Started searching earlier today for a plugin that would display tweets about 4realz articles as comments and found a plugin, BackType Connect, that does all that and some…
For example, here’s how a tweet that Linsey made about this post looks:
Sweet!
Love a good SWOT analysis and just came across one that Jeremiah Owyang published last month that looks at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats of these four social networks: Google Buzz, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
I find it most interesting that he would even include MySpace in the equation seeing as how they just don’t seem to offer much these days… and definitely seem to be becoming more irrelevant by the day.
With a month’s perspective behind us, I also find it interesting how he puts Google Buzz at the same level as Facebook and Twitter. It seems to me that Google Buzz is quickly going the way of Google Wave… Interesting technology that will definitely be used heavily in a few niches, but it’s not likely to change the way the majority of people interact online.
Interesting that Seesmic just launched a contact manager (as part of their web app)… The MG Siegler at TechCrunch seems to think they’ve perfected management of Twitter followers, but it’s still missing my favorite feature of Gist: the ability to view updates sorted by how important I’ve ranked people. Nonetheless, it is encouraging to see Seesmic going down the route of improving the sad state of contact management within Twitter.
Lately, I’ve been putting a huge focus on thinking through how we (as professionals) can use social networking tools to build and strengthen our relationships... and in particular, our relationships with people who are key to growing our business (i.e. our “sphere” or “referral network”).
And this has led me to my new favorite tool, Gist. (much thanks to Gahlord Dewald for the intro!)
The main idea behind Gist is pretty similar to other social media aggregators like MyBlogLog, FriendFeed , Seesmic and Google Buzz in that you add all of your other social media accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc) and then use one tool to see all your updates.
However, there’s one HUGE improvement they’ve made. Rather than forcing you to view updates based on a timeline (i.e. most recent updates first), they allow you to view updates in a “people” mode where you can view all the updates from that person (whether they are on Facebook, Twitter, their blog, foursquare, etc.) based on the importance that you’ve selected. (Facebook has tried to do this with their “top news” feature, but it’s crude at best and doesn’t do a great job finding updates that are important to me).
After a few days of using Gist, I can tell you that there’s no turning back to this style of update consumption. If I’ve got 5 minutes, then I can quickly navigate all the people that are super-important to me, whereas if I have a bit more time, then I can dive deeper into reading updates from people that are less important. And because I’m not missing out on updates from super-important people any more, I’m finding I’m MUCH more active on places like Twitter and Facebook because I spend less time sorting through the noise.
However, there is a HUGE problem with the tool. There are so many options and ways to configure things that it could definitely be off-putting because it can take a few hours of configuring before the system is humming. Nonetheless, it’s totally worth taking the time, so let me walk you through the steps to setting up a configuration that’s working really well for me.
1) Import contacts (connect) from four main tools: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Email. For Facebook, Twitter and Gmail (my email), this only needs to be done once and then will get updated automatically afterwards.
2) Configure your dashboard view to get updates. My configuration is listed below, but the important parts are:
In other words, just show EVERYTHING and then sort the results by importance.
3) Start prioritizing people within your sphere. All you need to do is go through your people and start ranking them on a scale of 1 to 100. Initially, I’ve been adjusting EVERYONE’s priority, even if only just a bit to make sure I put some thought into how important this person is to me. To make this as easy as possible, I’ve been basing my ranking of each person based on one simple question: How likely is this person to send me business some day?
Here’s a screenshot of my page where I’ve ranked Scotty Brown a 100 (out of 100!).
Using the criteria “how likely is this person to send me business some day?” might sound a bit cold and calculated, but I’ve found it works quite well. The people close to me (family and good friends) are almost always referring business my way, so they show up highest. Other people have been ridiculously great to my consulting practice in terms of referring business my ways, so of course I want to see and respond to their updates whenever appropriate.
4) Use Gist instead of Facebook, twitter.com, seesmic, tweetdeck or whatever else you use to check status updates of your contacts. If you configure things just as I have, you’ll find that there are a ton of updates coming into the system all the time… almost definitely too many to check on a regular basis. However, there’s no need to read all the updates. Start at the top (i.e. the most important people) and wind your way down as you have time.
To move from one person to the next (and this is critical!), all you have to do is click on the check mark to the right of the “importance” bar (this is the “mark all as read” option). For example, while I’m reading Linsey Planeta’s updates, if I click on the check mark, the tool will bring up Scotty Brown’s updates because he is the next most important person with an unread update.
And, of course, if I want to respond to any of these updates, there’s always a link that takes me to the appropriate place to respond.
Another useful feature is the “remove” button to the right of the check mark. This will remove this person’s updates from showing up on your dashboard. If you find a person or company that you never want to see updates from, simply hit the remove button. In order to make the tool as useful as possible, I’ve adjusted just about all of my contacts by either revising their “importance” or “removing” them.
