Mitch Levinson Webinar Transcription
Matt Hiester
Good afternoon, and welcome to EPA’s Indoor airPLUS Maximizing Your Business By Social Media Webinar. As part of our guest speaker series, Mitch Levinson is with us today to provide industry insight and expertise on new, effective and exciting ways to promote your homes through social media. Social media tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs can set you ahead of your competitors, and capture the attention of your customers. You will learn how to get started in the world of social media and how to use these tools to promote your business and build relationships with customers. 
I would like to begin by introducing our speaker today. Mitch Levinson is an internet marketing expert with expertise in social media, website development, e-mail marketing, search engine optimization and CRM consulting services. Mitch is Managing Partner of mRELEVANCE, LLC, an internet marketing, social media and public relations firm. As a multi-million sales producer who earned an MBA in Computer Informations Systems and E-Commerce, Mitch brings a unique perspective and experience to the field of real estate communication. Mitch combines the two interests in order to help homebuilders and developers gain a competitive advantage through the internet and technology. So at this point, I’m going to turn it over to Mitch. 
Mitch Levinson
Well thank you very much. Good afternoon to everyone. I think we have a good group today; a good mixture of beginners, intermediate and advanced people in social media. And it also looks like a lot of us are pretty comfortable using the technologies that are out there, with almost half of the people using the big three. We’ll start our presentation here today talking about the intersection between social and search; how to make social media work for you. The first step in the entire program is trying to think like a search engine, so you want to make sure that you have the ideas in your mind of Google and what Google is going to think. Ping early and ping often, critical words and strategy. How do you use those words to get Google to think your content, your content in your blog or in your Facebook update or in your Twitter tweet, how does Google see that as relevant to the type of website or blog or strategy that you are trying to accomplish. Again, the key is search engine optimization.  
So I want to give it a quick view of what search engine optimization is. People refer to it as SEO, and in this case, the 411 information about SEO is how does it work? What Google and the other search engines- and throughout the course of this call today I’ll talk about Google and I’ll probably say Google. And Google does drive 80-85% of the total traffic online, but when I say Google, think all of the search engines including Yahoo and Bing and AOL and some of the other smaller search engines. But I’ll probably out of habit just say Google. So what search engine optimization is is how you get Google and the search engines to think and realize that your site and your information is relevant to the topic or the key words that you are using. So what Google does is- think about Google as Lewis and Clark, as their controllers trying to map out the internet one road or waterway at a time. And what they are doing is what Google does and what Google box do is they go around and index each page by visiting each of the links on every page, and they start at one end of the country or the internet and they quickly click through on each of the other ones. 
And when you look at your site and strategy, you need to think about what are the words that you want to use, and how realistic are they to drive the quality traffic that you have based on what your product is. So for instance, on this page there are a lot of words of various levels. We have “Indoor airPLUS”; we have “green homes”; we have “swim tennis communities”; we have “new homes in Atlanta.” There are a lot of words with various levels of volume searches and competition, and what we want to do is create a strategy that will enable us to determine the words that will be most effective for the type of company that we are; our chosen words. There are tools out there like Google trends is the first one that will help you gauge the amount of search traffic in Google for those two words. In this example you can see at the top “Atlanta new homes and Gwinett new homes.” Gwinett is a smaller area in the Atlanta market. You can see that the blue line is- there’s a lot more volume of traffic and searches than the red line, which you can only see a very little bit if you look at the bottom of the chart. So the first thing is how much search volume is there in the search, and then the next part of it is how much competition do you have for the words? 
One way to gauge that is look at the amount of traffic or pages that are indexed. We are going to identify here that there are 21.8 million indexed pages for those words. So there’s a lot of search volume on the words “Atlanta new homes,” but there’s also a lot of pages that are indexed. So it may make sense for your type of company to pick a set of words that are- that have- that are more targeted to your local market. Like in this case; this is a screen capture of a Google Analytic chart for keywords of a client of ours, and you can see that they have selected words in their market “Lakeland real estate,” “winter haven real estate,” “Lakeland new homes.” They have used the words like Florida, and they have used bigger words, but they are highly and extremely successful if you can see by the number of total visits and the total number of keywords for those visits because they have been realistic with their target of their volume and competition in terms of words. 
