Join Me For a Meeting Online With Join.me
December 8, 2010
Bill Risser is an Assistant Vice President and Branch Manager for Chicago Title in Phoenix Arizona. When he is not conducting workshops or closing escrows, he can be found at the movies with his wife or golfing with his son. Follow Bill on Twitter @billrisser or friend him on Facebook.
Im sure most of us have attended online meetings or webinars. The most popular product Ive seen is GoToMeetings. Ive never had the joy of setting up an online meeting, but I know from personal experience that joining them can be a royal pain.
The other day, I saw a blurb from Reggie Nicolay about an online meeting site called Join.me. Being the curious type, I instantly downloaded and installed the software, and tested it with a couple agents. It worked flawlessly. Most important was the ease of joining the meeting for the people I invited. No software to load, no ID numbers to copy and paste, just a simple link to click. Once they joined the meeting, they had the ability to enter their name, participate in a chat, conference call on a provided number, and even be given control of the presenters screen. Another great feature is the Join.me blog with great tips and tricks for the product. They even hold a Coffee Break contest on their Facebook Page for more engagement. In a word, Join.me is awesome!
The LogMeIn people are responsible for Join.me. LogMeIn allows users to remotely access their home or work computers. It is the bread and butter product of the company. Quite a few agents I know use LogMeIn from their laptops when they need to access a file on their home computer. Join.me is just a couple months old, and I love the attitude of the company regarding Join.me. Heres what CTO Marton Anka said about Join.me this past October.
Its a super-simple yet super-reliable secure tool that lets your peers take a look at your screen no matter where they are. For now, thats it.
I love the simplicity of the application. Oh yeah, before I forget, it works on Macs too! I now have a desktop shortcut that instantly starts up Join.me so all I need to do is invite guests. In the real estate space, Join.me can be an invaluable tool for agents that cant physically get together with their clients. An agent could invite a client to their screen and then search the MLS. This way, the clients could participate in the search. If an agent was preparing a contract, the buyers could join in via Join.me while the agent explained the purchase contract.
From the brokerage point of view, why not hold Join.me meetings when introducing changes in the company website, new required documents, or the latest market data? There are many ways real estate companies could implement an online meeting strategy to save time and streamline business.
I will be using Join.me when agents that have attended my workshops have questions about Facebook, HootSuite, Google or anything else weve covered. Now, instead of finding a common time and place to meet, I simply have them download Join.me, invite me to their screen, and request control of their mouse remotely. I can now answer their questions as I show them on their screen. Many IT professionals are using Join.me this way too, as a tool for remote access when they do not have other options in place.
What are some other ways Join.me can be used in the real estate world? Id love to hear from you. Leave a comment below with your idea for using this simple yet sophisticated screen sharing tool.
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheFutureOfRealEstateMarketing/~3/m9j49I-WQto/
Create a Social Media Optimized Email Signature
December 8, 2010
Create a Social Media Optimized Email Signature
Email isn’t dead. We send literally hundreds of personal emails a week in our day-to-day jobs and are literally missing hundreds of opportunities to engage these people at a deeper level by incorporating social media into the mix!
Adding in these elements used to require a fancy email platform and someadvancedHTML knowledge. (Not anymore!)
Anyone with an index finger and 3 minutes can make a great looking and social media optimized email signature with WiseStamp.
Your new beefed up emailsignaturewill help you not only grow your social media outlets, encourage readership on your blog, boost the idea that you are a thought leader in your spacebut also help give the recipient a deeper picture of who you (or your company are) and what you are all about.
What is WiseStamp?
WiseStamp is a browser addon that lets you create an awesome Email signature that includes your social media profiles, latest blog posts, images, and a bunch of other cool things.
For example my new signature looks like:
This only works if you are using Firefox, Chrome or SafariAND if you are using Gmail as your email client.
1. Install WiseStamp for Gmail.
2. Open the WiseStamp options, click the HTML box to add in atemplate, or use the code below.
3. Add in your blog’s RSS feed to pull in the latest blog post into your signature.
This will help drive a little more traffic to your blog and help seed the idea in the persons mind that you are an opinion leader in your industry.
4. Go into the social media tab and add in social media profiles.
The profiles you add into your signature arecompletelyup to you. Werecommendadding in your Linkedin, Twitter, your companies Facebook Fan page, and maybe even your Tungle.me profile (which is a slickschedulingapp).
This will not only help grow your social media fan base but it will also help people get a better feel about who your company is and what you represent.
5. Go into WiseStamp settings and turn off “Keep WiseStamp credit in signatures box”.
Now you have a social media optimized signature that your customers/prospects will be amazed by and ask you how you did that.
