Posts Tagged ‘Intero Cool Apps’

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Cool Apps: Central.ly Offers a One-page Profile for Your Business

By John Thompson | July 15th, 2011 3 Comments

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just throw together a great looking webpage that acts as an online business card, one-page glossy ad, and sends leads directly to all your online networks? Now you can with Central.ly.

Central.ly is a free online service that’s extremely similar to About.me, except it’s targeting businesses rather than individual profiles. (If you missed About.me, check our review of it here.) It helps you create a one-page business profile that can include a number of third-party apps that link to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and your own website.

How does it work? Very simply. In fact, if you’ve used About.me, you’ll have no problems as it’s very similar. First, go to the site to register. You can use Central.ly’s native URL or you can use your own domain name.

After securing an account, you’ll then spend just a few minutes filling out your business’ basic information like what it’s called, what you do and how people can find you. Then you can have fun adding a background image to give more of a branding or visual identity.

So, why do you need this? I wouldn’t say you need it, as in your online business will completely die without it. But it does only take a few minutes to do, is kind of fun, and free. And when you’re done, you’ll end up with a nice new visual identity that can be found in search results. Once found, it then plugs into all the sites you want it to. That alone deems it a cool app in my book!

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Intero Cool Apps: Why You Should Resist the Urge to Ignore Google Plus

By John Thompson | July 8th, 2011 0 Comments

By now, you’ve likely heard some buzz around Google’s latest big release called Google Plus. Maybe you’ve already gotten an invite and tested it out. If not, you should. I’m going to talk about why and how this new social network can be useful in your real estate business and go over a few basics of the road.

Why oh why do we need yet another social network?

This of course is the first question that comes to mind anytime someone invites you to a new “Facebook” of sorts. The short answer for why Google Plus is worth your time is this: It’s easy to use, takes seconds to set up and gives you the flexibility you’ve been longing for to segment your professional and personal social networking in a meaningful way.

OK, so how to get an invite if you don’t already have one?

The best way is to simply put the word out on Facebook and Twitter. Let your existing network know that you haven’t gotten an invite yet and are looking for one. Chances are high that someone in your circle has gotten in and can send you an invite.

What’s it all about?

The fundamental difference between Google Plus and the others before it is privacy. Google Plus is based on the Google Circles feature, which enables you to share and view content to and from specifically defined groups of people – and no one else. So if you want to share new listings or local housing news with your group of interested local buyers, then your cousins in Minnesota don’t have to be burdened with your irrelevant posts. Likewise, your professional contacts won’t have to see the pics from your summer family reunion.

How is this any different from Facebook’s list feature? Very very different. First, there’s ease of use. Google Circles is simple drag and drop. As soon as you get set up, you start creating your circles and simply sort your contacts into their respective groups. Second, there’s the segmentation of viewing content from these groups. So you’re not getting professional news and marketing tips alongside updates from your family members.

It’s easy to get fatigued by social media and resist the urge to jump on the next big thing that ends up being nothing at all (remember Google Wave?). But Google Plus really shows promise to be the best social web tool of all – especially for those of us who’ve found our personal and professional lives blending, finding it hard to keep up with all the content we want to keep up with due to this very blending.

Reach out and get your invite and start test-driving Google Plus today!

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Intero Cool Apps: Get the Inside Scoop on Your Clients with Flowtown

By John Thompson | June 24th, 2011 0 Comments

You know those names and addresses that line the pages of your real estate email contact list? Do you know who these people really are? Have any clues about them, what they enjoy in life, where they envision themselves living? Or, when is the last time you did a quick reality check on who you think they are?

Without any information (or the right information) about the folks who receive your marketing messages, your efforts are wasted dollars.

Enter Flowtown. It’s a social media marketing platform that enables you to mine your current email lists and figure out where your contacts are active and engaged online. (Could this be the end of aimless Twitter and Facebook campaigns?)

The web app can help you reach your existing contacts in new ways. You’ll know a bit more about them as you gain information about where they’re engaged in public online networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. You can get more detailed data about what they’re into.

The only thing Flowtown needs to work is an existing contact list, which hopefully you’ve been cultivating since the day you set foot into the real estate field.

OK, how does this thing work?

1.     Go to Flowtown’s website to get started.

2.     Once you’re in, hook up your contact email list.

3.     Watch as the app prepares an information sheet with data about your clients (based on their public social network activities).

4.     Mine that data for all sorts of useful information like which social networks they use most, which clients have large followings online, their occupations, interests, etc.