5) The hardest part of using gist is configuring the importance for all your contacts and this is only hard because it takes a decent amount of time. However, if you ignore tags and all the bells and whistles besides “importance”, it doesn’t have to take all that long before you can start using the dashboard and getting some decent value from the tool. At least a few times you’ll almost definitely want to give yourself an hour or two in order to filter through updates from everyone on your list. Gist tries to auto-prioritize folks for you, but tons of folks from Facebook and Twitter who might be super important to you will likely be have the default importance levels of “50,” “25″ or “1″.
The beautiful part of the tool is that once it’s configured, you end up with so much more control over which updates you see.
Here are just some of the most obvious benefits to this style of consuming updates:
Finally, Gist is still in “beta” and there are a few bugs (and they mention they will likely start charging some day). However, even if they start charging some outrageous amount, or go under for lack of funding, I can tell you that this approach of filtering people based on the importance you place on them is here to stay. It’s just too darn useful!
RT @4realz: “How likely is this person to send me business?” http://su.pr/2Da4WK **running over to Gist now!
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @ines: RT @4realz: “How likely is this person to send me business?” http://su.pr/2Da4WK **running over to Gist now!
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
@tyr great post about @gist. I’m loving the possibilities and I think it’s worth the time investment. http://bit.ly/aanc2l
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Dustin – after reading your prior post “Screw consumers” I downloaded Gist, uploaded contacts from my gmail and facebook accounts, and immediately ran into the difficulties you described. Thanks for the great post on how to work through Gist. I totally agree with you about the unique person centric point of view that it provides as compared to what network or medium they are using to communicate. Thanks again!
Gist is a new AM aggregator that allows you to follow updates by person. Excellent quickstart post from my VF @tyr – http://ow.ly/1c9ur
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Gist is a new SM aggregator that allows you to follow updates by person. Excellent quickstart post from my VF @tyr – http://ow.ly/1c9ur
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Been a ridiculously great morning at the HomeQuest Social Media Summit in Portland.
We had a packed house… Great audience. Wonderful crowd. Engaging speakers. So much fun!
And the speakers were unbeatable. There’s always so much to learn from:
And if you were at the event, we’d love your feedback… What did you think? How could we improve the event/presentations?
[Photo from Dale Chumbley!]
Great audience!
I’m totally missing the buzz…
I’ve been playing with Google Buzz for a few days now and I know I must be missing something *big* because the ONLY thing I’ve found interesting about it so far is that by connecting with a bunch more people on the google platform, I now get more articles showing up in my Google Reader.
Others talk about how it is vindication that email is the social network, but I’m finding my experience much closer to Fred’s that we can’t assume implicit and explicit social networks are one-and-the-same.
The whole service feels really kludgy and doesn’t pass the would-my-family-use-this-tool test… and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t use it to share personal stories, organize events, upload photos, etc, like they do now. My gut tells me it has potential to be a popular tool among the tech-crowd along the lines of twitter thanks to slick mobile integration, geolocation features, etc., but it’s missing way too many of Facebook’s “connecting” features like photos sharing/tagging, video sharing/tagging, groups, etc., for it to really be a mass-appeal social network.
However, with that said, David Gibbons obviously has a different take. He tweets:
“@tyr a) not a walled garden b) nothing cutsie about it c) smart conversation notification d) local integration is AWESOME #whyBUZZisbetter”
and
“@tyr it’s far from perfect but they’re iterating at light speed & what really matters is the (sociological) foundation which kicks fb’s butt”
so I’m worried I must be missing something big. Help me out.
How is Google Buzz going to challenge Facebook in any meaningful way?
UPDATE 1
Appropriate to the topic, there has been a decent conversation about this topic on a google buzz thread.
UPDATE 2
Robert Scoble sums up my thoughts well: Why did Google copy FriendFeed’s worst features?
Two of the slickest aspects of using the P2 theme are 1) it gives me the option to write simple posts directly from the homepage (twitter-style) and 2) it updates comments and posts without any need to “reload” the page. To give you an idea of how cool this is, while I was writing my last post, two new comments were being left on the previous post and I got to see the comments in real time as they were being made… It’s pretty slick technology for a wordpress blog… and I’m totally lov’n it!
Kevin Rose has a good rant on why Google needs Buzz…
In a nutshell, his premise is that google knows they missed the boat on real-time search and is going to do what it takes to get this one right…
Looks like Twitter is catching on with the younger crowd….
I spent the evening playing with this site… and I’m finally at a spot where I feel like I can take a break. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for the night. 
The inspiration for changing things up was pretty simple. I really wanted to play with the power of the P2 theme in terms of real-time updates. In order to really take advantage of the way this theme treats comments, I’m positive I’ll also need to start blogging a bit more, which is a darn good incentive…
I also had some specific functionality I wanted with my P2 install… I wanted a WP plugin that 1) authenticates using either Twitter or FB & 2) allows sending of comments to either Twitter or FB.
My main problem is that the few plugins that could do such a thing (like IntenseDebate) came with their own set of baggage or simply didn’t work within the P2 theme (which I’m extremely fond of playing with!)
The end result was that I installed two plugins that appear to play “well enough” together. The first was Twit Connect and the second was Sociable’s Facebook Connect Plugin.
