Marketing | MGHurston Creative Services

The Wall

Posted by admin | Posted on 12-04-2010

Tags: FourSquare, hotels, Marketing, shops, walls

In my attempts to come up with new ways for our city to promote its businesses and ultimately bring in sources of revenue I’ve recently felt as if I’ve been hitting a wall. Not walls with my ideas mind you, but rather a wall with what the city and the organizations that surround me are willing to do.

One idea I recently had was to partner with a hotel who would be interested in reaching out to local or foreign businesses that could set up mini “shops” within the rooms of the hotel instead of in a meeting facility. Essentially businesses could set up a bar in a hotel room for people walking by or another place could be selling clothes and another novelty items.

This would on one hand create immediate revenue for the hotel given its rooms would be filling quickly, but it would also give them a lasting exposure with the foot traffic and word of mouth that would spread with such an event.

We could do an event like this once a year, once a quarter, or maybe even once a month and keep moving it from hotel to hotel, rotating through all those who would participate.

Unfortunately, I have lots of people who would like this to happen, but we don’t have anyone who can make it happen, and to top it off it’s something that falls outside of the model of the company I work for.

And to reference my previous post I still can’t get a hold of anyone at Foursquare to set up a special badge for people who have checked in at all of our venues or to talk with about working on a promotion no matter how many times either myself or my boss fill out the forms on their website or post on Foursquare’s GetSatisfaction.

Marketing with no money

Posted by admin | Posted on 05-04-2010

Category : Content Producer, Marketing

Tags: content producer, content sharing, cross promotions, Marketing, no money

With budget cuts and everyone trying to keep a buck in their hand I’ve been looking at various ways to promote businesses with little to no money involved.

Now the easiest thing is always going with the social media angle, a reTweet here for a mention or a cross post amongst Facebook pages, but I needed something that was going to draw in foot traffic to our downtown core. While social media can do this, our pages, and our partner pages, don’t have enough draw right now to really make a large movement happen yet. So what was I to do? I decided to try applying my same cross promoting social media plans to business scenarios and came up with the following two promotions.

The first promotion I had, which is still yet to be determined if it’s worked out or not, is a cross promotion I set up between Cryptic Studios, makers of the Star Trek Online game, and our Tech Museum, which has been featuring a Star Trek Exhibit. I started approaching the marketing department at Cryptic back in December, and our office heads here at Team San Jose. Through a long series of events it took until just a few weeks ago before I could get all of the decision makers together on a conference call. In the end Cryptic agreed to mention the Star Trek Exhibit to their player base in exchange for us letting them distribute STO game time flyers at the exhibit.

Hopefully we’ll see if we can’t drum up some business for the Tech, and maybe the MMO as well.

The second promotion isn’t so much a marketing promotion, but rather an opportunity for the city. We were recently approached by a company called Hear Planet, who has developed a phone application that allows users to listen to descriptions of places via their phone. Don’t know what something is, open the app and listen to the narrator tell you what the museum, club or store are all about. We’ve set it a partnership with them so that our entire database of businesses is being uploaded to them. While this doesn’t bring in a monetary value for us, it allows us to be one of the main providers of information for the city of San Jose, as well as make sure all of our venues and partners are getting listed.

I’m currently working on trying to get a city-wide event planned with Foursquare, but it’s yet to be seen if this will happen and I have a few other ideas I’d like to implement before the end of June. I’m hoping at some point during the next few months I’ll be able to follow up with this with some good news.

The ebb and flow of content producing (part three)

Posted by admin | Posted on 26-01-2010

Category : Content Producer, Marketing

Tags: content producer, evenings, Facebook, Marketing, mornings, Reading, Research, Social Media, Twitter, wife, Writing

I wake up at 7:30 am and I’m grouchy. I hate mornings. But I’m up because I have a conference call at 8:30am with the east coast. I head into work and place in my call. We chat for an hour about case studies, what info I need, who I need it from, when I need it by and when it will go live.

A marketing department email goes out from my boss shortly after and this is my queue that I’ll need to send out my Social Media email later today, after his has had time to digest with everyone. I prepare my email, make sure my attachments and links are working and save the draft so it’s ready to go later on.