And then we go in and, on a regular basis, look at the search engine and where the site ranks related to those words. So what this shows you is the words “Stamford Connecticut apartments,” their website is the fourth on the list in the search engine results pages. Included in those search engine results pages are also sites like LinkedIn and Facebook and YouTube and the social media sites that we’re targeting, because what is key about thinking like a search engine is understanding the concept of when you Google your name, do you like what you see? What type of information; what type of references; what is the list of websites that people who are interested in your product, what type of websites will they see and look at to evaluate whether they want to buy from you. Do you like what you see when you look at that Google list? So you have to be in the places where they are. You have to know what your audience is. What social media sites you need to be in. Along with how to use them, and you have to be very careful with what your profiles say about you. So for instance on this call we’re going to talk about a couple of these. There are a whole bunch more social media sites, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites as well as local search sites like Yelp and video sharing sites like YouTube and photo sharing sites like Flickr for you to use to get more exposure in the right place. But for the purpose of this call and this webinar, we’re going to talk very specifically about blogging, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, I believe, but using them in a way that will get you the market share and the third party credibility. And what I mean by that is when you Google your name, you have to like what you see. 
So this is just a Google search of my name, Mitch Levinson, and I am certainly not the only Mitch Levinson there is out there. But in this search results, you can see that there are over a million one results for my name. The first two pages are almost entirely filled with my websites, blogs or profiles. You can see that my mitchlevinson.com is number one; MLC Home Marketing is number two; a real estate company that I have is number three; LinkedIn is number four; mRELEVANCE is number five; Twitter number six; Facebook number seven. You can see that what I’ve done is targeted words, and of course in this case my name came easy, targeting words so that when someone searches for my name, they can find me; that’s really what it is. 
So again, the first thing you have to do is define your goals. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you going to use social media and create your presence as a lead generation source? Are you using it for customer service and online reputation, where you want to engage your customer? Or are you using it for SEO, search engine optimization- organic relevancy and the search engine results page? Our goal traditionally is the last three. We want to interact and build online brand credibility, while at the same time, we want Google and the search engines to identify our content as more relevant for the words that we’ve targeted. And if we do those three things correctly, then the leads will come. We will see that we’re getting traffic. We will see that we’re getting brand awareness. And we will see that we’re getting leads. It’s just not the same as the concept of- I built a website; I now have a form on my website, and I want someone to fill it out. Well by doing the other three, you are creating the environment for that web visitor to take that next step; to click on your call to action so that they will generate your leads. And one of the other main and significant reasons why you really have to be in social media right now is because if you don’t, someone else will. We’re going to show you in a few minutes how easy it is to not only engage your customer, but how easy it will be for your customer to engage you whether you are there or not. 
Before we get into that, the very first thing we have to talk about is the foundation of your social media strategy, and quite honestly, that is blogging. This red car symbolizes a very fast, a very effective sports car, but what would happen if this car didn’t have its engine in it? It wouldn’t go very fast, and if it didn’t go very fast, you are looking only at the shiny, red coat. You are looking at the bling-bling. What the blog is, and what blogging is all about is that is the engine jet that drives your social media strategy, and that should drive your online and internet marketing strategy. And we are going to show you about what you need to do initially for it, but blogging by the numbers. If you look at it, this is very significant and it is growing into a more significant thing each day. Fifty-seven million Americans read blogs. Twelve million American adults maintain a blog. Technorati, which is an online directory that tracks blogs; they are tracking 70 million blogs right now. And blogs can now be built so that they are websites. Most of the websites that I have that were on that list that were mine, initially they are blogs. They are built as blogs. They are built on blog platform. You wouldn’t know that they were blogs when you looked at it. But 22 of the top 100 most popular websites in the world today are currently built on a blog foundation. But what is a blog? 