This way, users *can* use either service to “login” before leaving a comment (as well as no service at all!). And while I never could get the “send to twitter” option from Twit Connect working, you’all will be able to send your comments to Facebook should you choose to.
Anyway, there’s lots more I could talk about… including why I’m so fond of the P2 theme… but I’m going to leave this post somewhat simple… and leave my P2 thoughts until I’ve played around a bit more. If you have any thoughts on the changes (or just want to see how the comments update on-screen in real-time), feel free to leave a comment!
Bold choice of themes Dustin. It has a very Twitterish feel about it. I wonder if 2010 will feel more like this as opposed to 2009 which surely was the year of Thesis.
Ridiculously great observation Geordie… and I agree that 2009 was the year of Thesis in terms of themes. Personally, I don’t think it’s gonna change much this year, but I’m tired of the huge SEO focus on themes… and think it’s doing more of a disservice to people these days. Most agents, you being one of the obvious exceptions, just aren’t skilled at web analytics and internet prospecting, so when they try to implement blogging strategies that are about google rankings, they set them selves up to fail.
The flip side is that the vast majority of successful agents are ridiculously great networkers. Get them in a conversation with a group of people, and they’ll find a client or a referral just about every time. I actually think my skills lean that way as well, so I’m hoping to use this platform more for conversations going forward.
One final thought… When I launched 4realz.net back in 2006, it was ALL about micro-posts (I wasn’t even adding titles to posts!), so this is really my attempt at returning to blogging basics.
I’ve toyed with ideas for P2 for some time now. I think it could be valuable for a small brokerage like mine to get a true pulse of what the entire organization is doing. But I’ve always viewed it as a backoffice resource and a bit confusing for public facing as many consumers would be lost in the flow of conversations. I’m glad you’re testing for me 
Agreed abou the “pulse” nature of P2… and almost all of the implementations that get talked about are back-office in nature. Along those lines, I’m happy to be testing for you! And at least from my perspective: so far, so good!
Just coming back to let you know that P2 may get you removed from Google Reader. It’s just too overwhelming via RSS. But I’ll ride it out a few more days for the spectacle
Hey… that wouldn’t be any good. Can pretty much promise that the rate of updates over the past few days is definitely not sustainable. Just been playing a lot lately and I’m positive things will slow down soon!
IwillnothijackthispostIwillnothijackthispostIwillnothijackthispostIwillnothijackthispost…
However, your comment about most agents needing a “social” web strategy vs a “search” web strategy (to paraphrase) made me think.
I think that the reason agents set themselves up to fail with a “search” strategy is the same reason their business doesn’t take off in general. They have no niche and no brand. Most agents sell anywhere and to anyone.
No one is an expert in “Washington State Real Estate” or even “Seattle Real Estate”. If you want to compete for these terms you better be prepared to stay up late at night and have a big checkbook. But the point is you shouldn’t.
Focus instead on condos in Ballard or Tacoma Craftsman or Houseboats or Mercer Island retirees.
I look in my own office and ask myself… what is John’s brand? What does Mary specialize in? The few REO experts stand out, but the for the most part they are all generalists fighting for a peice of the same pie.
I guess if you don’t have a business plan or strategy (or maybe you just have a huge list of past customers) the social strategy is best. I just wouldn’t recommend it for longterm success or growth.
I definitely see where you’re going, but it’s not only the failing agents that don’t generate business from analytics/SEO-style blogging. The vast majority of agents I meet that have a decent business don’t necessarily feel like they have the skills to pull off the niche search strategy you describe.
Seeing as how you were one of the first real estate bloggers around, I feel like it’s safe to say that many of the technology skills come natural to you, so you may be overlooking just how much there is to learn. But between using the blogging tools, figuring out what to write, setting the time aside to write the content, learning how to promote the content, using the analytics tools to iterate/improve content creation, and figuring out how to optimize your traffic purchases, there really is a lot there. My guess is that it took you all of a few hours to get “good enough” at these various skills and start seeing results, but I can guarantee that’s not the case with most professionals (both inside and outside the real estate space).
Here’s a funny tidbit. Guess what I did before I was a blogging real estate agent. Tech? Marketing? Nope.
I was a backcountry ranger with the National Park Service. I lived in a tent all summer and most of my technology experience was with a solar powered battery charger.
Love it Geordie! Obviously, the technology parts just aren’t that hard… My experience is that most folks simply don’t give themselves enough time to play… And play is so darn important because almost no successful marketing strategy works the way it is initially envisioned. You’ve got to play a bit, iterate and improve things.
I think that most people are just a bit too scared to break things… and while breaking a website or tool is no fun, it’s hard to do too much damage to most online tools/websites!
ridiculously great observation by @geordieromer on my latest theme change http://su.pr/ASwpkZ
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retechulous 2:12 pm on March 18, 2010 Permalink |
Shared from GReader: Started searching earlier today for a pl…: Started searching earlier today for a plugin that … http://bit.ly/aZGG71
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