The first discussion this morning was about the Orange County Brian Solis event that occurred this past week. Many recommended seeing him speak as well as getting his book.
The key takeaways from the event seem to be that in business to use social media effectively you must engage those individuals that are key influencers of your targe market. If your business is real estate see if you can reach out to key bloggers and Twitter users, etc and engage with them.
Updated: We brought back the conversation to ways that business are being effective with this. The thing is you have to talk about your passions. If you’re passionate about something share that with others. If you’re passionate about real estate tell people why you are passionate about it. Companies like Zappos that are huge can do this, so small companies need to be aware that while they had a benefit before but now they’re fighting in the same space for that engagement.
Digg
Emily is here from Digg she’s talking about the new launch this week. They have some amazing new features that I was fortunate to see a few weeks ago. Imagine all the links you see in your Twitter stream, the new Digg to me is basically an engine that finds all those links that my friends are sharing and gets me only what is probably going to be interesting to me.
RSS vs Email
The discussion turned to whether people should be using RSS or Email. We discussed this a few weeks ago, but I think it’s important for people to understand that people like to engage your content in different ways. Why not let them interact in the way they want. I would say that email subscribe to your feed is really important, but having an RSS feed is also important. Plenty of people still use readers. Mel Aclaro pointed out that he’s seeing more and more sites not including RSS feed buttons.
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The psychology discussion is very interesting here, consider that it’s much more valuable for a business to have the email sign ups. They now have a direct channel to that person’s inbox. From what people are saying if they really like something and they look for the RSS feed and can’t find it, they go to the email. However, again I think that having the RSS feed is really important. Give people a way to interact! Perhaps you can encourage them to sign up, for example if they sign up they get access to extra market data or something extra for the sign up. Some suggested that the best thing to do is to ask / find out from your users what they care about.
Mel, Loren Nason, and I suggested downloading a plugin to add a subscribe box to your feed. That way you can try and create email subscribers from RSS subscribers. Loren recommended Post Post Plugin for this
Data on Web Visitors
There was a discussion about identifying the information about visitors to your site. People suggested services that allow you to find out demographics of your site visitors like Quantcast. I suggested that this data is not necessarily great. The issue is that it goes by your IP address. In many cases your IP address is not geo-located well to your home. For example, in St. Louis my IP address showed a location at least 30 minutes away in a very low income area. The reason? AT&T’s node where their IP addresses are registered are at their nodes which might be 10s if not 100s of thousands of people at one location.
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Facbeook Pages
I brought up the discussion that I’ve done with Derek Overbey lately. I think Facebook pages are something that you should really be concetrating on at this point. Scott Schang brought up the fact that if you’re doing a page about a specific community (not a community page) it could be taken over by Facebook and turned into a community page. I think there is a sweet spot of up to about 20,000 people that if you’re under that number you’ll be fine, Facbeook isn’t going to pay attention to that. Stacey Harmon suggested that people shouldn’t focus so much on Facebook Pages, especially if you don’t have the time to keep it up. But what I really discussed was the Google rankings that these pages have and simply can’t be ignored. The key is that while most other companies like Posterous use Subdomains like (ericstegemann.posterous.com) Facebook has created their pages as subdirectories(facebook.com/tribusrealestate). What this means is that Facebook is putting the strength of their ranking behind your page. Subdomains don’t really offer that. Google pretty much looks at them as mostly a different domain.
Final Thoughts
SMMOC is sponsoring Jeff Pulver’s Birthday Party / #140Conf Meetup on September 15, 2010 from 7-10pm at Kimera. Get more information here.