A blog is a really a website. It’s just a different type of website. It’s built on an architecture that displays information and content in reverse chronological order. It can show pictures; it can show video; it can be customized to look anyway you want it to look, but it’s built so that when you add content, it pushes the old stuff down and displays the new stuff on top. You can tweak and change that a little bit, but that’s really what it is. It started as if it were a journal of someone’s activities or events, but now companies and web development teams are using blogs as an easy way to build websites and add content. You know traditionally people don’t update their websites on a daily basis, but blogs should be updated daily or weekly. What a blog will also do is allow you to write something that positions you as an expert in your industry. It provides SEO juice to your main website, meaning your posts, third party credible posts written on someone else’s blog, could provide a link to your site that would fuel your social media program. It provides the content, the indexable content that Google can then use as a gauge for how relevant your content, your site, your blog, your links are for those critical targeted words that we talked about in the very beginning. And it also helps you to stay in touch with realtors, other influencers, referral sources or anyone else who would not only buy your product, but suggest other people to get in contact with you for those sales. And when we talk about blogs, I want to throw this in there, there’s a lot of places for you to go to get a free blog on their platform- there’s Wordpress, and there’s blogger, there’s real estate sites hub, there’s a lot of places for you to get a blog free. All you have to do is set it up. 
We recommend a self-hosted blog, which is a website, your own website. The reason we recommend that is because you own it. You can put your own URL on it. You can control SEO your own way on it and target your own words. You can then connect it with your social networking sites, and you can have a blog post tweet for you or update your own status. And it can be yours. It then is your engine for you to choose whether your blog is your website, your blog is inside of your website, or your blog works with your website from an SEO standpoint. And those are three very different things. And again, your self-hosted blog, the content becomes searchable, each page is now indexable, and it can be sortable in the search engines and on the site itself. So I think that is critical. 
We’re going to flip through a couple of examples really quickly so that I can show you what a blog looks like. This is one of the clients that we have in Atlanta, and you can see that it looks just like their website; it is built right into it. This is their news page on their website. You can see that some of the topics that are talked about on a page like this not only are their products and their apartments that they lease, but also some events that they have in the local market area and/or something that is going on in the industry for them to become credible for other sources. If we look at the next one, it shows that this builder is using this blog to fuel their social media by having those icons on the left navigation area that shows how to get from one place to the next. It makes it real easy for the web visitor to visit their Facebook page or look at their Flickr account or see some videos on YouTube. And you’ll notice that even in this case, this blog looks remarkably like their website. If we go to the next one, again this is an integrated blog. This is one of the clients of the Indoor airPLUS ENERGY STAR builder. You can see that in the top they have Google integrated into it, and they are using this site as a way to tie it all together. This is a great way. And this site is also if you read the content and look at the words, they are targeting some of those key critical words in a way that will help them drive traffic, very effective traffic. Well again, your blog can integrate with your social media sites. So, your blog can’t be your only tool in this arsenal, you have to use other tools like Facebook. 
And this is a very effective Facebook page, and there are a few reasons why. So this is an apartment community, and it’s a high-rise. And what this Facebook page has done is the company has put a lot of effort to getting the right content out there to begin with and targeting the right words, but also understanding that Facebook is a community. It’s a place for people to go not necessarily to talk about where they live or their apartment, not necessarily to go and find a house to buy, or to find any product for that matter to purchase. It’s a place for them to go to interact with their network and their circle of influence. Oh and by the way, we all are there and we all do something for a living. What these call outs on the right hand side demonstrate are residents in the community answering the questions from residents or prospects themselves without interaction from the company. So what this Facebook page has done is created a sense of community for this apartment, where not only can the company itself help build credibility by answering questions, but the residents are now answering questions, which is far more credible of a response in not only the consumers’ eyes but also in the eyes of Google, then having the company just respond and having this bit of information on the internet and/or on their website. Another great way to do just that- create community is through the use of Twitter. 
