Martha Stewart Seeks Special Permit for Storage Center – Bedford-Katonah, NY Patch
Leave a reply
Daily Archives: April 10, 2012
Pinterest: 3 Takeaways About Personalizing the Customer Experience | Bedford Corners Realtor
THE CHALLENGE: Customer-driven personalization is a powerful competitive differentiator, and marketers should take note of how Pinterest provides this.
True personalization is complex to achieve and requires a deep database of individual’s opt-in preferences. However, the results are powerful.
Personalization is an Expectation:
Online shoppers view personalization as a requirement for their preferred shopping venues, rather than as simply a perk. Per our Voice of Customer research:
» Many BtoB decision makers use Amazon as their point of reference regarding expectations for BtoB personalization.
» Both BtoB and BtoC marketers have to at least match the Amazon level of personalization!
Pinterest Approach to Personalization:
Pinterest has a fascinating approach to personalization: Pinterest doesn’t take on the hard work of personalizing the experience, it enables the consumer to personalize their experience.
Per a recent article in TechCrunch by Nir Eyal, “Pinterest is becoming the web’s personalized mail-order catalog. Each user is presented with a one-of-a-kind visual interface based on their tastes. They are presented with any product, from any retailer, anywhere in the world. The items they see are curated through people and topics they’ve identified as interesting and what is shown to them improves the more they interact with it. Every time they pin, re-pin, like, or comment on an object, the relevancy of the products displayed on their magic catalog improves.”
Pinterest lets the consumer do the work by allowing them to decide whose tastes they would like to follow. It is curated by the consumer so the consumer likes what they see. And if they like the products, they will buy them.
Per a recent article from Fortune, “In March the site registered 17.8 million users, according to Comscore, a 52% jump in just one month…Brands–from large companies like Gap and West Elm–are tripping over themselves to establish a presence on it, and some are starting to reap the rewards of being “pinned,” a referral that prompts followers to click on product pictures to learn more. In February, Pinterest drove more traffic to websites than Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined.”
We will keep an eye on this company and track how they evolve to the next level of personalization.
3 Key Takeaways for Marketers:
1. Determine the type of personalization experience you want to/are able to, offer: Deep preference-driven personalization, like the Microsoft example above, or, like Pinterest, avoid some of the hard work of personalization and enable the consumer to personalize their experience.
2. Make your value proposition so appealing that consumers will come to your site, (repeatedly) and engage with others in the community by posting and consuming appealing content.
3. If you are offering a service based on personalized engagement, don’t restrict how people can engage with you. I could not sign up for Pinterest without connecting via Facebook or Twitter. They would not let me sign up via email. It is inconsistent with a positive customer experience to block enrollment via email.
Also, need to respond to questions in a timely manner. I, along with a colleague, sent questions to their support email address requesting to join via email. One week later, we still await a response.
Author: Ernan Roman Ernan Roman on the Web Ernan Roman on Google Plus Ernan Roman RSS Feed
Ernan Roman is President of the marketing consultancy, Ernan Roman Direct Marketing.
Recognized as the industry pioneer who created three transformational methodologies: Integrated Direct Marketing, Opt-In Marketing, and Voice of Customer Relationship Research.
Ernan was recently inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame.
Clients include Microsoft, NBC Universal, Disney, Hewlett-Packard and IBM.
How To Build a Better Inbound Marketing Machine | Chappaqua Realtor
Tracy Becker Credit Expert and Author | Armonk NY Realtor
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
6 elements of a compelling home seller love letter | Mount Kisco NY Real Estate
via inman.com
Simplifying homebuying experience for agents, homebuyers | North Salem NY Real Estate
via inman.com
Why Is Pinterest So Addictive? | Waccabuc NY Real Estate
via flowtown.com
5 Reasons Why You Should Schedule Your Tweets | South Salem NY Real Estate
Social media is now one of the most important parts of any marketing strategy, with Facebook and Twitter being the most prominent platforms and a great way to continually promote your brand. But for a small business, managing the day-to-day operations can be a full time job, so it can be a challenge to stay active and engaged. With Twitter, it is important to tweet, retweet, reply, mention, promo, and direct message—and that’s just on one social media platform! Luckily, tools like Timely help you automate tweets, which is an effective ways to maximize your time and social media presence. Here are five more reasons why scheduling your tweets is a no-brainer.
1) Save Time
With so much to do and think about, tweeting throughout the day is likely the last thing on your mind. Scheduling your tweets allows you to spend a few minutes prepping everything you want to say, and the rest of the day taking care of business.
2) Get More Exposure with Less Effort
Not only can scheduling your tweets save time and effort, Timely also schedules your tweets for maximum exposure. Have an important announcement that you want to save for peak hours? No problem. Want to make sure followers in different time zones get the message at the right time? Done.
3) Give Your Audience a Break
Not only is scheduling tweets useful for you, you’re also doing a good deed for your followers. A clogged feed of back-to-back tweets can annoy your fan base and maybe even cause some of them to drop off. But spacing out your tweets throughout the day offers well-paced interaction that keeps them engaged.
4) Craft Your Message
Staying relevant on Twitter is often confused with posting a lot. In reality, as with many things, quality over quantity wins out. Scheduling tweets lets you craft thoughtful content that contributes to your larger brand goals, rather than just tweeting for the sake of tweeting.
5) Increase Your Social Presence
If you’d like to be more active on Twitter but your posts are sporadic and irrelevant, scheduling tweets will help solve that problem. Not only will you create a consistent presence, you will also help your overall social reputation. Scheduling tweets can help increase your Klout score, which gauges how much influence you have in the social sphere.
