Anne Francis Web Design

Have you seen that “So-and-so read an article…” in your Facebook news feed, and it’s something really incriminating?

Peter read an article.
“How to hide an affair from your wife.”

Ouch.

Where does this come from? One of the latest types of apps that have emerged on Facebook, social news readers. These apps automatically post to your Facebook friends everything you read on the related news site. So for example, if you have installed the Washington Post Social Reader Facebook app, EVERYTHING you read on the Washington Post can appear in your Facebook friends’ news feeds.  This seems like a serious invasion of privacy, with inadequate forewarning for the users who enlist.

Though it is brilliant for publishers to push their articles out into Facebook’s viral atmosphere, maybe you don’t want people to know you just read about how to eradicate back warts.

Good news is, there’s ways to avoid this and ways to adjust if you haven’t avoided.

Here’s how people get into this fix. Lets say you see that your friend read an article and you’re interested in reading too, and you click on the article in your Facebook news feed. If you aren’t taken to the article but instead arrive at the app installation page where it asks you to install and allow it access before you see the article, stop. Probably you should evacuate.  But, if you want to allow a particular news app access to your news feed, and would like control over the news stream nightmare, just adjust the app settings (or remove it altogether).  Here’s how:

Log in to Facebook. In the top right hand corner is a downward facing arrow. Click on it.
Click on Account Settings.
In the left-hand sidebar click on Apps.
Click the Edit button next to the app you want to edit and adjust accordingly.

It’s highly recommended to once in a while go into your Facebook settings and see what apps you’ve installed and remove those you don’t use or recognize. You’ll be surprised what’s lurking there.

Here’s something my friend Tami emailed a couple of months ago, I saved it to share.  And for the record, my parents didn’t call me into the room to change the channel on the TV for them.

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning… uphill… barefoot… BOTH ways yadda, yadda, yadda.
 
And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it.

But now that I’m over the ripe old age of 30 (ok maybe 40), I can’t help but look around and notice the youth of today. You’ve got it so easy!  I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia.

And I hate to say it, but you kids today don’t know how good you’ve got it.

When I was a kid we didn’t have the Internet!! If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog. There was no email!!  You had to actually write somebody a letter – with a pen. Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there, and you had to pay money for a stamp to make it all happen.

Child Protective Services didn’t care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass!  Nowhere was safe. 
 
There were no MP3′s or Napsters or iTunes. If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself; or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!  There were no CD players. We had tape decks in our car. We’d play our favorite tape and “eject” it when finished, and then the tape would usually come unwrapped rendering it useless. Cause hey, that’s how we rolled.

We didn’t have fancy crap like call waiting. If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that’s it! Beep-beep-beep, and you had no idea they had tried to call.
 
There weren’t any frickin’ cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn’t make or receive a call. You actually had to be out of touch with your “friends”.  OH MY GOD!!!  Think of the horror.  And then there’s TEXTING.  Yeah, right.  Please! You kids have no idea how annoying you are. 

And we didn’t have fancy Caller ID either. When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was.  It could be your school, your parents, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, the collection agent…you just didn’t know!!!  You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister. (We had “party lines”. It’s one way to get to know your neighbors real well.)

We didn’t have PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3D graphics. We had the Atari 2600 with games like ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Asteroids’.  Your screen guy was a little square!  You actually had to use your imagination.  And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen… forever.  And you could never win.  The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died (just like real life)!

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on television. You were screwed when it came to channel surfing, you had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!!  NO REMOTES!!!  I remember getting called into the parents bedroom just to change the cannel for them.
 
There was no Cartoon Network, you could only get cartoons on Saturday morning.  Do you hear what I’m saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little ratfinks!  (Yep Saturday mornings where great)

We didn’t have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! Imagine that. I remember our first microwave…. baked potatoes for months.

And car seats – oh, please. Mom or dad threw you in the back seat and you hung on.  If you were lucky, you got the “safety arm” across the chest at the last moment if they had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for being a pig and calling “shotgun” in the first place.

See!!  That’s exactly what I’m talking about, you kids today have got it too easy. You’re spoiled rotten.

You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or any time before.

Regards,
The Over 30 Crowd

You ask.  Or maybe you don’t ask because your website already has a content management system. At any rate, if your business is the type that will benefit from a professional online profile when prospective clients Google you, or if your business has the potential to get new customers from the web, then YES content management can help your website, and in the end, your business.

If you don’t know what content management is, according to Wikipedia…

Content management, or CM, is the set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. In recent times this information is typically referred to as content or, to be precise, digital content. Digital content may take the form of text, such as documents, multimedia files, such as audio or video files, or any other file type which follows a content lifecycle which requires management.

As it applies to this article, a content management sytem (CMS) is a wrapper that holds your website in such a way that you can easily edit your site yourself with an internet connection, a web browser and the basic knowledge of how to navigate the web.

