Design Sherpa brings 100 design enthusiasts closer to a dream trip to Paris

Design Sherpa, our Digital Sherpa product for the home design and remodeling industry, is hosting the What Inspires You? contest.  In this contest Design enthusiasts are competing to win $10,000 and a 10-day trip to Maison & Objet in Paris.

Phase 1 has ended, the judges have spoken and narrowed down the field to 100 winners which are announced daily on the Design Sherpa blog.

Each winner submitted a photo and up to 100 words telling us what inspires them.  Below are a few of the images submitted.  You can view these, the 100 word design inspiration messages and the rest of the 98 winners on the Design Sherpa blog.

Phase 1 winners will now move to the second phase of the contest.  In this phase each contestant will enter a 350 word blog post about an interior or architectural design topic that communicates both his or her unique passion for design and writing style.

Your Blog IS About Results;

We Are Driving Ourselves Mad

Content Curation, Original Content, Re-purposed Content, Purchased Content, Content Yada, Yada, There sure is a lot of fodder these days about how to slice the Content Pie, from bloggers, clients, side liners and such.

What is a Business To Do?

How about starting with what you always do when operating a business, Look at The Numbers. If no one is reading your blog, what you are doing isn’t working. How the content is labeled has little bearing on the success of your blog.

There is an underling current surrounding original content, and sometimes folks get stuck on always wanting original content on their blogs. That is a flawed approach. As an example, a good friend of mine, Erin Rose runs a local news blog  Positive Detroit,, now a couple of years running was just voted as The Best Local Blog in SE Michigan by our local media, Real Detroit. Erin does an outstanding job curating content, but guess what friends, none of her content is original!

The point here is this, Erin has a keen understanding of what type, and feel of content her Circle of Influence wants to consume, and she satisfies that by filtering through localized content for her readers and following.

Focus on Results

If you are using your blog for your business, it IS about driving leads. Marketing has always been about selling more stuff to more people for more money. If you are using new media, social media or whatever the buzz word of the day is, Focus on the Results. Nothing else matters,

Alone and No Visitors Have Arrived: Creating Engagement in Business Blogging

So you have started your company or apartment community blog, and you are posting away, but you look around only to discover you are Alone and No Visitors have Arrived

Now What

Well, according to the American Marketing Association, you aren’t really alone. When tasked with the question, Are brands providing meaningful and engaging experiences to their customers through their online communities, the answer is a somber no.

Our research on 135 online communities representing 45 major brands indicates that, with few exceptions, the answer is no.

Nearly half of the brands in the study were still in the social marketing experimentation stage, showing fairly robust levels of activity but lacking an integrated strategy across multiple communities and social media. Almost one quarter of the communities were “ghost towns,” mere facades with little or no member participation.

So if big brands can’t get it right with engagement, what doe the small business do who has jumped in with both feet. There is a great discussion going on over at our good friend, Jason Falls blog on a post titled Corporate Blogging Success Starts and Ends With Business Metrics.

The social media purists will tell you that a corporate blog serves as a community hub for your brand. They say it gives your customers a connection point to your company and engenders a sense of community. In some cases that’s true, but you’re going to see me exploring corporate blogging a lot more this year to follow up on a theory that your “community” or “audience” for your blog isn’t what you think it is. That, and the ultimate judge of a corporate blogging effort must be more closely tied to success metrics than making everyone feel good.

Start With a Corporate Blog Purpose

With our blog for our own small business, Urbane Apartments, and our blog The Urbane Life, our first goal was to create SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and web traffic to our UrbaneApts.com web site, for the sole purpose of Renting More Apartments. While there are a lot of little pieces and parts to the puzzle, our blog was and is the highest driver of leads for us. Our combined blog and web traffic for our small business will exceed 17,000 views this month, and 51,000 page views.

We went on to create Engagement next, and have enjoyed the benefits of that evidenced by increased resident retention. But it took awhile to enact engagement, but after 467 posts and 1,851 comments, our blog is humming along nicely.

Tactic Lust Has Little Value

Are you in love with on line tactics, such as facebook and twitter, but are wondering why you only have a handful of followers or fans? It is all the rage today to be a part of this craze we call Social Media Marketing, but if you are just talking to yourself, there is no net effect for your business. Said differently, being on facebook and twitter alone has little to no value to your small business unless you are engaging with your community of interest.

