URBaCS blog

Links for the week: Small Business Tools We Use

Jayson Manship — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:12:07 +0000

Batchbook - Over the last three years we’ve shifted Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications three times, and we finally found one that sticks. We loved Salesforce, but it was difficult to write the check every year for our Team license. We tried using Sugar CRM, but found it’s open-source nature too slow and clunky. We love Batchbook because it is simple, quick and does everything we need it do to.
GetClicky - Although we still use Google Analytics, we prefer Clicky. We love the reporting features of GetClicky (especially the spy component that let’s us track users navigate the site in real-time).
Gimp - The only desktop application in the group. We’ve been using the Gimp for years to edit photos and create buttons, banners and templates. Simple and intuitive for a novice Photoshop user. But it’s free.
Mailchimp - Their API makes it easier than ever to create e-newsletter mailing lists. Add a simple sign-up form and create campaigns using their What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor. Creating graphic HTML emails is like making a flyer in Word. Simple and easy. Mailchimp also has a great Wordpress Plug-in to easily integrate sign-up forms into any Wordpress blog.
DimDim - We have tested and tried just about every online presentation tool. We loved Yugma but outgrew the free version, so we searched and found DimDim. DimDim is a free webinar tool that lets users schedule meetings and host video conferences online.

SugarCRM Releases 5.5 Beta With More Mobile CRM Tools (centernetworks.com)
SugarCRM Launches Sugar Express, Online Hosted CRM (ostatic.com)
How To Choose a CRM (frontofficebox.com)
Prospect/Contact Management for Real Estate (functionaltech.com)

Links for the week: Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Brogan

Jayson Manship — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:03:44 +0000

Seth Godin - Marketing advice from PCBC - Video Post - Mike Lyon from DoYouConvert.com interviews Seth Godin at the 2009 Pacific Coast Builder’s Conference. Excellent advice for an industry that has lost it’s way.
Relating Gladwellian Concepts To Local Search - Neg Norton, President of the Yellow Pages Association, discusses Malcolm Gladwell’s take on the Yellow Pages market. He briefly discusses how the Yellow Pages fit into the fold of Gladwell’s three books: The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. We think that Local Search still has lots of room for growth.
Tune Up Your Personal Message - Chris Brogan provides some great points about how to become a better public speaker. We’ll get to test his speaking skills as he was just announced as a presenter at Blog Indiana 2009. Chris does a great job of sharing links.
An Essential Marketing Principle: Give Before You Try to Get - The title of article says it all. Dosh Dosh discusses a human shortcoming that Dale Carnegie pointed out 80 some years ago.
Whuffie Math - Tara Hunt from HorsePigCow.com talks about the logic behind getting her book in front of bloggers. She shows the difference in logic between herself and her publisher, Crown Business, about launching her new book, The Whuffie Factor.

Malcolm Gladwell: “Re-Framing” the Yellow Pages Industry (blogs.praized.com)
Give ‘em something for nothing and make your fortune (guardian.co.uk)

URBaCS will design online application for the Big Ten Conference

Jayson Manship — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:25:31 +0000

URBaCS has been chosen to develop a custom web application for the Big Ten Conference in conjunction with an annual Career Expo housed in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Indianapolis will host the Men’s Big Ten Basketball Tournament in Conseco Fieldhouse prior to the March Madness tournament through 2012.

As an incentive to bring the tournament to Indianapolis the city agreed to host a Career Expo that coincides with the event. The Indiana Sports Corporation is the palnning body for the event and has selected URBaCS as the vendor to provide a Software as a Service web application for the Career Expo.

We will be developing an interface for employers and sponsors to register online and provide information about their companies. We will also be creating a student registration system that students can use to upload their resumes and interact with companies prior to the event.

More information will be available at BigTenCareerExpo.com as March approaches. Employers will be able to register on July 1st and students will be able to register on September 1st.

We’re eager to work with great organizations like the Big 10 and the Indiana Sports Corporation.

List of Homebuilder Websites - Las Vegas

Jayson Manship — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:03:30 +0000

Here is a list of homebuilder’s that we found in Las Vegas with websites. If you know of a homebuilder in Las Vegas that isn’t profiled here please leave their URL in the comment section below so they can be added.

See all other cities in our Builder Lists from the across the United States or suggest a homebuilder that we may have missed.