Sample html code
table border=”0″ width=”300″
tbody
tr
td width=”30″ align=”top”img style=”border: 0;” src=”http://img.tweetimag.es/i/hubspot_b” border=”0″ alt=”Hubspot” width=”73″ height=”73″ //td
td
div style=”text-align: left;”span style=”font-size: x-small;”span style=”font-size: xx-small;”strongspan style=”font-size: 8pt; color: gray;”spanspan style=”font-size: medium; color: “David Wells/spanbr / /span/span/strong/span/spanspan style=”font-weight: bold; font-size: medium; color: “span style=”font-size: xx-small;”span style=”font-size: 9pt;”Inbound Marketing Consultant/span/span/spanbr / span style=”font-size: xx-small;”span style=”font-size: 8pt; color: gray;”br //span/spanspan style=”color: “strongspan style=”font-size: xx-small;”spanspanspanPost a question to the/spana href=”http://success.hubspot.com/Customer-Discussion-Forum” target=”_blank”HubSpot Forums/a/span/spanbr /spana href=”http://success.hubspot.com/log-a-support-request” target=”_blank”Log a support request/a/span/span/strong/span/div
/td
/tr
/tbody
/table
table border=”0″ width=”300″
tbody
tr
td width=”30″ align=”top”img style=”border: 0;” src=”http://img.tweetimag.es/i/hubspot_b” border=”0″ alt=”Hubspot” width=”73″ height=”73″ //td
td
div style=”text-align: left;”span style=”font-size: x-small;”span style=”font-size: xx-small;”strongspan style=”font-size: 8pt; color: gray;”spanspan style=”font-size: medium; color: “David Wells/spanbr / /span/span/strong/span/spanspan style=”font-weight: bold; font-size: medium; color: “span style=”font-size: xx-small;”span style=”font-size: 9pt;”Inbound Marketing Consultant/span/span/spanbr / span style=”font-size: xx-small;”span style=”font-size: 8pt; color: gray;”br //span/spanspan style=”color: “strongspan style=”font-size: xx-small;”spanspanspanPost a question to the/spana href=”http://success.hubspot.com/Customer-Discussion-Forum” target=”_blank”HubSpot Forums/a/span/spanbr /spana href=”http://success.hubspot.com/log-a-support-request” target=”_blank”Log a support request/a/span/span/strong/span/div
/td
/tr
/tbody
/table
If you want to pull in your twitter photo change thered hubspot textabove to your username.
More templates are onhttp://wisestamp.com/goodies/category/signature-examples/
This sample code looks like:
How do you use your email signature to support your marketing efforts?
Free Download: Online Marketing Blueprint
CommentsPosted by David Wells on Wed, Dec 08, 2010 @ 07:00
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HubSpot/~3/FVQqdOm4MYU/Create-a-Social-Media-Optimized-Email-Signature.aspx
Gowalla Partners with Sundance Film Festival
December 8, 2010
Now Trending:
Hackers Defend WikiLeaks by Attacking PayPal and PostFinance [UPDATE: Mastercard, Too]
Article source: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/OVPiEbJym0w/
7 Tips for Succeeding as a Social Media Strategist
December 8, 2010
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
The role of social media is expanding rapidly and many organizations of all types are trying to stay afloat amidst the changes. Meanwhile, a small group of innovators pulls the industry onward.
In the past few years, the social media marketing role has become increasingly present, leading the way to more strategic social media programs. Enter the social media strategist.
Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst at Altimeter Group, a digital strategy consulting firm, recently spoke at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association Summit about the career path of the corporate social strategist, touching on current responsibilities and challenges, as well as the future of the role. His presentation was based on months of research funded by Altimeter, in which 140 enterprise-class social strategists across various industries were interviewed. Other online sources, such as LinkedIn and blogs, were consulted to gather job descriptions, profile work histories and catalog the ebb and flow of new hires in the social media space.
Owyang presented seven key tips for building a successful social media program and focused on how social media strategists can facilitate those successes. Read his tips below and add your thoughts in the comments.
1. Be Proactive, Not Reactive
Owyang pointed to a funny, but oh-so-true anecdote that happened while he was collecting research for this study. While interviewing a social media strategist, the phone conversation was stopped abruptly as the strategist confessed, Jeremiah, Ive gotta go. There are two people standing in front of my office demanding Facebook Pages. If they didnt get the Pages, they were going to build them on their own.
While its somewhat hilarious to imagine two professionals camping in front of their colleagues office until they get their doggone Facebook Pages, its equally as sad to realize that these instances actually happen in the corporate world. If this is happening in your organization, take a step back, look at the chaos, take a deep breath and then do something about it.
A proactive mindset is required, Owyang said. You cannot wait for the company to catch up to you. You have to go to the business units and tell them what is required [to participate in your company's social media program] before they ask you for a Facebook Page. Make a list of requirements: dialogue, ready for conversations 24/7, ongoing commitment, two-way communications. Make it clear whats expected, before they ask you.