5.     Start thinking of how you can better target your marketing to fit your real customers.

Real estate choices are about lifestyle. It’s amazing the kinds of clues you can get about a person’s approach to lifestyle just by analyzing what they’re doing publicly online. (I stress the word “publicly” because this activity could have a Big Brother feel to it, but no one’s privacy is being compromised here because the app is using information gleaned from public sites.)

Once you know more about your clients – past, present and future – you’ll be able to craft stellar marketing messages that really speak to them, not just out-of-the-box real estate marketing that every agent in town is using.

This sounds wonderful, right? But alas … there is a catch. Flowtown is still in early stages and accepting new users only by invite. So to use the service, you have to sign up to be on the invite list and invite a few friends and colleagues along with you.

Bummer, I know. There’s a tad bit of waiting involved.

But cruise on over to the website and get your name in there to test drive this thing. You may be surprised by the results!

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Cool Apps: Social Mention

By John Thompson | April 22nd, 2011 0 Comments

It’s Friday afternoon. Your phone is slow. Email is caught up. Contracts and deals have all been taken care of. Do you know what people are saying about your real estate brand online?

No? Well, now you can with a service called Social Mention.

One of the best uses of social media for business to date has been the ability to put your ear to the ground and really listen in on what people are saying about your service and your brand. Are you listening so far or just talking?

Social Mention is a real-time search engine that crawls through user-generated content from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google, and others. It monitors more than 80 social media outlets, enabling you to track and measure what people are saying about you, your service and your brand.

How it works: Go to SocialMention.com and enter a search term or phrase (try your name or Intero Real Estate to start). You’ll see a list of most recent content showing your term or phrase. And you’ll also notice the left sidebar of the screen shows some measurements for strength, sentiment, passion and reach.

Strength measures the likelihood that your brand (or name or service) is being discussed in social media. Social Mention calculates this based on number of mentions within the last 24 hours divided by total possible mentions.

Sentiment measures the ratio of positive mentions to negative ones.

Passion measures the likelihood that those talking about your brand will talk about it repeatedly.

Reach measures your range of influence – the number of unique persons mentioning your brand divided by the total number of mentions.

Why does all of this matter? Consumer insight, for one. What’s more valuable than getting an inside view into conversations about your business?

The second big use in real estate for this service is direction for your social media efforts. Gaining insight into how people might already be engaging with your brand or service online can help you target your social media marketing.

Give it a try. You won’t even have to download anything this time!

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Cool Apps: Master Your Square Footage Needs

By John Thompson | April 15th, 2011 0 Comments

Square footage is a key aspect of homes and properties – and often it’s either inaccurate or not noted at all in an MLS description when you’re talking about individual rooms and outdoor spaces.

As a Realtor, I’m sure you’ve found yourself reaching for the tape measure with clients on more than one occasion.

Now, if you have the right app, you can just reach for your phone. I recently discovered an Android app called Square Footage Master that can help finesse the square footage question. You can use the app with or without an actual tape measure or laser ruler.

Here’s how it works:

Camera Ruler
The app comes with a camera ruler, but to use it you’ll need to set it up by measuring two values first. Have someone help you capture these two distances with a tape measure or ruler:

Camera height: Hold the camera at eye level and measure the distance between it and the floor.

Camera-to-wall distance: Hold the camera as if taking a picture while standing with your back against the wall. Measure the distance between the camera and the wall behind you.

Once you get these two measurements, you can input them in the Settings menu from the app’s home page.

Body Ruler
It’s a good idea to also take the time to measure your different body dimensions. If the app knows that your foot is 8 inches from heel to toe tip, then you can use your feet to get a wall measurement.

Square Footage Master is pretty robust in the way it can save your data. You file measurements by rooms and rooms into a house.

The app costs $2.99 and is available at the Android Market.

It requires work (with the calibrating) to get it running right, but it ranks high as an app that you have a real-life use for once you learn how to use it. The developer, Ying Wen Technologies, has a great online tutorial with screenshots that will give you a detailed view of all that the app can do.

Give it a try and maybe next time you can leave the tape measure at home.

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Intero Cool Apps: Business Contacts, Rock-Star Style

By John Thompson | March 18th, 2011 0 Comments

Being busy is good, but it can quickly go awry as all other things in your life get tossed aside. Two of the first physical pieces of evidence here are business cards and business receipts. Who among us hasn’t simply tossed these items into a jacket or pants pocket, laptop bag or backseat? Then they become lost at sea.

