Eversince Google+ started, businesses have always wanted to be part of it. In July, Google closed any account that has been verified as a business. Fortunately, earlier this month Google+ Pages welcomed in businesses & brands to use the Google+ social network.  An amazing addition is that Google+ branded pages are appearing in search results.

People + pages, better together 

Google+ has always been a place for real-life sharing, and Google+ Pages is no exception. After all: behind every page (or storefront, or four-door sedan) is a passionate group of individuals, and we think you should able to connect with them too.

For you and me, this means we can now hang out live with the local bike shop, or discuss our wardrobe with a favorite clothing line, or follow a band on tour. Google+ pages give life to everything we find in the real world. And by adding them to circles, we can create lasting bonds with the pages (and people) that matter most.

For businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face. All you need to do is start sharing, and you’ll soon find the super fans and loyal customers that want to say hello.

A number of pages are already available and to create your own Google+ Page for your business, go to the Create A Page and choose which category you belong.

• Local Business or Place
• Product or Brand
• Company, Institution or Organization
• Arts, Entertainment or Sports
• Other

Have you always had the problem of taking less-than-amazing videos?  Too long & too many boring segments with no activity or human faces, poor framing and really only a few minutes of the video is all you really need. Not all of us have the patience to use video editing software and I’m just happy the HighlightCam app has been created. The app reduces the complexities of video editing with just a simple push of a button.

HighlightCam, centering around mobile device & currently works on the iPhone & iPod Touch, is an amazing application that helps you turn your photos & videos into great mini-movies without the need to do any editing. Based on the user’s preference, HighlightCam simulates a human editor’s decisions and implements them aligned with the user’s stated preference. Just feed it a raw video in any format and it will send back a great video that is  worth sharing!

It edits a user’s video & analyze both the images and the audio track and convert them into an impressive video with enhanced quality & detects the parts of the video that has activity, voice and human faces. It is amazing how it is able to select the most appropriate scenes to put together and make a highlight video that everyone can enjoy. You can even publish minimovies to YouTube or Facebook in one step. So, you can definitely make use of this app as one of your tools for your  social media marketing.

“Think of it like having your own personal video editor: you send them the footage, and tell them what you want, and they do all the editing,” said CEO Robert Neivert. “For us, you send us your footage and tell us what you want, and we do the work and send it back to your iPhone, including scene selection, fades, cutting out of bad shots, audio fading, and more. Just like a professional editor would.”

“Our ideal user is an iPhone user that shoots video and want to share it, but does not have time to manually edit it,” said Neivert. “We expect this will be strongly represented by parents with small children and pet owners who tend to shoot a large amount of casual video, but don’t have the time or skill to manually edit all the footage.”

I am looking forward to shooting more video now that I know I can get results that are actually worth viewing and sharing!

The app is free on the App Store but this gives you only 10 free movies. It costs $2.99 for additional 10 credits.

*You can get a refund if you don’t like the generated movie.

Facebook remains the most popular form of social media to promote brand awareness which I have discussed here.

Recently, Roost, a social marketing platform for individual professionals, businesses, consultants and agencies, determine what type of businesses have topped the rank in terms of increasing the impact of social campaigns, engagement & remaining active in marketing.

Summary of Roost’s findings:

• Businesses who had the most reach are small & mid-sized businesses who are involved in music, entertainment, and luxury goods.
• Small and mid-sized businesses who are in the medical and health industries are the most active.
• Companies in the music and broadcast media sectors posted the most efficient “signal-to-noise” ratios.

As analyzed by Roost, in terms of reach, medical practices were the most preplexing, it is the last in the rank in terms of reach but it is topping the activity list.

Other industries with similarly large gaps included:

• Music, number one, 26th in activity;
• Consumer electronics, number five versus 23, respectively;
• Hotel and hospitality, six versus 25;
• Commercial real estate, 25 versus seven;
• Fitness, 26 versus five; and
• Insurance, 27 and eight.

