2009 January | Shuaism

Forward thinking and a few updates

Written on January 29, 2009 by Josh Peters in Social Media

I want you to think about moving forward. Not just in a physical direction, for most of you that would mean you would just ram into your desk and that would serve no purpose. I’m talking about moving forward in life, actions, and thoughts.

Why look at the same old tool and just think hammer? Why keep thinking that something has to be done because that’s the it’s been done for years? Why use something only for it’s intended purpose (power tools excluded)? Why not start delving into new areas of imagination and excitement?

There will be a new Guerrilla Social Media Marketing post up soon, it’s been shipped off to the host and I’ll be sure to post the linking article when it goes up. It’s about WOM. WOM takes creativity and the ability to make something interesting enough that people want to tell a story or useful / wonderful enough that people want to tell other people about it.

Next week I’ll be (finally) putting up a review about the GTD Agenda. Next week I’m also starting school again to get my Masters cert in Internet Marketing so posts may drop down to 2x a week instead of 3x a week as more of my time will be disappearing. Though I will try my best to keep up the usual 3x a week, but I will always get out the GSMM project posts, and I have an announcement that I think is pretty cool next week as well.

This is just a quick update to those of you who stop by the blog, subscribe to my feed, or get it sent to their inbox. Thank you all. I appreciate the time you take to read my blogs and comment on the posts. I enjoy interacting with you and hearing your thoughts and concerns.

Hopefully tomorrow we will have a guest post going up on a truly awesome host blog, and we can talk about it and discuss it then.

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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Tags: GSMM, GTDAgenda, Guerrilla Social Media Marketing, Social Media, updates

20+ Social Media and Online Resources for Realtors

Written on January 25, 2009 by Josh Peters in Real Estate, Social Media, Social Networking, Tips, Web/Tech

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Think about buildings.

Dull, beautiful, lifeless, warm, inviting, scary, haunted.

We love to tell stories about them, describe who has lived in them and we mark them with plaques to signify what’s so important about them.

A while back I did an article about Century 21 and the request / challenge they gave to David Meerman Scott on the subject of new media marketing. My grandpa was a very successful Realtor, my cousin is a Realtor, one of my good friends is a Realtor, and in Feb I’m presenting to the largest commercial real estate group in Utah.

It seems like I’m being drawn to this topic. I can’t get away from it so I might as well embrace it with open arms and put together a couple lists to benefit the online Realtor.

Social Networks

Active Rain – A social network for real estate professionals to gather and tell their war stories, start conversations, get advice, and connect with each other.

Dwellicous – Think Delicious for real estate. Bookmark and share properties with family, friends, and potential customers.

FaceBook – Display who you are and what you do using a variety of tools and start making connections. I”ve read many testimonials of Realtors getting new business from friends they’ve made online.

GreenPearl – Formerly MyIdeaBook boasts over 450,000 real estate professionals, investors, and principals on their network all talking about real estate marketing, events, and issues.

HouseTubeTv – Like YouTube, but meant ONLY for real estate.

LinkedIn -Same idea as FaceBook but much more professional oriented.

Localism – Join your community (city) and post up advice, list real estate properties for sale, and talk about local events with other real estate pro’s and local businesses.

RealSeekr – Looks like eBay, acts like Zillow. This one actually has a place for commercial real estate, but it’s empty. Realtors can make profiles, list their properties, and connect with other Realtors.

RealTown – Network with agents, buyers, sellers, investors, etc. and gain valuable insight from articles and group discussions.

Trulia – Get advice and share your knowledge with real estate professionals and locals.

Twitter – More of a microblogging site its quite like a small social network where you can meet and communicate with people. The most powerful feature of Twitter is the search which will help you track down possible prospects or fellow Realtors.

WannaNetwork – Full of unique features for Realtors to connect, share, and invest with each other.

YouTube – Create a video of your property, place it on both your site and on YouTube to gain more exposure. Just please leave to 80’s porn music out.

Real Estate Sites

Craigs List – Post and search properties for sale or rent in your area.

Move – List and find millions of apartments and neighborhoods. Get tips, help, advice, and more from professionals.

Realty – Post and search real estate listings.

Zillow – See the value of real estate properties in the area and monitor their fluctuation.

Zipvo – A huge listing of available real estate properties for sale in your area.

Real Estate Blogs

Agent Genius – Real estate blog with tons of social media advice thrown in.

Home Gain – Real estate tips, stats, prices, advice and more.

Real-Estate.Alltop – A list of all the top real estate blogs.

Real Estate Marketing Blog – Tips for listings, SEO, and real estate online.

Real Estate Tomato – Blogging and content advice for Realtors

Tips

During my research I ran across quite a few crimes against humanity being perpetrated on many social networking sites and it really made me wonder what exactly these Realtors were thinking.