Now with new services like CardMunch you can nip this behavior in the bud and become the world’s most organized Realtor when it comes to managing contacts. You’ll be the envy of all your peers. How does she manage to have so many contacts all at her fingertips?

CardMunch was recently acquired by LinkedIn, which makes it even more interesting. One can only assume there could be more synergies between the two applications down the road.

In fact, the first cool feature to come out of the acquisition is that CardMunch is now free!

CardMunch is a mobile app that works only with iPhone right now. (Sorry Android and Blackberry users!)

How it works:  You download the app from the iTunes store, then snap photos of business cards using your phone’s camera. The images are then reviewed and transcribed by actual humans (I know, right?), and the information is sent back to your phone and stored as contacts within minutes.

Amazing.

Some other cool features of this app include:

  • A rolodex-style way of flipping through your new business contacts.
  • One-tap LinkedIn invites: After a new business contact comes back to your phone via CardMunch, you have the option to click one button to request your connection to them on LinkedIn.
  • You get to choose which address book you want to store your contacts in:  the one native to your iPhone, the one provided with the CardMunch app, or both.
  • Back up: CardMunch synchs all your contact data to your account. What a lifesaver that could be should you happen to lose your phone before you’ve had a chance to synch new data.

Give it a test drive if you’re an iPhone user. If you’re on Android, you could give CamCard a try (though it’s not free). I would hang on though, as the app market moves pretty fast and I can’t imagine CardMunch is not already developing apps for other devices.

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Cool Apps: Pagemodo Helps You Build Your Facebook Page in Minutes

By John Thompson | February 4th, 2011 0 Comments

With 500 million registered users, it’s difficult to dismiss the power of Facebook for reaching new customers and building business online. But not everyone has the know-how or the budget to build a compelling business page on Facebook.
 
Enter Pagemodo (formerly Fanbuilders), a marketing tool that enables small business owners to design their own custom Facebook pages using the company’s Pagebuilder product, free of charge. To date, the service has published more than 100,000 custom Facebook pages to more than 60,000 small businesses, according to a recent TechCrunch article.
 
How does it work? Pagebuilder walks you through the process every step of the way. You can choose from a variety of templates, change backgrounds, place images, videos and copy all without having a single design skill under your belt. But you also won’t end up with a product that looks like a DIY web page.
 
The company offers a free version for personal branding (perfect for real estate agents!), and a tiered pricing menu that adds features along the way ranging from $9 per month to $59 per month.
 
If there’s one app you check out this year, this is it. Pagemodo makes it so dead simple to get your professional page up and running on Facebook – enabling you to save your energy for the hard part, which is figuring out the best way to build and cultivate your network for your real estate business.
 
Having a professional-looking Facebook page will help you keep your personal brand intact and focus your Facebook activity from this page around your real estate clients, neighborhoods and providing all-around stellar service. Just be sure to tell everyone about it once it’s up and running and encourage them to “like” the page so that they’ll receive updates you send out on a regular basis.
 
Visit pagemodo.com to give it a whirl.

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Cool Apps: Two to Tango

By John Thompson | October 22nd, 2010 0 Comments

As a mobile professional whose work requires a lot of travel on a typical day, real estate agents can appreciate any app that makes communication easy, natural and free.
 
That’s why I had to bring up a new app that offers ease of communication – both audio and video – and is free, free, free. Yes, free calling!
 
iPhone 4G owners have FaceTime. The rest of us now have Tango, a new free mobile-to-mobile video calling service. Think of it as Skype with an even easier interface – or your phone without the bill for extra minutes (plus video capabilities).
 
Here’s how it works: Find the Tango app in the app store for your iPhone or Android device. Download it and invite your friends, family and colleagues to download it as well. This takes just a few minutes. Then once you’re set up, you can call any of your contacts who also have Tango installed on their smart phones.  All you need is WiFi, 3G or 4G to make a call.
 
Tango is pretty cool and its popularity has already exploded since launching on September 30. (It is already in the #2 spot for most popular social networking app, according to PCWorld.)
 
Tango’s main attraction is that you can bring your calls to life with video and talk for free. It’s also one of those apps that you can use for both business and personal calls. Sometimes business makes us late for dinner or takes us out of town for a few days. Tango can help keep you connected to your family – face-to-face.
 
Other features you’ll no doubt find useful in your real estate business:

  • Talk for free using your data service (WiFi, 3G or 4G).
  • Toggle back and forth between video or audio-only during a call.
  • Live stream to share what you are seeing (i.e., the other person isn’t stuck staring at your face the whole time). Hint: you see a house without your client present but want to give him a quick glimpse.
  • It’s super easy to invite your contacts to install and share the Tango experience.

