Ning

Recently, the creators of Ning made the decision to start charging for Ning networks in return for providing more features and more support.  The change will take place starting in July.  That means if you created a social network using Ning, you’ve got to decide whether to keep your group and start paying, or dissolve it.  And that can be a tough decision if you have a vibrant group with many members and lots of activity.

If you’re a WordPress users have a third option.  You can use BuddyPress, a free WordPress plug-in that lets you transform a WordPress blog into a social network site.  Then you can use a Ning to BuddyPress importer to migrate your users to your BuddyPress-created social network.

BuddyPress is completely customizable so that it can have the look and feel you want.  It gives network members an activity stream that lets them follow the actions of their friends à la Facebook; it also allows them to create profiles and set up blogs.  It has groups, forums, private messaging and a growing number of plug-ins that extend its capabilities.

It has the potential for a number of really great real estate applications and—better than Ning or Facebook—you own the content, you set the terms of service, and the members and their information belong to you.  What could be better than that?

If you have network built on Ning, take a look at what  BuddyPress can do.

Facebook’s

In fact, your blog turns out to be one of the most valuable Internet marketing resources you have.  Here’s why:

1. You don’t own your Facebook account, and therefore, you have no say over what changes Facebook might implement.
2. You don’t own the content on your Facebook page so that if it were shut down for some reason—or if some change in Facebook policy were to go too far and you decided to close your account—your content would be lost.
3. You like to think of them as “your” followers, but you can’t control how Facebook chooses to use the private information of people who like your page.
4. Your content (and that of millions of other people, of course) is what makes Facebook successful.  Your effort enriches Facebook.  Are you getting back as much as you give?
5. Your blog, on the other hand, is yours. You set it up, you make the decisions, and you own the content.
6. Your blog enriches only you, your brokerage, or whomever you chose to write about.
7. Your readers are your readers and your subscribers are your subscribers.  As long as you put out good content and treat them well, they’ll stay with you.   (You don’t have to worry that changes someone else makes might erode your readership.)
8. Other than occasional upgrades to the blogging software, there will be no changes that you don’t authorize.

The Internet and the social media tools we all use will no doubt continue to change and evolve as the big players try to find ways to gain market share and turn a profit.   That means we’ll frequently need to review our Internet strategy and the usefulness of the tools we’re using.  In the mean time, don’t ignore your blog.  It’s one of the best tools you have.

The Internet is an excellent medium for crowdsourcing because it can accept input from so many people.  One local real estate board is making use of the Internet’s crowdsourcing capabilities to raise the bar professionally.

The Houston Association of Realtors® (HAR) has created a Client Experience Rating system, which uses information from the “crowd” to assess the performance of real estate professionals.  At the conclusion of each transaction, buyers and sellers are invited to rate their agent.  Clients are asked to rate their agents on competency, on the agent’s knowledge of the market, on how well the agent communicated with the client during the process, and on the client’s overall experience.  Clients area also allowed write free-form comments about their agent, and about their buying or selling experience.

HAR complies these surveys and gives each agent a score (e.g., 4.8 stars out of 5).  Agent’s scores are then posted in a number of places on the HAR website, including on the agent’s web page and alongside his or her MLS listings.  Prospective clients can see the agent’s score, and can know many transactions that agent has completed before hiring him or her.  At some point, the Houston Association of Realtors® plans to allow clients to search for agents by score, which will, no doubt, reward better agents over time and weed out weaker ones.

Crowdsourcing has allowed Wikipedia to become a bigger, more vibrant encyclopedia than any paper reference book could ever be.  Crowdsourcing has the potential to raise the stakes for the real estate profession as well.

But “starting” isn’t enough.  It’s just as important to stay active.  The more active you are on the Internet, the easier it becomes for someone to find you; your name pops up more times when searched, prospects can see and learn more about you, your credibility grows.  So, the real key to Internet visibility is to stay active online.

An important part of staying active is posting regularly to your blog.  But there’s more you can do. Here are three additional activities you can undertake on a regular basis to increase your visibility on the Internet:

• Comment on other people’s blogs. Add thoughtful ideas or follow-up suggestions to the comment sections of the blogs you read (You do read other people’s blogs, don’t you?)  The keyword here is thoughtful. Be positive and respectful; make sure your comments add value.  Comments on Active Rain are great, but for maximum visibility step outside the box and comment on blogs beyond real estate.
• Write articles for online magazines. These can be rewrites of your best blog posts that you think will have universal appeal. (Don’t just copy and paste, but actually reword your magazine article to get it recognized properly by search engines.  The best known online magazines are www.ezinearticles.com and www.goarticles.com.  Both give you a space at the end of the article to tell more about yourself and to include a link back to your blog or website.
• Submit press releases. When newspapers, magazines, and online publications need material or someone to interview, they read press releases to get ideas. Often journalists copy press releases word for word into their own publications.  That puts information about you in front of more people.  Anyone can submit a press release about themselves and the Internet makes it easy to do.  Visit www.prlog.org to get started.

