Want to know what people are saying about your company online?  There is an easy way to create a “Listening Channel” to monitor the online chatter about your brand, your name, your keywords or phrases or any of the discussions that you find interesting.  This screencast will show you how to get started.

If you would like a little help setting up your listening channel for brand monitoring, just contact us. We are happy to help!

Related articles:

1. Social Media – Where do I start?
2. How We Use Social Media
3. Social media success: Science or Personality?

Yammer is one of our most used social tools at Vestor Logic.  We use it as an internal Twitter platform to aggregate links, share ideas, and communicate on active client campaigns.  It has become indispensable for us and is used by our team every single day.  Think of Yammer as a private Twitter platform for your organization.

You can setup your own Yammer network in minutes here.

Integration with Google Reader

We have integrated Yammer with our Google Reader to share interesting blog posts and articles from the numerous feeds that we subscribe to and review each day.  Sometimes we find blog posts from our favorite blogs that prompt internal discussion.  A member of our team will Yam It! using the bookmarklet and apply a hashtag to make it easy to follow the conversation in the future.

Yammer provides a step-by-step tutorial on how to integrate with Google Reader here.

Yammer as a link manager

Recently, we began using Yammer to manage articles, blog posts, links, and web pages that apply to an active client campaign that we are working on.

For example, we are leading a one-day workshop for a large corporate client in early March and we have begun collecting relevant stories and resources in Yammer to help build the presentation that we will give at the event.  We submit the link to the relevant content, hashtag it with the designated client tag, and then discuss it internally using Yammer.  We can go back at any point and view all of the submissions we have under that tag to begin crafting the slides for the presentation.

For this project, we now have 30 posts under that client tag and we should have more than 50 posts by the time we begin building the presentation.  This is by far the easiest way for us to aggregate all of this information.  This is a very powerful way for us to manage all of these links in one place and easily recall them when we are ready to review.

Our take on Yammer

Yammer provides us with an easy way to aggregate information from other sites and blogs in one place.  We can discuss each post independent of all the others in our stream.  It has become one of our most used social tools and I cannot imagine not having it as part of our arsenal.  All of our posts are preserved forever and the platform offers a free account.

How can you go wrong with that!  If you are storing links somewhere else, get on the Yammer platform and make your life easier.  You will find that it provides more efficiency to your research process and will certainly allow you to perform better for your clients and the projects that you are working on.

For companies that are accustomed to discussing topics regularly with the entire team, Yammer provides a perfect platform to do so.  Team members can subscribe to hashtags, discuss the content using comments, and the entire discussion is preserved for future reference.

Yammer’s new release is coming

Today, we discovered that Yammer will be reviewing its newest release on Thursday.  It’s certainly worth a listen.  You can register for the upcoming event here.

Are you using Yammer?

What are your thoughts?  How are you promoting discussions in your organization?  Are the discussions taking place on an internal system or out in the open?  Tell us how you are doing this?  We want to know.  Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Related articles:

1. How We Use Social Media
2. Finding interesting people to follow on Twitter
3. Google real-time search – WTH is going to happen now?

At Vestor Logic, we use social media apps and platforms in a number of different ways.  Some create efficiencies for us in the daily work flow.  Many help us accelerate our learning curve about new technologies and tactics.  Others give us insights into trends and breaking news that we would be hard pressed to discover without the help of social apps.  And some of the things we do/use are for pure enjoyment.

The following is an inventory or sorts.  It is a list of the tools that we use everyday and a description of how we use them.  We are sharing this to give you a better idea of how we are embracing social media to make our business better but is not intended to be a blueprint for your business.  Your needs and goals may require that you rework this mix of tools and maybe even how you use them.

Tell us how you are using social media to benefit your business by commenting below.  We want to learn from you and your experiences as well.

The Vestor Logic Blog

Certainly the hub in our business model

The Vestor Logic blog serves up our original content and allows us to share our insights into the ever-developing social media landscape.  We post weekly and will increase our frequency now that we have finished the development of a few other internal projects that have been huge time-sucks as of late.  Our model is simple: create content on the VL blog and syndicate it through the various social outposts that we have created.  Though our team has been at the forefront of social media for a number of years (we launched the first social network dedicated to real estate investors in Feb 2004: see The Investor Nexus), our Vestor Logic brand is relatively new having just launched in August 2009.  We are still building out our foundation and further defining our marketing strategy just like many other companies.

