However that doesn’t stop twitter working its magic and having seen a request tweeted from Susan (@buzzedition) to help her find an interview of an artist Lou D Philips, (@loudphilips). Heres what Susan said originally.

“Can anyone recall the interview done with @LouDPhillips that showcased his painting? Even Lou himself can’t find it and I want it!”
(http://twitter.com/BuzzEdition/status/22642508295)

What happened Next

I took a few seconds to do a quick search and see if I could find what she wanted and I think I found the wrong Lou D Phillips and I sent her the wrong interview.  That didn’t matter.  The thought was appreciated and it was to my complete surprise that I got tweet a few minutes later from Susan saying:

” #MeetSomeoneNew BTW this is one of the nicest guys you will ever meet on twitter … meet my dear friend —-> @justinparks ”
(http://twitter.com/BuzzEdition/status/22645968081)

That tweet went out to a staggering 64,000 people who follow Buzz Edition and its probably the nicest thing anyone has said to me on twitter.

The little things

This wasn’t expected or asked for and this, I guess, added to the significance of this small but important gesture for me. Its good to remember that its the little things that matter as they can mean big things when given freely.

Thanks Susan, you made my day!

It just takes someone a little creative to think up a smart idea and spend some time presenting it well. Spencerfinnell (@spenncerfinnell on twitter) has done just that with this free WordPress theme that can be used as a quality control or ticket system. Hes purposely kept it light to allow for user customisation and with a nice design and layout it means it can be integrated or branded as required.  It may have some bugs that still need ironed out but Spenncer realises that and is continuing to support it so expect those to be dealt with in due course (if there are any!)

Well done Spencer, great job and nice work.

FaceBooks notification reads:

Profile and Page Roadmap Update

Property prices and house values are one such indicator, and when combined with other metrics, such as unemployment – used to make important decisions. However, one of the primary problems, and challenges facing economists, is the speed at which data is received. Often, the data is out of date by the time it gets into the hands of the people that matter.

Web Development in Property

Thankfully, the web’s is advancing at a speed of knots, bring information delivery ever closer to real time, and products such as Twitter and Facebook, whilst used primarily as a social tool now, are undoubtedly laying the ground work for other real time streams of information.  In addition to their technology, Google have also recently changed internal architecture at the Googleplex, with their ‘Caffeine‘ technology enabling a must faster indexing of the web.

One of their more interesting products that we have a lot of fun playing around with internally, is Google Insight’s for search. This tool allows users to see both past trends of searches that happened previously on Google, and it also offers an analysis of future potential trends. Think of it like a stock market for searches. If there is a peak in the results, for example for searches such as the Winter Olympics, you can pretty much pinpoint an event. i.e The Winter Olympics in Canada happened around February.

Applying this logic to the property market provides pretty interesting results, for example – if we want to drill down into specific searches that happened in particularly countries, we may be able to identify if searches within the property sector are on the up, or still on the way down. Take a look at some of these searches and the associated results.

The following is a graph showing the trend for ‘searches in Northern Ireland’, for property, over the past number of years. It pretty much reflects what happened in the property market – with a serious lack of confidence, the second half of 2007, and after September the 11th. It also shows a gradual increase in volume of searches, indicating consumer confidence if nothing else. Granted, it is no-where near what it was, but a positive incline none the less.

Searches for Property in Northern Ireland.

Another tell tale indicator of the market, would be the number of sale searches, verses rentals across Google. The graph shows a gradual increase in rentals, although sales searches are still greater in number. Searches for ‘house prices’ are indicated by the red line on the graph, and follow closely the pattern for sale searches.

The jobs market should also indicate the general state of the economy. Searches for “belfast jobs” – one of the highest searched terms on the web should reflect the current state of unemployment in the city. According to Google, we are pretty much hitting our peak right about now, and there’s still a number of people looking for work.