These activities have the added benefit of helping move your website closer to the top of the search result when someone googles your name.  So stay active and do a little bit each day.

What if a consumer or another agent were trying to find you?  What would they get if they googled your name? How much searching would they have to do on the Internet before they found your contact information?  And if someone did contact you based on an Internet search, how long would it take you to answer?

Here are the five minimum things you should do to make sure prospects and colleagues can find you with ease:

1. Have a LinkedIn profile.  Your LinkedIn profile serves as an online résumé that will come up whenever anybody googles you name.
2. Have a Google profile. Google also lets you create a profile, in which you can write a description of yourself, upload photos, and provide links to other applications you use on the Web.
3. Be on Facebook. A Facebook Fan Page is ideal because it lets you keep your friends and family separate from your professional image, and because the person looking for you wouldn’t have to have a Facebook account to find you.
4. Check Your Broker’s Site. Make sure your contact information is easy to find and up to date on your broker’s website.  If you can’t control what’s on your broker’s site, get your own website.
5. Have Your Own Website.  Even if you do have input regarding what appears on your broker’s site, you should have your own website.  On your own website, you can express our individuality, show your professionalism, and demonstrate how you differ from your colleagues.  A blog is even better than a static website because it allows you to easily update the site’s content.

There is more you can do.  But if you can’t find yourself when you google your name, start with these.

The company, Imperva, analyzed 32 million passwords in December 2009, and discovered that:

• 30% of all computer users select passwords of 6 characters or less.  The shorter the password, the easier it for a hacker to guess.
• Nearly half of all computer users create easy to remember (and therefore easy to guess) passwords, using slang words, dictionary words, or familiar number combination.  The most common password, for example, is “123456”.  Among the top 5 passwords are:  “12345”, “123456789” and “password”.
• Half of all computer users use the same password for all the websites they visit. This means that once a hacker figures out a victim’s password at one site, it’s easy to invade that person’s accounts on other sites.
• Almost 60% of users create passwords from a limited number of characters.  Passwords should not spell out a recognizable word and should contain upper and lower case letters along with numbers and special characters such as “!@#$%%^”.

If you’ve made any of these mistakes, you should take the time to review and change your passwords. Choose strong passwords and use these techniques to help remember them.

For example, did you know that you can do a real estate search on Google Maps?

1. Click the drop down menu that’s labeled “More” and check the box that says “Real Estate”.
2. Enter an address or a zip code in the search field.
3. Refine the search by price, number of bedrooms and number of bedrooms.

The result is a list of properties for sale—certainly not the entire MLS right now but enough to get a consumer started.  And you can be sure Google will add more features as time goes on, and improve the search so it draws from more sources.

Currently the listings on Google show multiple photos, property descriptions, maps, public transit information, and a button that makes it easy to e-mail the listing to someone else. If the property has been listed multiple times, data from each of the listings—including the listing broker, listing agent, and list price—may also show.

It’s interesting to note that properties offered by brokers are shown right along side properties listed on Buy Owner.

So, will Google someday replace the local MLS?

First, the background story:  ReadWriteWeb reports that an employee at a St. Louis area school lost his job for repeatedly posting vulgar comments on the newspaper’s website.  The employee assumed his comments were posted anonymously.  Meanwhile, the social media director at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch traced the IP address of the poster to a local school and contact the school’s administrator, assuming the comments had been posted by a student.  Not so.  The commenter was an adult employee at the school who was immediately fired.

People posting on the Internet often get confused and think that no one will ever know who they are.  Or, even when their identity is well known—as when they’re posting on their own blogs—they think only a handful of their closest associates will ever see their comments.  Neither of these things is necessarily true.  Therefore, whenever you post something to the Internet, it’s important to use good judgment.

