This post is written for Calgary Real Estate Professionals however it applies to every business model

Each week Ulistic, your local Calgary Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization team hosts a series of webinars to help Calgary business understand online marketing, social media, Internet Technologies and help debunk some of the myths associated with social media and general online marketing.

This week, our team at Ulistic hosted a webinar for a number of Calgary-based REALTORS® on the power of social media and Internet marketing to help them market their listings more efficiently online.  This was not a hyped up social media discussion and actually social media was just a sliver of what we discussed during the 60 minute REALTOR® webinar.

Here are some of the highlights and what you can do as a REALTOR® to help place your Real Estate business online.

Success online takes commitment, this is the first crucial step towards success in anything we do.  REALTORS® who demonstrate commitment in applying the principles of effective online marketing make great success stories versus those who pay it “lip service”.  This is not something you simply set and forget.  Online Marketing success takes effort, it takes commitment and it takes time. Set up a schedule and commit to keeping that schedule.  For those who were on the webinar, remember F + V = C.

Does your REALTOR® website welcome and convert visitors to potential qualified buyers and sellers?  You don’t need another virtual billboard on the Internet highway.  Personally, I would rather have 10 solid buyers and sellers visit my site each week versus having thousands of visitors who never engage with me.  Does this concept make sense? Your marketing online must attract qualified prospects to your business or why are you doing it?  Numbers don’t matter if no one engages with you.

Experiment with new ways of doing the old things.  We discussed services like Microsoft Tags and other new technologies can offer the same information to a new audience.  Consider attaching tags or bar codes for those interested in learning more about your listings.  With smart phones, a potential buyer can easily research your listings with a click of their camera.  Microsoft Tag is a great way for you to showcase your listings.  Almost everyone today has a smart phone, let’s leverage this for our benefit.

And finally, don’t forget about video.  If a picture says a thousand words, then video must say millions.  Start using video now in your business and use it for your advantage.

These are just a few of the items we covered during our REALTOR® webinar this week.  If you would like to learn more about Social Media for REALTORS® give me a shout at 403.775.2205 and our team at Ulistic would be more than happy to work with you or you can click here to contact me directly online.

Welcome to the age of the Internet.  I think it is pretty safe to claim this now.  Just look around you and there is no doubt that our online world is just as important as the face-to-face relationships we have.  For some, online is more important.

Cloud Computing For Business

One of the biggest shifts has been in business.  Business is now starting to embrace “the cloud” and the power of online applications.  Need proof, next time you fly, how many printed boarding passes do you notice?  How many people are using the smart phone to store their boarding pass?  More and more everyday.  Big business and small business are leveraging the power of the Internet to run their day-to-day business applications.

Even Microsoft has started to take notice. Well, they have been for a long time, at least 4 years since the first time I heard “Software + Services”.  Businesses across North America are flocking to Microsoft’s Online Solutions.  Many of them are turning to the Microsoft BPOS solution or solutions delivered by Microsoft Partners each day.  The online solutions market is heating up and taking off at an extremely fast pace.

The reality of the market today is that many small businesses are turning to Microsoft BPOS now versus having a server sitting in the back room doing nothing but email.  The next versions of the Microsoft Small Business Server will have a version that is cloud-equipped.  My understanding is that it will do nothing but authenticate your users and store files.  Sounds like a Foundation Server.

Join us for a free webinar

Ulistic is hosting a free webinar on Tuesday to help you get answers to hosting your business applications on the Internet.

Join us on Tuesday, July 20th at Noon Eastern/9 AM Pacific for a no charge 60 minute webinar that is geared to help you get some answers on what online service you should turn to.  Is it Google?  How about Microsoft Office Web Apps? Do you need a CRM?  What sort of backup strategy should I have?

Lots of questions and our goal on Tuesday is to help you get some answers.  Real world answers and the facts about the best online solution for your business.  For the past 6 months, I have been doing my own research, testing out many different online platforms.  We have also installed many different solutions ranging from Google Apps, Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite and Hosted Exchange through one of our partners.  I have had my frustrations to say the least.

