SOON locators within the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (Peza) economic zones will get to choose where they would want to source their power requirements.

This after the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) granted Advent-Energy Inc. its wholesale aggregator license for electric power. AdventEnergy is a fully owned unit of AboitizPower Corp.

In a statement, AboitizPower said the license will allow companies in Peza-registered areas across the country.

“The license will basically allow us to serve customers in Peza-registered zones when open access is permitted,” Luis Miguel Aboitiz, senior vice president for trading and marketing, added.

He said Peza customers are different, because of the way there are taxed.

Aboitiz said they will have fewer issues to deal with if they are supplied by a provider that is also Peza registered,” Aboitiz said.

AboitizEnergy Solutions Inc. (AESI) was also awarded the renewal of its Retail Electricity Supplier license. AdventEnergy, an affiliate of AESI, is the first Peza-registered retail power supplier.

Wholesale aggregators are persons or entities engaged in the consolidation of electric power demand of distribution utilities, including Manila Electric Co., for the purpose of purchasing and reselling electricity on a group basis.

The creation of wholesale aggregators is mandated under the Republic Act 9136 or Electric Power Industry Reform Act as part of the open access and retail competition provisions of the law.

The law allows end-use consumers belonging to the contestable market to obtain power from independent suppliers who are licensed by the ERC. Electricity consumers will have the option to purchase electric energy from a variety of resources other than those selected by their local distributor.

http://www.businessmirror.com.ph/home/companies/18863-adventenergy-granted-erc-license.html

By Kimberly D. Mackey, MCSP, CMP, Realtor®

One of the biggest complaints I get from people who are just starting to use Social Media as part of their overall strategy for marketing is that it takes a lot of time.  And yes, particularly in the beginning as you are learning and setting up your sites, it does take a lot of time.  Then before long, someone tells you about this “really cool tool” that will feed all of your sites at one time.  WOW, you think, this is the answer to my prayers, I can just PUSH messages out there all day long and they will go to all of my sites at one time.  HOLD ON THERE NELLY—NOT SO FAST!

There are a lot of  Aggregators (systems that let you blast out to all Social Media Outlets with one click) out there and it can really be tempting to use them to save time, but you really have to be careful or you will turn off your audience and you will start to see your followers drop off.  Perhaps even worse, is that they just “hide” your updates, so you never even know that you might have done something to offend.  Each site has its own unique “personality” and its own set of etiquette rules.  Please make sure you understand those for each site you are utilizing.

In my opinion, some of the biggest audience turn-offs come when people/companies use Facebook like Twitter.  What do I mean?  On Twitter you can post up to around 30 times per day and no one would think twice about it.  However, on Facebook if you post that many times, you are monopolizing the Newsfeed/Live Feed on your Fans/Friends profile pages and they won’t read it.  In fact, they will have a very adverse reaction to it.  Facebook updates should be limited to a few times per day at the very most.  LinkedIn should probably only be updated a couple of times per week if you really want people to read what you have written.

On Twitter, you might include a whole host of articles regarding positive press about why now is the time to buy or perhaps the $8000 tax credit and you can even use services like Tweetlater.com to have them appear at different times of the day.  Some of the best Tweeters, “re-tweet” their own articles at varying times because you get a different audience at different times through out the day.  Now, let’s say you want to use some of this same information on Facebook.  Pick out only the 1 or 2 top articles you want to share.  Space them out, so you don’t appear to be hogging the Newsfeed of your Fans (and I say Fans instead of Friends because Facebook is a self-prescribed PERSONAL site, your personal profile is just that—PERSONAL.  Per Facebook’s rules, businesses are allowed to have Fan Pages).

Articles or any information you wish to share should be targeted specifically to who your audience is on each site.  If you have more Realtor® followers on Twitter, use specific call to actions or link to your inventory page with several of your Tweets.  If you have more of a customer following on Facebook, you might post great home ownership related items, such as the importance of caulking your windows once per year or new painting techniques that everyone can do, how about gardening and landscape ideas?  Perhaps even feature a happy homeowner each month and have them tell the story in their own words about why they enjoy living where they do and how great their experience was with you.  Run fun contests, but keep them simple.  Support any articles you post on Facebook by also posting them on Twitter (not the other way around).

I use a couple of different Aggregators that I find helpful.  Facebook now allows you to post your Fan Page status updates onto Twitter.  Since this is Facebook TO Twitter, it avoids the problems of doing this the other way around; plus it has the added benefit of allowing you to build your Fans on Facebook because posts that are larger than 140 characters, which is all that is allowed by Twitter will have to be viewed by clicking a link which will take the reader back to your Fan Page.  My Fans on my Facebook Page grew substantially once Facebook made this feature available.  Another Aggregator that I use is a “widget” or programming tool that allows my last 5 Twitter Updates to be posted live right onto the homepage of my website and another one which does the same thing on my blog.  It is always interesting to me when I run into someone who says they don’t have a Twitter account, but who have read my latest Twitter posts.  It turns out that they are following my posts by pulling up my homepage of my website.  Just imagine the potential for your business if you were to add this widget to your site as well.

Blogging is a fantastic way to interact with your target audience, and you can have different blog sites for different audiences.  You should certainly support your blog with your other Social Marketing efforts, but again be careful not to over-expose.  It is my very strong opinion that rather than using an Aggregator to post all of your blog posts on your social media sites just post the occasional one to draw your audience to your blog where they can choose to subscribe. There are some great “widgets” out there that allow you to showcase your blog on your LinkedIn or Facebook Page without using an Aggregator to post every single article.  The danger in posting every single article is that people just tune you out and then begin to never read what you have written.  Now, I have to be careful here because I do believe that you should support your Social Marketing efforts on your blog and visa versa—just don’t overdo it.  For instance, you get an amazing Happy Homeowner comment on your Facebook Fan Page, copy it and post it on your blog and your website.  Also make sure you Tweet it and link back to your blog and website.  Have links on your website and your blog to your Facebook Fan Page and your Twitter and LinkedIn sites.  If you have a YouTube Channel, make sure that your website and blog showcase those and occasionally post links back to them from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  If this sounds like a delicate balance, it is because it is.  I use the ratio of 1:15 +/- with (1) being the self-promoting object and (15 +/-) being the content you post that has nothing to do with direct self-promotion.

