Posts Tagged ‘FourSquare’

Cool Apps: A Cure for Social Media Schizophrenia

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If you’re out there on the social web communicating, connecting, branding, selling, you’re no doubt on at least a few – if not several – social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare. Manage these networks for a day and you suddenly see the need for an application that can help you pull them altogether like HootSuite or Tweetdeck.

The market for these third-party apps just keeps getting bigger – which is great for agents who may be looking for a good solution to keep it all organized. After all, the goal still is to sell real estate, not to spend all of your time figuring out your online social circles, who’s saying what and who’s responding to your messages and links.

The latest to come out is from Seesmic, which last week released a new version of its Seesmic Desktop application. The new desktop app allows users to log in to more accounts from one dashboard and customize activity through plugins for various other applications.

At launch, the available plugins will enable you to connect with Google Reader, Ning, TwitPic, Salesforce and even Zappos, to name a few. Seesmic also has set up a plugin marketplace where presumably more will be created.

The Seesmic Desktop app is all about customization, which offers users like us a lot of flexibility in terms of what we want to see and do. This enables you to pull in everything you want and get rid of everything you don’t want – making it a sort of “Swiss Army Knife” for social applications. This is really what makes it different from say TweetDeck, which is a great app for pulling in multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, but wouldn’t presently support something like Google Reader for your news feeds.

The key with social media is to try new things, test them and adjust accordingly. But as I mentioned, as real estate agents we really can’t spend the whole day logging into several different sites. The new Seesmic Desktop has a lot of promise to be the one social app you’d need to log into. Let everything else come to you there.


Cool Apps: Share My Map!

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In real estate, the most important three words are LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION! This is true for your clients and where they find their homes and it’s true in the way that you do your business — how many times have you heard the word “hyperlocal” in the past couple of years?

In the realm of social/mobile media, location is the name of the game, as well. FourSquare. GoWalla. Yelp! Google Latitude … each of these applications is taking advantage of the hottest trend on the social media block.

Well, now there’s a new player, and this one could have some pretty nifty uses for REALTORS, not to mention lots of other folks.

People, I invite you to Share My Map.

ShareMyMap is a social network paired with a geo-location service. It allows you to create communities based on whatever geographic information is of interest to you. Do you want to make a map of the best restaurants in San Diego? Places where you’ve been on your World Cup trip to South Africa? Or even new home communities in your local market area? See where I’m going with this?

You can make a map of anything you like. Be as broad in scope or pinpointed as you want.

More than just that, though, the service is interactive, so members who are looking for the information you’ve posted can rate or review places they’ve been, and add other feedback, as well.

Whatever sort of local expertise you’d like to promote, you can enhance with an interactive map on ShareMyMap. If you use your creative noodle just a little bit, you’ll see that there are some strong possibilities here.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to seek out the best running trails in my town. What will you look for?


Cool Apps: Don’t Be Blue, Get BatchBook!

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Each and every day, it seems that there’s a new social media channel on which we need to keep tabs. Whether it’s making professional connections on LinkedIn, managing our personal Facebook profiles, our “fan” pages, Twitter feeds, FourSquare checkins, not to mention email, and the things we use to make sure we’re meeting the needs of our clients, there’s an endless stream of, well…streams to monitor.

How can we do it without sacrificing our work ethic or our commitment to providing the highest quality work to our customers and clients?

BatchBook may just be your answer.

BatchBook, developed by the big thinkers over at BatchBlue Software, features contact management, social media monitoring, email forwarding, communications tracking, to-do lists, the ability to create lists, reports, and Web forms, and integrates seamlessly with Google Contacts, Freshbooks, MailChimp, Shoeboxed, and Zendesk. These features, combined with some of BatchBook’s unique offerings, might make it the most powerful social monitoring/CRM tool around.

First and foremost, BatchBook is a contact management powerhouse. It makes it possible for you to track your business, personal, and social media contacts and share them, if you like, with team members or coworkers. You can create a database from the ground up, or import your contacts from any of several different existing systems. BatchBook has a great feature, which they call “SuperTagging”, which you can use to create custom fields that’ll let you monitor the information that’s important to you, not just those that conform to the software.

Its social media monitoring helps keep the lines between personal and business contacts on social media channels clear. For each of your contacts, you can see their most recent tweets, blog posts, as well as their LinkedIn profile.

Another cool feature is the ability to track communications. If you want to know the last time one of your team members contacted a client, you can see it in BatchBook, whether it was an email or phone call, you’ll have a complete record of all of your communications with your clients. And with BatchBox, your emails can get forwarded directly to BatchBook and attach them to your contact, so you’ll know exactly where you stand at all times.

BatchBook gives you the ability to collect information about your clients and other business-specific information. Not only does it do that, but it gives you an easy-to-use system with customer support that’s second-to-none.

Got the contact management blues? Get BatchBook.