I will have these real life stories plus intelligence on what some Calgary business owners have been quoted recently and what you should expect to pay the service you choose.  The truth is this, everyone has an opinion, everyone has a favourite and everyone’s needs and tolerance for techy stuff is different.  What works for some, doesn’t work for others.

It is your decision, I can only share with you what I know.

Register for Is Your Business Ready For The Internet webinar on Tuesday.

One of things I miss about not being at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference besides not being able to see all my buddies from Microsoft and through the partner channel is all the great announcements that come from this annual pilgrimage from Microsoft Partners.

I tuned into Steve Ballmer’s keynote address on Digital WPC this morning just in time to hear the announcement of Windows 7 Slate amongst all the talk of the cloud (FY2011 is going to rock).  Microsoft is getting into the iPad type game with full force.  I kinda thought they would and no better place to announce it.  WPC I heard has over 14,000 delegates in attendance this year.

If you don’t think the cloud is for real…watch the keynote address from Steve Ballmer.

This will be my only year off from WPC.  I look forward to WPC2011 in Los Angeles.

My good friend and fellow blogger Karim from Techvibes summed up the announcement on his blog.

This year one of the most important things that we will do in the smart device category is really push forward with Windows 7-based slates.

They’ll come with keyboards, they’ll come without keyboards, they’ll be dockable, there’ll be many form factors, many price points, many sizes.  But they will all run Windows 7. They will run Windows 7 applications. They will run Office.

They’ll (the tablets or slates as Ballmer calls them) come from the people you would expect — from Asus, from Dell, from Samsung, from Toshiba, from Sony.

I can’t wait to see one and compare it to my iPad.  I do love my iPad but it has limitations when it comes to working on documents.  If the Slate will run Office, I may just switch.  After all, Office is the make or break application for me.

What do you think?  Leave a comment.

I found out this morning that a very good friend and colleague was a victim of the latest round of cutbacks across the Microsoft Partner Network.

My good buddy Robert Dutt from CRN Canada reported that long time channel program manager for the Microsoft Partner Network, Carol Terentiak has parted way with the Mississauga crew.

I found by accident when contacting Carol and another colleague this morning at Microsoft Canada, who informed me prior to getting the Google Alert.

During my tenure as IAMCP Canada President, Carol was there for me and the entire team.  She made sure everything was taken care of.  Her commitment to the Partner Program and now Partner Network was second-to-none.  I sometimes have to shake my head at the decisions made at large organizations.  Carol was a gem and still is…she was the type of person who would respond to your emails and return your phone calls.  That doesn’t happen much in these large companies (well doesn’t happen in small ones either).

I wish you luck Carol in your next steps…

Your Friend

Stuart

Thank you to everyone for all the emails lately.  Many of you who have been used to getting my blog posts delivered via email have emailed me concerned about the slow down or the drop off in the frequency of the emails.  Thanks for that.  The reality is this, I have just been very busy.

Ulistic is growing and expanding.  We have welcomed Frank Allen as one of our sales reps and are currently in discussions with another amazing person who will become a vital component of our team just like Frank.  Ulistic is blossoming into a Internet consulting firm across Canada and the United States.

Next week, David and I are heading back down to Los Angeles for a couple of days and then come home right in the middle of Stampede.  No Microsoft WPC for me this year. Going to miss seeing everyone who I have become friends with in the Microsoft community but it will also be great to spend a week networking in the Calgary business community.

All is well with me.  Trying to get back into my routine of working out, working on the business and working on my own personal goals and family.  It is truly a fine balance.  I haven’t even watched much World Cup Soccer.  Football however during the month of June kept us busy and it will again come August.  Football even reduced me business networking where I had to just pop in to say hi to those colleagues in a local Calgary Oil and Gas Meetup group.

All is well…just busy.

________________________________

Ulistic focuses on serving the needs of Canadian Small Business, REALTORS, and Information Technology firms across Canada and United States. Helping your business understand, deploy and leverage social media, search engine optimization and online communications to generate business opportunities and make an impact inside your community and industry.