The Vestor Logic site and blog are powered by a Content Management System (CMS) called WordPress.  We host the site on our own servers and recognize the effort as one that will never truly be complete.  We constantly tweak pages, add new widgets, and refine the message for our visitors.  WordPress as a CMS makes this process easy.  The learning curve is short and almost anyone can master the basics in a short time.  The other big benefit of WordPress for us is the collection of plugins that offer social functions like Sociable, Tweetmeme and WWSGD.  These plugins provide great functions to our site and cost nothing to use.

Facebook Profiles

We post to our personal profiles several times a day

Jessica (Jessica’s profile) and I (Tim’s profile) both have Facebook profiles that we use primarily to stay in touch with our friends.  Of course, this counts for business too as many of our clients are friends or are referred to us by our friends.  We post multiple times throughout the day on a variety of topics but try to keep the business talk to a minimum.  Of course, we do share cool tips and tricks with our friends for some of the more popular social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.  Both of us are passionate about other things.  For me it’s hiking and I share pics and accounts of my trips on my profile page.  Jessica has artistic roots.  Her posts cover the spectrum of cool and unusual topics.  She is a great follow for anyone looking for a laugh or smile during your workday!

Facebook Fan Page

We update the Fan Page a few times each day

The Vestor Logic Fan Page is a testing ground for us.  We test different tactics relating to design and functionality in an ongoing effort to stay ahead of the curve and provide the best advice for our clients.  We regularly post links to interesting articles from our favorite blogs, thought leaders and news aggregators.  We post links to our new blog entries and maintain an active stream from www.TimMiner.com covering my ramblings on everything from social media to hiking to kids and family.

Twitter

I use Seesmic on my desktop and my Blackberry to check the Twitter stream multiple times each day

Our Twitter account is used primarily to research the current trends in social media and uncover the news sources (i.e. blog posts) that are covering those trends.  We use Twitter to test drive concepts with other social media pros and to syndicate our own content from the Vestor Logic blog.  We see Twitter as a news source and a testing ground for ideas.  Our experience suggests that the value is far greater for those activities than it is for generating sales.  But to be fair, we mostly follow social media people and do not focus on building a following for potential customers.  Your experiences may bear more fruit from sales initiatives if you target more individuals that could be potential customers.  Our Facebook page also posts to our Twitter stream.

LinkedIn

I visit the site several times a day and try to post at least one update each day

We have a company listing on LinkedIn for Vestor Logic and I also maintain my own profile.  We connect with other social media folks, each of our clients and prospects, the members of our past projects like Investment Riches and all of our referral sources.  I participate in various groups and maintain close ties to many of my classmates from college on LinkedIn.  We have had a fair number of referrals come from our relationships on LinkedIn, most coming from connections made years ago that now see what we are doing in social media thanks to the updates that we publish regularly.

YouTube

Our YouTube activity is just beginning – look for our new video series “Social 60″

There really isn’t any excuse for not posting video on a regular basis.  I wish had some great reason for not doing it.  But I don’t!  We have been busy building our Vestor Logic outposts and YouTube fell to the bottom half of the list.  But we are working on it now.  We are launching a video series called “Social 60″ which is a video format that will allow me to rant on the top social media issues for 60 second clips and encourage responses and feedback.  I don’t expect these videos to provide clearly defined answers up front but rather to create a place for us to discuss the hot topics of the day and encourage others to share their opinions.  Together we will reach more of a consensus and perhaps all learn something.  Look for a few new videos each week.

Micro-blog: www.TimMiner.com

This is my safe place to test ideas

It usually takes Jessica and I a few days to work through a new idea or concept or to reach an opinion on a new platform (like Google Buzz) that just launched.  The micro-blog allows us to do two things: explore the value of Posterous (which is the backbone of the micro-blog) and test ideas that are not yet ready for the Vestor Logic blog.  I also post pics from my hikes and backpacking trips, share interesting links to stories I find, and share my joy as a father of a 19 month old little boy.

Yammer

Yammer is our own private Twitter platform

I jumped on Yammer the middle of 2009 and have found that its value to Vestor Logic is really that of a link repository.  I use a bookmarklet labeled “Yam It!” to archive links to interesting blog posts or articles or web pages and then check back later to review them in more detail.  The most effective practice however is to use hashtags to organize my link submissions by topic and most importantly by client.  I am working on the structure of a one day Discovery Workshop for a client right now.  I have more than 25 archived links that point to blog posts and articles that are relevant to their event.  I will go back about a week before the event and revisit each one turning many into slides for the event.  I have found this practice to be very effective and it allows me to share all of it with my team.