Joomla and WordPress are 2 CMS I’ve worked with. Both are open source software (free to download, written and maintained by a collaboration of those in the programming community who care to contribute). They have “plugins” available that will extend the functionality of the website they’re running.  Most plugins are free but some you have to pay for.  You will have to pay your webmistress to hook you up with this stuff.

How do I get a CMS? What is the process?

Here’s how it works.  At least here’s how I do it.  Your webmistress installs a CMS for you, along with it a fresh new contemporary look (why not?) — or if your website is already bitchin’ — she creates it to look like your existing site. Once your CMS site is up and running, you, armed with only a web browser and internet connection, after a short lesson, can keep it updated yourself.

Why do I want to do this?

1. Instant Gratification
   If you add a new department to your business, or a new service, instead of calling your webmaster and waiting however many days they take to help you, just login and add the new information to your website yourself, NOW.
2. Better Ranking in Search Engine Results
   The way some CMS are coded makes Google happy.  They are lean, comply with web standards which gives them higher rank, and are content-focused.  Your site will rank higher when there’s more relevant content than there is messy code in your files.  And if there’s new content added regularly.  This takes a while but pays off in the long run.
3. Lower Web Maintenance Costs
   You can decide to change your site for free everyday if you like. No more sacrificing fresh content because your web budget is blown.

What do I add to my website?

You can add pages to your site that enhance the information you’ve already presented to your clients, perhaps according to a long-term plan you’ve made.

Depending on what you’re selling you could add support information that people will find when they need your service or product.  Here’s a good example.  The other day my washer started leaking.  I live and die by Google, so I got on there and found a website with video showing how to open the front of my particlar type of washer.  Once the front was off it was clear the pump (I only knew it was the pump because of the video) was leaking & needed to be replaced.  The website with the video, turned out, sells that pump for my washer, imagine!  So I bought a pump from them.

Another way to beef up the content on your site is to add articles in more of a blog fashion, sharing information AND letting your clients get to know you better at the same time.  If you’re not a nice person, or if you are not good at forming sentences, find someone who is and have them write your articles.  In the end the hope is that your clients will relate to you, like you, or feel a sense of confidence in your abilities.  Running spell check is a good idea.

A couple of tips…

Add fresh content regularly. Google loves it when you put up new content. Returning visitors to your site will also appreciate new content. This could mean just changing your homepage text regularly, but my advice is to take a little time and make a long-term plan. Which leads to the next item:

Make a plan. If the objective of your website is to get more paying customers, then your goal should be to build a rich, content-heavy site that contains a lot of information your potential customers are searching for on the web. Look around at some competitor sites that blow you out of the water and go from there, but make it your own. Create a storyboard using pieces of paper, each with an idea for a page or area of your website.  Lay the papers out on the floor creating the flow you imagine on your website, refine it, then break it down into easy tasks that will move you closer to your goal each couple of days with a minimum amount of time involved in each sitting.  Keep your goal flexible & fluid, rethink it occasionally.  The web is changing and some of your competitors are changing with them, if your business is responsive you will do well.

But… this all depends on you!

The web didn’t build itself, and so you will need to devote a little time, regularly, to adding content to your site.  I enjoy putting content on my site, it makes me think about my business in a broader sense, and it makes me consider my customers.  All good stuff.  I’m writing for you, as you will be writing for your clients. Or potential clients.

*hire me*   Whew. Ok. Got that out of the way.

No.  However, social media is another way for you to build business, a pool of potential customers that has recently become available to the average Joe. You can tap into social circles you already belong to and expand your reach… not by knocking them over to take what you want, but by sharing information that is interesting and pertinent. It is labor intensive, but free. AND IT IS GOOD FOR YOU. Doing research or reading on subjects related to your profession, then reflecting on those ideas expands your knowledge about your business, and about life in general depending on the subject matter.  In addition, sharing what you learn is a good way to earn respect and confidence in your abilities from your peers and friends alike.

The article below titled Who REALLY killed the real estate blog? (and is it even dead?) was shamelessly stolen from Sean Cutright’s blog at www.dripmarketingblog.com.  It’s about social media advertising for the real estate business, but contains specific tips that are helpful to anyone who is interested in expanding their marketing efforts.  Some of you may relate to these experiences and confusion.

So lets get on with the plagiarism…

For years you’ve heard about the importance of social media.

“You have to blog!”
“You have to be on Facebook!”
“You have to get a Twitter account!”
“You need a profile on ActiveRain/Trulia/LinkedIn/insertstartuprealestatesocialnetworkingsitehere!”

And now, you hear the opposite.

“Agents killed the real estate blog,” a recent story on Inman News proclaimed in its headline.

After years of real estate conferences being driven solely on the self-proclaimed prophesies that you, by attending, will learn the best way to improve your business and profits from social media and blogging practices, now you’re being told that you killed that industry.