My business partner David and I are business professionals first. We understand what it takes to run a successful small business.

I invite you to reach out to me personally at 403.775.2205 or email Stuart at scrawford@ulistic.com.

Our clients at Ulistic challenge us from time to time.  Encouraging us to think outside the box when it comes to functionality with their online marketing, blogging and social media.  I would like to believe that my 15 years of experience as a Calgary IT consultant helps me understand how things work technically and then I love to put my creative layer over top and see where things go.  It is pretty cool and without great clients to push us…we would never be where Ulistic is today.  Thank You.

Blogging platforms are a dime a dozen.  Everyone has their favourite.  For me, when it comes to blogging platforms, WordPress is a hands down winner. I have used Blogger, TypePad and a wealth of other options and personally I haven’t used a platform that is as feature-rich plus offers the ease of use many small business marketing professionals are craving for with all of their online marketing solutions.

During a recent Internet Marketing Coaching call with one of our clients in Tampa, FL. I was challenged by them to add particular functionality to help with getting their message out online.  They needed to add a signature component at the end of each blog post so they don’t have to constantly type in a calls-to-action or quick blurbs about their business.  Sounded pretty simple and with my experience I knew WordPress would already have something I could recommend to my client.

The WordPress community did not disappoint.

I stumbled upon this great new plugin for WordPress which met our client’s need.  The FT Signature plugin designed by FullThrottle Development offered everything they  and we were looking for to meet this particular requirement but all now we have something we can use with all of our fully-managed online marketing clients.

The FT Signature plugin provides bloggers and clients of Ulistic, the ability to append a signature file at the end of each of their posts.  Just like you would with Microsoft Outlook.  You will see a great example of the FT Signature plugin in action at the end of this post.

It is customizable with a bit of HTML knowledge and can be turned on or off when you are composing your blog post.  This is a pretty powerful plugin for the WordPress platform.

If you haven’t heard of FullThrottle before, they provide full service web development in Raleigh, NC. Thanks to the team at FullThrottle for helping us out.

Learn more about how to automatically insert your signature on a WordPress blog today.

________________________________

Ulistic focuses on serving the needs of Canadian Small Business, REALTORS, and Information Technology firms across Canada and United States. Helping your business understand, deploy and leverage social media, search engine optimization and online communications to generate business opportunities and make an impact inside your community and industry.

My business partner David and I are business professionals first. We understand what it takes to run a successful small business.

I invite you to reach out to me personally at 403.775.2205 or email Stuart at scrawford@ulistic.com.

Thanks to my good friend Marcia Johnson for sharing this with me.

Microsoft Tag!

I have been sharing with a number of the small business clients that we work with at Ulistic about the day when tagging comes into play.  Now, it is here with Microsoft Tag.

What do I mean by tagging?  If you check out the Microsoft Tag website you will learn a tonne about what they have to offer.

In a nutshell a Microsoft Tag is something similar to a bar code that you see on any product we purchase at the supermarket.  Traditionally bar codes were used for internal inventory or other systems that a store would use.  Now this is all going to change!

Microsoft Tag now takes what was traditionally an internal mechanism and puts power into the hands of the consumer.  Many restaurant owners, small business managers and those who run hotels may be shaking in their boots or jumping up and down in celebration.

What Microsoft Tag offers now is something like this bar code that a web designer can use on a website, a restaurant owner can post on their menu or a hotel owner can share on the front door of the hotel.  Consumers, readers, information gatherers now with their smart phone or mobile phone can use a special Microsoft Tag Reader to scan the image (see near the bottom of my blog for a functional example) and they ar directed to a mobile website that offers additional information or where you can leave a review or share your feedback.

Where I see this playing a major role in business?  The opportunities are endless..really.  Need to solicit reviews from those who come to your restaurant..put a Microsoft Tag on your credit card bill.  Want to keep in touch with those who purchased products and services from you, get a Microsoft Tag and email the tag to your visitors.  Imagine the potential this can have for small business.

Microsoft Tags are where the fax machines were in the early days….remember what happened with fax machines…now everyone has one.

