I’ve been using a MacBook Pro for just over 2 years now after switching from a Windows laptop. It didn’t take long to get used to doing just about everything on the Mac side of the Mac rather than booting Parallels so I could run popular Windows software including Office.
I managed to wean myself off Office and never replaced it on the Mac side of the computer. Instead, I started to rely heavily on Google Docs for word processing, presentation, and light spreadsheet work. For heavier spreadsheet work, I run NeoOffice. That program, as it exists today, wouldn’t be mistaken for Microsoft Office, but the spreadsheet is pretty good and much more robust than the one that exists today within Google Docs.
But one program that I really do love has only been available on Windows until now: Netflix streaming. I’ve found that I watch many more hours of movies and shows per month via streaming rather than DVD. In fact, I just returned a DVD to Netflix that was sent to me on July 8th. Hulu has also cut into my DVD playing.
And now that I won’t have to boot to Windows in order to watch Netflix, life is even better.
If I was to guess, I think the problem faced by many large retailers trying to succeed online is one of front-door mindset.
They come from a mindset of build a strong brand experience, get people in the door, take care of them, watch the cash register ring.
But online, it’s not about getting people in THE door. It’s about EVERY door. You’re no longer competing at the store level. You’re competing at the product level.
The doors into your store are every single product and category page.
If people can’t find the appropriate door into your store when searching for a specific product, you lose. It doesn’t matter how strong your brand is, how generous your return policies are, or how big you are in the offline world. If you’re not found on specific product searches on Google, you’re losing money.
Once you get someone in one of your thousands and thousands of doors, you have the potential to leverage your brand’s power to increase the size of your consumer’s shopping cart. But first, you have to get them there.
Sadly, it seems that many strong offline brands are still focused on the front door of their online presence. They stare at homepage mock-ups in boardrooms and make group consensus decisions on how to make every stakeholder happy instead of focusing on the thousands and thousands of other doors into their online store where the real money is made (or should be).
Real Estate Agents are in an interesting breed of business where there is often a large crossover between business and personal relationships. Because of this, tapping into the power of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter can be a very smart marketing strategy, but only if done with some tact.
An effective strategy for this is to use Twitter, the status update within Facebook (or both) to shed some light into your business day.
Here are some example Twitter message / Facebook status updates worth considering:
1. Heading to my open house at 1355 Main Street East http://tinyurl.com/5omyz7
2. Just wrote up an offer for a client. Wish em luck!
3. 312 Franklin Ave has an incredible view of downtown.
4. Just listed 1234 Oak Lawn Dr. Create backyard for kids and dogs.
5. Trying to get in touch with seller’s agent but he won’t return my calls. Aaaargh!
Messages like this remind your friends and family that you’re out there working on behalf of clients every day. You’re not selling but reminding them that you work in real estate so when it comes time for them to make their next real estate transaction you’ll come to mind. And, of course, it has the potential to lead to more referrals from your friends and family members.
Show some emotion. Show that you care. Show that you work hard for your clients.
Of course, few friends will want to hear about your work life 24-7 so try to figure out an appropriate balance of work and non-work related updates and a post volume that your network will find reasonable.
I’ve mentioned previously that it would be helpful if Twitter users received better feedback on unfollow requests. Basically, let people know when their followers are dropping so they can at least know that they’re burning people out, pissing them off, or underdeliverying in some other way.
Well, now you can do with with Qwitter. After signing up with the service, you’ll receive an email alert every time you lose a follower. In addition, it will send along a copy of the last tweet you sent before being unfollowed, which may give you an indication of what it is that you said that generated the unfollow request.
The last post may not be the final straw, but I doubt many people lose followers based on a single tweet. More likely, the follower wasn’t getting the type of content they were expecting for a while and they just happened to be near a computer (where it’s easier to unfollow) at the time.
Personally, I think this is a great new feature that should help improve the quality of Twitter over time. A little negative feedback can go a long ways.
As far as positive feedback goes, check out Favrd, where you can track the “most favorited” tweets on Twitter.
I continue to be surprised at how many journalists continue to struggle with web publishing. Here are 25 must-knows for people publishing content to the web in 2008:
1. How to create a link. Both using a WYSIWYG publisher and hand coded. Put it on a Post-It next to your desk, or Google it if you can’t remember how.
2. How to embed photos and videos.
3. How to properly cite other sources. Understand that people are more generous on the web so you may run into trouble if you play by offline’s rules.