I hit up our Twitter and Facebook pages, making sure we have something going on today in our city I can post about. I also notice we’ve had some replies to us and so I respond. Next I log into our webmaster email and clear out 119 spam messages that made it through our filter, as well as add several more emails to our blocked sender list.

It’s nearing noon and there is a lunch meeting on Stress. I attend and learn some fun facts on nutrition, breathing, exercise and stress management. There is a good chance I won’t implement any of these things in my daily life as I long for the sweet embrace of death, but I’d like to think that someday I’ll have the time to do these things.

Back at my desk and I finish stuffing my face from the food at the meeting as I send out my email. Within minutes I have three people sending me questions. Most of it is useful, of course there is one that asks a question that if they had read my email they’d know the answer, but they didn’t. Still, I reply nicely with the answer to their inquiry. I respond to the others as well and then I prepare the text for my follow up email I will send out tomorrow when I get in. I also email some department heads with whom I’ll be meeting with over the next couple weeks to do Q&A sessions with.

I decide I want to pretty this up, and so I have a layout I have worked on in InDesign that I’ll need to copy my Word file into. Note: we typically send each other PDF’s with our emails internally because our mailboxes are small and everyone has gotten into the habit of saving the PDF’s in their personal folders to review later.

I have three follow up items on my desk, software packages I’m supposed to look over and then talk about with our office manager and PR department for photo management. Fortunately I have been given a write up on each from our UI Designers, but I take a look at each company’s website and product page and see what type of reviews I can dig up. I look through them all and jot down some notes that I’ll refer to in the meeting.

Next I need an article, I heard on the radio coming in to work that Jay-Z would be in town next month and so I work up an article on Hip Hop Across the Bay and talk about the Hyphy subgenre of Hip Hop and list some of the Bay Area artists such as E-40 and Too Short. I pass it along to our office manager for review and then my wife is calling me asking where I am. It’s 7pm and she wants to know when I’m coming home. I tell her “I’ll be home, when I get home” and hang up. It’s rude, but she knows better than to call asking this question when there isn’t a meaningful reason to ask.

I end up going through my revisions from pervious articles, update them, file them where they belong and organize my notes for tomorrow’s meeting. I check in with my own email and social media outlets to see if there is anything I need to respond too. It’s now a little after 8pm and I’m heading home.

The ebb and flow of content producing (part deux)

Posted by admin | Posted on 20-01-2010

Category : Content Producer, Marketing

Tags: content producer, Creative, Design, Discipline, Marketing, Networking, Research, Staying Current, Technology, Writing

So what skill sets do you need to be a Content Producer? I view it as a jack-of-all-trades type of job and in no particular order here is my list…

Key Item One: Writing

On one hand you need to be able to write when asked about any subject, but this doesn’t mean you need to be Hemingway. As long as you can write the bulk of the content, other people in your department will be required to proof your work so you don’t need perfect grammar and spelling – though it helps and less people will laugh at your at work. Anyone who actually expects a Content Producer or any type of writer to proof their own work is doing it wrong and asking for slip ups as anyone, I don’t care how good you are, will make mistakes. You can have an editor who is also a writer and a writer who is also a good editor, but you can’t have them proof their own work.

Key Item Two: Research

This ties into the first part of writing, being able to write about any subject as you’re tasked with it. This really requires that you be able to do research, as you may not always be familiar with what you’re being asked to write about. If you’re asked to write about something and aren’t pulling up Google, Wikipedia or a binder of printouts from under your desk before writing about something you’re either already an expert on the subject or you’re faking it and going to get caught.

Key Item Three: Technology

While much of content producing is all about the writing you work closely enough with Graphic Designers, Web Developers and Social Media that you need to be familiar with their work and not just know that HTML is used in websites. You need to know what backend the company you are working on is using as this will help you to know what functions you can ask them to include. For example, I know that our development team is building our site using Drupal, and there was an issue where we were concerned about using 3^rd party site feeds with profanity. Fortunately I found a free online resource that filters syndicated RSS feeds and the developers are building it into the site as a plug-in.