If you have a website, be it a blog, a portfolio website, a real estate website, etc. there’s always this need to keep on coming up with new & interesting stuff to put up to attract & give visitors a reason to keep on coming back & would make them want to stay longer on your site. RumbleTalk is a chat service that provides your visitors an exciting live conversation experience. It’s a fun way of giving your visitors a further reason to stay on your website and will promote your content for you.

To set it up, go to RumbleTalk. You simply need to register with your email and create a password. Rumble Talk is a cloud-based solution so there’s no coding or server required. The chat is added to the site by simply copying and pasting an automatically generated code.

RumbleTalk provides a live customizable chat widget that can be added to any web page in 3 basic options:

• Embed anywhere on your website as part of a web page.
• Embed as a floating toolbar on the bottom.
• Get a URL and share it to your community.

Why use Rumble Talk?

• Custom-Designed Chat  - You will have an admin panel where in you can customize & design the look and feel of the chat box to align it with your website’s colors, font & theme, control background style in different parts of the chat, use your own image as a background & it gives you the ability to ”stretch or shrink” in size as needed.You can also use Rumble Talk’s skins & templates if you wish.

• Promote via Social Networking & Increase SEO –  Not only does Rumble Talk adds a chat service to your website, it also has a feature that makes it easy for your visitors to share your website to social networking sites like Facebook & Twitter. Use a single sign-on with Facebook or Twitter account.  Visitors will have the ability to “LIKE” your company’s Facebook page & retweet interesting lines from the chat or repost them on Facebook, instantly promoting your site! You can also let visitors contribute content to your site or blog.

• Easy to Manage – You may have a couple of websites that you’d want to add the Rumble Talk to. No need to worry because you have an option to use one account to manage all of your site & you can manage as many chats as you like in each site. You can even restrict inappropriate words. With RumbleTalk you can define a list of words and phrases that will be restricted & ban certain users to help control spamming visitors.

• It’s FREE!

What better way to energize your website or blog? Use it to engage visitors &  to create a community in your website.

According to the latest annual survey of the blogosphere conducted by Technorati, Facebook remains the most popular form of social media and dictates what bloggers post (depending on the trending topic on Facebook) more than any other source of information.

According to this year’s survey,  60 percent of all bloggers use social media to follow the brands that they blog about.

And 14 percent of bloggers spend at least 21 hours a week on Facebook.

Facebook gives  new ways for real people to play a role in providing feedback for organizations, companies and individuals. Whether you’re a big established company, an individual with loyal fans, or simply someone with ideas and opinions, social media means new ways to create and communicate with people to reach out to them & promote brand awareness.

Checking emails every single day & emptying an inbox is very hard to attain. There’s nothing worse than seeing an avalanche of emails, an inbox crammed with unread messages from yesterday or the week before the moment you open your email account! It seems like an endless daunting task to get caught up with every single email that comes in and to be honest we should spend less time struggling to keep up, if we could just organize them on a daily basis.

Having these same sentiments in mind,  Baydin, which is in the 2011 class of 500 Startups, created  this utterly amazing webapp/website, The Email Game.  The email game is a website that imports your inbox (gmail for free, outlook/exchange/other corporate solutions for a fee) and changes the way that you interact & delegate your incoming mails. It has a countdown timer and the carrot of points for completing various actions on an email. Basically, turning mundane tasks into a game which  increases your likelihood of actually doing them.

So here’s how it works:

Go to emailga.me & give the web app the permission to access your Gmail account & you will be directed to this screen to start the email game.

Click start and let the fun begin!

Bear in mind that the main goal is to get emails out of your inbox & put them where they’re supposed to be. The 3 main actions are responding/replyin, boomeranging ( which returns the email to your inbox after any length of time you would like, be it a few hours or a month)  and archiving/deleting.  So for every email, decide what to do with it.

Try to clear you inbox as much as you can and you’ll get higher points.