4. How to buy a domain name.
5. How to buy an ad on Google AdWords.
6. How to use an RSS reader.
7. How to set up Google Alerts.
8. How to do some advanced searches such as phrase matches, negatives, and site-specific searches.
9. How Wikipedia works and changes over time.
10. How to join conversations on other blogs.
11. How to moderate comments.
12. How trackbacks work.
13. How to upload photos and video to the web.
14. How to record audio.
15. How to shoot video someone beyond your immediate family would find interesting.
16. How to measure a your content’s performance.
17. How to use Facebook and LinkedIn.
18. How to use Twitter.
19. How to build upon stories you found on blogs.
20. How to edit live stories.
21. How to do a round-up post.
22. How Creative Commons works.
23. How blogs make money.
24. How to find subject experts on the web.
25. How to deal with trolls.
If you’ve written advice posts regarding any of these subjects, drop a link to it in the comments.
Today is Blog Action Day, where bloggers are asked to write about a specific topic in order to bring more attention to it. This year’s theme is poverty.
I took the above photo while driving through Gary, Indiana last week. Of cities I’ve visited in the United States, it seems the most depressed. In many cases, they haven’t even managed to board up vacant properties. You can see right through them.
What can techies do about poverty?
If you’d like to do something to help people in need, strongly consider doing something that uses your skills. While helping serve food at a soup kitchen if noble work, try to contribute in a way that scales. That’s what techies do best.
Here are a few examples:
1. Help a local non-profit set up a blog. Show them how to update it and coach them on what’s worth writing about.
2. Help an organization improve their email. Move them off of Hotmail and onto Google Apps. Pay for their domain if they don’t already have one.
3. Help them set up online donations.
4. Set up web analytics on their site and help them measure where online donations are coming from.
5. Set up a Twitter account for them and show them how to use it.
6. Refurbish and donate computers to them.
7. Help them improve their office network.
8. Show them how to collaborate on documents and presentations using Google Docs.
Consumers have more power than most realize today. Here are a few examples of what can be done today and will seem commonplace soon:
1. Put home improvement projects out to bid. Rather than calling around to find someone to work on your home, just take pictures of what you need done and post them to Craigslist. Let people compete for your project. This is so much more efficient than dialing through the yellow pages since you’ll hear from people who have the time to solve your problem.
2. Ask for restaurant recommendations on Twitter. Do you have one night to spend out in a new town? Send out a request for recommendations to your Twitter followers. Someone who knows you and cares about you will probably get back to you within minutes. Or, you could rely on someone who doesn’t know you for a recommendation.
3. Post your target salary on your blog. If you’re good at what you do, someone may be willing to pay you more to do what you do than you are making now. Why not post your current “Make me Switch” target salary to your blog so people know what you’re looking for? Perhaps your current employer would find this offensive, but they shouldn’t. You’re giving them first-right of refusal, so they can’t complain if you receive an offer they’re not willing to match?
4. Use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for tedious tasks. Need to get a large volume of tedious work done but can’t find the time, or maybe your eyeballs are already starting to crack from dryness. Outsource the assignments to Mturk.com and watch how fast things get done.
Every four years during the month before the presidential election, national news sites run stories about voter registration fraud. This year, the target of much of the stories is a non-profit organization called ACORN that knocks on doors across the country and registers voters.
Not surprisingly, they end up with some bad data. In some cases, canvassers are paid for productivity and end up falsifying voter registrations to improve their personal performance.
This is reported as scandalous, but I don’t care.
Why?
Because there is a HUGE difference between voter registration fraud and actual voter fraud. You can put as many names as you want on the voter rolls but unless someone shows up at the polls on election day to actually vote under the false names, there was no fraud.
What’s most humorous is hearing the press read names of fraudulent registrations under names like Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. Do you think your vote is going to be countered by someone showing up at the polls to vote under the name of a cartoon mouse or duck? Not a problem.
Legitimate voting concerns should focus on efforts to keep people from voting. That’s a real problem that really does impact elections.
When consulting with businesses on where they should allocate their ad dollars today, my most common response is, “Start online, measure everything, and spend as much online as you can justify. Then look at other options.” It sounds like Wine Library’s Gary Vaynerchuk takes a similar approach for his own business, as he explains here:
What do you think? Are you aware of any forms of offline advertising that measurably beat what can be done online today?
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