What Do I Say or Post

Social Media is outreach on steroids. it is a way for folks to share things of interest with other like friends and associations. Social Media Marketing can be an excellent way to expand your customer base. Master aligning content with your core customer base, and become a source conduit via the various social platforms within your Circle of Influence.

Be a Curator of Content That You Are Experiencing

Dan McCarthy summed it up nicley on a recent comment he left on his blog

The distribution challenge — how do I get the content I want to share out into my social graph as easily as possible — is a technology-standards issue. For Facebook et al to leverage value out of their audience, they need techniques to keep their audience as organized as possible. Ergo, a walled garden of a certain degree. As a marketer or a media player, you want to assess each potential distribution channel in terms of the scale that you can aggregate and the results that you get from distributing content. The equation would be something like: (Size of social graph on platform/click-thrus)+(Redistribution of links)+(Inbound link recognition by Google)=Weighted value of audience.

The broad debate across the social media community about “original” versus “repurposed” content defines the content question in a way that is too confrontational, I think. A good example is the Good Reads summary of things that struck me that I do on this blog. I’ve been fascinated by the volume of upstream click-thru’s I’m driving with those posts. People are reading them and clicking through to the articles that I’m highlighting.

I’m acting as a curator of content that I’m experiencing. I’m applying an editorial filter on that content, and in each summary providing some context for why I think the post is interesting. The blog post itself isn’t strictly original, but it is definitely presenting a point of view that some number of my readers find useful.

That’s the role of curation, and every brand can benefit from it. For instance, imagine posting once a week on your Urbane apartments blog about new reviews of restaurants in the surrounding area. The reviews can come from any number of sources, and you pick out the ones that you think would be the most interesting to your Community. That’s curated content. It’s not original. But it is incredibly useful.

All Blog and No Comment Makes For Slow Growth

When we started our blog at our small business, it didn’t do so well. The fist set of posts went up in February of 2008. We did what we thought you were supposed to do, we provided regular content, (at least what we thought regular was at the time, we since have increased “regular) we posted relevant content to our business, and we had a pretty good writer with a journalism degree doing the posts.

Dribble, Dribble, Dribble

I love to do marketing experiments to test what works and what doesn’t work, and see our own small business as a “laboratory” to test ideas before bringing them to our clients. So, that is partly why we started blogging in the first place, to see what worked. I actually hung with the blogging test with lackluster results for much longer than typical, as by August of 2008, some seven months after the blogs launch,we only had about (35) monthly visitors. Frankly, most of the ideas we test fail, and so I was ready to pull the plug on this one too, as just being some type of fad for folks drinking the Social Media Kool Aid.

It Is All In The Comments

So, in September we made two significant changes to our blogging approach,

1. We added Guest Bloggers, which later became staff bloggers (more on that in a later post)
2. We required the Guest Bloggers to leave 3-5 comments on like other blog posts for each blog post they did for us.

An array of pretty interesting things happened from this turn of events, but the most significant was that our monthly blog traffic took off like a rocket. By March of 2008, monthly visitors to our Urbane Life Blog had grown to over 4,500 unique visitors.

Slow But Steady

Social Media Today penned a post recently titled Comments Have More Value Than Tweets, which tends to support this commenting theory.

If a person blogs and uses a commenting service like Disqus, you’re pretty much guaranteed they will receive your comment. Email gets ignored. Calls go straight to voicemail. Comments get responded to.

Commenting on someone’s blog accomplishes so much:

• you engage someone on their turf and in a very non-invasive way
• comments tend to have a high response rate, it’s likely you’ll get a reciprocated comment back
• comments let you showcase critical reasoning and smarts
• regular commenting is a sign that you value the other person’s opinions; that won’t go unnoticed

But here is the rub, and we speak this from first hand knowledge,  Blogging is Fun, commenting can become work. We typically get push back from bloggers and folks starting out blogging, as everyone wants to create content,which is good, but Social Media at its core is about connections, and leaving thoughtful, relevant comments on like minded blog posts is an excellent strategy.

How about you, what has worked for your blog growth,

Digital Marketing; Want More Business-Start Blogging

So, How much data do you need to start blogging?

I am a big fan of what the folks over at Hub Spot are doing, and they continue to provide actual results as to what is working for their clients. According to a study of 2,300 HubSpot customers revealed that businesses that blog witness their monthly leads rise by 126% more than those who don’t.

