Here are a few tips to help you find the storytellers and content within your organization. Need more advice? Ping me at randy.ksar@gmail.com or comment below.
I met up with my favorite real estate agent in the SF Bay Area, Ed Gory, and talked about how he uses technology in his day-to-day business. He is a big networker in finding new clients and similar to social networking his friends are the ones that refer him his business. Ed Gory is one of the few real estate agents that have started using the online world in expanding his network. He is on Twitter, Facebook, has his own real estate podcast on iTunes, on LinkedIn, has his own blog, and random fact is a voice-over artist. How many real estate agents do you know who are in tune with technology like Ed? Not too many!
Enjoy this video of us walking thru his neighborhood in Redwood City, California.
Who is your favorite real estate agent and how do they market themselves in a unique way? Post a comment to this blog. Ed can be reached at ed@edgory.com or via his web site at edgory.com
If you are a Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, or any social network site user you’ve probably updated your status to tell your friends what you are doing at that very moment. Most of your friends probably have written a smart-ass comment or completely ignored you. I have on several occasions I posted a status that was completely absurd just to get a reply back since I knew people were reading my news feed and checking Facebook hourly. Well, now is the age that people are so attached to brands that they want to know what is happening in real-time with the company. Either they own the product or perhaps they are are an investor and want to know the latest and greatest.
Twitter, a San Francisco company started in March 2006, has made status updates a public way of spreading the word about what you as an individual or company doing. No longer is your network of friends reading your status but the public has access and can opt-in to follow you. The question is how do you effectively spread the word about your brand via Twitter. Here are some questions and to-do’s when wanting to get Twitter adopted at a company:
Get all the influencers in a room and give them a demo of the potential of Twitter and examples of companies using it (consumer brands such as JetBlue, Southwest, and CNN). Examples of influencers can be executives (CEO, CFO, COO, VPs), top engineers in the company, top designer in the company, pr manager, marketing manager, event managers.
Ask your influencers what do people want to hear about? Is it what they are working on? Which trade-show are they going to attend next? Which product was released today? There was got to be some piece of valuable, public data that changes frequently that your customers/users/investors want to know about.
If you are successful in getting influencers within your company to adopt/use Twitter then the question is how to tell the world. The first step would be to update your corporate web site but that is easier said than done. Twitter is just one piece of the puzzle in your overall social media strategy. What other ways can people get to know you better – podcasts, vlogs, badges, widgets, and/or Flickr stream.
Definitely a lot of work needs to be done but I firmly believe this is a new way of communicating. Instead of an email newsletter where you hope people read it, heck even open it, status updates via social networks where your company has a presence should be your focus in 2008. If you aren’t thinking about social networks for your company and aren’t signed up on one yet gimmie a holla and I can help you out.
A Yahoo! company called MyBlogLog helps companies create a social network around the viewership/readership of your web site and/or blog. If you think about it the people that view your web site probably have the same interests and why not create a social network around that. Those viewers/readers should be given the ability to network with each other. MyBlogLog similiar to technorati allows you to claim your blog and create a profile page where it shows the users (fans on Technorati and readers on MyBlogLog) coming to your blog. No more as a blogger are you looking at traffic numbers such as unique users but actually users that you can communicate with.Check out the badge on right of this page which shows the most recent readers of this blog. Small piece of code that you can get from MyBlogLog. One down-side to this badge is it is not customizable unlike other badges that are being produced these days.To view my public profile on MyBlogLog go to http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/lifeofrandyksar/
Who am I?
Randy Ksar
Landon Consulting
randy.ksar at gmail.com
408.409.9033