In the end my knowledge of CMS (Content Management Systems) such as Drupal and WordPress plays a decent role in my day to day tasks, even though I’m not necessarily coding anything myself in PHP or MySQL – I’m familiar with their functionality enough to know what I can ask for and expect it done quickly versus what would have to be built from scratch.

While it may not be essential, as you’ll more than likely have a web guy you can go to, having a working knowledge of HTML, PHP, ASP, and MySQL will help a lot. You don’t need the knowledge to build a database or a store from scratch, but it’ll help if you know how to edit meta tags on your own, add in widgets where they belong and all the little things that let your web people feel comfortable with you touching the site and not worried you’re going to break something.

It’s also important to know what Social Media platforms are out there and what will work best for your company. Just because Facebook is really popular doesn’t mean that your company may want to focus on a fan page on there. You need to be familiar with a lot of them and stay on top of trends to be able to justify to your teams about why one may be more worthwhile than another.

Key Item Four: Staying Current

To tag along with the last part my technology comments you need to stay current with technology and trends. This means checking in with sites like Slashdot and Mashable, among others, on a regular, almost daily, basis to stay up to date with current technology features.

Key Item Five: Design

While you’ll more than likely have a graphic designer to help you out, it’s a lot easier if you can be involved in the mockups for site UI and other site imagery as it’ll make it a lot easier when communicating with other artists if you can think like them as well as getting the exact look and feel you want incorporated to your site.

Key Item Six: Networking

While a lot of what I do requires me to be in front of a computer, or on my BlackBerry, there are times when I need to do an article on an event and this requires that I actually attend the event and talk to enough people that I can get some useful quotes or additional information. While you don’t need to be a social butterfly, you’ll want to at least be able to approach the people you need to and ask them what you want to know, or what your readers want to know.

In addition to this you need to be able to get yourself introduced to people who you need to talk to. For example, I’m currently working on a featured piece on Women Owned Businesses for our new site. While I only new one person who fit the description, she was kind enough to introduce me to four of her girlfriends who also own businesses and guess what, they each know someone else they can introduce me too as well.

Key Item Seven: Discipline

You need to be the type of person who is project orientated and will get your tasks completed ahead of time. Why ahead of time? Because someone up the later will always prioritize some article or project, ahead of your other tasks, that you won’t know about or be familiar with, without ever mentioning it to you ahead of time, and expect you to drop everything to get it completed now.

While being able to work from home and set your own hours is great, you do need to actually make sure you’re getting stuff done. People rarely tolerate mishaps when they don’t see you in the office often.

It’s worth mentioning that if you can’t get your tasks done from home, it may help to go into the office and work from there as I know a few people who just lose focus if they’re not glued to their seats.

Key Item Eight: Creativity

You have to be able to take vague concepts and develop them into a final product. For example, most of the time when someone asks me to do a specific article or column for their site I’m asked simply “Hey Mike, we need something to go here. We don’t have any ideas, so come up with something.” This means I need to look at the site I’m going to write for as well as the section this new article will go in and see what topics would fit. I then need to come up with a few ideas, research them, write about them and submit them back for review and if they choose one I’ll need to make sure I have some artwork ready to go, or at least to give them an idea of what they should do.

The ebb and flow of content producing (part one)

Posted by admin | Posted on 19-01-2010

Category : Content Producer, Marketing

Tags: content producer, Marketing, Reading, Research, Writing

While this may come across as being vain, a lot of people have asked me what, exactly, it is I do as an Online Content Producer and what they should focus on at their jobs to move into this type of position and so I find myself writing about a day in the life of me. It’s a bit hefty so I’ve broken this into two parts. The first is a Day in the Life of Me, the second is what I think you should focus on if you want to get into this line of work.

Being someone who isn’t a morning person I wake up around 9am on Monday and arrive in the office around 10am. I make sure I log into our Twitter and Facebook pages, that while we haven’t made them public, I post updates on so that when they do launch a couple weeks before our new website release that they won’t look barren. I also stop by my personal social media outlets to report or link to anything I think is relevant to my own followers and friends, such as the Star Trek Exhibit or Avenue Q.