Your profile and display of your properties says more to those initial buyers than I think you realize. As buyers this is our first impression of you and in my opinion so many profiles and site just plain blew it. My first thoughts were along the lines of “sloppy”, “unprofessional”, or “wow, they really don’t care”.

I don’t want to see this happen to you so here are 5 tips I’ve come up with while researching real estate and social media. Each one involves a tool and something to avoid doing or to do so you don’t blow your first impression.

Camera – Get a decent one, this is not an area to skimp on. As a buyer nothing turns me off quicker than a tiny, low res picture. I’ll skip right over it. This also goes for your picture on any social media profiles.

Camcorder – The Flip Mino HD is great for most scenarios, but if you really want to promote a professional feel and atmosphere on high end deals get a good digital camcorder and a tripod.

Blog / Site – Make it clean, make it informative, make it to the point. Long winded descriptions are great for SEO, but horrible when looking for details. List the details first, the 300+ word description second.

Profiles – Put a little of your personality into your online profiles. Make them fun and real, don’t be 100% business. People want to do business with people, not with a business pretending to be a person or vice versa.

Voice – Find your voice and mold it for your success. Work with being more professional, more fun, more informative, more emotional, less detailed, etc. till you find the voice that sells for you.
The sites are there, the tools are there, the ideas are there. So why are all the realty sites I see out there so dull? Why is there no story being told and why do we always

The biggest surprise to me was that when it comes to commercial real estate no one is doing… well, anything. Every site is geared towards homes, not businesses. The networks are almost 100% home and not commercial. Many of the sites don’t even have a commercial real estate section.

I smell opportunity, but this isn’t about me. This is about you. What do you think? Does the list cover everything? Am I missing sites or services Realtors should be using? Do you have any advice you’d like to give to any Realtors looking to start using social media as part of their business? If so please let us know in the comments.

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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Delicious Tags Social Networking RealEstate SocialMedia

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Tags: Real Estate, Social Media, Social Networking

Mashable guest post: 30+ FaceBook Apps for Doing Business on FaceBook

Written on January 23, 2009 by Josh Peters in Business, FaceBook, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy

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FaceBook as over 150 million users and it’s growing! Mom’s, dad’s, kid’s, crazy aunts who ruin every holiday and yes even businesses are flocking to FaceBook these days. Not just businesses either but business professionals from Lawyers to Social Media Consultants are finding new ways to use this amazing utility.

Developers are recognizing that fact and working to make apps to fill the voids left after you’ve thrown a snowball at the same person 1,000 times. The fact is that FaceBook can and is being used for business and being able to use it as a full service business out post is becoming vitally important to it’s users.

Whether you’re a seasoned FaceBook veteran, someone trying it out for the first time, or someone looking to get more out of your FaceBook experience there is something here for everyone. Click on this link and head on over to Mashable to read this article.

30+ Apps for Doing Business on FaceBook

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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p.s. I apologize for putting this up so late, I had two guest posts go live today so I was going to put this one up in afternoon but BlueHost “took my server down for maintenance” (of all the freakin’ days right?) and it didn’t come back up till I was away from my computer. So apologies all around and enjoy the post!

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Tags: FaceBook, Guest Post, Social Meida

Guerrilla Social Media Marketing: Guest posts and articles

Written on January 22, 2009 by Josh Peters in Social Media

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The second post in the series has been put up with a guest post on Mark Goren’s blog and it’s about the tactic of guest posting.

A guest post can add credibility to your name, get your ideas and content in front of a whole new set of eyes and help you build new relationships. It’s free publicity and is the very definition of a win / win situation. There are some things to consider when doing a guest post so go read the article and lets talk about it. Also if you have ever written a guest post for someone else head on over to the article on PlantingSeeds and leave the link to your guest post in the comments and share your experience doing it.

Thank you Mark for hosting the second Guerrilla Social Media Marketing post! Please go check it out here: Guerrilla Social Media Marketing: Guest posts and articles – on PlantingSeeds.Ca

Thank you for reading, and following this project
Josh Peters

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Sharing 101, using TwitterFeed and Google shared items

Written on January 18, 2009 by Josh Peters in Advice, Ideas, Productivity, Social Media, Tips

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Invest in sharing by Shira Golding

I love serendipity.

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to share more of the info I come across easier. I’d love to have a “one click” option to share something via Twitter, my Google Shared, BXBW, and save to Delicious, but I haven’t discovered it yet. Then I was assisted by my good friend Caffeine.

Walking through the parking lot of a coffee shop / tattoo parlor / nail salon to my car I came up with a great idea. At least I think it’s a great idea, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

First thing’s first, you need to be using Google Reader or any other reader that has a way to share items and push it out via an RSS feed.

