The fellas at the far end of the hall have just wrapped up another round of tweaks to StepRep. Most of the changes they made were in the “back end” – that is, they’re invisible to schmoes like you and me. But they also made a couple of “front end” changes that will affect – for the better! – the way you and I interact with the product.
For instance,
1. In the past you might have created a new search and were annoyed to discover that StepRep didn’t allow you to save it. That’s because, for the present, users are limited to creating 5 searches at a time. Now there’s a handy error message to explain what’s going on when your sixth search gets snuffed out.
2. The numbers next to the menu on the left, showing how many stories you have in each category, used to be a little sluggish to update. Now those numbers will change immediately when you move a story from one category to another.
3. You know your StepRep public profile? Wait, you didn’t know that you had a StepRep public profile? That’s probably because you had to dig around in the settings to find the link. Now the profile link is prominently displayed at the top of the screen, where users are more likely to stumble across it…and maybe now that they know it’s there, they’ll start filling out their profile with information about themselves and their business.
4. Speaking of your public profile, it’s been redesigned. If you’d like to see what it looks like now, I’ll modestly provide my own page as an example. It’s nothing fancy, but the profile page is designed to be super easy for search engines to find and index. For example, as of February 12, if you Google my name, my StepRep profile page comes up fourth in the results. My profile page, in turn, points search engines toward the stories that I’ve chosen to promote using the StepRep widget.
5. One more thing about the public profile: we’ve changed the URL. I don’t quite understand the technical reasons, but apparently the new URL is a little Google-friendlier than the old one. If you’re using the StepRep widget on your blog or website (and if you’re not, why aren’t you?), you might want to re-install it so it points to the new URL. But if you don’t feel like re-installing, no worries, the old link will redirect to the new location.
6. Are you a StepRep user from outside the US and Canada? If so, you were undoubtedly irritated at sign-up time by the fact that your home country wasn’t available in the drop-down box when you selected your location. We apologise for the inconvenience. For new users, we’ve created a comprehensive list of countries for the drop-down box. And if you’ve already signed up using a fake address, you can now go into your settings and select your actual country from the list. So all you users in the South Sandwich Islands can stop with the hate mail, already!
Reputation not just what you say about yourself, but more and more importantly, what others say about you. In the previous 2 posts I discussed building a search profile for yourself. Today, I’ll build on that a bit. If my first statement is true, which I think it is, then it’s not enough to just promote stories about yourself. You need and want people to find stories and comments that other people have written about you.
Today, social media has opened up a new era of transparency. People are cynical about marketers. You know those old testimonials that we used to put on all of our websites from “Bob Jones in Chicago”. Those ones with no link to Bob, his email or any information that Bob was a real guy and his testimonial was real. Those don’t have a lot of impact anymore. Thus it is important to promote verifiable comments, opinions, recommendations and views about you and/or your business by 3rd parties. These are more legitimate when they come from a 3rd party and they are published on a 3rd party site.
So when I promote all of my own profiles to increase their collective search rank, I also link to and mention stories, articles and comments about me on other sites so those rise higher in the search results for my name.
StepRep helps this process first by helping you find comments and stories about you. It helps you find them early and allows you to comment on things in a timely manner. You’ll often want to reply to comment and stories whether they are positive or negative. StepRep further helps promote these stories by putting all of the good ones on your StepRep profile. As you promote this profile, the links to your good stories become more and more valuable. An easy way to promote your StepRep profile is to place the StepRep widget on your other sites and profiles. It rolls through your good stories and it links back to your profile.
In the end, you want a good mix of results when someone Googles your name. You want some of your websites and personal profiles to show up and you want 3rd party comments and stories to show up.
In the last post, we talked a little about the basics of linking. It’s important to understand how pages show up in search. So by building your online search profile, we’re talking about making it easy for people to find you and managing what people see when they search for you. If your name is rare, you’ll have an easy time. If your name if John Smith, you have some work cut out for you!
I’ll use myself as an example right now. If you search for Jeff Tomlin, most of the results on the first 2 pages of Google will either be my online profiles or articles about me. I’ve achieved that primarily by linking my profiles together. That is, on most of those profiles and websites, I list all of my other profiles. Next, I link to other articles about me on my blog. This gives rank to those other articles about me. Lastly, I try to list my sites and profiles on other 3rd party sites, directories, blogs and news.
There are a few things to note. Let’s go through the list of link attributes I mentioned in the last post.