Picasa + Flickr

I love photos!

I have nearly 15,000 images on my laptop (and a backup copy on Google using web albums in Picasa for just $20 a year!).  I take pictures at each event we are part of, all presentations, every hike I embark on, all family events, and just about anything else I can think of.  Up to this point, I have been storing all the personal stuff on my laptop install of Picasa.  But recently, I changed my strategy to incorporate Flickr.  Moving forward, I will use Picasa for personal images mostly and Flickr for the business stuff.  Of course, there will be some spill over as I find it very difficult to delineate between work and personal.

Google Docs

A great way to share and collaborate on documents

Jessica and I have been using Google Docs for a long time.  We collaborate on project specs, new page content for the website, new blog posts, just about anything you can do in Word or Excel.  We use the Form tool to create presentation evaluations.  Now that Google Docs allows you to upload ANY file to Docs and the storage is so cheap it makes it very easy to aggregate most of our docs on the Google platform.

Google Analytics

The best free tool for website owners in my opinion

We have a Google Analytics account that monitors all three of our web properties which provides priceless insights into visitor behavior.  This application allows us to make changes and modifications to our websites to improve on the experience for all of our visitors.  It also provides feedback on which social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Email Campaigns, AdWords) are referring the most traffic.  We look at Analytics every week.

Google Reader

RSS feeds are our lifeline!

I currently have 138 subscriptions in my reader.  They produce somewhere between 400-500 new articles a day and cover social media, real estate, general interest, business, hiking, and even our ECHO.  Our ECHO folder is a collection of RSS feeds that monitor platforms like Google Blog Search, Google keyword alerts, Twitter Search, Icerocket Blog Search, and each of our own RSS feeds for mentions of our brand.  This is a great way to establish a basic listening channel for monitoring the chatter about your company.  I spend about 90 minutes a day scanning the feeds, starring items, and reading about the topics that matter to me.  This may be one of the most important functions I perform each day.

SlideRocket

SlideRocket is PowerPoint on steroids!

We use SlideRocket for all of our presentations and also for the image galleries on our site like the Portfolio page.  They just recently released some social plugins including a live Twitter stream that can be integrated into live presentations.  The best feature for us is the portability of the presentations and the fact that they are housed online accessible from any web browser.  Of course, there is also the choice of linking to your presentations online using a link or simply embedding it into any blog post or web page.  Very cool application!

Seesmic

Our desktop and mobile Twitter and Facebook interface

We have used many of the popular Twitter clients including HootSuite and Tweetdeck but have found Seesmic to be the most comfortable.  They all do most of the same things and there are tons of reviews out there already for each, but I think it is a personal preference.  Bottom line – I like Seesmic!

Feedburner

RSS management and promotion made easy

Each of our three web properties is armed with a Feedburner feed to manage the subscriptions and promotion of the site RSS feeds for posts and comments.  If you want to step up the value of your feeds you need to take a close look at Feedburner which is another Google product.

Mobile Apps on the Blackberry

I use mobile a great deal but I expect that usage to increase

I find that I am using my Blackberry Bold more and more to connect to my social outposts.  There are apps for almost everything.  It will only get better (for Blackberry users specifically) as the development of apps continue to provide a functional experience similar to what we get on our laptops or desktops.  Currently, I use mobile apps for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Google (which includes Picasa, Docs, Maps) and WordPress.  I access a least half of these everyday if not more.

bit.ly

Keep it short!

Bit.ly is a URL shortening service that allows you to take those really long URLs and shorten them into something manageable.  The service also tracks the metrics for each of your links showing you which content has the best reach or was most effective at reaching an audience.  We see this as a nice compliment to the data we track using Google Analytics.  I don’t visit our Bit.ly account as much as I should but will certainly do so more often now that we are running at full steam.

In testing…

Both of us are constantly testing new apps and programs.  Currently, I have a list of about 25 that I am getting to know better and the following three have excited me the most in recent days.  Feel free to check these out too and see if they fit for your business strategy.

• Swix – a social metrics dashboard of sorts
• Social Network Integration in Outlook – a cool way to connect Outlook to LinkedIn (and Facebook soon!)
• SpredFast – a cradle to grave social marketing platform created by friend Scott with robust management and analysis capabilities

So what are you doing?