Searches for “Belfast jobs”

This is obviously not an exact science, and the tool suffers from the same issues mentioned with house prices- the data is still out of data, but as Google continue to develop this tool, improve the predictive algorithm (perhaps even using some of the data from their finance product) – and integrate it further with the real time web, it will most certainly become an important tool for predicting market swings. Combine that with live data from government departments (supplied direct to Google via a feed?) – with data from products such as Google checkout (number of purchases over time with average price of purchase), with existing organic and PPC data– and Google could have a pretty interesting tool for predicting the economy.

About PropertyPal

Today’s guest blog comes from Paul Anthony, who works as Internet Marketing Manager for Northern Ireland’s largest property website, PropertyPal.com. His role within the company includes managing all search engine optimisation, search engine marketing and social media activity.

PropertyPal.com is Northern Ireland’s number 1 property website, displaying details of more homes for sale and rent than any other website. It has around 95% of all properties for sale and rent, and at any time stocks over 40,000 properties to buy or rent. Including at time of writing approximately 5,000 houses for sale in Belfast, and 1,770 houses for rent in Belfast
It is independently owned and has more properties to rent in Belfast than any other Northern Ireland website since January 2010.
What do you think?  Let us know in the comments.

WordPress GPL

WordPress, developed by Matt Mullenweg has a General Public License (GPL) which means that it is distributed freely to all and as such it has allowed development from 1000′s of people who are part of the user base and community. With 11.4 million users out there hosted on WordPress and an estimated 12 million more on self hosted solutions it has established itself as one of the top platforms to use for a blog or website.

Thesis Theme

The Thesis Theme by Chris Pearson has been developed and sold as a separate entity (164 dollars for an unlimited license) but it is based on the WordPress platform. It has an estimated 27,000 users and is NOT under GPL (apparently it is as of recently but I’m still seeking confirmation on this.)

Chris as a business person is arguing that he isnt beheld to WordPress, the license and is resisting the GPL. Have a listen to the debate, arranged by Andrew Warner in the vid and see how you feel on the two sides to the story.

Personally I think Matt came across as more convincing and with a stronger basis for the “correct” thing to do in this particular situation. What do you think?

Paper.li allows you to sign in with your twitter account and gives you three options to produce a daily newspaper based on the information you want to read. You can:

• Add you name and create a newspaper about you and your social network (like this one: The Justin Parks Daily)
• Add in a #hashtag that you monitor or wish to keep a good eye on and you read about alot.
• Add a Twitter list of specific people you want to read about daily.

*Word of warning, paper.li is still in Alpha testing, you can only do this with 5 different names, lists or #hashtags!  So DON’T waste them!

The end product is split into different sections for Business, Media, Technoloy and such and includes your own tweets in there (if you created a paper on your own twitter account name) and the thing I like about this is definitely the format as its familiar and similar to reading a newspaper.  the newspaper updates everyday andso once you create it then you just have to return to that URL and you can read the updates anew.

It will probably change some more as it moves through the testing stages but as far as I am concerned its already looking good. Nice job!

The final aim = To convert visitors to consumers.

If they do not become consumers then they should be converted to one of three things if possible beginning with the most important.

Primary Goal

• Purchase and item or order

Secondary Goal

• Email subscribers on the blog
• Facebook Fan page members
• Twitter followers

The Company Blog

With the inclusion of the blog we must look at it as the hub of the social media efforts.  It is the content provider that is used to compliment current promotional campaign efforts and as such is the focal point where visitors are sent.

Currently we are discussing sport as the next marketing effort.

To begin with, content about sport should be created in the generic form.  Rules about the sport or competitions and some history of the sport and its development are good areas to cover. Then, content should be aimed towards more up to date news about the current leagues, teams or individuals and their standings and form. Eventually and if possible, interviews are an excellent form of content from players or teams as human interest pieces are the most “sticky” and also it is the easiest content to produce as the players themselves fill in the blanks.

While being exposed to the content then visitors should also be exposed to the opportunity to choose one of the three options listed above AFTER they have been offered the possibility to purchase and item or make an order on the company site.