1.Page Rank of the Linking Pages
I have about 12 personal sites and profiles that I link together. Each one I add means they will all generate another link. But linking them together isn’t enough. Each profile needs to have independent incoming links. I can’t write for and market all of these profiles effectively so first I syndicate content to some of them. An example of this is friendfeed. It aggregates content that I’ve posted from my other accounts and thus it updates regularly, but I never really go to the site. Secondly, I really focus on building a small number of them. As I market 2 or 3 of them, their individual rank goes up. As they build popularity, the links from those 2 or 3 to my other profiles carry more weight.
2.The Number of Other Links on the Linking Page
To maximize the value of the links I have to each of my profiles, I manage the total number of links on my linking pages. To do this, I simply ensure that I don’t populate my pages with links to too many other websites.
3.The Topic of the Linking Page
I want to maximize the topical importance of my linking pages. This is one reason I’ve created so many different online profiles. Each profile or website is about me, Jeff Tomlin. Thus when I link to all of my other sites, the link is highly relevant. Google now recognizes that these sites are all about the same person.
4.The Text of the Link
When I link to one of my sites or profiles, I use proper link text. The key is to ensure the link is descriptive, yet optimal from a search engine point of view. That is, you want to describe what the link actually links to, and you want link relevant value from the text. So I’ve formatted links to my profiles including a short name of the profile along with my name. An example is: “Jeff Tomlin – Linkedin”. A good clue to use is to try and make the link text similar to the title of the page you are linking to.
5.Reputation of the Linking Site
I always ensure that I don’t engage in linking schemes. I am careful of the sites I link to and I only promote my sites to other reputable sites. This happen naturally when you market yourself with ethical online practices.
Today, people Google each other on a regular basis. If you have a job interview, the employer has Googled you. If you offer a service, your prospective customers have Googled you before they phoned. If you have an introductory business meeting, the other party has likely researched you online. This is why Online Reputation Management (ORM) is critical today. While ORM is a broader topic, what we’re talking about right now is managing the Google-ability of your name, or rather, how easy it is to find you on Google and what people will see – your Google profile if you will. Now of course this discussion includes other search engines, but Google has become the verb ‘to search’ now so I’ll keep referring to Google. I’m going to split this discussion into 2 posts and focus on the background that links play in search for this post. The next post, I’ll get into actually building your profile.
The topic on how links work is rather old news to many, but complicated enough to leave many others still in the dark. I’m going to discuss this at a high level. Google ranks the relevance of a page by many factors. In general, a page is ranked based on it’s topical relevance to a keyword search and how many links point to that page. The most important factor would be the links a page has pointing to it. Here is what makes a link valuable:
1.The Page Rank (PR) of the Page the Link is From
The more popular a page is, the more valuable links from that page will be. Google has a patented algorithm that calculates the popularity of a page. You can see the page rank of a page using the Google toolbar on a scale of 1-10. This number is not the actual PR that Google uses, but it shows you the ballpark popularity of a page.
The idea here is that if you receive a link from a well established, popular page, that link will give your site more value than a brand new page or a page with few or no links pointing to it.
2.The Number of Other Links on the Linking Page
The value of a link on a page is diluted by the total number of other links on that page. For example, if a page has a page rank of 5 and there is only one outgoing link on that page, that link will carry a relative value of 5. But if there are 99 other links on that page, that link will carry a relative value of 5/100.
3.The Topic of the Linking Page
This point is simple. If my blog is all about real estate in Denver, a link from another Denver real estate site (or page) is more valuable than a link from a casino site.
4.The Text of the Link
This is a big one. Link text matters a lot. So a link to my Denver real estate site that looks like this: Denver Real Estate, is a lot better than a link that is formatted like this: click here.
5.The Reputation of the Linking Site
This relates to point three. Google gives websites a relative weighting based on the links they attract and the sites they link to. The idea is that they recognize the types of ‘neighbourhoods’ you associate with. So if a link comes from a site with a good reputation, the link will carry more weight than a link from a spammy site. For clarity, if a site is linking to other low value sites and receives links from those sites, its links will carry less value than a site that is being linked to from CNN, Yahoo, educational institutions etc.
In the next post, I’ll use some more examples of the above concepts and show you how to build out a strong profile to increase the Googlability of your name.
Recent posts on the AgentGenius blog have really hurt the SpokesMonster’s feelings! StepRep is still in Alpha but we thought we would give you a peek at the SpokesMonster’s StepRep dashboard just to show how badly the negative posts have damaged his online reputation.