So, while it is ok to use Aggregators to some degree—do so cautiously and expeditiously so that you don’t run the risk of turning-OFF the very audience you are trying to turn-ON!

Kimberly Mackey, MCSP, CMP, Realtor®, is the founder of Creative Sales Solutions, which provides sales and leadership training in all aspects of business development — including social media strategy and training — and sales and marketing management and training. For more information, visit the Creative Sales Solutions Web site at www.creativesalesnow.com, or visit Mackey at LinkedIn, www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlymackey; Twitter, www.twitter.com/CreativeSales; and Facebook, www.facebook.com/CreativeSalesSolutions.

Looking back on the previous year I realized that the travel world has changed me.

After decades of showing up 1 hour before my flight (and that’s for international flights, mind you) now I end up showing up so early – I have 2 hours at the gate.

I credit that to ElAl.

A good friend of mine showed up 2+ hours before his flight to Madrid and made it to check in with plenty of time to spare. Unfortunately for him, the flight was overbooked. Rather than bump a happy bumpee, they dug up the fine print and informed my friend that he did not show up on time. Don’t worry – the story has a happy ending.

For ElAl. Not for my friend, who was shipped to Barcelona and had to find his own way to Madrid. Cost – 1/2 day of vacation and at least $500. So, now I get there 3 hours before the flight. I am a changed man.

Second big change was reported in the New York Times.

Not about me, personally, but about the average traveller is ditching the web and booking flights through their travel agent. For the first time, I called a travel agent and had them do all the work. Changed flights ten times, paid later, speak to a human – it was all new for me and quite refreshing. (Kind of like my 8 year old kid discovering the VCR – you just put the tape in and press play. What a great idea! No menu! No scratched disk! No Estonian subtitles! – Just play the movie.) I actually had a good travel agent honest enough to tell me if I could get it cheaper online. But, I must admit that I still enjoy using the Western Union hold from time to time in online bookings.

And of course, if you need to decide where to do your Hannukah shopping on Long Island – at Roosevelt Field Mall or at Smithhaven Mall – you need the web. Or for conditions at Mt Baldy Ski Resort. If you just like reading blogs – try this travel blog and this vacation blog.

I guess this is a good place to introduce my readers to Josh Herst – blogger and Web entrepreneur, founder of TripHub. For our Canadian readers – check out this post with a rabbi’s experiences in the Canadian tundra (that’s a bit north of Hampstead, eh?).

• Restaurants Blog
• Shopping Blog
• Lloyd Center Mall Portland
• Pearlridge Shopping Center
• Potomac Mills Outlet Mall

I’m the new happy owner of an iPhone. One of the first thing that I did was trying to find the right application to bring back all of the feeds that I carefully manage on my Google RSS reader. Because living in Brooklyn means sometime fairly long commutes, reading trade news and the bloggers that matter to me when traveling was critical.
And the app that I found works fairly well (seamlessly download all of the latest articles when I’m connected, that I can then “comfortably read” while commuting).

But the problem that I have is that a bunch of publishers (never bloggers I have to say, either by lack of tech knowledge or maybe because they’re just more open to the social web) think it is smart to parse their feeds and only include abstracts. Here are the usual reasons brought on and why it doesn’t make sense:

- “We need to have the user on our site, if not, people tend to not go anymore to our site…”
Who cares where the media is consumed? The key thing is make sure that you aggregate all of the analytics (and not only your site’s analytics). Most of the analytical packages now include that as a standard. And you might even learn interesting things about your audience (where is the media consumed, through what device or what platform etc.). In the end game, what matters is that the user is in contact with your brand, whether connected or disconnected.

- “We’re losing money since we can’t serve ads…”
While that was true for a long time, there’s more and more solutions coming down the road for publishers to monetize their RSS audience (see the good article from Dosh Dosh on that). And even if it’s not fully perfect, you can actually come up with new interesting packages for your advertisers that would, for example. include location-based services / promotions / coupons etc.

- “Our content is beautiful and should really be consumed on a full screen rather than a micro device…”
True again for a long time but the irruption of smart phones and e-readers is going to revolutionize that radically in terms of media consumption usage while potentially increase the rendering of your content (you might even stretch that argument to say that in some large e-readers that include color, the rendering will be ultimately better than through the current web experience).

There’s also a couple of downsides on the abstract method. The main one (realized from my own use) is that I tend to skip the feeds that are just a couple of lines long. It’s very very frustrating to start reading the abstract, get excited and then being unable to finish the article. Sure, I can always save it for later, but unless that 3 lines abstract was crazy interesting, I’ll never go back to it. So, first effect, I don’t use these feeds anymore (and therefore, I actually stop reading that specific publication, relying on the rest of the feeds to get me informed – good example at Silicon Alley Insider).

You have to follow your users instead of trying to shoehorn them into what you believe is good for you.
In the long run, I realized that with the help of an e-reader and/or a smartphone, I actually consume more media than before. It’s an exciting feeling to board on a plane with no internet connection (that’s getting rare though) and know that you’ll be able to catch up on all these great articles you’ve been saving for a moment like that, a moment when you’re not connected. And that’s also probably a moment where you, as a media company, want to be in the mind of the mind-free user, especially when that user is actually available to connect with your brand.

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• What Happens When There Is Only One Feed Reader? (techstartups.com)
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• Google Is Burning Your Feed Data, Still (techstartups.com)
• Google adds more personalization to Reader (news.cnet.com)

Twitter è un servizio di microblogging, semplicissimo da spiegare. Si scrivono messaggi in 140 caratteri, che vengono letti dai followers, ossia dalle persone che seguono il nostro feed.
A nostra volta, possiamo seguire i feed di altri utenti. In tal modo si genera un flusso completamente personalizzato di notizie e commenti, scegliendo i contenuti in base agli autori.
La recente possibilità di creare le liste consente di dividere per categorie gli autori stessi, garantendo all’utente un accesso rapido alle novità della sezione di interesse.

