Use Your Thumb to Plant a Tree
One more reason why I love StumbleUpon. Today is Earth Day. Stumble Upon has set up a page that is tracking thumbs. For every thumb they get up to 25,000 from now until May 2nd, the National Forest Foundation will plant a tree. How easy is that?
Click on the pic below and see for yourself. Read more…
Social Media Helped Us Move
This is a special guest post by Lorna Harris (aka Mrs. Danny Sullivan)
Most of you probably know by this point that Danny and I are heading back to California in the Summer. It was a big decision to make and took us several months to get there. Read more…
What Are You Doing?
It’s a simple question that is easy to answer and hundreds of thousands of people answer it every day. Some people answer it every 10 minutes of every day. It’s called Twitter.
Warning: Twitter use can be highly addictive. Read more…
PropertyTown Acquisition
I’m thrilled to finally be able to announce that we have completed a merger/acquisition deal involving National Relocation and PropertyTown. As is the case with these types of deals, I can’t disclose specific numbers, but I can provide the basic components of the deal:
National Relocation will pay WebGuerrilla, LLC (our parent company) a combination of cash, and a substantial equity stake in exchange for an exclusive license to use any current custom WordPress related tools we own, as well as any new tools we may develop in the future in the real estate space. National Relocation will also take ownership of the PropertyTown domain name, and any brand related items.
We will continue to handle feature development, but will also be getting involved with National Relocation’s team to work on integrating our system with their infrastructure. I’ll be putting Dax and Cesar on a plane to Hawaii in a couple of weeks so they can spend a week with the National Relocation team getting things rolling.
This deal is a perfect fit for us, because it allows us to focus our efforts solely on development. It also provides the tools and support we need to make larger scale broker level deals, as well as access to related markets like rental properties, and mortgage services.
That’s about all I can talk about at this point. We don’t have a hard date to roll out the new service, but our tentative goal is to be ready to re-launch in early June. When we do that, it will contain a ton of new features, including fully integrated IDX, and lead management tools, and a bunch of new competitive/market analysis tools.
Blogs and RSS Buttons
In my industry everyone knows what an RSS button is for. Outside…in the real world…most people don’t have a clue. In fact, it’s confusing and clicking on it could be a catastrophe to someone that is not computer savvy. My thoughts on this though is too bad. Teach your users what it is and let them decide whether or not they want to use it.
Here’s my scenario…I volunteered to build a site for our local pop warner football association. It turned into adding sites for track and cheer as well. All of these were built on our Wordpress platform (the one that kicks ass). Anyway, I had a GoTo meeting to do some training with the moms that had volunteered to run the sites. Hands down, they hated the RSS button. They wanted it gone and didn’t care that it offered a feature to users that subscribe to feeds. They said that they had received phone calls from parents complaining because "they clicked on it and ended up on another site, then they couldn’t figure out how to get back".
So fine, we took it off.
This really frustrated me because I enjoy teaching people about the internet and 99% of the time everyone is very receptive to the learning. So when a group puts up the hand to one of the best things to come out of Web 2.0 it blows me away. Whatever.
The way I see it the button should be displayed prominently at the top of your blog kinda like how it is on mine:) I can’t stand it when I spend 10-30 seconds trying to find an RSS button.
The worst are the blogs that have it in a text link at the very bottom where you can barely see it like this:
I’ve built a few feeds in my day and trying to find the feed button is very difficult most of the time. I have found blogs that are actually SEM blogs and they don’t have a button at all.
So please, if you have a blog display your RSS button at the top so it’s easy for your visitors to subscribe. Just slap it up there and who knows, you may be pleased at the results.