According to the folks at Hub Spot,

We compared leads last month with leads two months ago for 6 consecutive months, and the result shows that blogging businesses, whether or not they use the HubSpot platform, experience a 165% lead growth, a much larger increase than that of non-blogging businesses, which experience a 73% lead growth.

So, How long are going to wait to start a blog for your business? No time for that, let us here at Digital Sherpa help, we do blogging you, in a big way, and we can help you move the Google Needle! This stuff works, and IS how we grew our own small business, It will work for you too.

Google Juice and Social Media Marketing

A proven strategy for Moving the Google Needle is Consistent Content, which starts with a Content Strategy Plan. Dan McCarthy in his post titled A Case Study in Building Google Juice lays out how consistent posting, with relevant copy can and will  serve up some of that famed Google Juice.

Dan points  out some flawed thinking surrounding the Google Juice and Internet Marketing debate;

Say the words “Google Juice” and people are likely to nod their head knowingly. Getting Google Juice is a dark art, easy to understand and hard to execute. People hear Google Juice and they think, Page 1..

These conversations are flawed. Google Juice is an ongoing by-product of a consistent content strategy that connects with a specific audience. As my colleague Todd Dubnerpoints out, when you try to game Google, you end up gaming yourself. But when you try to serve a market with consistent content, even with a marketing emphasis, you’ll accrue a natural level of Google Juice that will differentiate you from the market.

Content Strategy

Valerie Maltoni, over at Conversation Agent lays out a the importance of a Content Strategy.

Static and often stale Web sites have been in dire need of evolution for a long time. Content formats shared in social media and networks suit the way we evaluate, talk, and socialize our decisions about products and services better, at this stage.

Although we all know that it’s still very early days. We’re trying to retrofit how we think and organize our knowledge, recombining and building on information, as well as out humanness, in a medium that has a long way to go on mapping to either one. Content comes close, but only when it’s activated with engagement.

Just like TV didn’t kill radio, the company Web site still plays an important role in the digital marketing mix. Razorfish highlighted the importance of Web content to provide experiences in their 2008 FEED report.

Instead of building a site around an organization chart, which in many ways mirrors the company’s hierarchy, we should build the context around customer needs in two areas of browsing:

(1) search – for answers
(2) sharing – of stories

These two desires and functions are the bread and butter of blogs, where more recent, or shared trump content win. Plus, blogs help with the relationship thing in ways that Web sites don’t – by humanizing the interaction with your company through conversation and relationship building.

Blogs Are the Cornerstone of  Your Digital Footprint

As both Valerie and Dan point out, a company blog is an excellent tool to Expand Your Digital Footprint, and create Google Juice. While your individual approach for your business may differ, the fundamentals are mostly the same.

Think about this, most companies create a web site, and then sort of forget about it. That doesn’t work for Google, as they are scouring the web for fresh content regularly. A blog, which is just another web site allows you to easily update content easily.

We would love to here what is working for you, and what may have been a challenge,

Commercial Real Estate Professional Leverages Social Media Tools

Posted by: Adam Japko, ajapko@nci.com

It has been a busy season for us at DigitalSherpa releasing industry focused social media service programs helping both local and national businesses harness the social web as part of their marketing programs.  As we were preparing for last week’s release of CRE (Commercial Real Estate) Sherpa, we discovered John Reeder, a local commercial real estate professional associated with Sperry Van Ness in Southern California. 

John has a really fine commercial real estate blog.  You can check it out here.  It is an impressive centerpiece for his overall social media campaign on several fronts:

1) There are not that many commercial real estate blogs to begin with.  This is one of the reasons that we introduced CRE Sherpa to help the industry leverage the available tools that can drive their personal and business brands like John is.  John is breaking new ground and is an early adopter in the CRE space.

2)John has integrated other social identities, like Twitter, and has also leveraged some good tools on his blog such as Disqus Comments.  

3)His posts are regular and frequent, a key to a good social platform and engaged following.  In addition, he is providing a “News Dump” that he powers that includes CRE content from around the web.