That’s my Google Shared items page, isn’t it neato? If you’re not aware of what that is I’ll explain If you know all about it / already have one skip on down to the TwitterFeed image. If you’re looking at this going WTF keep reading.

Google Reader is an RSS reader. You know those orange icons you see all over the web and on blogs like mine (look at the top)? Those are RSS icons and they allow you to subscribe to the content produced on blogs. When you click on them you’ll be prompted to subscribe in a feed reader of your choice (mine is Google Reader) and have the content delivered to you instead of you going to it.

On Google’s there is an option to share or share with a note

Share puts it onto your Shared Items page (like above) and share it with your friends. Share with note lets you add in your 2 cents regarding the info you’re sharing with the world.

The nice thing about Google’s shared is that you can subscribe to anyone’s shared items using the little orange icon found on the page. That’s exactly the feature I wanted to exploit using the next service.

TwitterFeed is a great little service that allows you to setup RSS feed delivery straight into your Twitter stream and the delivery is amazingly customizable. You can setup how often you want an RSS Feed checked, how much info to display when posting to Twitter and even what service you want to use as your link shrinker.

This is what makes it possible to share more info with just a click of the mouse. I just copied the feed link from my Google shared (right click on Atom Feed select Copy Link Location) then entered it into my TwitterFeed account and set it to post up to 3 items from that feed every 30 minutes. Now I’m sharing more information easier. I always have Google Reader open and running on either my computer or my G1, but I don’t always have Twitter running as sometimes it can be a bit of a distraction.

The link shrinking service I use on this is AdJix, which inserts a small ad at the top of anything you link to and if anyone clicks on it the ad you get paid. Some of you might be thinking “oh this is one of THOSE type of posts about how to make money online and blah blah blah.” It’s not.

The reason I’m using Adjix is simple,I want to donate any money I make using the service to TwitterFeed. They are a free (and completely awesome) service that just asks for donations. I was going to do it at a rate of 80 / 20 to them / me but I’ve changed my mind and decided to give them 100% of my income garnered via this setup.

It’s a really quick and easy way to share more information while simultaneously sharing more information.

Can you imagine how much extra funding TwitterFeed might get if power sharers like Chris Brogan or Robert Scoble used this kind of a setup? I think it’s a fantastic idea, what about you?

Thank you for reading
Josh “Shua” Peters

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Guerrilla Social Media Marketing: Features and Benefits List

Written on January 14, 2009 by Josh Peters in Marketing, Social Media, Strategy

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The first post in the series has kicked off with a guest post on fellow social media consultant Jacob Morgan’s blog and it’s about the tactic of using a benefits list.

Benefits lists are a great way to show off what you offer. It gets even better when you have your customers get involved and start creating your list for you. Then you add a dash of social media and it really takes flight because not only are your customers seeing your benefits list but your customers friends are seeing it too! This creates a system of passive recommendation and builds out your benefits list that can then be used in other marketing areas. Not to mention that as people contribute you can figure out what else they are into and determine other companies to create cross promotional campaigns with!

Thank you Jacob for hosting the first Guerrilla Social Media Marketing post! If you’re still reading at this point stop reading and start clicking! Guerrilla Social Media Marketing: Features and Benefits List

Thank you for reading, and following this project
Josh Peters

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Guerrilla Social Media Marketing

Written on January 12, 2009 by Josh Peters in Ideas, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Tips

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“YOU CAN BE a high-energy marketer, and you can do it for free. Your marketing can propel you to gloriously high profits, and you can do it for free. You can become well known for your nonstop visible marketing, and you can do it for free.” – Opening paragraph of Guerrilla Marketing for Free by Jay Conrad Levinson

It’s true that Guerrilla marketing has been used offline for many years to bring small and large businesses to success. These tactics have been use by creative marketing teams and business owners to create unique marketing messages for their products but what exactly is a Guerrilla Marketer?

According to Wikipedia “Guerrilla marketing is an unconventional system of promotions, running on a very low budget, by relying on time, energy and imagination instead of big marketing budgets. Typically, guerrilla marketing is unexpected and unconventional, where consumers are targeted where they would not be expecting, which can make the idea that’s being marketed memorable, generate buzz, and even spread virally. The term was coined and defined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book Guerrilla Marketing. The term has since entered the popular vocabulary to also describe aggressive, unconventional marketing methods generically.” I’d say that’s a pretty good definition.

That’s exactly what I want to discuss with this blog series. I’m taking Jay Conrad Levinson’s methods and applying them to social media. Using a combination of Jay’s ideas from his books and my own I want to create a a year long series (once a week) where I will post an idea, give examples, show how I did it myself, or create a project for you the readers to get involved.

To track the progress of the project and to see links to all related posts, examples, etc go to my Guerrilla Social Media Marketing page and bookmark it.To get the latest post in the series and to easily follow which blog the new post is showing up on just subscribe to my feed via RSS or Email to receive the latest updates.