Being proactive and having guidelines will help alleviate stressful moments like the one described above, where being reactive is usually status quo.
2. Be a Program Manager, Not Evangelist
As social media programs become more sophisticated, Owyang believes that employees currently in the social media evangelist roles will move on to the next thing, evangelizing new technologies. But with an ongoing need for social media programming, a new role for social media program managers will emerge.
Quickly switch hats, Owyang advises social media strategists who want to stay relevant to businesses that have evolving needs. Its time to take off the evangelism hat and put on the program manager hat. A new skill set is going to be required, and a program manager is responsible for resources, timelines, Gantt charts, ROI models, analytics, data modeling, resource management, project management. Its a very different skill set than the evangelist role that weve seen before.
3. Educate Your Business Units
Educate your business units ahead of time, and give them the information that they need, said Owyang.
He is an advocate of testing employees to measure digital and social media proficiencies, pointing to Intels Digital IQ test as a great example of aptitude measurement. You can take this online test before you participate in social media and become certified in that particular program, he said. Thats one of the more advanced programs that weve seen.
In its official Social Media Guidelines, Intel clearly defines Digital IQ training as a responsibility for all employees taking part in social media on behalf of the company.
Its important to not only lay down guidelines, but to also provide training for employees who want to learn more and get involved in the social media program.
4. Organize for Success
Five ways companies organize their social media teams
During his presentation, Owyang presented five models in which companies organize their social media teams decentralized, centralized, hub and spoke, dandelion and holistic, as pictured and described above. He highly recommends that social media programs be organized in hub and spoke or dandelion models in order to scale.
In the hub and spoke model, theres typically a cross-functional team thats serving multiple business units, with the strategists at the center of the formation 41% of the organizations that Owyang interviewed fell under this category.
Within large companies with multiple brands or units, such as Microsoft or HP, the dandelion (or multiple hub and spoke) model is common, where multiple social media strategists lead individual business areas or brands across the company.
There are three steps necessary in order to reach a hub and spoke or dandelion organization, according to Owyang:
- Set up governance: policies, legal, some executive buy-in.
- Roll out processes: who does what, where, when and how a triage system. How does information flow through your company? Publish that diagram on the Internet.
- Launch an ongoing education program.
If you do those three things in that order, its very likely your company will form in hub and spoke with you in the hub, stated Owyang.
5. Be an Enabler
It is unrealistic to think that one strategist can stay at the center of every social media effort or that he or she could even hire enough community managers to stay on top of an entire enterprises social activity. In light of that reality, Owyang believes that it is crucial for social media strategists to slip into the mindset of an enabler. He explains:
Remember, social media does not scale. You cannot manage every social media program, campaign or effort. You now have to become an enabler to teach the business units to do it on their own thats the only way youre going to be able to scale anyway. You become an internal consultant, an internal resource to help the entire business.
6. Deploy Scalable Social Media Programs
Communities, advocacy programs, social media management systems (like CoTweet and HootSuite), and Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) the practice of connecting social networks to your existing CRM system are all worthwhile social media efforts, according to Owyang, because they are scalable.
Dialogue does not scale, Owyang reiterated multiple times. One-to-one communications does not scale You cant possibly do it. What scales? Community programs getting your customers to do the work for you. Advocacy programs Microsoft MVP, Intel Insiders, SAP Mentors, Oracle Aces, Walmart Moms those are advocacy programs, when you take your best customers and you give them a platform and let them do the work for you, and you dont pay them. Those are scalable programs.
While its important to set up channels for communication with customers, make sure your programs can expand as the company and community grow.
7. Transcend Marketing
The report found that 71% of social media programs fall under the domain of marketing or corporate communications. In order to make an impact, though, Owyang says that social media programs must transcend marketing. Strategists should take note and act accordingly.
Over time, think about how you can be more than marketing, suggests Owyang. Think about how you can apply [social media] to support and service and the physical, real-world customer experience and improve products and experiences.
Owyangs seven insights into succeeding as a social media strategist should have social media programs shaping up in no time. What would you add to his advice? Let us know in the comments below.
View Jeremiah Owyangs WOMMA Summit presentation below:
More Business Resources from Mashable:
– HOW TO: Define a Social Media Strategy for Enterprise
– Social Media Success: 5 Lessons From In-House Corporate Teams
– HOW TO: Get the Most Out of a Coworking Space
– How the Fortune 500 Use Social Media to Grow Sales and Revenue
– Beyond Viral: How Successful Marketers Are Embracing the Social Web
Image copyright of Gary Michael and courtesy of WOMMA.
Article source: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/XzS4YaTv2Tk/