Twitter, what we are going to see here is, Bethesda Bungalows. And again, they are using these targeted words. It’s my experience that the target audience for Twitter are more referral sources, and realtors, and industry personnel and media, and what we use it for is to target those types of, that type of demographic, instead of consumers because we’ve scored a lot of stories for our traditional agency, traditional PR, by using Twitter just because we are talking about what we are doing from a PR standpoint or from an industry standpoint, and then we are linking back to the blog. That first highlighted post “EcoHome Magazine Award Entry,” that is a blog post. The title of the blog post is “I just got back from the post office where I dropped off the entry to the EcoHome,” and it links to a bit.ly page and that bit.ly page will be the post on the blog that displays the information probably about the entry itself. So this is a very good use of Twitter and how Twitter can feed back into the blog, because the blog is where your foundation should be and the content that you are trying to drive traffic to. The next example is the EPAiaplus account. Again, same thing, helping their constituents, their clients by driving traffic to them through the account as well as using it to promote not only this webinar but some other things. Twitter is a great tool to connect to your referral sources and to the media. And I would keep focused on the concept of referral sources and media relative to Twitter. If you look at the next one, again this is my page; you can see that one of the goals is to drive more followers and more traffic if you just click one time, a pop-up is going to come up and it’s going to show you, there’ll be two if you click twice real quick. The first one, the one on the bottom, shows the growth of Twitter over time in terms of how many tweets per day. We are pushing 50 million tweets per day total for all the people using Twitter. And there’s roughly 21 million unique visitors on a regular basis with 143 million visits per day in February of this year. So this is a significant tool that is going to continue to be used from the media and for PR channels and for referral sources like realtors, and you can see it just growing. The media, they don’t want to hear- they don’t want you to e-mail them anymore. They like a phone call every now and then, but they’d much rather find the content for their stories here at Twitter when they can use and find them themselves rather than having the traditional pitch. So again the industry is changing and these numbers show you how. 
So how do you integrate your blog and Twitter and Facebook into a single program? Well we’ve seen that in action, but here is a blog that demonstrates it directly. So this green high-rise in the loop on the Chicagoland Real Estate forum blog, this has at the top you’ll see it has updated the Facebook page in the status update, and it included a link on Facebook right back to the article as well as on the bottom you’ll see that it tweeted, it posted an update to Twitter. And it also included a link right back to that blog post. So you can see that it is kind of a circle where it goes from one piece of content that you’ve written for your blog is used for updating your Facebook status, updating your Twitter account. You can use it in multiple places, and conserve and save time, but you also give your web visitor the ability to review your content and look and find you in the way that makes most sense for them and is more comfortable for them. 
Now, as your social media engine, you are looking at trying to drive traffic through better search engine optimization and better social media optimization- SMO. So we talked in the very beginning about what search engine optimization is. Social media optimization is the same concept of search engine optimization except for you are targeting the social media sites. So in other words, you want your Facebook profile to appear on the first page when someone Googles your name or your targeted words, just like you want your website or blog to appear on the first page when you Google those targeted words from a search engine optimization standpoint. So, social media optimization really is filling up Google with your online profiles- your profile on Facebook, your Twitter account, your Yelp account, which is a local area, a local search. It’s a place for people to rate your company, and for you to go in and identify your company, claim yourself, provide your address and contact information, and any specials that you might have, but it’s more localized from a search standpoint. But again, your social media standpoint, your social media engine is trying to enhance your search engine results and your social media optimization in order to increase your website traffic, build your brand and engage others because engaging others and building your brand will help to build your online reputation. And really that is what happens, and that is what people are looking at when they Google your name. 
So again, let’s review real quickly how the blog is going to post to Facebook. Here is a builder who has a Facebook page, and on their Facebook page they have their blog post on the top right you’ll see it post as a status update with a link back to the article, and it has been set up properly. On the bottom left, you can see the “follow us online” where you can click from Facebook to their Twitter account, or LinkedIn, YouTube or their blog. You can also see that they are using social sharing in their Facebook by having that share it feature at the very bottom of the post. So again the same builder, we’ll see how they use Twitter. And again, the same post is posting to Twitter and linking back to their blog and not always shortening that link, only shortening it when it exceeds the maximum number of characters that Twitter will allow. So in this case the link says directly “Bowen Family Home blog.com” and the links to it instead of the bit.ly link or the tiny URL you can see in the lower tweet. And the next one is the same builder, and on their website you can see at the very bottom, they have all of their social sharing icons where you can see that they have their Twitter, and Facebook, their blog, their Wordpress, their free Wordpress hosted Wordpress that is SW, and their active rain, their profile on a few other places, and their YouTube account. And you can also see their blog has the same type of links back and forth and all over. And I hope you have noticed also that from a branding standpoint, all of the accounts- their Facebook page, their Twitter account, their website, and their blog- they all look the same. They all look very similar, and you can tell that when you are looking at their blog you can tell that it is branded to them and it is all about them for here. And again, you don’t want to forget the most important bit of communication that we do every day; it is your e-mail. At the bottom of your e-mail you should offer the ability to link to your LinkedIn account, your website, your blog, any of the profiles that you have. This is, for me, one of the most challenging ones because I could have 12 to 15 links there; the same with Carol my partner. We’ve decided that six is enough, or in some cases, potentially too many. But you can see by looking at this that you need to offer your visitor and your prospect the ability to get in contact with you the way where it is most convenient for them. So as we are talking about e-mail, the next logical step is to talk about e-mail marketing. 