In my inbox is a bunch of Google Alerts I set up for our company. I look for anything I should forward to our Public Relations department or Sales Team. I also have an email from our web development team informing me of what website functions and sections they are building out this week. This is relevant to me as I’ll need to come up with content for these areas of the site.

The requirements are vague, a featured article section, a community page and sports venues among others. I then leave my desk to go grab some coffee and think about what I want to fill in these areas. When I arrive back I have three story ideas in my head for the articles I quickly jot down because I will forget them. I then go through some websites that compete directly with us or offer similar types of information, in either case I want to make sure that I’m not about to write about something that was already done, or if it is something that really needs to be talked about on our site that it’s done in a unique way.

So what do I come up with, San Jose Sharks, Technology and Golf. Keeping in mind that articles on our site run one to four paragraphs, as that’s the longest people really want to read online from a non-blog/non-news site, I pull up Wikipedia and after reading more than I ever wanted to know about the history of the San Jose Sharks, I work up a write-up that highlights a couple key facts mixed in with some of my fan boy commentary.

The next thing I do is start Google searching for local Golf Courses in my area and end up finding a great site that features user reviews and focuses on golfing in our area. I email the site owner asking if I can link to his site and how I’ll be linking to it. (Note: they don’t always respond this fast, but this particular one did) I get an email a little while later and he agrees, so I write up a one paragraph blurb about golfing in my area, drop some names of the prominent course and include a link to his site.

Now for technology, fortunately our company works with some rather interesting organizations that focus on Art & Technology. Having spoken with them and having previous write-ups on their organizations I take a look through my old files and check out the latest news on their website before I write-up what you could consider a brief advertorial of these organizations.

While I’ll need to add new articles each month, it’s not something I need to work on today. So now it’s on to the community page. I take a look at the prototype our developer has sent over and compare it with the UI design our front end developers are working on (yes we have two different developers). I realize that most of the items are dynamic pulls from feeds. Fortunately I had pulled together a list of over 40 local blog and corresponding twitter feeds a while back for another project so I’m able to incorporate most of these into the page. I do end up having to stop by Yelp and create some custom city feeds, but all things considered, this is the easiest page to set up. I then send an email to our developers making sure they’ll add a field or widget for allowing users to upload their photos and feeds.

By this time I’m a bit hungry and feeling a sense of accomplishment so I send off an email to one of the sales team members to see if they want to do a working lunch to talk about some of the sports related venues. He agrees and we go eat and talk about his clients, their needs and the venues he works with. They’re all very niche and I jot down the names of each on my phone.

I’m feeling tired after eating and so I head home and take a nap. After I wake up I go to my computer and begin Google Searching for the website of each of his venues. I copy and paste the About Us section into a Word document and print it out. I read it over and then I start to write a brief paragraph or two on each of the facilities and include a link to their sites.

I then take everything I’ve written for that day and email it to our proofing person; I also send a copy of the sports venues to the sales person I had lunch with so he can make sure his clients are correctly represented in the write-ups. Our proof person is also our departments Office Manager, so she’ll get back to me by tomorrow with any corrections or changes to the text. I usually try to get this all over to her by 6pm.

So my articles are written, but I’m going to need some imagery for these articles and sections. I send an email off to our graphics department asking for specific images that we have on file I think will fit well with the stories. For those that I know we don’t have images of, I go through my own image libraries at home, as well as, browse various stock art images online. Once I’ve found some that I like I include them in my folders with the articles. It’s important to note, that no matter what images I choose at some point the UI developers or our graphic designers may come up with something better, but I always need to have something ready to go just in case.

By now it’s around 8pm. I’m done with my tasks for today and the rest of the week will involve making updates to my articles, submitting them to our Marketing Director to ensure that they fit in with the rest of our website content and following up on any items I didn’t get a chance to finish. By the end of the week I’ll have the finals done and I’ll be ready for next week’s items. I’ll also have at least two meetings with either department heads or partners we work with who will want to ask me about writing an article on a specific topic related to them, which you almost always need to accept.

Have you StumbleUpon’d your Delicious Digg and is it worth it?

