Home Staging Checklist
If you are selling your home you really should check out the new workbook by Susan Victoria Phillips, Certified Interior Designer, Home Staging Consultant and author of “The Seductive Power of Home Staging: A Seven Step System for a Fast & Profitable Sale”. She has just released her newest book “Home Staging Workbook: A Comprehensive Checklist” for pre-order.
Visit her site for more information and to pre-order before June 1st, 2012
Top Social Media Mistakes Your Business Can Avoid
Lack of Engagement. Social Media isn’t just a two-way street; at its roots, it’s multidirectional. That means that the communication between your business and an individual extends far beyond that of an email, phone call, or in-person conversation. Your communication is being read, shared, and commented on by others that you may or may not know. People are even talking about your business without your involvement.
Solution: Remember that it’s not all about you. When people are commenting or asking questions, make sure you take the time to thank or answer them. If there are businesses that you like, make a connection in social media. If there are clients that post interesting (and appropriate) things, go ahead and like them, follow them or repost/retweet (with your own comment). Also, it doesn’t hurt to keep an eye out on social and review sites to see what people are saying about your business.
Lack of Content. If the only reason you are posting on Facebook or Twitter is to get more likes or followers, why are you posting at all? People don’t want to read about how you want more people reading your posts or tweets.
Solution: Post about things that will be of interest to your existing and potential clients. They’ll share with others and help spread the word. If people are interested in what you’re writing, they’ll come back, like and/or follow you.
Lack of Purpose. Hopefully, you’ve invested time and effort into creating a website that represents your business well. When it comes to business, Facebook, Twitter, and others are the new marketing channels. The purpose of marketing is — shocking as it may be — to sell products or services. Yes, brand-building, product exposure and client engagement are all very important, but ultimately they are intended to get people to buy something from you.
Solution: Make sure you’re making the connection between your social media activity and your website where they can buy from you. Keep your site active by posting articles, updates, and announcements, then share them on social media. Have a way for people to connect with you on your website using a newsletter sign-up. An important thing to consider: What if Facebook or Twitter suddenly disappeared? What would happen to all those likes and followers that you’ve spent countless hours and effort on? How would you get in touch with them? It would be nice to have your newsletter email list as a fallback.
Posting to all sites at the same time. Each social site has its place. Many people will engage with you across multiple sites so you need to be aware that posting on all of them — at the same time, with the same message — ends up giving the appearance of automation, or worse, spamming. This may result in people disengaging.
Solution: Time your social activities based on how the sites are used. Even if it’s a single announcement, make sure that you time and word it differently. For example, announce something on your website and Facebook a week in advance, then tweet a reminder on Twitter closer to the event.
Life Magazine Powered by…
You guessed it, WordPress. Time Life site has recently been relaunched running on WordPress. I know there are thousands big of businesses running WordPress but it’s nice to see yet another high profile public site using one of the best content management systems out there.
The State of HTML5 Video
Excellent article by LongTailVideo on current (Jan 2012 article, Nov 2011 data) support of HTML5 video features on various devices and browsers.
Keep in mind that this is specific research and should be balanced using your own site analytics (eg. Your site gets mostly Firefox traffic vs IE you can move towards certain features sooner).
QR Codes and vCards
While playing around with QR Codes as discussed here and here I found myself wondering if I could throw together a dynamic QR Code for creating a vCard. The answer was yes. With a couple small caveats, it looks ugly and I’ve tested it but you need to test it yourself before publishing the QR Code, I’m pretty happy with the results.
I did find that my favorite QR Scanner I use on my iPhone was one of the many that suffers from poor vCard support so data was getting put in the wrong fields. Once I tried QRafter (vCard support is good, but I’m still not sold on the rest of it) I was able to properly test the images.
Feel free to give it a try, right-click on the preferred image to save and post your comments or feedback here. I get the feeling I will be updating this to make it more useful.
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