Al mantra spesso ripetuto, che definisce i social media completamente inutili, basta controbattere che anche alcune delle testate giornalistiche nazionali sono di recente sbarcate su Twitter, e testate internazionali come New York Times (@NyTimes) e BBC News (@BBCWorld) twittano già da tempo.
Ciò non vuol dire che si debba scegliere di seguire solo i feed delle testate online. Anzi. Se così fosse, useremmo Twitter come un “semplice” aggregatore di feed.
Il bello, invece, sta nella possibilità di ricevere anche suggerimenti su servizi, battute ironiche, commenti veloci su un fatto di cronaca, breaking news e tanto altro.
Noi stessi, pubblicando sul nostro feed, diventiamo parte integrante del flusso informativo, generando notizie, commenti, risposte e idee che, a loro volta, gli altri leggeranno e da cui trarranno spunto.
I messaggi, dalla cronaca alla tecnologia, dai social network ai media tradizionali, su Twitter si propagano con una velocità maggiore della media della Rete, arrivando molto prima ai destinatari.
La caratteristica di limitare i messaggi a soli 140 caratteri, anche se rimane un punto debole se si punta all’approfondimento, diventa il punto di forza nell’ottica dell’immediatezza.
140 caratteri (meno di un sms) bastano a sintetizzare il lead della notizia o il commento, rinviando ogni approfondimento ai link, che quasi sempre si aggiungono al messaggio, o ad aggiornamenti successivi.
Conosco l’obiezione: molti utenti non usano Twitter e gli altri network per scopi positivi o propositivi, ma per riempire il web di crap, per usare l’espressione con cui il direttore di Wired US ieri ha definito gran parte dei video su YouTube.
La risposta è scegliere bene gli utenti.

Foto di tsevis | Flickr

Website: footballfilter.com
User submitted: Ben (from Football Filter)

Hat-trick: this is a great little aggregator of a site, pulling together a mass of football resources from around the web (with a slight English bias, which is nice!) into one filterable page. The design is simple but elegant with clear use of a grid: a great example of practical type design on the web. Also the bank of podcasts you can listen to within the click of a play button is a nifty feature that makes you feel like some kind of media mogul. The wide variety of sites linked to is good to see, even including a whole section on WAGs! And big respect for not needing a new login to be able to sign up.

Own goal: being able to filter by time is a good idea but the timeline device used to do it isn’t very intuitive. Would be better if it was a big timeline across the screen, clearly marked by days or hours. Displaying photos is a nice touch but it would be good if they linked you through to where they are hosted (presumably Flickr) so you can get the originals.

working on this site

In integration it is a very common task to receive different messages from different locations process them individually and produce a result in the form of a single consolidated message. This task is performed by an aggregator. In the aggregator a Singleton orchestration with sequential or parallel convoys is implemented. There are variations in the collection of input messages i.e. it can be a parallel convoy or a sequential convoy with different or same message types.

You can read more about Aggregator Enterprise integration pattern here.

While implementing the aggregator orchestration you need to ensure that the single instance of the orchestration receives the convoy of messages. There can be two types of convoys.

Sequential Convoy

In sequential convoy all the types of messages are received in an ordered sequence. The first receive shape initializes the correlation set while the other receive shapes follow the correlation set. You can have the first receive shape’s activate property to true and set the initialize correlation property. While the other receive shapes will have the follow correlation set property set and activate property false.

Parallel Convoy

In the parallel convoy the messages arriving are not in a sequence and their sequence does not matter but the processing should be started when all the three messages are received. Configuring the parallel convoy is straight forward. Just drag the parallel shape and add the receive shapes in the parallel shape branches. If the parallel shape is the first shape in the orchestration then each parallel receive shape must have activate property to true and initialize the correlation set otherwise follow the correlation set initialized by any first receive shape or send shape.

In my example I have used a sequential convoy and used a transform shape to aggregate all the three messages into a single message and then send this message through the file port.

You can download the example from here.

Maggwire

Here’s another voting based aggregator that’s calling itself the “iTunes of Magazines”. Like Rex, I have no idea what they mean by that. Perhaps they see themselves as saviors of the print industry? While presumptuous and ambitious, the site looks pretty solid.

by Kimberly Mackey, MCSP, CMP, Realtor®

You have worked hard to build your brand and the identity that goes with it.  In the past, using only traditional methods of marketing made it so much easier to carefully craft your image and the message you wanted to send to the outside world.  But now, in this whole new world of social marketing the lines are often blurred.  How do you really make sure that what you are putting out there is enhancing the brand you have worked so hard to build?  How do you layer in all of the variables that come with the open platform of social media and yet keep your image consistent?  There are no 100 percent-guaranteed rules to define exactly how to do this in cookie-cutter fashion; however, I have observed that if you incorporate the following 10 concepts into your social marketing strategy, you will be much happier with the integrity of your brand and return on investment (ROI).

(10)  Define Your Target Audience

Although this one seems obvious, if you spend any time on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or blogs you will quickly realize that the vast majority of companies out there have no idea who their target audience is.  So, are you trying to reach out to Realtors®?  Current homeowners or customers?  Or are you trying to reach out directly to new prospects?  There is no right or wrong answer here and no requirement that it just be one audience.  You can and should be able to reach multiple resources with an effective social marketing campaign.  The difference is to know what types of information or content each of the targeted audience members will be interested in reading or seeing.  Social marketing is not about pushing a message out there like a traditional advertising campaign and hoping that your target will respond to it.  It is about providing interesting content that will cause your target to want to engage with you.

(9)  Decide Who Will Deliver The Message?

Again there is no right or wrong answer here.  It is much more important to know what the message will be than who delivers it.  Even if you decide to outsource to someone to upkeep your social marketing, you should still have a very strong hand in crafting the message.  Those that come from agencies tend to be pretty “vanilla” and really lack that personal touch.  Some builders have assigned their marketing person to keep up with their sites as part of their normal duties.  This plan can work really well if there is a very well thought out strategy in place and a team to support doing the research to find and write interesting material.  And still others, particularly the local or regional builders have their principal or senior management staff carefully crafting the message.  The person you choose should be someone you know will put a lot of effort into making your social marketing the best it can be, someone who clearly understands your brand and types of messages you want out there.