Posted by admin | Posted on 11-08-2009

Category : Marketing, Social Media

Tags: Advertising, Bookmarking, Craigslist, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Social

You may have no idea what heading means, and that’s probably ok if you’re in the Real Estate industry. If you’re in to SEO/SEM or are looking for an easy way to increase traffic to your website a quick Google search will lead you to all three of these sites: Stumbleupon, Delicious and Digg – but are they worthwhile for the Real Estate Community?

These three sites are considered, Social Bookmarking Sites, meaning they allow users to submit links to places on the Internet they find interesting. These links are then placed into the sites directory of user submitted links and the entire network could comment on them. It’s an easy way of generating an influx of referring traffic to your site with minimal effort. But does it convert?

From several articles I have read online as well as my own personal use, when a site offers a product for sale, such as a digital download or a subscription based service the traffic from these social bookmarking sites doesn’t seem to convert. My most recent experience yielded over 900 visitors within a single day, and 1,400 over thee days, yet none of them purchased a single copy of my eBooks. On the other hand, I had a press release go out to a popular online gaming site and received 13 visitors of which 2 purchased eBooks from me.

So what does this mean for real estate?

Much like my questions and comments on Twitter, I think social bookmarking is a great way of generating traffic, but since real estate isn’t something people can click on and buy instantly, you’re chances of having that traffic convert are even less than others. However, it is a great way to show clients how much exposure their property is receiving, but what’s the point if it’s not ending up in a sale or lease of the property after months of high traffic?

So how does one get traffic to convert, or better yet, how do we increase the rate of conversion on any links we have? That’s where SEO/SEM come into play.

Statistically the conversion rate of visitors to sales has always been a very low percentage, so the goal becomes to increase the amount of traffic so incredibly that even with a 0.001% conversion you’re able to sell your products. Below are the most common examples of typical SEO/SEM:

Article Submission – submitting articles you write to online webzines is a great way to advertise your site, as you can include a link to your site in the articles “about” or “signature” block.

Blog Commenting – commenting on other peoples blogs can be good or bad, if you are there just to drop a site link people will know and it doesn’t always reflect kindly on you.

Directory Submissions – If you have a real estate blog submit it to a real estate blog directory, it’s a pretty simple concept. If you have a site about flowers, find an online flower site directory and submit it there.

Craigslist – many people have a love/hate relationship with this site, but at the end of the day search engines seem to pull content from this site quite often, so posting ads about your product or services here is a good way to get yourself noticed in search engines like Google quickly.

Emails – even if you don’t have an email list to market to, just put your site’s URL in the signature of your emails, the people you talk to on a daily basis will see it and maybe even take a look or ask you about it. Think of this as an easy in for Word of Mouth.

Forums – not quite as popular in all circles, but there are many forums available for a number of topics, if you happen to be involved in one, such as the CrackBerry forums for BlackBerry users, it’s a good idea to include your site’s URL in your forum Signature, so as you talk to others they keep seeing your site.

Press releases – these aren’t just for local papers anymore. All PR sites now place their releases online where search engines and subscribers come to view them. Include your web address in any press release you send out.

RSS submission – if your site is a blog or you generate an RSS feed for it, there are many RSS syndication sites out there that want your feed, Syndic8 is the first one that comes to mind.

Reciprocal Linking – this is probably one of the least used methods of SEO/SEM, but it can have very successful results if done right. You basically find other site owners who run sites similar to yours, but do not compete directly with you and the two of you add links to each other’s site on your pages. It can take some time, but if you have at least 10 sites in your head that come up as places you could cross link with, that’s a great start.

But what about Meta Tags and Search Engine Submission?

Here is my answer in a nutshell, for Meta Tags websites have smarted up a lot with them and the days of the late 90’s where people stuffed a gazillion words and sentences into the code of their site to inflate rankings is dead and gone. Here is all you need to do with them: for keywords don’t use more than 15 terms and for the description, a one liner, sentence, is fine. Anymore than that and most current search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing will toss out the rest anyway so it doesn’t help you. As far as submitting your site to a search engine, once you’re site is working the way you want and you have a good amount of content on it feel free to stop by free services such as AddMe and SubmitItExpress. If you’ve taken advantage of at least 60% of the above suggestions you won’t need to pay anyone for SEO/SEM.