Over the next few weeks I will learn more about practical uses for Microsoft Tag.  This is so new the exact impact on business is still to be determined but I think it will be huge!  Almost as big as video.  Want to chat about Microsoft Tag, give me a shout at 403.775.2205.

A full onslaught war is brewing online between Google and Microsoft.  For those military friends…forces are assembling and loading the mags.  As a career Microsoft Partner (Ulistic is a Microsoft Partner) who wandered away from the mother ship for a while I am starting to slowly move some of my day-to-day technology use back my colleagues from Redmond.  I am very excited about the upcoming Microsoft Office 2011 for the Mac and interested in learning more about what Microsoft has to offer online through there Office Cloud.

My friends at CRN Canada recently reported that the new Microsoft Office Cloud (get Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote online) has been opened up to Microsoft SkyDrive clients as a response to Google slamming the Redmond software powerhouse a few weeks ago urging Office users to switch to Google Apps.  Microsoft Office Cloud solutions is a  free Web-based Office applications, dubbed Web Apps, gives users access to Web version so Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Web Apps has been in beta for roughly nine months but no Outlook or email client.  Maybe Microsoft still wants people to use Windows Mail or some other mail solution.  Microsoft claims that Office online will work exactly like the desktop version…looking forward to testing it out on June 15, 2010.

Prepare the forces, a war is brewing on another front between Microsoft and Google.

I wonder how it will work with Safari on the iPad?

I am sure readers of this blog can go and find examples of where I praised Google and their Apps solution as a suitable replacement to Office.  I gave Google Apps and Google Doc an honest attempt in my early days at Ulistic but since those days I really missed the functionality Microsoft’s productivity solutions and I recently moved back to Office.  Electing to go with Office 2008 on my MacBook and now I rarely use Google’s online apps.  The move back was brought on simply by a lack of simple and common features that Microsoft offers that are nowhere to be seen in Google Apps.  Simple features that may not mean much to the average user but this power user who requires basic functionality to work noticed.

Sure my email is hosted with Google on the back-end, as a mail platform Google is pretty good for $50 per year.  However you really need a mail client.  I have elected to go back to my MacMail which is a good mail platform on the MacBook.  But nothing beats the look and feel of a robust email client (something I miss by not having Microsoft Outlook) and with Office 2011 bringing in the powerful Outlook application that will be a wonderful upgrade from Entourage.

But, who should you trust with your data.  Do you trust Google or Microsoft?  You will get a chance on June 15 to test drive Microsoft Web Apps and compare to Google.  Both solutions are free for you to test out or use.  Give it a chance…but keep in mind where the data is housed.  Web solutions normally offer storage and the Microsoft offering with SkyDrive or Google both supply a limited amount of data storage as part of the free offering.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

For those who are concerned on what is missing:

1.  Booking meetings across multiple time zones (calendaring)

2.  Page breaks (Google Docs vs. Word)

3.  Smart Art (Google Docs vs. PowerPoint)

For the record…I still love my MacBook..but need Office to survive!

Is your head buried in the sand or does your technology organization understand and leverage the powers of online marketing, search engine optimization and social media to share information, content and advice with your community and client base?

Hello from Toronto and the 2010 Search Engine Strategies conference.  David and I are guests at this years Canadian stop and enjoying a great opportunity to share best practices and ideas with many of our peers in the online community.  It is great to actually see faces in this usual face-less world that is emerging.

It is no secret that the online search world is evolving, is your business prepared for the upcoming changes or are you still attempting to catch up with older techniques?

Today’s age of the knowledge worker empowers users and search is one of the most important ways many learn about what you have to offer and teach the market about your offerings. Search can be a complex yet adaptive strategy and the time is now businesses large and small to take control of how and where people find them online.

Interested in understand the latest on how Google’s search techniques impact the marketplace? Does Microsoft’s advertising strategy tweak your curiosity but allow prospects to find you?

The 2010 Toronto Search Engine Strategies may just have the answers for you. Now underway at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Toronto this annual event brings the sharpest minds together for 2 days of intense collaboration on search engine techniques and facilitates the sharing of best practices amongst conference delegates.