How are you managing your social marketing efforts?  Are you doing the same things we are?  What are you doing differently?  We want to know…besides, I showed you mine so now you need to show me yours!

Related articles:

1. Social Media – Where do I start?
2. Yammer is a powerful link manager
3. Update: Autopost Experiment on Posterous

I wrote a post a few weeks back titled Passion for Work, Family and Fun – How do you find balance? to discuss how I strike a balance for my passions.  I’m an avid hiker, I like to cook, I am a dedicated husband to an amazing women, and the proud father of an 18 month old little man named Nate (my wife and I call him Nater Tot and Jess calls him Nato Potato!).  During work hours, I obsess about new social technologies and how people are using those technologies to interact with each other.

So as I discussed that post with a few friends I realized that my social footprint, or my social ecosystem, is pretty large.  Here is a mind map of it:

I have actually trimmed down my outposts a bit to allow for the addition of the Trail Sherpa and The Investor Nexus platforms.  Both are new projects that I have begun to develop and both focus on passions that I have for work and hiking.  Look for more information on these two pursuits in the coming weeks.

What does your social ecosystem look like?  Have you created a mind map to visualize the structure?  I use Free Mind to create my mind maps.  You can find the free download here.

Is there some other app or service that you use that I don’t?  Tell me how you are socializing on the web.

Related articles:

1. How We Use Social Media
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The following is a presentation for the Nevada Network Against Domestic Violence.  This organization works with more than a dozen outreach programs in Nevada that provide services to individuals impacted by domestic violence.  As a progressive organization, they have created a Leadership Series, featuring presentations and training for their future leaders to ensure that the success of their movement is realize.  We are very honored to be part of this.

I was asked to present on the use of social media in both for-profit and non-profit organizations and to share our insights on the emerging trends within the social media space.  This presentation, including the notes and the complete slide deck, have been made available to you as well.  We will be adding audio to each slide next week so please return to experience the full impact of this presentation.

Click here for the full .pdf presentation notes and sources with links

Working with Vestor Logic

If you would like to have Vestor Logic present this presentation to your non-profit organization, just contact us.  We can also create a custom presentation for your specific needs.  Tell us how we can help.

* info@vestorlogic.com
* (702) 321-0790

Related articles:

1. The Social Media Dialogue: It’s Not About You!
2. How We Use Social Media
3. Social Media – Where do I start?

At the cabin with my wife, Cathy

It’s the eternal struggle for any business owner, isn’t it? Finding a healthy balance between all of your passions. For me it’s family, work, cooking and hiking.

It seems like I have been on this quest for years.  And in the last few years that quest has become even more difficult with the proliferation of social technologies that make us feel almost required to stay plugged in.  Finding a time to step away to find enjoyment in our other passions and truly unplugging from the social net is often difficult.

I returned to Las Vegas in 2001 to chase the woman of my dreams and joined a startup as the second of eight original employees.  I burned the midnight oil for a few years while working on the concept for what would be the first social network for real estate investors on the web.  The timing was perfect in February 2004 when I launched and the immediate success justified the long hours.

As the business matured, I did find some success in striking a balance between my business responsibilities and the desire to enjoy life with my wife before we started expanding our family.  We bought a cabin in southern Utah and spent every other weekend there, retreating from our business lives for a few days at a time.

Of course, the real estate market began to show signs of stress, our business strategy began weaken, and the fate of the real estate industry became apparent.  We sold the cabin, sold the real estate community technology and turned our focus once again to burning the midnight oil to ensure our survival.  With a new focus and a new purpose, and did I mention a new baby boy, I returned to my role as a startup entrepreneur.

I have found as I look back on my life that my experiences have been positive when I “wanted” them to be and negative when I “thought” they should be.  From a Buddhist’s perspective, my experiences are neither good nor bad.  They simply contribute to the story of my life – I have chosen how to perceive them.

The Miner boys in the Big Horns (WY)

I took this perspective into my developing situation and “wanted” to make a positive of it.  Real estate was failing, our social networking technology had been sold off, and desire to create a balance between work and family was once again paramount.  The difference this time around was fatherhood.  Anyone with kids knows that once they enter your life your path is forever altered in ways that you could not possibly have imagined.

I want to wear my “Dad” hat as much as possible!

To give you a better sense of timing for my story, it was this time last year that I began to work on the business concept and plan for Vestor Logic.  I focused first on my imperatives – the way I wanted the business to impact my life.