And your blog could be your foundation for e-mail marketing also. This shows an integrated blog. The blog is on the left, and what this blog does is- this builder writes a blog post and then in their article on the right hand side in their blog, I’m sorry, in their e-mail marketing piece that they send out on a monthly basis, they just list their blog posts and a little blurb about that blog post. So they are using e-mail marketing to drive traffic back to their blog. They are archiving that e-mail marketing piece online, in this particular case they are doing it on their website and not their blog, but you can archive it on your website or on your blog, and you are creating more relative content for those targeted words both on your blog, on your e-mail marketing page, on your, in your archive, in lots of places to do that. And then on your blog and in your e-mail marketing piece, it’s always good to offer social sharing. 
And what social sharing is, it is the way for people to repurpose, repost or republish your content. So at the bottom of most blogs you’ll see “Share and Enjoy” or you’ll see “Share It” or “Publish this to your Facebook page,” and what it allows you to do as the reader is click on any one of those links and publish this story to your Facebook page or Twitter profile.  You can also re-tweet something if you see it in your account. You can also “like” something on Facebook or comment on it. That is in and of itself a whole different strategy for using social media. Being someone that maybe you have a harder time writing original content, but when you read something that someone else wrote, you certainly can think of a couple of sentences or a paragraph to comment about how good that article was, or how you see or think about something similarly but slightly different. That is also a good strategy; comment on people’s status updates or comment on people’s blog posts. That is definitely a strategy to do. That will get more people sharing- social sharing- with you, and the more social sharing that happens, the more likely it is to be seen. 
For all of you who are currently using Facebook, if you use Facebook and you update your status, they have this live news feed, where what displays in that live news feed are all of the stories of all of your friends that get the most activity, whether someone likes it or whether someone comments on it. So it’s a good thing to try to target your status updates so that people will comment on them. That is definitely important, if you want to appear in the live news feed, and I think you do. So we are going to go and show a couple of examples real quickly. Here is ECO Evaluator. You can see how they have incorporated very well and graphically on the top right how they are trying to get people to follow them on Twitter and in other areas. Next one, we’ll see “share on Facebook” and “Buzz it,” you know Google Buzz, which is a whole new way to share profiles. And of course “Share on Twitter” and then the contact information below with, of course, the link to their website and what their service area is. I think that is very good of the U.S. Green Buildings Council for people to understand exactly where they are at and how to target them. And then often overlooked from these social media sites and social networking sites, when you are driving traffic from these sites back to your blog or to your website, as your foundation, one good strategy to capture them as leads, because again I said this at the beginning, if you concentrate on the two, three and four, the leads will come. 
