Intended benefits to Greensboro include including new business connections, conferences, exhibitions, services and investment opportunities to stimulate the economy.

Greensboro council members voted to approve the sister city partnership at a board meeting on October 20, 2009, where every council member attending voted yes. Read my press release at http://www.prlog.org/10440999

Author: Rob Rowe

Poken Image

When I first heard the word Poken, I immediately remembered the Pokemon craze that my son was all about some years ago. Thankfully, he has grown out of all that And fortunately, the poken has nothing to do with it.

A poken is a new gadget that allows electronic business card information to be transferred easily between two pokens. The advantage of the poken is that you won’t have a stack of cards to flip through when looking for someone’s contact information. When you meet someone who also has a poken that you wish to exchange information with, you simply touch the two pokens together and they glow to let you know that that the data exchange took place. Do this for everyone you wish to exchange information with at an event, then connect it to your computer through as USB cable, and the information is then uploaded to your web-based Poken contact page. Simple, right?

It gets even better. Not only is your information easily changeable, you won’t have to get new business cards when you want to change your email address or phone number. And then wait for them to be delivered.

Not only does the poken contain your usual contact information, but when you register online you can make it ‘social’, where you choose which social networks you want on your e-card. Meaning, you can decide how you want people to contact you – through the phone, email, FaceBook, Twitter, etc. This may be the best part of it all yet, and it just may make the traditional business card obsolete. Check it out at www.Poken.com

Author: Rob Rowe

The plan is to include the other NC MLSs as well as those of South Carolina next year. More details can be found here. Happy house hunting or selling!

Author: Rob Rowe

Reference: Carolina Business Connection.com

And you can add a new posting on your blog, web site, FaceBook page and Friendfeed all at the same time; it is easy to do through the likes of ping.fm

The benefits are, of course, that you can write it once and distribute it everywhere quick and easy. However, having the same post multiple places can actually negatively impact your organic search rankings if you are linking back to your web site, because search engines try to weed out duplicate content, thus reducing your back links. See the google blog article on this.

So for these purposes, you can use article spinners, or spinning software, to change various words so as to avoid exact duplication of content. Jetspinner is a free one that you might want to check out. Happy writing!

Ah, but it is so much more than that. The Gadgets are pretty cool,  and are something that IMs didn’t have.  These include response bars (yes/no/maybe) and maps to show where an event is taking place. Drag and drop of files to share between participants are convenient, but I was impressed with taking the collaboration of a series of photos and just dragging them into your blog.  This allows developers to embed rich media content into sites with  very little coding. How about the Twitter robot that lets you tweet in a wave and updates your twitter account with the tweet using the API. Or the language translation that allows people to converse in real time using different languages. You have to admit that’s pretty slick.

I can see a real use for this with collaborating on a rich media document. This would be a lot easier than emailing it around, although a wiki hosting the document would work just as easily.  The playback mechanism, which records each step of the evolution of the document, is comparative to the wiki history. Take a closer look at Google Wave here.

So what’s your take? Are you impressed with this? Tell me.

Yesterday’s barcamp brought several knowledgeable social media subject matter experts to Cary, NC to discuss social media and how Real Estate professionals can use it for lead generation, reach, awareness and branding. I attended a session in each time slot and, while I consider myself well versed in this area, was quite pleased to come away learning a few things myself. Session updates and information were being posted throughout the day on Twitter, with the hashtag #rebcrdu . It was time well invested for the learning experience as well as the networking aspect; the chance to meet others in the social media arena as well as other Real Estate professionals. Yes, I, too am among them, holding a current, active NC Real Estate Broker’s license.

It ws interesting to see the number of Real Estate professionals attending these sessions. Is it because home and commercial property sales are slow right now and they are looking for non-traditional ways to increase sales? Or perhaps because they are curious as to where the industry is going? As one professional stated, the newspapers are getting thinner. Not due to any lack of news, but because the advertising section is getting thinner. It’s too expensive, and the main point is that people don’t usually look there anymore. Most people I know look online for things they want to research and ultimately buy, not in a newspaper’s classified section. I know that the real estate office that my wife works in stopped all newspaper ads completely a few months ago since not one house sold through those ads over the previous several months.

So what’s in store for the real state profession? Online marketing. The MLS has already gone this way. Successful Brokers have web sites and are conversing with potential clients through social media such as blogs, micro blogs (twitter) and other forums such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

If you are a Real Estate professional and want to learn more about social media and how it will ultimately affect your industry, I suggest you get on the bandwagon and start learning about it now. If there is a barcamp coming in your area, attend, socialize and learn. Stay ahead off the game.

I hope you found this post informative. Your comments are welcome.

Using social media instead, it is just so easy to incorporate a survey or poll on a blog and get far more results from varied participants in a very short period of time. Certainly this would not work if the product were something tangible that the pollsters had to actually touch and feel. Or perhaps after the product is marketed, surveys and polls could still be used to find out what the public likes and dislikes, to be used going forward in the next generation or revision of the product. The presumption, of course, is that the blog or web site containing the poll or survey has sufficient followers. But if they do, I believe the expediency and number of possible participants makes focus groups a thing of the past. What’s you take? Do you agree?

I encourage all readers to post comments so that I can stay focused on relevant content that is of interest to the public.

Bye for now…. stay tuned!

-Rob