At the end of the day, scheduling tweets is a great way to minimize effort and maximize results. So do yourself—and your followers—a favor by taking advantage of the tools at your disposal.
via flowtown.com
Steady Recovery in Washington’s Housing Market | Cross River NY Real Estate
The housing market in Washington, DC has been among the steadiest in the country ever since the national housing slump. Stability in this market owes much to the significant role that the Federal government plays in driving employment patterns there. Judging from detailed local housing data provided by the Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, the multiple listing service (MLS) which covers the Washington, DC metro area, and Real Estate Business Intelligence, a Maryland based group that specializes in data reports for MLSs and real estate boards, Washington is on track for another healthy spring market.
Closed sales in the Washington metro area rose 1.9% from February of 2011 to February of 2012, trailing the 13.0% increase in non-seasonally adjusted sales for the nation over this same period. However, it is important to remember that sales in Washington have been relatively robust for several years, so this mild improvement is from a rather strong plateau.
Over the last five years, closed sales in the Washington area have outpaced new inventories, which resulted in a steady decline in the months supply of inventory from its peak in 2008 (depicted in grey above). This pattern continued in February. New listings of properties were up 14.7% from January to February, a typical spring pattern. However, they were up only 2.3% compared to a year earlier. Steady sales and sluggish listing resulted in a decline in the total number of active listing to 9,823 in February, down from 10,095 a month earlier and 27% below the inventory level of 13,511 from last February.
Sales are likely to pick up this spring, though. Pending sales rose 11.3% in February compared to the same period in 2012. The increase in pending sales and decline in new listing suggests further tightening in the Washington metro market. This tightening should support modest price growth, which already appears to have taken hold as the median home price in February rose 6.0% from a year earlier to $317,900.
Further evidence of a strengthening housing market in Washington is the decline in days on market, which ticked one point lower from 86 days in January to 85 days in February and well below the 5-year average of 94 days. These trends point to a shift in pricing power in the local market away from buyers and toward a more balanced middle ground between buyers and sellers. The increase in the ratio of the average sold price to the original list price echoes this sentiment. That ratio, which reflects in part how much price/profit a seller concedes between the list and sale of a property, rose from 93.1% a year ago to 93.9% in February.
The recovery in the Washington metro area has not been distributed evenly. However, the headline figures are on the rise and low inventories combined with rising prices will force buyers to search out opportunities in other sub-markets. This pattern will help to spread the green shoots of recovery across the metro area this spring and summer.
Higher Interest Rates Expected from End of Fed Bond Buying | Katonah NY Real Estate
Mortgage rates and other long-term interest rates are bound to rise measurably in the second half of this year, if not earlier. The Federal Reserve has been aggressive in buying U.S. government bonds as part of Quantitative Easing and has tried to hold down the long-term rates with Operation Twist. But both measures will soon be coming to an end. Furthermore, there will inevitably be a reversal of these policies at some point, which means the Federal Reserve will be selling back the bonds it had already purchased and sitting on the balance sheet, probably at the same time the U.S. government will continue to sell its bonds to cover the deficit spending. That means someone has to buy the flood of U.S. government bonds. If there is a lack of investors, then higher interest rates will be required to induce buyers to step forward. Higher offered interest rates also mean higher mortgage rates as well.
A quick review of recent history will help better understand why rates will move higher. In the aftermath of the financial market crisis from 2008 the Federal Reserve purchased roughly $1.6 trillion in U.S. government debt. Without this purchase, the interest rates would have been higher since relying on purchases solely from private bond investors and foreign governments such as China and Saudi Arabia would have been insufficient. The U.S. Federal Reserve in essence printed money to hand over $1.6 trillion to the U.S. Treasury to meet its borrowing needs. At the time, inflation was not an issue and if anything there was a growing concern over future deflation, a period of falling consumer prices. The buying of government debt by the Federal Reserve was known as Quantitative Easing. Two rounds were pursued, thereby giving the name QE1 and QE2. A third round appears out of the question because the economy is healing and growing, and with inflation above the Fed’s preferred rate of 2 percent.
In addition to Quantitative Easing, the Federal Reserve implemented something known as Operation Twist. The goal for this (given some harsh critics, like the Presidential candidate Ron Paul, who have accused the Federal Reserve of printing too much money), was to not to print money, but simply to re-shift the type of bonds that the Federal Reserve would hold. The Fed sold off some of its short-term U.S. Treasury bills it already had in its balance sheet to the market and thereby took in cold hard cash already in circulation (not freshly printed ones). It then used this cash to buy long-term U.S. Treasury bonds of 10 and 30 years in length, thereby recirculating this cash back into the market. So the total amount of the cash remained the same from the broader economy point of view but the composition of type of bonds held by the Federal Reserve was towards longer-term bonds and away from shorter-terms ones In essence, this helped push down the long-term bond yields. Automatically, this pushed down the 30-year fixed rate mortgages.
But these measures of Quantitative Easing and Operation Twist are coming to an end in a couple of months. The bottom line being who will now buy incoming the long-term government debt. After all, the U.S. is running a very high budget deficit and needs to continue to borrow heavily for the foreseeable future. In addition, the Federal Reserve may need to unwind what it did (by selling off government bonds it had purchased) if inflation picks up. Even more government bonds will need to be absorbed. Very hard to see how this can be done without offering higher interest rates.
The average 30-year fixed rate mortgage is around 4.0 percent today. It will rise to 4.4 percent by December. It will then reach 5.2 percent by the end of 2013. This projection is being done with fingers crossed that it will not be even higher.