Links for the week: Lots of SEO & Realtor Facebook Status

Jayson Manship — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:17:23 +0000

ROI for Social Media - Paul Dunay of Buzz Marketing for Technology talks about how marketers have forgotten how to measure return on investment. Dell has proven that ROI calculations for social media can be simple and effective.
How to be happy in business - a venn diagram that tells the whole story.
Social Engagement Spectrum - David Armano outlines how different marketing mediums engage people. Traditional marketing doesn’t work like it used to because people want to engage with brands not be forced into them.
Agents: Make your Facebook status work for you - Great content from the Trulia Blog explaining how Realtors can use Facebook to generate leads and sell more homes.
Social Bookmarking and Directory Submission Services - Looking to get lots of incoming links without spending hours and hours making it happen. Socialmarking.com now has a solution to build page rankings on the cheap.

Homebuilder Photo Galleries - Examples (5 of 5)

Jayson Manship — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:49:14 +0000

This is the last post in a five post series about homebuilder online photo galleries. So far we’ve discussed the importance of online photo galleries, ways to build a good photo gallery, some simple ways to search optimize your photos so they can be found, and we have taken you outside your comfort zone by encouraging you to post more pictures than you may be comfortable putting online. In this post we’d like to show you a few good examples of builder photo galleries from around the web.

The majority of your customers will visit your website before they visit your model home. More and more of your customers are engaging in social media every day. And more of these users are taking and uploading photos (more than 1 billion are uploaded every month between Flickr and Facebook alone).

What does it all mean?

It means that we need to take advantage of every opportunity available to us to get our message in front of the buying public. A well optimized photo gallery is one of the most cost effective ways to make sure that potential buyers not only find you but are positively influenced by what they see. And once you make that positive first impression please make it easy for them to tell their friends about you.

We took a look at hundreds of home builder photo galleries. There are some good, bad, and ugly ones out there. Here are three that are worth noting.

Good
Washington based, American Classic Homes, does a really good job of including pictures of their homes on their website. A link to their gallery is right in the middle of their homepage so it’s easy to find. From there you’ll find over a hundred thumbnails categorized by floorplan. Once a picture is clicked a slide show opens up where viewers can navigate from picture to picture and from home to home. The pictures have labels so they can be identified by search engines. That said, the html code behind the photo gallery could use some work. Without getting into too much technical jargon the slideshow is built using Javascript. The pictures automatically advance, but the text below the images doesn’t. Overall, American Classic Homes has built a good photo gallery.

Better
Jeff Click Homes of Edmond, Oklahoma kicks their photo gallery up a notch. From their Media Page you can choose to look at homes from a number of different categories. Showcase Homes, Completed and Available, Under construction and Available, Organized by Community, and Organized by Plan. Click on any of the categories and dozens of pictures can be viewed. Links to the floorplan and community are available. Pictures are viewed in an easy to navigate forward and back slideshow. The photos are all hosted on Flickr so they are labeled and tagged and are easily found by search engines. Click on any photo and you will be taken to the Jeff Click Flickr page. The only downside is that visitors have now left the builder’s website and may become distracted by looking at other photos on Flickr. Jeff Click Homes is one of the most new-media savvy builders we have come across. They are active social networkers and have built a great online presence to sell homes.

Best
Carmel, Indiana based Estridge Companies uses URBaCS Referral Builder to share photos of their homes online. MyEstridgeHome.com incorporates labels, tags and descriptions for all photos to allow users to browse and search by category or keyword. Photos can be viewed as thumbnails or in full screen as a slide show. Links to floorplans and communities are attached to every picture. The Estridge site is designed to be viral. Photos can easily be sent to friends or posted on social network websites like Digg or Del.icio.us.

The tools are all out there. Most of them are free (or close to free) and do not require special equipment or training to use. Its a tough market out there. Now is the time to stand out from the crowd and get noticed. A good search optimized photo gallery is one great way to do just that.

The Power Of Social Media (slideshare.net)
5 Essential Steps to Make Your Site Search & Social Media Friendly (mashable.com)
Managing Social Media (slideshare.net)
Fresh Social Media Marketing (slideshare.net)

Homebuilder Photo Galleries - How Many Pictures? (4 of 5)

Jayson Manship — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:00:57 +0000

In this blog series we’ve outlined the growing importance of online photo galleries, how to build a good photo gallery, and some ways to get your pictures online using free photo sharing tools. In this post, we’d like to explain why you should upload more photos than you’re probably comfortable sharing.