So there you have it: Tango. A new way to communicate with colleagues, clients, friends and family.

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Cool Apps: Above All Else … Remember the Milk!

By John Thompson | February 5th, 2010 1 Comment

remember the milk logo

No matter what your business, keeping track of important tasks can be, at best, a hassle, and at worst … a superhuman feat of juggling (those guys in Vegas who toss around bowling balls, flaming orbs, and/or chainsaws have no idea what real danger is).

For those of us in the Real Estate Industry, however, everyday tasks and to-dos take on much greater significance because if we miss a deadline or forget to do even the smallest little thing, it can do irreparable harm to our clients, preventing them from fulfilling the terms of their contracts.

Will you remember to have your clients initial the changes on a counter-offer? Remember to schedule their home inspections? Follow up with lenders, appraisers, and title companies? There are a million little things involved in a real estate transaction, each of which has the potential to mean everything.

When you’ve gotta remember everything, you’ve got to Remember the Milk.

So much more than a simple to-do list, Remember the Milk takes Post-It notes, spare napkins, the corner of your whiteboard, even your forearm (you know you’ve written a note or two on there at some point … we won’t tell) and makes them things of the past.

Manage your tasks quickly and easily. You can set due dates for things with specifics (due 3/1/2010) or in natural language (due next Friday).

Get reminded anywhere (and they mean anywhere). When a deadline is approaching, RTM will send reminders to your email account, send a text message (SMS), an instant message (AIM, Gadu-Gadu, GoogleTalk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, Skype and Yahoo! are all supported).

Schedule reminders from almost anywhere. Remember the Milk is available for a host of tools. There are apps for iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android. If you “friend” Remember the Milk on Twitter, you can send direct messages (DMs) with details of your new “to-do”. When a deadline looms, RTM will send you a message, making sure that you don’t forget. Remember the Milk also syncs with Google Calendar, so all of your lists and to-dos are kept organized.

Each of us likes to think that we can handle everything. Each of us likes to think that we don’t need reminders like this. Sometimes, though, life gets in the way. For those times, it’s important that you Remember the Milk.

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Intero Cool Apps: Are You Waving?

By John Thompson | January 22nd, 2010 0 Comments

For much of 2009, techno-geeks were all a-buzz with talk about Google WAVE, the search engine juggernaut’s collaborative tool that was supposed to shatter the Earth and change the way we all did everything.

And then … WAVE was released. Did you notice? Lots of people didn’t. The ones that did, met it with a collective, “Meh. That’s it?”

This sort of thing often happens when people set their expectations too high.

The thing about Google WAVE, though? It’s actually extremely cool. People have just been so busy dismissing it because time didn’t stand still upon its release that they failed to see that.

In many ways, it’s much like Twitter was when it was first introduced. Not many people “got” it. “Why on earth do I need people to tell me about how their cornflakes got soggy at breakfast?” people would ask. “I have real work to do,” they’d say. Now, Twitter is one of the most powerful business tools at our disposal and no longer being dismissed by anyone (well, not many, anyway). I believe that the same will hold true for Google WAVE.

So, how do I use it?

The answer is that there are lots of ways to use it. But here’s just a touch of what’s possible: Google WAVE is already being used by lots of small business groups because it has tremendous strength in combining platforms like email, document sharing, multimedia file-sharing, instant messaging, project wikis, video conferencing, and a host of others. It has the ability to eliminate all of the other disparate communications tools by combining them into one well-honed powerhouse.

For example, let’s say that you’re having a same-time, multi-location meeting between team members. Everyone invited to participate in the WAVE (the name for a particular project in the application) can contribute to the notes and see who is adding what — all in real time. At the end of the meeting, all of the notes are captured in a thread that can be viewed later on if someone wanted a recap, or if someone got invited to the WAVE late in the game. If there are team members who couldn’t participate because of differences in time zones (or other asynchronous difficulty), they can go into the WAVE, see all of the discussion, then add their own notes, as if they were present from the get-go. And anything that Google WAVE can’t do in its native state can likely be managed with any of the wide range of plug-ins that are available for it.

Right now, Google WAVE is only available by invitation. But before long, it’ll be available to everyone. It’s also important to remember that using WAVE to its potential will take time. It’ll take patience. But the power is there. Oh, yes. It’s there.

As for its ability to change the world? It hasn’t yet. But I’m betting that it will.

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