Click archive or delete and you’ll receive some positive feedback, along with points:

When you need to respond to an email, you have 3 minutes to do so by default. Get your response written quickly to receive the most points, but  you can always add more time if you need to write a longer email.

When you’re done going over your emails, you’ll see your score, along with the option to share it on Twitter:

How cool is that? Now, go ahead and have fun taming your inbox and invite your friends for some friendly & healthy competition!

We know that the only thing that is constant is change. Sure enough, just a few days ago Google tweaked its algorithm again & made a huge change in how they rank content. The change created a buzz & got all experts comparing before and after results & talking about the site that were affected the most.

Google explained the following on the Official Google Blog:

Giving you fresher, more recent search results
11/03/2011 08:19:00 AM

Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer’s day, are best when they’re fresh. Even if you don’t specify it in your search, you probably want search results that are relevant and recent.

If I search for [olympics], I probably want information about next summer’s upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics (the only time my favorite sport, cricket, was played). Google Search uses a freshness algorithm, designed to give you the most up-to-date results, so even when I just type [olympics] without specifying 2012, I still find what I’m looking for.

Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old.

We completed our Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows us to crawl and index the web for fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Building upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.

Now, it’s clear that Google understands that the most relevant search result is more often the one that’s relevant “now” – the one that’s bringing you new information. Search engine strategies are used  in order to effectively promote businesses online, especially for Real Estate. Now, we have to know  how is this change going to affect the Real Estate sites? Find out here.

Nowadays, establishing an online presence requires more than just having a website. Almost all companies & businesses are using Facebook to promote their brand.For businesses, you need to set up a Facebook Page or a Group or both. Setting up your Facebook account is so easy to do & it can significantly help you in communicating & interacting with customers who have bought your product or hired your services and reach out to potential clientele.

Make sure you take advantage of the massive audience Facebook has to offer. If you’re still one of those people  who still has doubts about involving business with Facebook, know this for a fact: People are now spending 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. If you just know how to make Facebook work for you, it can give you impressive results.

Click here to see the The 15 Best Facebook Pages You’ve Ever Seen

The new iPhones 4S has been released last Oct. 14th. I know a lot of people are still trying to figure out if they should get the new iPhone 4s. If you’re one of those people who are having a hard time deciding, read on.

Listed below are the Pros & Cons:

PROS

• New camera — The 8MP camera with simple editing features (crop, rotate, enhance, and red-eye reduction), a backside illumination sensor, and larger aperture (for better low-light and white balance correction) make the iPhone 4S’s camera one that competes with regular point-and-shoots. It will also come with face detection and image stabilization and the ability to capture HD 1080p video.
• Faster processor — The custom A5 chip in the iPhone 4S is the same one you’ll find on the iPad 2, which means the iPhone 4S will be faster in processing speeds, games, and downloads.
• More carriers — Since the iPhone 4S is compatible with CDMA and GSM cellular bands, you can use it in more places around the globe. Even on Sprint’s network, if you’re looking for a change.
• Siri integration — Apple’s new Assistant feature basically turns the iPhone 4S into a voice recognizing personal assistant. The demo during the keynote was impressive and highlighted some interesting uses for the blind, hands-free texting, and more.
• Wireless syncing — Raise the roof for wireless sync! This will be an iOS 5 feature that will be compatible for the iPad and iPod Touch as well, but I couldn’t help but mention the fact that you’ll soon be able to set up your devices and get updates without connecting your iDevice to a Mac or PC.
• Airplay — If you’ve got an Apple TV, the iPhone 4S will allow you to stream what’s playing on your device to your HDTV with Airplay, which is built right into the new iPhone.
• Fingerprint resistant — The iPhone 4S has an oleophobic coating on its glass exterior, making it resistant to fingerprints by repelling oils in your fingers.