For real estate professionals that means:

1. Be Kind to People You’re Working With.  Never write in an unflattering way about a client, another agent, another agent’s client, or anyone else involved in a transaction.
2. Be Kind to People You Don’t Know. Never make fun of a seller or a property you’ve seen, no matter how ridiculous the offer or the property seems to you.
3. Be Aware of Your Duty to Maintain Confidentiality.  Never disclose any details about a transaction.
4. Think Before You Type.  Never put anything in a blog post, in a comment, in an e-mail, or in any other electronic format that you might regret later.  Once you hit the enter button, you can’t really ever take it back.
5. Remember that the Internet Never Forgets. Deleting or removing a post doesn’t necessarily get rid of it.  Websites are often cached or archived so that deleted comments can still be searched and found.
6. Assume That What You’re Writing Will Be Read by Millions. Always write as if your words will be seen by people beyond your intended audience.  Readers can link to your comments or forward them to others.  Search engines can often find what you’ve written.  Comments posted to sites like Twitter can be seen by everyone everywhere.
7. Know that You’re Not Really Anonymous. Few people are really anonymous on the Internet.  Comments and e-mails can be traced by people who know how.

1. Put a time limit on it. Limit in advance the amount of time you’ll spend reviewing articles in the feedreader. When time’s up, move on to other more productive work.
2. If you’re not reading it, get rid of it. Like the items in the back of your closet that you’ll never wear, articles from blogs you visited once probably languish unread in your feedreader.  Be honest with yourself:  if you’re not reading it, unsubscribe.
3. Put new feeds on probation.  One way to keep from accumulating items you’ll never read is to save your newest feeds in a folder labeled something like “Probation.”  If you find a new feed useful, you can elevate it out of the probation folder.  On the other hand, if you realize that the articles are not as good as you thought they would be, you can unsubscribe to the feed before it takes up residence in your feedreader and starts accumulating.
4. Feel free to mark all as read. If your reader has hundreds (or even thousands) of articles waiting to be read, it’s probably better to empty the reader by marking all items as read and starting again.
5. Search to find the gems. If you use Google Reader, you can Search by topic to find items of interest. The articles that meet your search criterion are pulled out for you to read and tag as needed.  This keeps you from having to page through all of your articles to find the few you want to read.  You may want to do this before you mark all as read.
6. Save the best for another time. When you find articles that you want to read in depth, you can mark them with a star to be read later, or you can tag them as a “Favorite”. Then you can come back to them at your leisure.  Set aside a specific time in the day or the week to do your catch-up reading. Beware of tagging so many Favorites that you never get around to reading them all.

While Twitter is an excellent source of info about what people are talking about, someone has to put it in a tweet in order for it to be picked up.  But Google Alerts let you “follow” stories that no one is tweeting about yet.  It also lets you follow stories that are of interest to you, but may not catch the attention of others on the Internet.

Use Google Alerts to

• Listen out for good (or bad news) about you or your company
• Generate intelligence on what your competition is doing
• Find items of interest to tweet about
• Follow a news story that interests you
• Get up-to-the-minute information on changes in interest rates, the housing market, zoning laws, or anything else that impacts your business

Here’s how it works:  You enter a search term in Google Alerts.  When a news story, blog post, or video is added to the Internet that would appear among the top ten search results to someone using that search term, Google will alert you.

For example, let’s say you want to be alerted when anything new happens with the first-time home buyers tax credit.

1. Go to www.google.com/alerts
   
2. Enter the exact words you would use if you were searching for it on Google, in this case:  “first time home buyers tax credit”.
3. Enter the type of content you want to be alerted about.  For example, do you want to know when there’s a new news story, a new blog post, or some other kind of written content on the Internet?  Choose “comprehensive” if you want to be alerted about all three.  You can also be alerted if someone uploads a new video about your topic (choose “video”) or if your topic appears in a new e-mail aggregate (choose “group”).
4. Enter how often you want Google to check for new items:  once a week, once a day, or continuously.  If you want Google to check continuously, choose “as-it-happens”.
5. Enter your Google e-mail address (You must have a Google account to use Google Alerts).  If you use Google Reader and you prefer to have your alerts sent to you as a feed rather than via e-mail, select “feed”.
6. Click “Create Alert”.

Once you log in to your Google e-mail account and confirm, your alerts will start coming to you.  Because you checked “as-it-happens” you may start getting alerts right away.  And because you checked that you wanted them to come to your e-mail, your alerts will look like the example below.  Here you see links to two news stories about the first-time home buyers tax credit that popped into your e-mail inbox within minutes of setting up your alerts.

Keep in mind that you’ll only be alerted when there’s something new on the Internet that would appear among the top search results.  If you don’t ever get any alerts, it’s because there’s nothing new, because there’s nothing new that comes up high enough in a Google search, or because your search term isn’t very good.  You can always go in to Google alerts and make changes.  To do that:

1. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts.



2. Click the link that lets you edit your alerts.
3. Select the alert you want to edit and make your changes.

To delete an alert, simply check the box next to it and click the delete button.

How might you use Google Alerts?