As Inman news reported today, we will be at the Inman Connect conference this July in San Francisco where Brendan will be talking about StepRep on a panel called “Changing the Industry: 5 Ideas at a Time”. This will be the first public discussion of StepRep from MyFrontSteps and how we see social networks affecting real estate in the next year. We look forward to seeing everyone there!
There are a few trends that businesses need to watch now. First, the rapid growth of social networks and social interaction online is making it necessary for businesses to become part of the conversation. Just as important as participation, individuals and companies need to build and manage their online reputation. The footprint left online is increasingly affecting both online and offline profitability.
Secondly, businesses have to watch the increasing rate of innovation. Recently, Brendan and I were at the Graphing Social Patterns East Conference in Washington D.C. One message that stood out to companies there – go fast. More application developers are developing more solutions, mashing up more technologies and doing all at a faster pace than ever before. It underscores the need for individuals and businesses to become early adopters of technology.
NoMoreDoorKnocking is Changing! However it will remain the name of our blog for StepRep, the Homes Services side our new Company – MyFront Steps. Confused yet? Let me explainIn this post I will attempt to answer the questions: What is MyFrontSteps? What is StepRep, and how does it fit into MyFrontSteps?
So what is MyFrontSteps? Well, MyFrontSteps connects people over any social network allowing them to control the sharing of their home with friends, family and the world – from their front steps in. It allows them to leverage the collective experiences of their social graph – people they know and trust – to find inspiration and local service providers to improve home and lifestyle.
We have put together a video in the Creative Craft style to describe what we do.
We believe MyFrontSteps will have millions of homeowners sharing their home and home experiences on their social network of choice.
We intend to help people and companies in the real estate and home services industry to connect with these consumers via our StepRep product.
So what is StepRep and how will it work for you? Well, StepRep is going help you in at least three ways:
StepRep will help you track and monitor your online Reputation and Identity
There are lots of reasons why your online Identity and Reputation are important. Today you can monitor what people are saying about you on websites and blogs with lots of tools like Google Alerts or RSS feeds. Tomorrow, StepRep will automate that process and help you to monitor the right things. More than that, however, we will help you to monitor what people may be saying about you in places you might not even know about. Anywhere the conversation is occurring such as; Facebook, Linkedin, Myspace, Flickr, YouTube, Plaxo, Friend Feed, Twitter, Plurk , or any of the emerging platforms and services. Services that you won’t be forced to join.
It will help you manage and even build your online Reputation
Today it is a technical and time consuming chore to mange and build your online Reputation. Websites, blogs, news releases, social network profiles; the list and the work involved, is immense. We aren’t going to give you all the details just yet, but we promise to make managing and building your online reputation an order of magnitude easier.
Most importantly, StepRep will let you leverage your Reputation, via past and current customers, to gain trusted access to all the people in their social graph (people who know and trust them), on all the different social networks.
In our past lives we learned something that all technology providers should know. Real Estate professionals don’t use technology for the sake of technology; they use it to make their lives, and their customers’ lives, better. Put another way, technology doesn’t change “what” people do, it just changes “how” they do it.
We also noted phenomena in technology adoption and usage. It goes something like this. An Agent or Broker has no business so they embrace technology to attract new business. They attract new business, impress their new customers, and their new customers refer more new business. They then become so busy they cannot keep up with the use of the technology tools so they quit using them.
The key thing to note is that satisfied customers refer business – lots of it. What if you could get your customers to advertise to all their friends that they choose you as their professional of choice?
With StepRep and MyFrontSteps you will be able to do just that. StepRep will allow you to connect with your past customers as friends on the social networks where they hang out. You will be able to connect with them as “friends” on all the social networks without having to join all these networks. In short you will be able to leverage your great reputation, built by the great work you have done for past clients.
Your customers’ friends friends will see you in the context of whatever social network they happen to be on. This gives your customers a chance to connect with you as friends and hold you up to their friends as their professional of choice.
This is important, because we all know, as much as your customer may like you or your work, they aren’t going to be recommending you in every conversation. That said, today, more and more conversations are happening on Social Networks. Connecting with customers as their friend, and provider of choice, helps make you a part of the conversation when and where it occurs.
If Joining Linkedin, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Hi5, Orkut, building a website, writing and maintaining a blog sounds and feels like too much work then StepRep is for you. In fact, as your satisfied customers participate in the social networks of their choice they do the work of recommending you.
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