(8)  Define Your Strategy and Set Realistic Goals

The second question I usually get regarding social marketing is how many sales have I gotten off of it.  Is it really worth the effort?  Or phrased another way, what is the return on investment.  All of you analytical people out there are not going to like the response here.  It depends.  Here is what I can tell you:  sales do happen every day as a direct result of social marketing.  Like everything else in business though, they don’t just happen automatically.  While the ultimate goal of engaging in any marketing activity is to increase sales, we know that some marketing is better at building brand awareness and public relations.  A good campaign will produce all of the above, but it will take planning, implementation, trial and error, and most importantly effort.  So while you should measure sales and try to determine their origins whenever possible, some more quantifiable measurements may need to be applied to your social marketing campaign.  If you are trying to build your co-brokerage business, it would be important to reach out to Realtors® on sites like Active Rain, Facebook, Twitter and even LinkedIn.  Measure your follower growth in that area.  Measure the number of interactions or comments to your posts—are you getting any?—are they positive in nature?  Then, how many of those interactions actually result in Realtors® bringing their clients in to view your models?

If your target audience is existing customers as a referral source, then a key metric would be to measure how many of your current customers are following you?  How can you increase that number?  Are you getting interactions regarding any of your posts?  These are the ways you measure effectiveness at first, then if those measurements are on target you will start to see the referral prospect come in and if you have a well-trained sales force, you will see the conversions from those prospects.

I think one of the simplest reminders about any sort of networking is that people do business with people they know, like, trust, and remember.  Social marketing is a great way to make sure that you stay top of mind.

(7) Understand the Media/Platform(s) You Are Using

To me, this is one of the most important things to consider.  There are a lot of aggregators (systems that let you blast out to all social media outlets with one click) out there and it can really be tempting to use them to save time, but you really have to be careful or you will turn off your audience and you will start to see your followers drop off.  On Facebook, for example, users have the ability to hide updates in their newsfeeds (the landing page after log in, with all recent updates from friends listed) from friends, groups, applications and pages. In this case, you might never even know if you have done something to offend.  Each site has its own purpose and its own set of etiquette rules.  Please make sure you understand those for each site you are utilizing, otherwise you may not be able to cultivate any brand awareness.

One example of improper social media use is when people or companies use Facebook like Twitter.  What do I mean?  On Twitter you can post up to around 30 times per day and no one would think twice about it.  However, on Facebook if you post that many times, you are monopolizing the newsfeed on your fans’ personal profiles (those Facebook users who connect to your business via a fan page, which is a page that businesses can create to connect with individuals) and they won’t read it.  In fact, they will have a very adverse reaction to it.  Facebook updates should be limited to a few times per day at the very most.  LinkedIn should probably only be updated a couple of times per week if you really want people to read what you have written.

On Twitter, you might include a whole host of articles regarding positive press about why now is the time to buy or perhaps the $8,000 tax credit and you can even use services like Socialoomph.com to plan tweets ahead of time and delay publishing so that they appear at different times of the day.  Some of the best tweeters retweet their own articles at varying times because you get a different audience at different times through out the day.

Now, let’s say you want to use some of this same information on Facebook.  Pick out only the one or two top articles you want to share.  Space them out, so you don’t appear to be hogging the newsfeed of your fans.  Again, target these articles specifically to your audience on each venue—don’t post the same exact thing on each platform.  If you have more Realtor® followers on Twitter, use specific call to actions or link to your inventory page with several of your tweets. This can help establish or maintain branding messages of community or cooperation.

If you have more of a customer following on Facebook, you might post great home ownership-related items, such as the importance of caulking your windows once per year or new painting techniques that everyone can do—great reinforcement for any builders trying to brand themselves as experts in the field.  Perhaps even feature a happy homeowner each month and have them tell the story in their own words about why they enjoy living where they do and how great their experience was with you. Such a posting is now an unsolicited testimonial that can strongly maintain a customer service brand message, for example. Hold fun contests via social media, but keep them simple.  Support any articles you post on Facebook by also posting them on Twitter (not the other way around).

Blogging is also a fantastic way to interact with your target audience, and you can have different blog sites for different audiences.  It is also a great place to state your brand messages strongly, as you have more space and control over what appears on the blog. You should certainly support your blog with your other social marketing efforts, but again be careful not to overexpose.  Rather than posting all of your blog posts on your social media sites, just post the occasional one to draw your audience there and get them to subscribe. But do support your social marketing efforts on your blog.  For instance, you get an amazing comment from a satisfied home owner on your Facebook fan page, copy it and post it on your blog and your website.  Also make sure you tweet it and link back to your blog and website.

Perhaps you are a builder whose brand revolves around excellent model homes. You might focus on Youtube and Flickr more (because we know that a picture is worth a thousand words). These sites allow you to support your brand and drive additional traffic in ways never before seen, just because of the appeal of video. Even more powerful than written testimonials is the power of video testimonials. When people see people like themselves talking about a great experience, they are much more likely to both believe the message and act on the message than if it is only in written form.

Absolutely everything you post out there should have a link to your Web site.  Currently, I am only using organic methods of search engine optimization (SEO) for my Web site, and I can clearly spot trends on the effectiveness of my social marketing campaigns and have now been doing this long enough that I can almost predict how many new prospective projects I will get based on watching the analytics for my web site and my blog.  The main point here is that the messaging can remain consistent across all the sites, and even support and drive traffic to and from the different sites despite the fact that each site typically serves a different purpose.

There are services out there, where for a fee you can track the effectiveness of your social marketing campaigns.  If you have the money in your budget you might want to consider these just for convenience sake; however, all of the tracking mechanisms they employ are generally available for free, but they take a lot of work to find and consolidate into a workable report.

(6)  Interact

Using social marketing is the equivalent of going to a big networking event—only without the restraints of time and space. You can be at multiple events all at the same time; however, if you only go there and don’t talk to anyone, you aren’t going to get very much out of it.  Even if you hire a service to manage your posts for you, it is still important that you go on and read what others are posting.  Take the time to comment when appropriate.  Comments to posts can be just as valuable as adding your own posts.  There is potential to create or expand brand awareness without trying too hard.

For instance, commenting on a blog or group in LinkedIn can bring you a whole new audience to your sites that you wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise.  While you should always avoid blatant self-promotion on these comments, it is perfectly acceptable and encouraged to sign your posts and include a link to your website, blog or other related.  Get very involved with LinkedIn groups related to home building, sales and marketing to share ideas with other professionals.  This is a great way to ask questions and brainstorm with your peers.  Join groups for Realtors® so you can interact with them and stay top of mind whenever they have a client moving into one of your areas.  Alumni associations are another example of groups you can join to cultivate buying referrals.  Try to think broadly, rather than narrowly when deciding whether or not to join a group.  You never know when that next connection is going to be the right connection for whatever you need.