That was easy:

1. a maximum daily commitment of 6 hours for meetings, calls and other scheduled items
2. a business structure that would allow me to work from anywhere with a laptop and a smartphone
3. a business process that I would gladly do for free

Armed with these requirements, I began to look at my past activities for a possible new endeavor.  And like most of the great choices in my life, I had no role in the process!  A chance call from a friend asking me to help his company build their network like I did with the real estate community became the ah-ha moment that had alluded me so far.

I had become a big fan of the power of MySpace and its role as a feeder for other social outposts.  My real estate community was seeded initially by real estate investors I met on MySpace and the sphere of influence that I had developed over the years in the mortgage banking industry.  I had crafted my own secret recipe for building an online community on the shoulders of the larger more generalized platforms like MySpace, Facebook, and the numerous general real estate news groups, forums and bulletin boards.  It wasn’t much of a stretch to think that some of the professional connections that had been part of my previous success would be interested in picking my brain about the process.

Vestor Logic Business Card - Back

So while sitting in the Las Vegas airport waiting for our flight to Wyoming just after the July 4th weekend this past summer I decided to put out a few feelers.  I called the CEO of a company that I had been a fan of for years and a friend that has found tremendous success as an author.  I left messages for both framing my idea of consulting companies on the formulation and use of social media technologies to strengthen their business processes.  I boarded the plane and tried to manage a 12 month old for the duration of the 2 hour flight.  Not always an easy task!

We landed in Wyoming, I released my seatbelt long before we reached the gate, and I turned on my Blackberry to determine how quickly we could be at a restaurant for a much anticipated beer shot martini lunch.  What I didn’t expect was that both of my friends had returned my call, expressed genuine excitement about my new business concept, and asked for a call back to discuss the plan in more detail.  So I did just that.  I called each of them back on the drive from the airport to my in-laws and by the end of the day I had my first two clients!

Fast forward 6 months.  Vestor Logic is growing very quickly.  We have expanded our service offering and as a result our client list.  We’re working on some really exciting projects across several industries and our clients are very confident in our process.  This has been a far more rewarding experience than anything else that I’ve ever done professionally.

I make breakfast for my family each morning.  I work from the home office most days with just my laptop and Blackberry.  Learning about the social media trends and technologies inspires me every day.  My “workday” usually starts at 9am, I break for lunch unplugging for about an hour, and then finish meetings and calls by 4pm.   There are typically a few “Daddy” breaks scattered throughout the day as needed.

Turtlehead Peak Hike, Red Rock (NV)

Writing this post clearly shows me that I have found a balance between family and work and a way to integrate my love of cooking. I guess the list of requirements that I framed out almost a year ago was a good idea! Vestor Logic has been created to allow for success both at work and at home.

So my next challenge is to incorporate my passion for hiking into the delicate balance of family, work, and cooking.

Any suggestions on how to do that?  Have you found a way to mesh all of your passions?

Related articles:

1. Striking a balance: brands and consultants
2. Mind mapping my social ecosystem
3. In Appreciation

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My first thought when I heard that google was going to be meshing real time search with it’s usual results was, cool, now we’ll get some real fast results reflecting what is happening at the moment.

But yesterday I read an insightful post from Rob Birgfeld on SmartBlog On Social Media called Reality setting in: What Google’s real-time search means to businesses. He brought up some very interesting points. In his post he used a different example, but what happens when my mom (or dad, let’s not be sexist while being ageist, one cliche at a time please) searches for Nordstroms to find out their hours and gets 350 links to posts about what random people bought at Nordstroms, issues and experiences they had? How much patience will mom expend trying to find a simple link to the store? Frankly, does she even know there is more than one page of results?

Mulling this over, I see 2 things happening.

Number one: Nordstroms now NEEDS to pay for placement in google search. I’m sure they already do, they are a giant company, but what about the smaller companies who have managed to do a bang up job with their SEO and have a long tail of positive comments, articles and mentions on other sites? Where do their current natural results end up?

Number two: somewhere within the depths of Nordstroms’ PR/Marketing deptartment, one of more employees (previously a bright-eyed social media pro) is furiously blogging, posting, commenting and tweeting not only about Nordstroms’ various marketing initiatives, but about simple things like store hours and locations in order to control the real time results.

Depressing, no?

What are your thoughts on real time search results? Should they be included in the broad search or segmented out?

Related articles:

1. Yammer is a powerful link manager
2. Using saved searches in Twitter
3. Finding interesting people to follow on Twitter