CONS

• No 4G — Still no 4G on the iPhone 4S. This is unfortunate, but you may not have to wait too much longer to get fast download speeds on your iDevice — analysts believe that Apple is waiting for better LTE chips before adding them into the iPhone, which could be as soon as early next year.
• No NFC — Mobile payments on the iPhone will have to wait as Apple has excluded NFC (near-field communication) technology on the latest iPhone model. Of course, this won’t be a deal breaker for some of you who said you wouldn’t use it anyway.
• All those leaked case images — We’ve seen too many leaked “iPhone 5″ case images to forget about the wider screen, sleek form, and wider body. I’m betting the real iPhone 5 is just around the corner.
• Other options — Why spend upwards of $199 with a two-year contract when you could spend $99 and get an iPhone 4? Sure, you won’t get the 8MP camera and Assistant feature, but it’s a really good deal nonetheless. Even better — the 3GS is free!
• No unlocked models . . . yet — If you’re an avid traveler, you might want to hold off on purchase for a few months. According to Apple’s website, unlocked versions of the iPhone 4S are coming soon.

So, Should You Buy?

If you are upgrading to iPhone4S from iPhone3GS, or an earlier model, the switch is is a no brainer; go ahead and do it. Especially iPhone 3GS owners who have been waiting for their contracts to expire will get a much-needed bump in power, speed, and form factor with this update, and it’s one that’s worthy of your hard-earned dollars. The new features are well worth it! However, if you already own iPhone4, the decision to upgrade to iPhone 4S or not is not as clear cut. iPhone 4 owners should stick to their current handsets and simply update to iOS 5 to get that “new phone feel.” You’d be better off waiting for the iPhone 5 next year.

As Apple continues to release updated, and improved versions of the iPhones, evaluating the changes and your needs as a user, are key to making the vital decision.

Social media is a valuable tool for businesses and organizations. While game-changing in many ways, they are simply the latest in the evolution of tools that allow people to easily connect with one another. Ultimately, it’s important to keep in mind that the purpose of social media is to generate interest in your product.

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Friendster, MySpace, Xanga, etc… Anyone who has internet is familiar with these sites. Some of these sites have faded (Friendster, Xanga, etc.), leaving decaying individual’s profile. Yet, the fact remains that social media is of essential importance to anyone hoping to expand their brand. So the question is “Should companies focus on one social media platform to ensure success?”

In a blink of an eye, something beyond your control might affect the way you reach your target audience, especially when you just rely everything in just one social media platform. Take for example – Facebook.

Whether you’re a fan of change or not, it’s coming quickly to the social media giant, Facebook. They basically just dropped a bombshell and instantly changed the way we communicate online with their new newsfeed, timelines, subscriptions and a myriad of other enhancements and updates. However, if you have a fan page, you might have noticed a drop off in the amount of interaction you are getting on it. Facebook said they want to make it easier for people to connect on the web. But we have yet to find out what good does the new changes bring to Facebook pages.

See, this is what we have to understand. If our brand just circles around Facebook and if it’s the only way we communicated with our clients because we haven’t diversified enough and use other platforms, these changes could have badly hurt our business. Email, Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, Google, SEM, SEO, phone calls, QR codes, texting and prints all need to be used in conjunction with one another to drive people to your home base, which is your self-hosted blog. That is the only thing that you control! And if Twitter goes away tomorrow and you use other mediums to communicate with your clients, you will not be badly hurt & crippled. You cannot afford to put all of your eggs in one basket.

The first step of a successful (and long term) social media plan is to spread your brand everywhere you can and the main goal is to drive people to your site and give them a ton of quality content that will keep them coming back. More than ever, it’s important that you have a web presence. Especially in a Real Estate business, since it’s is no longer a short term -transaction game, but a long term relationship building process, that would definitely be  strengthen by having a web presence. Your own website or a self hosted blog is the only thing that you have a 100% control over, so it is where your time needs to be spent first.

Here’s a pratical takeaway:  Google your personal name and your company’s name. What comes up? If you don’t see anything about yourself or your business, none of the other billions of people online will see it either and you know wha to do.