful, any business, and mostly online businesses need to master and rely on two distinct aspects:

• A community. Social media connects people and businesses. Businesses have the possibility to publish information about themselves along with other related info about products, services and other special offer they might have. Facebook lets its users to post info on the “wall”, which will appear to friends and fans (This is why it is essential to have a Business User page or a Fan page on Facebook). On the other hand, Twitter provides businesses with an online environment where they can post news and other info as “tweets” that appear as a list on other people’s user homepages. As you can see, both of the mentioned social networks work according to the same principles.
• A message. In order to “lead” Internet users away from Facebook or Twitter, you will definitely need a proper message. Convincing Internet users into checking your website, products and services is the most difficult part. It is more difficult even when convincing a person into becoming a customer. The best thing is to make a good appearance right from the first time. People tend to lose interest very quickly and this is part of the Internet user’s normal conduit. This is why it is important to have a clear and short message that may attract the potential clients.

A recent article on mspmentor.com talks about “six ways to generate leads without asking for them”. In this article, we take that discussion further by explaining how those six things can not only improve your business and CRM processes, they can also generate leads as a by-product of your efforts!

1. Play the Field – Get out there and start talking with your customers, prospects, industry, vendor partners and distributors. Today’s technology provides various ways to achieve this. Utilize as much of them as possible. Start with Social Networks, blogs, forums, have quarterly meet-ups with your customers and leads. It’s not just about selling your brand and product but rather listening to your customers and leads. This will help you understand your own limitations as perceived in the eyes of your customers and prospects and hence fix them proactively. In addition, this will help attract more customers.

2. Share Your Successes - Tout your wins and celebrate your accomplishments in every way you can. If you have done something great that has helped someone, don’t shy not to talk about it to others. People trust more if they see that a solution has worked at a similar place. Remember, if you won’t talk about it, no one will! Inculcate social bonding between your current customers and your prospects. Let the prospects talk with the customers (of course on prior approval from the customer).

3. Build Relationships - Don’t be Oz. Lead Generation is not something that you can do like buying an off the shelf toolkit. Yes, lead generation companies have a very big role to play; that is to give you a head start and get you in touch with your prospective buyers. But that is just a start! Remember, lead generation companies generate leads, they don’t generate sales! It is your product and your job to entice the prospect and get him/her to buy your product and service. All the lead generation company can do at best is try to hook you up with the best possible prospect.

4. Make Yourself Available – Don’t shy away from participating in vendor events, news releases, testimonials, success stories, and other press efforts.  Many small companies, especially the ones that believe they have a great idea think that just because they have a great idea customers would automatically come. Guess what? That’s not how the real world runs! If you believe in your product so much, spend some time and effort marketing it via right channels. Get the Industry experts involved and talk about it and give you feedback. This will not only help you shape your product and future goals as a company, it will bring in immense exposure and leads would come automatically!

5. Do Some Marketing – You don’t have to “go big” as they say, but have the basics in play. Ask your peers who have started companies. If you are a budding entrepreneur, don’t give up thinking that a $100 spending on marketing won’t lead you anywhere. You have to start from somewhere. Manage your finances and put the money on marketing that you are comfortable with. Remember that every effort is useless if it’s not implemented. Limit your spending give your best shot. In different lines, imagine if you did have the money to attract very high traffic and leads. Do you think your product has matured enough to get the right feedback? Most probably not. Take it as a positive thing. Starting small means small marketing, means fewer leads, means you would get a chance to try out your product sales on smaller sample set of people and quickly fix issues and glitches before you go big!

6. Give Leads to Get Leads – And last, but certainly not least…share the love. This a very unique way that can help generate leads and also build lot of trust in your product or service. Lead Generation is not just about getting more customers to buy your product but rather it’s a relationship building. If that lead was your brother or sister and if they were facing some other problem that you cannot fix, but you know your friend who can, would you refer your brother or sister to your friend? Obviously! Think of leads and customers the same way. Understand them and help them connect with each other if need be. This will help you create a very unique social bond with your customers that will help get extremely strong leads in future.

The global economy is not showing any signs of recovery and so is the Real Estate Market. This is putting immense pressure on sales managers to find new innovative ways to meet the numbers and keep businesses afloat. In this article we will highlight some of the new Social Media products and services that can help you generate leads in the Housing Market.

FavRav

This service uses Facebook to publish and capture product reviews. If you are a Real Estate Agent, this might be one good avenue for you to start promoting yourself. Simply ask your customers to rate and review you on FavRav. FavRav works much like Yelp but probably can be considered far more trust worthy as it will tell you the recommendations written about a product or service by your own friends. Furthermore, the service claims to have cool tools and provide far simpler interface than Yelp. Although we at ellipsis dive! haven’t yet started using FavRav to promote our product, but this is one product that seems to show promises of being able to utilize Social Media to generate leads not just in Real Estate but just about anything!

Top Producer Systems

This is a Technology Company that provides a suite of products catered towards the Real Estate Market. The company has introduced newer interfaces in their product suite that help seamlessly integrate with Facebook & Twitter and capture and analyze customer reviews. Products like these are very important to keep an eye on what your customers are talking about and help you proactively decide on future product offerings. This can help not only retain current customers but also get new leads in the Real Estate Market.

The “good old LinkedIn”

While there are all these new products and services that are woven around emerging Social Media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, there are still quite a few companies that are harnessing the good old LinkedIn channel to find new Real Estate leads. LinkedIn has changed quite a bit since the past few years with more “social” look and feel. It now gives far more insight into your “professional social network” and many companies are effectively using it to generate Real Estate Leads. If you are on LinkedIn, this is another platform that you could potentially use. Given that you are already here, you can harness your existing professional relationship to find new leads rather than starting from scratch on Facebook and Twitter.