fred-wilson:

New Facebook layout translated. It’s not that hard people!

original thread on canv.as

Social Media & Real Estate… a nearly “meant to be” marriage.

Could this be a 15 blog post series with that title?  Yup. 

But I don’t have the time nor the inclination to do that.  So don’t worry, you can all breath that sigh of relief and instead click the title of this post and read the ABA’s Law Practice Management Section’s Law Practice Today Article.  

Now if you’re like me, most of this stuff is rudimentary.  Have your own URL, or multiple… use a Google Profile to make sure you choose the info that people see early in search results for your name… advertise… use Linkedin… etc…, as I see it these are all basics.  But I’m “plugged in”, and many Attorney’s aren’t, so I thought that this article might be helpful to those of you looking to get more out of your web presence.  If you have questions, find me (use my Google profile for instance!) and I’ll help if I can. 

“Law firms should encourage their lawyers to write online content—by creating financial and career advancement incentives, and by making sure the top lawyers lead by example…”

“The whole point of a blog post is that it’s personal and authentic,” he writes. “What is published under your name and your photo must come from you. Avoid ‘ghostblogging’ in the law unless sincerity and trustworthiness aren’t important reputational assets to you.”

laughingsquid:

Facebook’s Growing Web of Frenemies

I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity to share my thoughts and experience on using social media in the real estate industry on WPRO, based in Providence RI, on 630AM and 99.7FM, this past Sunday morning.  Many thanks go out to Shamrock Financial, RI’s #1 home lender, and the companies I work for, HubConnected, social media solutions for real estate, and TitleHub Closing Services, a Massachusetts residential real estate law firm, for helping to make this possible.   

In truth, the topics we covered and addressed can apply to businesses of any type and I think there is some good information on here for anyone looking to leverage the services and tools available on the internet to market and promote their business. 

Here’s the show without commercials or breaks!

The title above is a link to the Mashable article covering the announcement.

Says Mashable: “The reports aren’t especially detailed, offering only the number of fans added, comments, likes, and visits in the past week.”

I’m a page admin for a handful of law firms and non-profits.  Its something I have experience with and do for free to help brands/companies that I believe in.  In the process, I’ve developed an interest in SEO, Web Analytics, and stats such as these.  When I discovered this little gem of information in my inbox yesterday I sent out a short email to all of owners/officers for the pages that I am an admin for, asking if they had the same statistics, and explaining what some of the numbers mean and show.  I’m an attorney, not a web developer or engineer, but the web is the future, and it fascinates me.  If I can provide value to clients, firms I work for, and even friends through these skills though, then the time I spend is well worthwhile, lest we forget there are 400+ million relationships to create and people to appeal to on Facebook.  To further to this end, the additional value I can provide in my career, I’ve found Facebook’s Insights feature for admins to be very useful as well; it can tell you details about your demographics, provide a longer look-back on your growth, and displays any engagement trends.  Armed with this information marketing to the Facebook audience just got a little more sophisticated. 

This article describes potential pitfalls of online and social marketing for lawyers and law firms alike.  You can already imagine that ethical rules about solicitation and advertising are a big part of ethical complications with our participation in this media… but this post will provide some additional insight and elaboration.

Social media and the accompanying developer-created tools are changing the ways businesses communicate with customers, the ways customers communicate with brands, and the ways businesses communicate with other businesses as well. With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Google Wave, Wikipedia, Slideshare, FriendFeed, Posterous, Delicious, WordPress, Tumblr and more, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed and confused.  Its even harder to start using them without feeling like this undertaking is going to be the equivalent of a part-time job.

So why should we even use social media in the first place?  Because being active on these new web 2.0 sites can:

Provide international web exposure

Attract like-minded and discussion minded people

Speak directly to your audience wherever they are

Help put out, or start, a fire (manage your PR)

Enhance your knowledge base

Improve collaboration

Expose you to different ideas

Allow you to test or get feedback

Let you meet and converse with new audiences, industry leaders, younger generation

The Cone Business in Social Media Study reported that 93% of Americans expect companies they do business with to have a social media presence, while 85 percent believe a company should not only be present, but also interact with its customers via social media.

This is what it is all about… the secret to social media is communication.  You must spend most of your time listening and then speaking, just like a face to face conversation.  You must listen to know what people want to hear, what topics will garner their interest and what answers will spark their interaction.  Then you can speak directly to them, providing the content that will engage the people on these media networks and delve into their discussions.  They’ll appreciate this, your brand’s reputation can grow and business will follow.  Good luck!

For those of us social media mavens who have to manage a single or multiple accounts over multiple formats, keeping up can be tough.  Thats why we use tools like Seesmic and TweetDeck, they allow you to manage many of your sites and feeds from one desktop tool.  At first many of these sites weren’t open source, so their API wasn’t able to be used by 3rd party developers, meaning there was less ingenuity and outside thinking input.  Thats the beauty of many of Google’s new tools, and their Google Wave project, its open source and encourages collaboration!  Now LinkedIn is joining the open source revolution, and companies like TweetDeck which previously only used to work with Myspace, Facebook and Twitter, now will work with LinkedIn too!

Very nice LinkedIn, now maybe people will begin to understand your many uses as well.