Well when someone clicks to your site, from Twitter or from Facebook, you should create a custom landing page so that they know where they came from and they know what to do. Here is a real estate guy, a Phoenix real estate guy, and this is his page that people go to when they come from Twitter, and it is Twitter friendly. It is something that has been targeted, people click from Twitter and they know where there are coming from. On the top right you have other ways to get in touch with other things. On the left you can search for new homes in the area that you want, but it’s comfortable for people to come from Twitter and get to a page that, on his website, that talks about Twitter. And we’ve seen it be an effective strategy. Grabbing people’s contact information when you build that trust and rapport with them as you would if they walking into your sales center or walked in to your retail establishment and you started to talk with them, or they picked up the phone and called you. It’s a great way to create that rapport and build your personal credibility with them now that they made it to your site, and they have taken the next step call to action. I mean you have to ask for people to do things if you want them to do it. If you want someone to comment on your blog post, I would ask for it. “If you agree with this, comment here.” Or “if you want more information, comment here.” Or “I have a contest,” or “I have a social networking site and I want people to do something; I want them to take action.” I have a blog, and I have a website, and on my website and blog I have a button that says “Contact Us.” And in a lot of cases, I turn that into a pretty graphic picture- something that looks nice- and give them a reason for them to contact me. Am I giving something away? Are they looking for more information? I want them to take that next step. And it’s not only do I want them to fill out the form, but I really want them to call me and get in touch with me. And for my builder clients, I want someone to get so excited about a blog post or the website content that they don’t call and they don’t fill out the form; I want them to pick up their car keys and drive to that model center. I mean, that is the goal. Social media is marketing; that is what it is all about. It is all about the bottom line. It is all about return on investment. And if done right, you can increase your website traffic and/or your blog traffic by 50 to200 percent. Those are real numbers. In some cases, it’s even more than that depending on where you are when you start benchmarking it. It’s all about search engine optimization, and increasing your keywords; using better keywords; targeting your keywords and those referring sites where you are posting your content. Or building those sites, building those referral sources for yourself so that you can create that concept of community like Facebook, where you can have your customers talking positively about you. And again, if you don’t, someone else will.  And if you can play and participate in that, you’ll see that there are not very many people who post very negative things at all. It certainly happens sometimes, and you address it. If it’s on your blog, you don’t have to publish it. You can keep that blog moderated. Again, if something is, if someone questions something you are doing and you answer that question with sound business process and procedure, or you address it in the right way to begin with online in a public forum, people are going to trust you. You are going to build that credibility. 
I don’t know if you all heard about the Southwest Airlines incident a couple of weeks ago, but it made the news. Southwest- there’s a gentleman who typically buys two seats on an airplane because he is large, and he knows that he needs two seats. And he usually buys them, but he had a last minute trip- and he’s a producer of films- and he had to buy two seats. Well he had a last minute trip, he didn’t get two seats. They tried to stuff him into one seat, and Southwest Airlines asked him to get off the plane. And during the whole course of that project or that problem, he was on Twitter tweeting about it. And within minutes, Southwest Airlines was tweeting with him- interacting with him in a public forum- and turned that very potentially, very negative situation into a positive result and building brand credibility for them; enhancing their brand awareness and again, it turned out to be a very positive thing for Southwest Airlines. 
And again, you are targeting better search engine results pages; that’s what SERPs are- search engine results pages. And you are trying to increase your conversion from a web visitor to a prospect. That is really what your goal is. So as we start to wrap this up, and I hope you are all thinking about questions. I want you to remember three things. 
The three most important take-aways from today’s presentation are: first, define your goals. Like all marketing, you need to create a strategy. A strategy that includes: what words you are going to target, and make sure they are both relevant; make sure they are realistic, and make sure they are the right words for you and your company. And then, where are you going to be? Who is your target audience? And where are those profiles that I need to build so that I can build it where my blog is the foundation, and my blog is used to feed those profiles so it doesn’t take too long for me to update and manage on a regular basis. That is the first take-away; define your goals, make them realistic and understand what your strategy is. The second take-away is at all times, when you are talking about the internet, you have to think like a search engine. When you Google your name, do you like what you see? What is Google going to do with the profile that you built? Have you used the right words? Have you used the right words appropriately for both consumers and a search engine robot that is going to read your site and index it for what it thinks you are trying to accomplish? And then the third thing is tracking and tweaking. You need to analyze your strategy on a regular basis each and every month to make sure not only is it being effective; are you getting those increases in traffic? Are you seeing the increases in traffic of quality traffic the right way? That is what you need to do. And if you are not, how do you tweak it? How do you tweak it to be successful?  So again, what we are trying to do is to get you to think that the internet is about the intersection of social media and search engine optimization. How can I use my new marketing techniques to increase my quality website traffic by 50 to 200 percent? And that is really the goal. 
Matt Hiester
One of the questions that came in Mitch, what are some good sites to learn how to integrate Facebook  and Twitter and blogs into a website versus if they already have a website, how do they add in a blog? What are some good links that can help folks learn how to integrate these things? 