Notice: This article may conflict with traditional “Marketing Director” wisdom. Don’t blame them.

Go to any homebuilder photo gallery. My guess is you’ll find between 8 and 30 photos. Total. The average new home requires tens of thousands of raw materials and takes more than six months to construct. And the best a builder can post is 20 some pictures. Dumbfounding.

Why?

Most builders that we talk with are worried about controlling their brand. They want to make sure that every photo showcases their company in a positive light. We don’t disagree, but if you only have 20 photos that glorify your company or the homes you build…it might be time to reconsider your profession.

We don’t see cost as an issue either. Digital photography is cheap. A great point-and-shoot digital camera is less than $130. You’ve got superintendents, salespeople and office personnel spending time on the build sites during and after construction. How difficult is it to have them snap photos when they’re on-site and simply post the “good ones” in an online album? You don’t need to hire a professional photographer or pay graphic designers to doctor up your images. Just post them.

How many photos should you post?

The truth is you should be posting as many photos as you can in as many places as you can. Nearly 80% of homebuyers will visit your website before they visit your model home and before that they must first find your website. Help prospective buyers find you by putting as much good content as you can online.

Post hundreds or thousands of pictures
Post pictures of your homes under construction, not just the money shots
Post pictures of your happy homeowners (with their permission)
Post pictures of Realtor lunches or Builder’s Association meetings
Post pictures of your design center
Post pictures of your neighborhood amenities
Label and tag them all
Use different keywords: (manufacturers, company names, neighborhoods, nearby amenities, employee names, floor plans)
Don’t be afraid to misspell. Many potential buyers are bad spellers. Include misspellings of your communities, floorplans & company name.
Pair your keywords with descriptive adjectives (stylish, cool, designer, bright, odd colors like “mother of pearl” or “mimosa”)

Tomorrow we’ll show you some great examples of homebuilders that truly understand the value of online photo galleries.

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On-page Search Engine Optimization Tips (themarketingprofessional.com)
Search Engine Optimization Strategy: Grab Market Share. (60 Day Challenge Lesson) (ronmedlin.com)
Take Great Panoramic Pictures with Any Camera (lifehacker.com)
Brand Perfection is Dead (marketingtechblog.com)

Homebuilder Photo Galleries - Where to Post Photos (3 of 5)

Jayson Manship — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:01:44 +0000

In the first article in this blog series we outlined the growing importance of photos to the online world. In the second post we showed you how to build a photo gallery that helps generate search traffic and spread your message virally. With today’s message we’d like to help you get your photos online using some great free services.

There are literally thousands of online photo sharing websites on the net. We only talk about two in this post, Flickr and Facebook. You can post photos on MySpace, PhotoBucket, Picasa and others, but we believe that Flickr is the single best website for photo sharing and Facebook is the best social networking tool that integrates photo sharing.

Flickr helps you share your photos with the world. Basic accounts are free and you can upload 100MB of photos each month. Flickr (owned by Yahoo) has made uploading, labelling and tagging as simple as possible. As we discussed in the previous post this is vital to helping your photos increase your search traffic.

Advanced functions - Flickr has basic photo editting capabilities built in so you can crop, add text, etc. You can map your photos in Flickr to attach a physical location with your shots. Organization is simple. You can create albums for each neighborhood or each home you build. You have complete control over your privacy settings. You can share some photos and hide others.

To get started using Flickr go ahead and sign up. If you need some more coaxing, take a quick tour.

Here are some builders that are using Flickr well: Campbell Homes, Lennar Orlando, Stylecraft Builders, MD Custom Homes

Facebook has become the go-to business networking tool over the last year or so. Custom homebuilders are finding ways to engage with prospective buyers and national builders are using Facebook to build tribes around their brand. More photos are uploaded everyday to Facebook than any other website, so it’s safe to say that Facebook would be a great place to put photos of your homes and neighborhoods. If you don’t have a Facebook Page for your company, get one. The team at Facebook has included some simple tutorials to help you along the way.

Once you’ve got a Facebook Fan Page for your company, you can start uploading photos. Again, start by creating albums for your neighborhoods or floorplans. Uploading is simple. Make sure to include keywords in your titles and descriptions to help people find you.