It is no secret that the Internet is evolving and the way small business across North America look at new ways to market their business challenges even the sharpest of marketing minds. SES 2010 provides a forum for online marketers to learn the latest techniques on effective link building, pay-per-click advertising, social media tactics, real-time search effectiveness and many more business and marketing strategies.

Now in it’s seventh year, SES Toronto is organized and programmed by the SES Advisory Board and SearchEngineWatch.com, the leading authority on Search Engine Marketing (SEM), including Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click.

What are some of the emerging trends? Is it Google’s recently announced “Caffeine”, which is a complete overhaul on how Google indexes websites? Will this shift from crawling the net looking for content to a real-time database of online content change the way many of our VAR businesses show up on search results?

Will Social Media continue the onslaught that has attracted the attention from experts, enthusiasts and hobbyists? Gobbling up the attention span of business professionals to casual surfers across everywhere? How important will Facebook and Twitter be in the next year? Will the “instant on” social media services play impact search results and help position business when prospects look for products and services? “We can’t continue to keep our heads in the sand.” states Ulistic Senior Advisor David West.

These questions and others will be discussed in the keynotes, breakouts and in the hallways throughout the 48-hour conference in downtown Toronto. Peter Morville, President of Michigan’s Semantic Studios kicked it all off with his morning keynote address on how search patterns influence the decisions and actions people make. “We really need to understand our users and the vocabulary and the words they use,” said Morville, talking on understanding how people search for information throughout many facets of Internet, mobile and Internet search.

Follow Search Engine Strategies on Twitter #SESTO.

I find myself these days with three Apple products at the ready at all times and with our team at Ulistic growing, collaborating and sharing of information amongst our team members is crucial to our success.  Our MacBooks, iPhones and IPADs travel with us everywhere we go and this allows for keeping in touch with our clients when they need us.   Having instant access to our client data is crucial to our success but having this luxury within our budget is especially critical.

The Internet Cloud allows Ulistic to operate in a manner that meets all of our needs for access, security and affordability.

Enter another robust, secure and free/nearly free solution for business

I stumbled upon a great “free” application over the weekend and what is even more impressive is how seamless it works with all of our computers and mobile devices.  For me personally, one of my biggest challenges throughout my business career has been taking accurate notes of things that happen or are said in a meeting.  I just wasn’t one of those guys who took notes on everything that was said in a meeting.  But I think I just found a solution that can cure me of this challenge.  Sure I tried Microsoft OneNote but it didn’t have a solution (when I was using it) that worked when I didn’t have my laptop.  With this new application I learned about over the weekend I may have just finally found a cure for my challenges with keeping track of what happens in our meetings.

Notetaking Software that just works

Enter Evernote! Evernote is simply one fantastic service!  Evernote offers free and “nearly free” services to a busy guy like me who doesn’t have countless hours in a day to wrestle with technology.  Evernote’s simply interface and synchronization allows our team at Ulistic to have our notes with us whereever we go.  MacBook, iPhone or iPAD they all work like a charm.  Synchronization works virtually without any user interference to all of our devices without any headaches at all.  Need to start taking notes for an idea that pops into your head, no problem, just open Evernote wherever you are a make a quick note.

This includes pictures, movies, typed in notes and audio recordings.  Can you say SLICK!

The free version of Evernote allows for 40 MB of data transfer each month, not bad as a starter. Go Premium with 500 MB of synchronization traffic for only $5 per month or $45 per year – less than the cost of that memory stick you just bought.  When you combine Evernote with other great online services such as Dropbox and Google/Microsoft hosted email, why would you ever need a server or complex information technology solution for your small business?  It just makes technical and economic sense to choose robust, secure and efficient services such as Evernote and the others if are simply sharing files and sending emails.

Evernote also works on the Microsoft Windows platform and Android, Palm Pre and Blackberry mobile phone services.  I am giving Evernote two thumbs up and placement on my home screen of both my iPhone and iPAD.  Great tool for any size of business.

Something else that is cool, Evernote can also track where you were when you worked on a file and bring up that location on a Google map.