Mitch Levinson
Sure, so there are several ways to do that, and there are a lot of online resources for that. And just like everything online, you have to be careful with what you read. Some of it works from a search engine standpoint, and some of it doesn’t. For those that are do-it-yourselfers and you are managing your own website, you are managing your own blog, and you really want to figure out how to do it the right way, I would go to either Wordpress or Blogger and look at their online accounts that are free and set up there. And there are typical instructions for how to create a self-hosted blog and how to make it work the right way. Now on your website, it depends on how your website is built to determine: number one, if you can have a blog within your website, and if your hosting environment is correct for the right type of blog. So I guess that is a- if you are not comfortable with technology- I would contact someone who knows your website or who knows blogging technology, which by the way are not always the same. Companies that specialize in blogs, and building blogs, and building websites, and search engine optimization may not have the same skill set as someone who has been just building websites and focusing on web development for a while. So you kind of have to understand that. But my first step when doing that would be to go to your web development company and start asking them questions. And understand and try to gauge whether they have the search engine optimization ability. And quite honestly, the best way to evaluate that is, just ask them straight up- what websites have you optimized and tell me what the words are that you have optimized them for, and then go to Google and do some Google searches. I mean any search engine optimization, any blog building, any web development company that tells you that they can be effective; have them show you. We certainly consider that our strength and we have a list of websites that we’ve targeted for which words and that is where the proof is. So ask your web development company what websites they have targeted and what words they have targeted them for. 

Matt Hiester
Another question is coming Mitch. A person is wondering if there’s any out of the box spots on how they might use site specific social marketing such as Foursquare or Gowalla as a custom home building company. 
Mitch Levinson
So just to give a little background of those two websites, they are similar to what I mentioned through the presentation of Yelp in terms of being social, local social searches. Foursquare and Gowalla are kind of like online games where people “check-in” quote, unquote, “check-in” to a location and they can publish or post something about that location. And the game is you try to become mayor of a location because you’ve checked in more than anyone else. And things like Foursquare and Gowalla- one’s an east coast thing and one’s a west coast thing- but they are kind of similar. 
What we have seen in using those are having special events tied around them where if you check in on a certain day, you get a something. We had an apartment community have a Foursquare day in Atlanta where if you checked in on that particular day and over the next two weeks and lease one of their apartments, you got I think it was $500 off of their first month’s rent. I don’t remember what the incentive was, but it was something like that. And what they did was they used that as an event. They were having an event anyways, if you had an event and you checked in, that was just icing on the cake. And they used that as an incentive. So I think that is a good way to think about using those two resources. 
Matt Hiester
Great, thanks. One question that I actually have; being someone that is involved in the industry and also with the social media work that you do, do you have a sense of how many and what percentage of the industry of builders are actually using these tools? And again, I know that is kind of a tough question to answer because there are a lot of different tools. But a sense of how much of the industry is starting to move in this direction?
Mitch Levinson
I want to answer that question very carefully. I don’t have- I know that number is growing. The feeling I get is that that number is growing. And a lot of times companies go into it thinking I’ve heard about social media and they think social media is Facebook, so I’m going to go create a Facebook page and that is going to be my entrance into social media. And I hope from my presentation today you’ve seen that although Facebook is important, the blog is the foundation of your social media program and a way for you to disseminate information about your company. And then Facebook is kind of that add-on and Twitter is kind of that add-on. Because you never know what is going to happen to those external sites afterwards. You never know what is going to happen to those external sites afterwards. You know what is going to happen to stuff that you control. So your blog is your foundation. So I have a feeling a lot of builders are getting into social media backwards. Meaning, they are going in because they want Twitter and Facebook because they hear a lot of people are using those and they think it might be effective. I’m not so convinced that those builders are going to consider social media a success for them, because it’s not going to help them accomplish their goals. Without a clear strategy, with qualified, relevant, realistic words and an entire program from a marketing standpoint, you can’t just build a Facebook page and have it appear on the first page for a word like “new homes in Atlanta” or “green homes in Charleston,” and expect your Facebook page to be on the first page, or to get people to like it or follow it or visit it. So I have mixed feelings there. There’s a lot of social media experts talking about how important it is to get involved, and the key is how are those builders getting involved. And are they doing it the right way with a clear marketing strategy. And again, I’m not talking about internet marketing strategy; I’m talking about experience with traditional marketing so that you understand how people think and what their demographic is where they are. 
Matt Hiester
You are teeing up our last- we only have two more questions that we have time for. And you are teeing them up well. One person is wondering in terms of the marketing that builders are doing, how much time should folks be budgeting to do this well, to do it effectively?
Mitch Levinson
So there are three ways really to do it. There is the do-it-yourselfer, who does it all themself and we are going to talk about that one most because that is the most time consuming. And then there is the builder that may be able to do some of it themselves, and then they may be able to hire someone to help them with it. Whether it is someone that they are hiring in house or whether it is a company they would hire outsourced.  And then there’s the other extreme which is hiring a company to handle it for you; hiring an agency that does that, and obviously that is the least amount of time. For those do-it-yourselfers, and again this is going to be the extreme most amount of time to do, to get everything all set up and working the right way is where a lot of the time comes in. Once you have it set up and you think about a blog post being 250 to 450 words, a couple three paragraphs maybe, and think about blogging four to eight times a month, once or twice a week. That might in the beginning take you an hour or an hour and a half, maybe two hours if you are slow the first couple of times to write that blog post. But it shouldn’t take you much more than an hour once you become experienced for each blog post, something like that. And then finding a picture to go with it and going some of the other things. So you’re really talking about maybe an hour a post and if you have it set up right, it is already posting to your Facebook page; it is already publishing to your Twitter account, and everywhere else you need it. And when you supplement that Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and YouTube and all that with other things, you might be talking about five to ten hours a week, give or take. And again, it’s not an additional five or ten hours; your marketing team is not doing five or ten hours worth of traditional marketing that they might have been doing before. They are not using that time to create newspaper ads or whatever else they might have been doing. This is networking- online networking- think of it that way. 
Matt Hiester
And Mitch, two thoughts: one, I want to clarify. I keep saying “builders;” obviously we have verifiers, realtors on the phone too. I think much of what Mitch is talking about is relevant to all of these audiences. But particular to that last point you made, someone was wondering of those traditional marketing tools, the things folks usually do, have you found that there are any that are more effective indriving folks to the blogs and to the social media sites? Is there anything that can help tee that up from a traditional standpoint? 
Mitch Levinson
Absolutely, and that is very specific to each of our clients and each company yourself. So you should think about how it- you have to have a clear strategy; that is the first step. But all of the program, your program, should include both online and offline marketing. And whether that marketing is a billboard; whether that marketing is your radio spot; whether that marketing is your bandit signs; whether that marketing is your- whatever it is- the pamphlets that are at the grocery stores- whatever that marketing is- it had to have already been effective for you. It has to still be effective for you. You just have to think about what the media is that you are using and what the demographic is of those readers, or those listeners, or those people you are trying to target. And make sure you are creating not only the right message, but the right call to action, because again, your ad is not effective if it doesn’t get people to do something. 
Matt Hiester
Thanks Mitch, and we are right at 3 o’clock so we won’t be able to entertain any more questions, but we do appreciate those that came in. And first I want to say as a wrap up, thanks again to Mitch for doing a great presentation today; giving a lot of wonderful information for folks on the line to consider as you think about how you market the work that you do- so thanks to Mitch. Also, I wanted to let folks know that if you have additional questions about the Indoor airPLUS program, you can go to EPA’s Indoor airPLUS website and the contact information is on your screen. There is a very active, vibrant FAQ section. So if you had a question come up about Indoor airPLUS that wasn’t addressed today, you can go to the FAQ section and very likely the answer to that question will already be there but if not, you can certainly contact EPA with your question for additional information. Once again, if you want to get a hold of Mitch, he provided his contact information obviously as we all saw. You can also Google Mitch Levinson and probably reach him in 20 different ways pretty easily. So please do avail yourself of his expertise. And finally I want to just thank everyone for participating today. This is a continuing series that we do every so often on the Indoor airPLUS program and felt a strong desire for folks to learn more about the social media aspects of marketing. Stay tuned for e-mails and other information on other topics related to the Indoor airPLUS program. At this time we will end the webinar and we thank you all for your participation today, and thanks again Mitch. 




Mitch Levinson Webinar Transcription
May 6, 2010


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