Here are some builders that are using Facebook well: Jeff Click Homes, Lennar, Bowen Family Homes, Hubbell Homes

If you’d like a little more control of your photo albums another option is to build a photo gallery inside of a blog. This is much simpler than you may think. Blogging sites like Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad make it easy to get started with a blog in a matter of minutes. We exclusively use Wordpress because it has tons of third-party plugins and is really simple to use. Wordpress is search engine optimized so you only have to focus on posting content, and there are dozens of photo gallery plug-ins that you can use to build a photo gallery in minutes. Here is a tutorial with step-by-step instructions to set up your own Wordpress photo gallery using the NextGEN plug-in.

We’d love to hear any other ways you’ve found to get photos of your homes out to prospective buyers. Any thoughts?

Tomorrow, we’ll be giving some advice about what photos to post and how to label and tag them.

Picli, a Hybrid of Digg and Flickr, Returns with a Redesign (mashable.com)
Photobucket Now Makes Sharing Easier (readwriteweb.com)
Tweeting Picnik Photos Now Simple with Twitgoo (readwriteweb.com)
Kodak and the free photo storage trap (dailyfinance.com)

List of Homebuilder Websites - Seattle

Jayson Manship — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:02:21 +0000

Here is a list of homebuilder’s that we found in Seattle with websites. If you know of a homebuilder in Seattle that isn’t profiled here please leave their URL in the comment section below so they can be added.

See all other cities in our Builder Lists from the across the United States or suggest a homebuilder that we may have missed.

Homebuilder Photo Galleries - The Right Way (2 of 5)

Jayson Manship — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:56:40 +0000

In the first article in our Homebuilder Photo Galleries blog series we showcased the explosion of online photos. In this post we’d like to outline how your photos should appear online. We’ll be outlining best and worst practices that we’ve seen from homebuilders.

Most builders already have a series of photos embedded on their website. We don’t need to tell you how important it is to have photos of your homes for prospective buyers to see. In a later post we’ll tell you how many photos you should have and what types of things should be included in your online photo gallery.

95% of new home builder photo galleries are absolute garbage. Some aren’t easy to find, some are cloaked in bad HTML or built into Flash videos and some are void of any descriptions or tags which make them completely worthless to search engines.

What a Homebuilder Photo Gallery Should Be
First and foremost a photo gallery should be easy to find. A direct link should be present on your homepage (no matter if you build 1 or 20,000 homes a year). A compelling photo gallery should be search optimized and have tons of pictures for prospective buyers to look at. It should load quickly and should give visitors the ability to flip back and forth between photos easily. Every photo should include a title and brief description, and the words used for both should be keyword focused. Search engines can’t tell what the photo is unless you tell them, so make sure to label every photo with words that will help prospective homebuyers find you.

Many photo sharing websites will break pictures into albums. This is a great way to separate your photos by floorplan, community or even home. Many times users will have narrowed their search to a specific floorplan or home type so why not make it easy for them to find their home? Some photo gallery applications will allow you to tag each photo with any relevant descriptive keywords to help users find the photo. This is also very valuable for search engines because Google, Yahoo and Bing will index your site and relate the tags to the photos.

To make your photos viral you need to make it easy for consumers to share their favorite photos with friends and family. They should be able to email every photo to a friend. They should also be able to post the photo easily via Twitter, Facebook, Digg and other social bookmarking sites. This creates new opportunities for non traditional prospects to see your homes. We’ve seen prospective home buyers post photos on their Facebook pages encouraging their friends to comment. This may lead to additional sales opportunities for you.

What a Homebuilder Photo Gallery Should Not Be
Too many times we see a custom homebuilder photo gallery that is a series of tiny thumbnails that when clicked open the actual JPG file in a new window. We realize that homebuilders aren’t web development gurus, but nowadays this is inexcusable. There are tons of free photo sharing applications that are simple to use.

The flip side is overproduction. Many builders that have invested small fortunes in flashy web design are also missing the boat on photo galleries. If your company’s photo gallery is built in Adobe Flash you’re probably missing out on tons of search traffic. Without getting too technical the search engines are incapable of reading the content inside of Flash videos. This makes it very difficult to get any value from organic online searches, even if the photos are labeled inside the video.

Your photo gallery should be easy for customers to use and share. And you should do everything you can to help search engines index your gallery to drive organic traffic to your website. In tomorrow’s article we’ll talk about some free photo sharing applications from around the web.