To download and read the full report visit their website and sign-up for a free account.

In addition to adding the normal share buttons, PIE incorporated the Facebook commenting system to the Bond website making Bond the first New York City real estate brokerage to use this social media tool.

Facebook’s commenting system allows users to share and comment on properties for sale. Each comment exponentially increases the exposure of a property.

In a New York Times article about the addition to the Bond website, Jonathan Butler of the popular real estate blog Browstoner.com said adding the commenting feature was “very enlightened and forward-thinking.”

NY Times article

Up until now, only 22 general use-approved TLDs have existed. These include TLDs that everyone has heard of like .com, .org, .net along with many you may not have. there are also a number of country code top-level domains (cctld) like .me and .ly which have grown in use throughout the years, though mainly used by companies for purposes other then to signify location.

As you can see the possibilities here are significant. The ability for a brand or association to build either a brand, category or location based gTLD can be a game changer by allowing a company to stake thier place as category leaders through the creation of one of these TLDs.

But, creating a gTLD will not be cheap or fast. