Even a year ago, it may have seemed like a great idea to build a social application for the real estate niche, but today’s reality is a niche application can’t build any critical mass versus an established “elephant” competitor. Today, my good friend Deb Madey gave me the idea for this article in a discussion of various real estate agent review sites. Yelp, by virtue of the sheer numbers of reviews of real estate agents eclipses any smaller niche review site that have little traffic, few reviews,  and are hard to find. Social media user bases are consolidating to the biggest player in each space, simply because everybody is there. Facebook reportedly has an overwhelming 25% page view share and a hardy few can remember the names of Twitter’s early competitors.

This trend is one more strike against startups. Fast growing apps like Foursquare and Gowalla can hit a wall when (not if!) Yelp copies its features, like it did with Foursquare’s location “Check-in” feature. Twitter have implied that their strategy is to add geolocation features that may also rival Yelp and Foursquare.

It’s now harder to be a game changer when the rules of the game called social media are solidifying / consolidating. Two years ago, no social network really dominated its niche… now lines are being drawn.

Simply put, the social media rewards value and service, and devalues self promotion and advertising. Up to now, most social media marketing methods simply wrap traditional push marketing methods into a new package. Facebook fan pages and Twitter broadcasting deals replicate websites and coupon advertising. In this new age of social media, push marketing appears obvious and may detract from the marketing intent. We’ve been advocating that entrepreneurial business people focus more on delivering valuable services to their community to attract business opportunities. One way to do this is to create local media resources.

The following slideshow describes how to create a new local media brand that leverages the many channels of the social media. The concept is simple: online media brands no longer reside solely on TV, on a website or as a Facebook page. Media brands now span all the channels of traditional and social media. Any local media property that delivers content across a panoply of channels becomes “ubiquitous” to the community. You’re always found. And if you or your company are behind the media brand, you benefit from association.

Social media reinforces the concept of branding because your brand is judged by what you do and who you are online. This couldn’t happen ten years ago, you would have needed to advertise who you were and what you did.

Twitterfeed’s analytics monitors the clickthrough rate of each tweet’s link (the bit.ly link) from each tweet. @A2BreakingNews has only 180 followers but averages between 200-300 clickthroughs on its bit.ly links daily.

The demand for community breaking news is tangible, and Twitter remains the best source for up to date information. The Breaking News Network’s mission is to provide real time hyperlocal news curated by on-the-ground community leaders.

Related slideshow: Pull marketing and community engagement strategies

from: How Geeks do Holiday Cards

Everybody has noticed how fewer Christmas cards arrive in the mail? and for the obvious reasons:

1. eCards have captured 5-7% of traditional paper and ink trade. eCard makers are sophisticated in their approach to maintaining customer bases by providing galleries for the Christmas cards being sent out by their clients. Example: Ashland University Christmas Cards 2002-2009.
2. Many PDF their own Christmas Card and send by email. The Christmas card photograph can be done instantly now, so people can procrastinate to the point of capitulating with “I’ll PDF and email the card”.
3. PDFs retain links so a business can direct traffic to their websites or blog for promotional purposes. This Online Marketing Blog article has some tips to make holiday cards a marketing piece.
4. Christmas cards were/are used for recapping the year. With social media, recaps are a lot easier when there’s constant contact and the ability to send a real time holiday greeting through Facebook. Check your Facebook timeline to see what everybody is doing on Christmas Eve…

Merry Christmas everybody!