This is achieved by the placement of text or attractive graphics at the end of content articles linking to the necessary product order pages on the main commerce site. Should this option not bear fruit then the secondary options should be available for consideration at little to no effort for the visitor via floating sidebars or unmistakable icons placed on the page and linking to the relevant profile.

The FaceBook Fan Page

Once this drive of content is in place we must begin the social media effort of talking about sport on the FaceBook Fan Page (not exclusively but enough for it to be a major subject).  This can be achieved by adding in the content form the blog automatically to the Facebook page and asking the current fans if they are involved in a sport or know anyone that is.

Of course, much more of a response is forth coming the more fans the page has, so I would strongly recommend that the mail shot to the current client base be completed at the earliest opportunity in order to establish a base and solid foundation to work on in the FaceBook ecosystem.  Having this available allows more depth and feedback to be gathered and more reaction to different promotions and campaigns assessed quickly and honestly from the user base. Indeed, it can be an excellent way of helping to generate sales as old clients are reminded of the excellent service and quality provided by the company though simple conversation.

In regards the administration of the page one person will responsible for this at the initial stages.  By administration we mean that conversations will be monitored and keep in the realms of decency and on point and of course, members that single themselves out to be particularly abusive or have little or now positive input can be removed.  allow this may sound ominous, due to the members on FaceBook carrying their own names and faces, this rarely happens as it did in the past on anonymous forums whereby users posted on fake or unidentifiable names.

Other FaceBook Groups and Fan Pages.

In conjunction to this the company then need to source and join some sport or sporting related groups and engage these groups in conversation about the sport.  the engagement should not be overbearing or pushy at this stage.  It should be a process of listening, engaging and assessing the groups nature and context by reading the information already available on the wall then asking a series of questions such as:

“How are the team doing this year?”

“Who has the best average score per game?”

“When is the next match?”

“Are any matches local to my area (put the specific area)”

Gradually this may lead onto things about the team and its events commenting on the team strip and mentioning how the company have supplied other sports teams and showing the results of this service via photos or links to the product itself on the company website or blog.

This whole process can take seconds and be done in a single burst if the group and users are active or it can happen over several days as comments and replays are made and the company react to them. Several groups can be run at once of course and by several it can be two or hundreds depending on time and resource and if those groups are exist.

The group sourcing aspect can be facilitated by searching or asking your direct network for advice but the actually conversational process must be completed and maintained by the company are it is the company that are most familiar with the product, service and price.

Beginning with Twitter

At this early stage twitter must be considered a fall back option.  It is an excellent tool for networking and locating individuals to connect with so it should be available and maintained to some extent at this stage in order to gather and increase its natural follower count.

The account can be maintained via the blog as the content created there, much like Facebook, can be automatically feed into the Twitter profile updating the status and increasing the visible content.  Twitter should be monitored on occasion for information requests (all of this will arrive via email regardless) until such times as the the company account can be run effectively and in a more hands on manner.

No big deal really but a nice touch that allows the more creative types out there to make the sidebar much more interesting with a well placed graphic or indeed to simply let more of the background show through.

I tested this out and here is how you can do it to:

Step One – Login to twitter and head to the Design section on to this link http://twitter.com/settings/design

Step Two – Copy the code below:

javascript:d=document;c=d.createElement('script');d.body.appendChild(c);c.src='http%3A%2F%2Fwww.justinparks.com%2Ftwitter%2Ftwitter-sidebar.js';void(0);

Step Three – Go to the address bar on your browser (where it says http://twitter.com/settings/design) and select the URL. Copy over it with the code from above. Just like this.

Now hit Enter/line break/return to make the change take effect.

Step Four – You should see this message appear if its all went well:

Final Step – Hit the save button at the bottom of the Design page and your done!

And you can see that the sidebar is now transparent:

Now what if you want to change back to a normal sidebar with a coloured background. No probs. Just login into the design page again and select “Change Design Styles” and hit save and your all sorted.

Nothing major, just thought you might like this little touch!