Most interesting of all to me, as a hungry learner on how and why businesses begin leveraging powerful returns from social media participation, was John’s starting point thinking found on his “Who Am I” page:

Why am I blogging?  Good question.  I don’t know for sure, but here is what I suspect:

30% because I am a shameless self promoter, but corporate websites are a poor venue for random thoughts about the market.  I see the power that having an online professional persona has had for my blogger heroes (Barry Ritholtz, Fred Wilson and Brad Feld) and it seems like leveraging an online presence is a no brainer for a CRE professional.

40% because I always end up creating a bunch of charts and graphs, and I figured I may as well post them on the internet so that 6 visitors a month can look at them.

15% because I wish there was a really good commercial real estate blog.  I’m skeptical as to whether this site will be the really good blog I am hoping for, but it never hurts to try.  Investment real estate gets very little good coverage in the mainstream press (as in journalists do not understand investment real estate, not that it gets bad press), so the internet seems like a natural place to be able to read thoughtful commentary on the market.  But I guess I don’t really see it online either.

25% because I believe that we are nearing the next sea change that will affect the way that we conduct business.  Tools like LinkedIn and Facebook are only starting to influence the way we conduct business.  I see this trend accelerating as the tools become more useful.  So I want to have my boat in the water when this sea change happens.

This is a common and prevalent perspective that new businesses or personal bloggers embrace when they begin deploying social media tools.  They have something to say, figure there is an opportunity to be heard, and there is little to lose besides some time trying it.  As you can see, John figured only about 6 visitors a month would show up and see his charts; and I am sure he was only half kidding when he wrote this as he was probably preparing to launch his blog.

It is not clear to me how long John has been at it.  I can’t find an archive on the blog.  But, his results have been impressive.  First, traffic to the Real Property Alpha blog is substantial.  According to Compete reporting, the site has been averaging 2500 t 4500 unique visitors for several months.

In addition, John has been active on Twitter and has about 480 followers and is on more than 20 lists of real estate related twitters.

The traffic results and engagement that John is driving around his content marketing effort is impressive, but not out of the ordinary for local businesses that approach the social web systematically.  The amount of web benefits that most social media participants see far outstrips the returns they previously experienced with more traditional tactics for driving traffic to their web sites.

I have not met John Reeder in person yet, but I have an impression of him as a smart CRE professional and somebody that I would turn to if I was looking for advice in Southern Cal CRE.  That’s the power that John has unleashed.  And it is doubly impressive that he has accomplished this in a marketplace that is under leveraging the power of the social web to date.

Welcome to DigitalSherpa

About DigitalSherpa
Welcome to DigitalSherpa, a social media and internet marketing service for companies of all sizes ready to build and participate in communities that  influence and directly contribute to the success of their business. Created by Network Communications, Inc., an experienced social media services provider, DigitalSherpa is a turnkey custom social media marketing program that helps your company grow through consistent quality engagement.

Social Media Marketing
What is it? Increasingly people are engaging and connecting around businesses, brands, and issues that interest them. The explosion of social media tools and networks, like blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, has created a unique opportunity for you to engage desirable audiences around your company’s voice. This has real and measurable business benefits: increased visibility, new leads, referrals, reputation enhancement, and more.    By outsourcing the heavy lifting involved in deploying effective social medial programs to DigitalSherpa — for an affordable fixed monthly fee, you get all the benefits of a powerful Internet marketing  campaign without the major time investment that is usually required. Your customized program will:

- Improve Google visibility

- Drive web traffic in new ways

-Create community engagement

- Unearth new clients

- Enhance client retention

- Turbo-charge word of mouth and referrals

- Build brand and online visibility

DigitalSherpa: An Experienced Partner
Using the latest social media tools, DigitalSherpa programs engage communities of interest, including your customers and prospects, in ways that benefit your business.  NCI’s Sherpa services have helped hundreds of businesses deploy social media marketing programs in a variety of markets. With DigitalSherpa, you have an experienced partner to help you leverage this exciting new marketing channel. We recognize the incredible potential of social media marketing to improve your bottom line; we also recognize the challenges that social media marketing present: the complexity, the costs, and the time.

DigitalSherpa: A Turnkey Solution
DigitalSherpa offers a monthly subscription service that provides a turn-key solution to create active, engaged and effective virtual networks. Creating this engagement results in outcomes that are clear, beneficial and measurable.  We help you create and define your audience, locate your potential clients, build social relationships with them, and promote your brand and website.  Together, we tailor the program to meet your business objectives to maximize your time and financial commitment.