Both Twitter and Facebook have their own mechanisms to allow you to interact effectively.  On Twitter, you can retweet (RT) when you like someone else’s post.  Retweeting is a huge compliment to the original poster and you will see an immediate spike in your followers by doing so on a regular basis.  Facebook allows you to share your positive opinion on something quickly by simply clicking on a button when you like something that someone else has posted.  Once you click on that button you get the option of sharing by posting to your profile or e-mailing it to your friends.  I encourage you to post to your profile whenever it is appropriate.  Of course, always give credit to the originator of the post.  Both Facebook and Twitter allow you to put the “@” symbol in front of the poster’s name and it will automatically alert them and give them credit.

Of course also use your best party manners.  Thank people for following you.  Thank them for sharing your comments with others.  And, do comment back when someone posts a comment on your blog or elsewhere.  Remember this is about two-way conversation.

(5)  Fix Some Problems in the Open

Many builders are nervous to open up two-way conversations because they have occasionally been burned by the upset customer who went on a rampage contacting the media, setting up bogus websites, etc.  While you certainly can’t please all of the people all of the time, most of these problems could be avoided by open dialog.  Even when dealing with an irrational person that no matter what you do, they are just not going to be happy. If the rest of your audience sees that you are making a good faith effort to go the extra mile. That alone will help to diffuse the situation and expose the irrationality of that person.

So, if someone posts something about a perceived warranty issue, don’t be afraid to permit that post to appear.  Take the time to respond in a non-confrontational manner, outlining the efforts that were made to resolve the situation.  If that occasionally means you fix a cracked tile 14 months after closing, fix the tile.  The PR alone is well worth the few customers who might “take advantage.”

(4)  Use Self Promotion Sparingly, But Do Use It

Going back to the networking event analogy, if you were to go to an event and only talk about how great your company is, you would probably find yourself alone before too long.  The same holds true on social networking sites.  Ninety percent of your content should be relevant, interesting articles and information that your target audience would enjoy.  The other 10 percent can be promotion of an event or a sale, etc.

I am giving you this rule of thumb regarding the obvious promotional items.  There is an art to working more subtle promotions into your posts depending on the site you are using.  For instance, if you are on Facebook, and one of your Realtor® fans sells a home in one of your communities, you may want to congratulate that Realtor® and her clients on taking advantage of such a great opportunity in a beautiful community, etc.  There are lots of things you can do along these lines to keep the content relevant and not appear boorish.

(3)  Get ALL Your Associates Trained

Probably one of the most overlooked areas regarding brand consistency is not training your associates on the use of social marketing.  Like it or not, many of your associates are already out there on social networking sites.  Although they are generally using these sites for personal reasons, these associates are still a reflection of you and also a huge opportunity for you to reach a broader audience.  However, without proper training and understanding of the impact and ramifications of actions on these sites your associates can quickly deteriorate your brand rather than support your brand—even though they may have the best of intentions.

As I go into companies to do this type of training, often times the management teams tell me that they only want to bring in a core group of individuals because they want to be able to better manage their social marketing efforts.  Sadly, it is only after they have completed the training do they better understand the importance of training the whole team.

(2) Update Your Policy & Procedure Manual to Include a Social Networking Section

Once you have all of your associates trained on how they can help to support your brand and what not to do to deter the brand, it is important to follow this up by updating your policy & procedure manual with a code of conduct regarding social networking.  Once you have this written, make sure that you have each associate to sign off on it that they thoroughly understand your policy and agree to abide by it.  It is probably a good idea to have an expert help you to craft this policy so that as many pitfalls as possible are included and the language is clear and easy for your associates to understand your expectations.

(1) Make it FUN and Interesting

Lastly, social networking and marketing is and should be fun.  Try to avoid controversial issues like politics and religion.  Share good news about our industry wherever you find it.  I think you will find that if you are out there looking for good things to share and helpful information, you will realize that this market isn’t as bad as the mainstream media makes it out to be and your own attitude will be uplifted in the process of uplifting the attitudes of your target audience.

Kimberly Mackey, MCSP, CMP, Realtor®, is the founder of Creative Sales Solutions, which provides sales and leadership training in all aspects of business development — including social  media strategy and training — and sales and marketing management and training. For more information, visit the Creative Sales Solutions Web site at www.creativesalesnow.com, or visit Mackey at LinkedIn, www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlymackey; Twitter, www.twitter.com/CreativeSales; and Facebook, www.facebook.com/CreativeSalesSolutions.

For more information about this item, please contact Tamsin Ayre at 800-368-5242 x8673 or via e-mail at tayre@nahb.com.

***Reprinted by permission of the Sales and Marketing Channel at the National Association of Homebuilders.

IF YOU ARE A MEMBER OF THE NSMC, PLEASE CLICK HERE TO VIEW THIS ARTICLE ON THE SALES & MARKETING CHANNEL SITE.

Sometimes it is tough getting an unbiased view of current events. Everyone knows that news outlets can’t help but color their works with their own special tint. What is the searcher of neutral news to do?

Well, try Newsy for one. Newsy is a relatively recent addition to the world of web news applications, of which there is no dearth. What makes Newsy unique is its treatment of news stories by inclusion and analysis of various news stories, media and sources with respect to each single news-worthy event. Obviously, one can glean all sorts of information from merely watching or reading the different takes. But there is even more to be learned about the story by examining which facts are emphasized, how much time and effort is devoted to the story, and other indirect characteristics of a given report. And Newsy provides its own version of the story, ostensibly culled from the various media outlets’ reports. Newsy’s self description from their site explains that:

Newsy.com is unlike any other news service on the web – we highlight the key differences in reporting so that you can understand all the angles of a story.

As indicated on the site, you will find CNN right next to Al Jazeera, the BBC next to ABC, and content from newspapers, news magazines and top blogs.

In a sense, Newsy not only aggregates news, but offers a means of analysis unavailable in typical news aggregators. Why fall prey to the game of telephone, when you can put everyone on the line in a conference call?

You can keyword browse by tags and filter content by popularity, recency, most commentary and highest ratings. There is also a category for editors picks. While not all news sources and news stories are represented, Newsy is definitely a place to check because its treatment of the stories offers a unique perspective.

