SMCRVA: What I Love about Social Media

Posted: June 12th, 2009 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment

This post is a delayed reaction to the June meeting of the Social Media Club of Richmond, Virginia. This was the second meeting of the club and the first full “regular” meeting. It was held on Tuesday, June 9 at the Science Museum of Virginia and was attended by perhaps 125 nearly 250 of the biggest social media enthusiasts in Central Virginia. The picture below was taken at the height of the revelry. Click it for a larger version.

The thing that I’m loving about this club is that it isn’t owned by one industry or group. Unlike the Public Relations Society of America or the Ad Club, it’s not populated by one type of person. While there are, of course, many in the club who are part of the marketing industry, the Social Media Club is incredibly … almost frighteningly … diverse. During the course of this week’s meeting I talked with traditional journalists, new media journalists, a real estate agent, a department store employee, a barista, and even the owner of a store that sells scooters.

Obviously, this is an all-inclusive club. No one owns social media, and that’s very exciting. All that’s required to start a blog is a desire to write. All you need to start a Facebook or Twitter account is an email address. All that’s required to start a podcast or video blog is some equipment and the desire to broadcast.

While it can be said that it much more is required with all of the above activities if you want to be successful, the word “success” is a relative term. For some, it means “rich” or at least “self-sustaining”. It can also mean “proud of my work” or “having fun”. For others, it means using quotation marks less than five times in the same paragraph. The fact is, there are as many reasons for taking the time to engage in social media as there are types of people engaging in it, and that’s a wonderful thing. I’m a little tired of homogeny.

Congrats to the Social Media Club and particularly its hard-working organizers on the early success of the endeavor. May the club long stand as a group that can be joined by anyone with a Twitter handle. If you’re interested in coming to the next meeting, please check out the SMCRVA Wiki and join the SMCRVA Facebook Group for more information. You can also join in the fun chats among group members on Twitter by searching the hashtag #SMCRVA.

First Time Home Buyers and Social Networking

Posted: June 4th, 2009 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: EndGame PR News, Social Media News, Speaking Engagements | No Comments

I’ve been invited to teach an upcoming class entitled How to Attract First Time Home Buyers using Facebook & Twitter. The class is presented by The Real Estate School (TRES), a service of the Richmond Association of REALTORS® (RAR). RAR and TRES are clients of mine who do a great job representing and teaching real estate agents and brokers in Central Virginia.

The class will cover how REALTORS® can use Facebook and Twitter to find new clients, specifically those first time home buyers. Social networking is showing immense growth among users who are more than 30 years old, but a large percentage of the users are still 20-somethings, an age group that is most likely to fall into that “first time home buyer” category.

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Tags: social networking, Speaking Engagements

Web Marketing Turnoffs

Posted: June 4th, 2009 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Web Design, Web Marketing | No Comments

I happened upon a great article from Entrepreneur.com that charts their list of 13 top web site marketing turnoffs. In my view, they almost nailed this list. On it is at least a handful of my biggest online pet peeves. Here’s my favorite (or is that least favorite?) on the list:

Forcing immediate registration: Requiring a new user to register is a reasonable request-after you’ve sucked him in. The sites that require registration as the first step are putting a barrier in front of adoption.

I run into this frequently on blogs that make you register before commenting. Nothing will make me less likely to comment on your blog that forcing me to register before doing it.

The reason I said that they almost nailed this list is that I disagree with one of the points and would add two more. I think they dropped the ball in including this one:

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Tags: Web Design, website marketing