My goal is to not host a single other post in this series on my own blog (except the last one), In true Guerrilla style I want to spread it across the web in a series of guest posts, so if you have a blog and would like to host one of the posts in this series drop me a line at shua (at) shuaism.com or leave a comment below.

My goals for this new year is to work smarter, harder, spread ideas, and ENJOY a cup of coffee in the mornings. We’ll get this series started later this week with a guest post, stay tuned for details.

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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Tags: Guerrilla Marketing, Marketing, Social Media

Want a powerful tech support team? Just add social media!

Written on January 8, 2009 by Josh Peters in Advice, Business, Consulting, Ideas, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Tips

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Image by Seattle Municipal Archives

Tech support is the perfect group to utilize Social Media. Maybe it’s my technical background speaking, but I truly believe that. Consider these points before you run down to the comments section to call me a liar.

They know your product inside and out.
They’re aware of the most common mistakes made by users.
Most technical support agents are smart problem solvers.
Most have customer service skills and know how to deal with difficult people.
They are already representing your brand with every call they take, so why not brand online customer interactions too?
More than likely the techs are going to be web savvy.
Chances are they already have profiles and are using social media in one form or another.

Everyday you have a group of people who are representing your company through their actions and your brand gets associated with their skills and the work they do.

That’s not to say they are infallible, even great techs have an off day or drop the ball from time to time and when that happens customers are increasingly moving to the web to complain to thousands of people. We’ve seen how quickly a bad experience can spread with the Motrin debacle, so why not empower your techs to do something about it?

It makes all the sense in the world to empower this group to help customers outside of the normal inbound call. Need some help getting started?

Setup your listening and reputation management tools.
After determining how active brand detractors are and where they are at, create a team.
- Team size depends on results from #2 plus 1-2 people for more proactive activities.
- After figuring out group size take your top agents that want to be a part of this and place them on the team.
Put the agents through any pertinent training on use, best practices, reaction strategies, etc.
Monitor their efforts and measure progress.
Use proactive techniques to help build the companies reputation for knowledge and service.
- Blogs and forums are an example of proactive resources.
Make sure to applaud their efforts and announce the teams existence on the corporate blog. Announcing the team’s existence through an official corporate channel lends credence to their activities.

Those are the 6 steps to getting started, but while planning and creating the team there are three things that should be kept in mind.

Be ready for changes, and plan for them ahead of time.
- This goes for everything from size of group needed to the methods and tactics utilized
This is a long haul commitment and requires some concept evolution.
If something doesn’t work, fails, or falls apart don’t worry. It can be documented, researched, and revisited later if necessary.

What do you think? Make sense? I’d love to get your opinion in the comments below.

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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p.s. If you’re interested but still don’t know where to start contact me (shua at shuaism . com) and we can talk.

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Tags: Advice, Customer Service, Social Media, Tech Support, Tips

Social media for small businesses – Pizzaria

Written on January 5, 2009 by Josh Peters in Advice, Business, Ideas, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking, Strategy, Tips

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This is part of an ongoing series about social media and small businesses. Living in Salt Lake City, Utah I’ll be using examples from the beehive state but obviously the ideas I’ll be presenting in these
article will work anywhere. Small businesses are the backbone of our economy so if you know any SB owners that might benefit from this article please send them a link to this information.

Happy Happy Pizza (cooked) by David de Groot

I love pizza, I go to a great little pizzaria called Este Pizzaria at least 2x a month if not more. Last time I was in I started talking to the owner about his business and how he markets himself and one thing he brought up was how hard it was for small businesses to market themselves online. So Este Pizzaria I dedicate these 5 ideas to you.

Set up a page on your website where people can submit pizza recipies and everyone can vote on them, UserVoice is a great vote based system that could be used like this. Then after a month the most voted pizza could be on the menu for a while. Or even eaten in a private party with the recipe creator and their friends. The even could be recorded and put on YouTube and MySpace video.
After a while of doing the pizza competitions you could release a free eBook of pizza recipes from the winners and even offer a print version in your store.
Start a blog about pizza. Talk about making dough, making sauce, put up videos of how to toss a pizza, etc. Several restaurant owners have already done this in their respective areas like Justin Levy at the Prime Cuts Blog.
Have an art competition where artists paint pizza boxes. Collect both online and offline votes. Then take the winner(s) design and use them as your pizza box design for a while. When the winner(s) are announced you could hold a pizza party for them and put it online.
With any of these you can create a widget through sites like WidgetBox, KickApps and others to promote the contests and get your fans to spread the word for you.

What do you think? Have any ideas of your own to share? I’d love to hear them in comments section.

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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Tags: Marketing, Pizza, pizzaria, Social Media

Monthly Archives: January 2009

Social Networks

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