Even cooler is the free Newsy iPhone app, so you can take your news analysis on the go.

If you are a news junkie, or simply a researcher looking for the widespread treatment of a particular story, Newsy is a hard application to overlook.

Hat tip to ResourceShelf.

Buat antunna yang ingin membuka “Kumpulan Situs Akhwat Salafiyyah” silahkan gunakan URL http://tholibah.comze.com , karena URL  http://tholibah.co.cc sekarang sudah tidak bisa dibuka lagi karena direject oleh admin co.cc dengan alasan “tholibah.comze.com is not being used” (?).

Sebenarnya http://tholibah.comze.com ini juga sudah beberapa diperingatkan oleh admin webhosting-nya karena sebuah aggregator menggunakan resource yang besar, maklumlah kami cuma menggunakan webhosting gratisan… jadi sangat terbatas sekali, tapi al-Hamdulillah masih bisa hidup sampai sekarang. Ini juga sebab kenapa tidak semua blog akhwat bisa dimasukkan dalam aggregator.

Tapi RSS-nya tetap bisa dipakai karena webhosting-nya tidak berubah. Ada tiga RSS Feed yang bisa digunakan :

• http://tholibah.comze.com/?feed=rss2
• http://tholibah.comze.com/?feed=atom
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/KumpulanSitusAkhwatSalafiyyah

Demikian sedikit informasi dari kami.

Buat antunna yang ingin membuka “Kumpulan Situs Akhwat Salafiyyah” silahkan gunakan URL http://tholibah.comze.com , karena URL  http://tholibah.co.cc sekarang sudah tidak bisa dibuka lagi karena direject oleh admin co.cc dengan alasan “tholibah.comze.com is not being used” (?).

Sebenarnya http://tholibah.comze.com ini juga sudah beberapa diperingatkan oleh admin webhosting-nya karena sebuah aggregator menggunakan resource yang besar, maklumlah kami cuma menggunakan webhosting gratisan… jadi sangat terbatas sekali, tapi al-Hamdulillah masih bisa hidup sampai sekarang. Ini juga sebab kenapa tidak semua blog akhwat bisa dimasukkan dalam aggregator.

Tapi RSS-nya tetap bisa dipakai karena webhosting-nya tidak berubah. Ada tiga RSS Feed yang bisa digunakan :

• http://tholibah.comze.com/?feed=rss2
• http://tholibah.comze.com/?feed=atom
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/KumpulanSitusAkhwatSalafiyyah

Demikian sedikit informasi dari kami.

Social bookmarking is the easiest way to organize articles you want to read, websites you want to reference later, and videos you want to remember forever.  It’s allows you to view the media you want, when you want.  We could go on and on about what a wonder of organization social bookmarking is, but we’ve already done that (here).

We talked about why you should care about social bookmarking, now it’s time for the how.  Getting setup with social bookmarking is a breeze, and you’ll immediately be amazed at how easy it makes reading, saving, and sharing information.  Here’s a quick guide:

1.  Sign-up

Our social bookmarking platform of choice is delicious (others include Yahoo! Buzz, StumbleUpon, & redditt).  Signing up is easy, simply visit the site, and click on “Join Now!”.  If you have a Yahoo! account, you’ll be ahead of the game, if not, to use delicious, you’ll need to set one up.  Delicious will walk you through setup.  You’ll create a profile.  When creating your profile, think about how you want to be portrayed.  Your bookmarks will be public (unless your specify otherwise), so your username and profile info should fit your business (or personal) purpose.

2.  Add a toolbar or bookmarklet

Bookmarking becomes easy when you just have to press a button and the bookmark is set.  If you install the delicious toolbar (available for  Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and a variety of other browsers) bookmarking will be as simply as point and click, having the toolbar allows you to press the bookmark button on any web page and save that page.  Bookmark anything with the press of one button.  View your bookmarks with the press of another button.  Couldn’t be easier!

3.  Start bookmarking

Get after it.  Find pages you frequent often and bookmark them.  Read news with abandon, bookmark what you can’t read now for later, bookmark what you want to read again, bookmark what gets you riled up, bookmark pages that are valuable resources for your business.  Don’t worry about bookmarking too much, enjoy the freedom and save whatever your heart desires!

4.  Start sharing

Delicious has a built in share feature.  Every time you bookmark a web page delicious gives you the option to send the bookmark to someone else – just add their email address.  No need to print articles for others, no need to copy and paste, no need to save to your computer.  One button to save and share.

Want a little more insight and info on getting setup with social bookmarking?  Check out this quick video explanation from commoncraft:

Social bookmarking is a powerful resource, it can make you a master of organization.  Getting started is easy, and once you’ve figured it out, you won’t be able to picture life without social bookmarks!

There is just so much information on the Internet!  How on earth can you keep up with everything, remember what you like, and make sure reading what’s important?  Have you ever wished there was a way to save, search and share the articles, ideas and web pages you find online? Do you wish you had a better way to organize all the information you read?  There is.

Enter “social bookmarking”.  Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, find, and share online media in one online location.  Social bookmarking allows you to save and organize websites, articles, and videos in one location. Why should you care?

1.  Make any computer your own library.

Social bookmarking saves your bookmarks remotely (not on your computer), making it easy to access all your bookmarks no matter where you are.  It’s won’t matter what computer you’re on computers (work, home, library) or what browser you use (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox) you can access your bookmarks.

2. Save yourself some time, save a tree, save space on your hard drive.

Social bookmarking allows you to become incredibly efficient at finding and organizing online content.  Rather than miss out on articles because you don’t have the time to read or have to write down websites to remember, and instead of printing articles to pass out to others, bookmark them.  Social bookmarking allows you to read what you want when you want, it makes saving websites you want to remember easy as pie, and it allows you electronically share information.  Time is money – social bookmarking can save you a lot of time.

3.  Find what you’re looking for, fast.

Trying to hunt down a particular article or blog post can be daunting if you can’t remember all the details. With social bookmarking, you add tags (keywords or reference words or your choice) when you bookmark. This makes it easy to search your own bookmarks by your own keywords.  This makes finding what you save simple and fast.