I really see no reason why anyone couldn’t invest a single Saturday afternoon and complete all of the above, but if you are really busy and would like to hire me to do your SEO/SEM, feel free to drop me a line. mgh@lasvegascrenews.com

- Michael G. Hurston

Which social networking site is right for me?

Posted by admin | Posted on 22-07-2009

Category : Marketing, Social Media

Tags: Bebo, Facebook, friendster, hi5, linkedin, Marketing, myspace, ning, orkut, ping, realcorner, Social Media, social networking, Twitter

If you’re in commercial real estate this is something you have probably started to ask yourself. Do you immerse yourself and join every possible site out there, automate all your postings with Ping.FM and run the chance of not having the time to manage responses to all these sites or do you select a couple key places to better manage your ability to interact with potential clients on a more personal level?

While the first option may sound great as far as exposure for your listings, advertising on a site that doesn’t have your target audience in mind may end up causing you to waste a lot of time on setting up accounts you don’t need. While from a business standpoint it may be worthwhile to create the accounts to block others from using the company’s name, that’s not always a concern when you’re focusing on your individual listings. To help in deciding which place may be the best for you to hang your hat I’ve taken a look at some of the demographic information provided by Quantcast.com on several of the most popular social sites and compared to our typical client information.

The following sites are in order of popularity based on subscriber information and visitor traffic. US Site Views are based on 30-Day increments.

Facebook.com
US Site Views: 90.8 M
Majority Users: 54% Female
Age: 46% are 18 to 34
Income Level: 30% over $100k/yr

MySpace.com
US Site Views: 62.7 M
Majority Users: 57% Female
Age: 46% are 18 to 34
Income Level: 25% over $100k/yr

LinkedIn.com
US Site Views: 10.9 M
Majority Users: 56% Male
Age: 43% are 35 to 49
Income Level: 38% over $100k/yr

Ning.com
US Site Views: 7.3 M
Majority Users: 54% Female
Age: 35% are 35 to 49
Income Level: 16% over $100k/yr

Bebo.com
US Site Views: 5.1 M
Majority Users: 60% Female
Age: 45% are 12 to 17
Income Level: 20% over $100k/yr

Hi5.com
US Site Views: 4.0 M
Majority Users: 52% Male
Age: 48% are 18 to 34
Income Level: 6% over $100k/yr

Friendster.com<
US Site Views: 1.9 M
Majority Users: 52% Male
Age: 29% are 35 to 49
Income Level: 27% over $100k/yr

Orkut.com
US Site Views: 485.9 K
Majority Users: 54% Male
Age: 55% are 18 to 34
Income Level: 18% over $100k/yr

So why is the above relevant?

Given that the majority of commercial real estate clients tend to be Male, between 45 and 60 with mid to high level six figure salaries we can see that it wouldn’t be worth our time to advertise our Industrial or Office availabilities on a site that has a primary demographic of females between the ages of 12 and 17 such as is found at Bebo.com

Overall, LinkedIn seems to be the best site for professionals to connect with other professions, followed closely by Facebook, which also boasts 9 times the number of visitors and users when compared to LinkedIn. The only other site from this list I would consider, from a strictly commercial real estate point of view, would be Ning, as this social networking site operates completely different than the others. Instead of signing up and being part of a wide variety of users the site instead allows each user to create or subscribe to user driven social clubs. Essentially a Ning user can create their own “social networking group”, such as a social club focusing on Las Vegas Real Estate.

While other social media services like Twitter can compliment all of these sites it may also be worthwhile to look at up and coming networks. Recently I became aware of a new social networking site geared specifically for real estate professionals. The site, RealCorner.com is still relatively new and unfortunately I could not find much third party information for them short of Alexa.com which of my last checking had a lot of holes to fill with their information still.

In any case the site is still worth watching and based on its description and meta tags is usually not blocked by most companies firewalls or web filters, much like LinkedIn, where as most of the popular sites listed above are blocked from within the work place.

- Michael G. Hurston