The worst part of it is it’s true. Kind of…

Real estate agents have been told what they need to do to improve their social media footprint repeatedly in one-hour conference sessions that amount to about 35 minutes of real speaking after introductions, questions, bad jokes, inadvertent sales tactics, etc. But they might not have really been told the importance of how they need to do it.

Blogging sounds great when someone is explaining to you at a conference you or your company probably paid too much money to attend how much it will improve your business. But then you attend the post-seminar luncheon. You chat with some old friends. You sit in the other hour-long afternoon seminars that also consist of 35 minutes of true engagement where you are told of all the other important things your real estate brokerage has to do to make money, possibly (depending on the conference) by a representative of a company that sells a product helping you do just that and also just so happens to have sponsored that conference.

Then you attend the cocktail hours (also sponsored by a company). You sit in on the next day’s worth of seminars, where you see a repeated theme. You take diligent notes, but even those begin to fade away along with the energy and vibrancy you walked into the conference with. You hurry to catch your flight. You return home just in time to crash for the weekend while the notes and seminars and tips and tricks and talking points and sales tactics and all the other “have tos” begin to melt into one big mess that you try and push away by Monday morning so you can get back to your energetic, vibrant self.

You return to the office. You remember a few key points. You re-read your notes, wondering why you took some of them. You see the stars you drew next to the key points.

We have to blog!”
“We have to be on Facebook!”
“We have to get a Twitter account!”
“We need a profile on ActiveRain/Trulia/LinkedIn/insertstartuprealestatesocialnetworkingsitehere!”

You start hashing away at accomplishing those things without remembering why you have to do all of them, and how, exactly, they translate to business.

Soon enough, you’ve started blogging. You have a Facebook and Twitter account. You set up all your social networking profiles. And you start filling those blogs/updates/profiles with, well, filler because you don’t know how else to use them.

And now you killed the real estate blog.

Well, the real estate blog is more than alive. But — let’s be perfectly honest — it’s terribly misused by several, several agents. So is Facebook. So is Twitter. So are all the other social networks.

But, you know what? They’re also terribly misused by a majority of the population. It’s just that it matters when they’re misused by the real estate industry because members of the real estate industry have a vested interest in prospering from their use.

Like networking at a community event, social networking takes time to perfect. Like writing essays and term papers, blogging takes time to get a grasp on your writing style, flow and subject matter.

Social media incorporation comes more naturally to those Generation Yers who were raised using it, and presents a learning curve to those Baby Boomers and late Gen Xers who make up a majority of the real estate industry. IE: adapting an effective social media strategy requires more time and practice than a one-hour session at a session-loaded real estate conference.

If you don’t get it now, don’t give up. And certainly don’t take the blame for its failure. Instead, stop blogging about only listings. Stop Facebooking to sell. Stop tweeting only price changes.

Start thinking about social media as you would any media, and social networking as you would business networking. Use social media to spread interesting stories of interesting places, businesses, restaurants and events in the community. Use social networking to build rapport with people; to spark interesting conversation and provide info for their region, not to sell homes or advertise your business.

Keep practicing and honing your techniques. Blog about any items of interest in the community. Seriously. Open this morning’s newspaper, find an interesting story that applies to your market and blog about it.

Soon, you’ll find that you’re thinking through how to use social media instead of only why to use social media. Because, regardless of what you heard at that business conference, social media is not going to improve your business and make you more sales anytime soon. But, when used correctly, it will help you get your name out, help you earn more Web visitors, help you help people learn about the community they live in or might move to. And soon enough, those people will start realizing that your site/blog/social networking account is providing the information they are interested in, but aren’t finding elsewhere online.

And I think we can agree that all those items will, in turn, help your professional brand…and stop killing the real estate blog.

1. Who Can See The Things You Share (Status Updates, Photo, Videos, etc.)
2. Who Can See Your Personal Info
3. What Google Can See – Keep Your Data Off the Search Engines

This is a great article, the only thing I would add is see what your pages look like when you’re logged out. Go to your facebook wall and copy the web address so you can paste it into your browser once you’re logged out.  I do the same with twitter to make sure I know what all visitors see.

http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/01/20/20readwriteweb-the-3-facebook-settings-every-user-should-c-29287.html?src=me&ref=technology

1. Go to www.twittericon.com
2. Put in your user name (this will automatically update the HTML code in the boxes)
3. Pick your desired icon by highlighting and copying the HTML code it gives you (make sure it shows justactnatual in the code as every once in awhile it won’t update properly)
4. Read more…

Video Tutorial… Read more…

Study of 1500+ companies to compare blogging to websites without blogs:

Is blogging better for your business than a regular “static” website? What does better mean? For the purposes of this profile of blogging versus normal websites for business, better means more site visitors leading to more business. Hubspot, a provider of website and blog services, studied 1531 of their customers. 795 blogged, while 736 did not.

Read more…