4.  Sharing your bookmarks with others.

Whether you need to send an article to a co-worker or want to show your entire sales team a competitor’s website, social bookmarking makes it easy to do both. There is no longer a need to copy and paste the web page’s link into an email, print copies of articles, or save PDF’s to your hard drive.  Simply bookmark and share.

5.  Finding new materials, articles and ideas.

Do you ever wonder where people are finding some of their information, or what your co-workers find interesting online? With social bookmarking you can connect with others (co-workers, friends, etc.) and share what you find as well as view what others are filing away in their bookmarked pages.

By setting up a profile and regularly using a social bookmarking site, you can make you’re your online life and social media work immensely easier. Want to know more?  Check out or step-by-step guide to social bookmarking here.

Want even more info?  Check out the Wikipedia entry on social bookmarking here.

การนำ Feed มาแสดงผลโดยใช้ Module Aggregator

Module Aggregator เป็นการนำ Feed จากผู้ให้บริการเข้ามาแสดงในเว็บของเรา โดยไ้ม่ต้องติดตั้ง หรือ เขียน code เพื่อดึงการแสดงผลแต่อย่างใด เพียงแต่นำ URL ของ Feed มาป้อนใส่ใน Module Aggregator

ก่อนอื่น เราต้องเข้าไปเปิดใช้งาน Module Aggregator กันก่อน เข้าไปที่ Administer > Site building > Modules ทำเครื่องหมายเช็คถูก ที่หน้า Module Aggregator แล้วทำการบันทึก

หลัง จากนั้นทำการกำหนด Permission ให้กับ Module Aggregator ให้เข้าไปที่ Administer > User management > Permissions โดยจะพบว่า Module Aggregator จะมี สิทธิ์ อยู่ 2 ประเภท คือ  access news feeds กับ administer news feeds

access news feeds ก็จะเป็นการกำหนด ว่าใครสามารถเข้าถึงการใช้งาน ได้

administer news feeds หมายถึง ใครสามารถเข้าไปจัดการได้

ผมจะกำหนด ให้ บุคคลทั่วไป (anonymous user) และ สมาชิก (authenticated user) สามารถเข้ามาใช้งานได้ ผมก็ทำการเช็คถูกที่
user ดังกล่าว แล้วทำการบันทึก

จาก นั้น เราก็เข้าไปทำการเพิ่ม หมวดให้กับข่าวโดยเข้าไปที่ Administer > Content Management > Feed Aggregator > Add Category เพิ่มหมวดของข่าวเข้าไปแล้วทำการบันทึก

จาก นั้นเราก็ไปหาข่าวที่จะมาแสดง โดยผมได้เตรียมข่าวมาจาก Sanook.com พอเราได้ข่าวที่จะมาแสดงแล้วก็ทำการ เพิ่มข่าว โดยเข้าไปที่ Administer > Content Management > Feed Aggregator > Add Feed ทำการป้อน ชื่อของข่าว และ ทำการคัดลอง URL ของข่าว ที่่จะมาแสดง ลงไปในช่อง URL เลือกเวลาในการ อัพเดทข้อมุล และ ทำการเช็คถูกที่ด้านหน้าของหมวดของข่าวที่เราได้เพิ่มเข้าไป เสร็จแล้วทำการบันทึก

เมื่อเสร็จแล้วจะพบกับ Item ของ Feed และ Feed Category ดังรูป ทำการคลิ๊กที่ Update Items เพื่อทำการดึงข้อมูลมาแสดง

หลังจากนั้นเข้าไปดูผลงานที่เราได้ทำมา ครับ จะอยู่ใน Feed Aggregator

Wow. It has been a while. I have been really busy lately. Beyond busy actually. Teaching, studying, working as a Community Manager….which brings me to the topic of this post. Brand reputation being built by the consumers.  Advertisers are facilitating these conversations in many cases, but really, it is the consumer who is telling fellow consumers whether or not a product or service is worthy. The on-line community that I have been ‘managing’ is Glade, [the fragrance people], and through a bit of Grassroots facilitating [Facebook, Twitter, Review Blogs etc.], the community is growing, people are talking and word is getting out. 

But there is a surprising entry into the world of word of mouth. A bank.  The UK Bank – First Direct – has created a new website that aggregates live comments about the brand from eight million social media sites.

“Our customers are writing about us all over the web and we want to embrace this, so we’re showing customer comments, good and bad, from websites, blogs and forums for everyone to see,” says Lisa Wood, head of marketing at First Direct.

A brave effort. Not all of the comments are positive. It is still a bank after all. This is the first bit of innovation seen in the banking industry in a very long time. By letting consumers know that they are willing to be transparent, to show the good, the bad and the ugly as told by the consumers, they are building trust in an industry that has lost all trust. 

Research conducted by First Direct, indicated that we now trust online strangers to help us make many of our everyday decisions. Consumers are turning to online review websites and comparison sites rather than listening to sales people. 

Graham Jones, an internet psychologist who specialises in the way people use the internet, explains:  “As we become more open, so our expectations change towards the way we communicate with businesses.  This new age of openness demands an honest and transparent approach and the rules of engagement are changing.  The research clearly showed that one of the major drivers for people sharing their opinions online was a feeling of power, of having a voice both to promote good and lambast bad customer experiences.  Businesses need to understand this and adapt accordingly.” 

And more and more businesses are. They have to if they want to compete in the ‘Age of Openness.’ 

This afternoon I’ve been playing with and testing Flavors.me, which was pointed out to me by designer Simon Ianson.

The service is currently in private beta but once launched aims to help you create “an elegant website using personal content from around the internet”, ie. help you bring a selection of your social media presences under one roof and for it to look nice. The latter I think is the point as much as the former. The company are citing possible uses as:

• personal home pages
• life streaming
• splash and microsites
• celebrity fan pages
• commercial promotion
• brand marketing

From what I understand the service is being built by Jack Zerby, designer director at Vimeo and his partner in crime Jonathan Marcus, but I should emphasise that the project is not affiliated with Vimeo.

Pages on the site aren’t yet public and unfortunately the demo video (also see it here) isn’t shareable, not sure if that’s purposeful, but I can share this video made by someone else who has tested things out:

And here’s a pic of my test, which took me about 30 minutes to put together – but only because I decided to play with the font colours and background design, and was enjoying things a bit too much. In reality you could get something functional up in about 2 minutes and something more to your tastes up in about 5-10 minutes.

