Small Business

Unfriending Your Real Estate Clients – Realtor Marketing

Realtor marketing question – should you be unfriending your real estate clients on Facebook? This week we got A LOT of questions asking about a post that one person had written, suggesting that if you have friends on Facebook you could be, scary music sounds go here, ruining your real estate career and putting your license at danger of being revoked.

On Wednesday I got a frantic call from another client who said, “DID I KNOW THAT THERE WAS A FACEBOOK PHONEBOOK AND THAT EVERYONE’S NUMBER IS LIKE PUBLIC?!?!?!” I did know that and so what. If you are in business in general, your number is on your website, on your business cards, in your ads and generally available for, huh, people to call you. If you are a Realtor, your number is generally in eight inch high numbers on each of your yard signs.

So let’s address this new “calamity”. Per Facebook’

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Tags: Estate Clients, Marketing, Real Estate Clients, Realtor Marketing

Saturday, February 26th, 2011 Small Business No Comments

10 C’s That Comprise a Company

Company begins with the letter C and we set out to find 10 reasons why this makes sense and here they are:

1 Customers the reason why the business is there in the first place.

2. Curiosity to seek and understand what the customers’ needs are.
3. Creativity or the mental ability to generate new ideas and concepts to solve the customers’ problem and make their pain go away.
4. Courage to confront fear and uncertainty, to face the physical hardship the business may be subjected to and the moral courage in the face of shame and scandal.
5. Compassion because the business is there to benefit others and the company needs to be continually reminded of that. It needs to have compassion for clients and for employees.
6. Con

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Tags: Company, Comprise Company

Saturday, February 26th, 2011 Small Business No Comments

Welcome SearchFest 2011 Attendees

If you’re reading this while at the SearchFest event in Portland, a big welcome to you. In my presentation, I mention a couple dozen web sites, articles, and other links that you may not have had time to jot down while I was speaking. If that’s the case, here are all the references I made in chronological order:

Build Your Own Assets
Do Not Follow This Social Media Advice
HubSpot: Study Shows Small Businesses That Blog Get 55% More Website Visitors

Manage Your Reputation
Google Alerts
Yahoo Alerts
Bing News
SocialMention
BlogPulse
Twe.pe
KnowEm
namechk

Track Results
Google URL Builder
Bit.ly
Goo.gl
Awe.sm

Trust & Thought Leadership
Dr. Cyn

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Tags: Searchfest, Searchfest 2011

Thursday, February 24th, 2011 Small Business No Comments

5 Business Planning Tips

Any business that embarks on a project without prior planning is being at the very least careless, or perhaps even wilfully reckless. Without good planning it is easy to veer off-course or get distracted, plus it becomes increasingly difficult to evaluate the success of the project. With this in mind, here are some planning tips for any business starting a new project:

Market Research: It is essential to know everything about your marketplace, especially if you plan to launch a new product or service. Businesses that are unprepared for entry into a market will not have a full picture of all the factors that impact on their product launch.

Competitive Analysis: Similarly, you need to understand the competition that exists within that market.

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Tags: Planning, Planning Tips

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011 Small Business No Comments

Social Sustainability – A New Buzz Word.

Wikipedia defines Social sustainability as one aspect of sustainable development. Social sustainability encompasses human rights, labor rights, and corporate governance. …

An alternate definition on the web is: Practices to ensure that the cohesion of society and its ability to work towards common goals are maintained. Individual needs such as those for health and well-being, nutrition, shelter, education and cultural expression should be met.

In terms of today’s business ecosystem, Social Sustainability is that set of values that relate to concurrently tending to and respecting the people and the social networks they are a part of. One of the primary goals of social sustainability therefore, is to achieve human and social network well-being together.

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Tags: Social, Social Sustainability

Monday, February 21st, 2011 Small Business No Comments

It’s the Age of the Customer – get over it!

Markets were born when humans chose to acquire what they needed by trading with each other rather than producing it themselves or taking from someone else by force. The moment of proto-market conception was when the first seller offered to trade with the first customer, and that offer was accepted.

For millennia, this marketplace dance was as beautifully simple as it was exquisitely effective, having at its nucleus three primary elements:

1. The product, controlled by the seller
2. Information about the product, also controlled by the seller
3. The buying decision, controlled by the customer

From that first transaction, when shells were the reserve currency, to about 1995AD, the marketplace dance was performed zillions of times with little variation.

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Saturday, February 19th, 2011 Small Business No Comments