During my experimentation I came across a few minor bugs and the team were impressively quick to respond. From Simon’s experience as well, they seem very keen to get the service right, which is fantastic.

What I like is that it’s simple, brings things together, and does what-it-says-on-the-tin as the results generally look good (although some of the pre-selected colour schemes don’t work for all content). I can see how it could be popular as a personal webpage or the starting point for a celebrity fan site, gathering all the pieces of social media presence together.

However, at the moment there are only six social media services that can be added to your Flavor.me site – Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, Tumblr, Facebook and Last.fm. Whilst these do cover a wide variety of possible intents and users, it will be interesting to see how the team balance the design of Flavor.me with the desire of users to have more services included.

Simon also pointed out, and I agree, that being able to add your own domain to the service would add great value to the proposition (although, noted, this does add technical complexity). So instead of the URL http://flavor.me/user/kcorrick it could resolve to kathryncorrick.co.uk (or whatever).

I’m not also not sure that as the service currently stands would be something that could withstand the rigours of brand management and marketing: the fonts – whilst funky – are still fairly limited, and only one image can be uploaded, which for a brand would introduce interesting questions regarding logos (it still always comes down to logos, unfortunately).

But I’m sure there is much to come, given that the service I tried is in beta and de-bug mode put together with the obvious keenness by the team to get things right.

UPDATE 19/10/2009: Jack from Flavors.me has been in touch and responded to some of my queries above. Watch this space.

Conversations on the social web are mostly performed through comments. But comments are so fragmented! Consider this example:

• Publisher  publishes a blogpost
• A regular reader of the Publisher comments on the blogpost
• Someone else reads the post in  Google Reader and shares it
• Another comments and reshares the Google Reader item
• Another decides to share it on Facebook
• Another comments on above  the Facebook link
• Another submits the link on Digg
• Another comments on the Digg link
• Publisher  has a Friendfeed account and the post appears in his FF stream
• Another user comments on the FF stream item
• etc

Obviously the post has stirred some interest and generated a conversation. But the conversation is dispersed in many different places. Publisher looses track of many aspects of the conversation around the post. Commenters also mostly ignore what happens outside their area of interaction with the content: Facebook users ignore the FF commenters etc.

This situation has fired some intense debates. Many publishers think this situation is not  in their best interest as potential traffic to their sites is deflected to an ‘aggregator’. Especially publishers that have a financial interest in their site traffic and do not just want their opinions spread, find this particularly not appealing.

To mend this situation, a group in Google is working on a new protocol that will allow comments to ‘return’ back on the original publisher site. The protocol is called Salmon

Salmon protocol logo

and you can get a basic idea of its workings  from this  presentation.

Salmon does bring back the comments to the publisher site but it does not solve the publishers’ problem.  As you can see from slide 4, once a comment is back to the publisher’s site, it  is republished back to all its subscribers (including the aggregators). What this would mean is that each aggregator has a full picture of the comments around the post, regardless of origin. From the user’s standpoint there is no need to move to the publisher’s site or to another aggregator for any reason, as the  full picture will be available in  whatever site the user prefers to frequent. The publishers may object it, but in what right? The publishers’ protests imply  they OWN the comments which is hardly the case. The user owns his comments.

But let’s leave aside the publisher’s concern for  a moment. Is slamon a good thing for the user? I would argue it is. He can have access to a discussion in its entirety  without much hassle. And therefore he might be tempted to engage or engage more.

But there is something still missing: the user does not have easy access to his own comments for ALL pieces of content he has interacted with. And he has no control either. They can disappear with a site that closes down. Or in the simplest case, the can be deleted by the site moderators. This is the problem that systems like disqus, intense debate and JS-Kit are aiming to solve. But they won’t. Because it is very unlike that one of them will become ubiquitus.

I think the problem should be approached from another angle. A comment is a piece of content. There is no distinction in form from any other piece of content. They are both text (or audio or video in some cases). What subordinates a comment-content to the original post-content is notional and semantic: the post-content preceded the comment-content and actually the post-content was what aroused the commenters interest in the issue. But the same applies to a post that pingbacks to another post. So a comment is a piece of content and should have independence.

The question is how?

The issue is related to our digital identities: if in the web -to-come we can  have a unique independent central point for our digital identities, this central point could be the originator and hoster of our comments.

A modification of the salmon protocol could easily let this happen: whenever a user comments on a publisher site, the site will send the comment back to the users digital identity home. Likewise, whenever an aggregator receives a user comment, the aggregator sends the comment back to the user home, as well as to the publisher.

I do not think this is difficult to implement although I can predict the frictions about who controls the user’s  digital ‘home’. But that’s another issue.

Read also Louis Gray’s post on Salmon

We’ve all got websites we visit over and over. Perhaps you’ve noticed the rss feed button on some of these. If you have sites that you would like to keep up with, try Google Reader.  According to Wikipedia it is “a web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online and offline”.  What does this mean?  Using Google Reader is the equivalent of having an entire newsstand at your finger tips.  Once set up, you subscribe to interesting news sites’ and blog sites’ feeds.  When logged in, all of your subscription feeds are there for you to browse and read without having to go to each individual site.  This is a huge time saver.  Instead of checking in on these sites to see if they have posted anything new, just let your Google Reader tell you when the site has been updated.

• Subscriptions- Subscribing to a site’s feed is easy to do.  You simply hit add subscription or paste in the site’s URL.

• Organization- Managing your feeds is as simple as making folders with the “manage subscriptions” link at the bottom of the page.  You can also delete feed that you become uninterested in.  In case you’re not sure if something is interesting enough to keep, Google reader puts it in black and white for you. At the touch of a button you can see what percentage of updates you actually read on any given site.

• Sharing- You can elect to share or email posts to people who you know share your interest in the subject. For example, you could share this blog with someone and perhaps they too will subscribe to the rss feed and keep up with me on Google Reader. (Forgive the shameless plug.)

• Convenience- Google Reader is available offline and on most mobile phones, so it’s easily accessible under most circumstances.

• Relevant- There is no faster way to keep up with what’s current. 

I like to think of Google Reader as a productivity tool.  It allows me to keep all of my useful and interesting reading material in one place. Perhaps if you’re not already using Google Reader you’d like to give it a try?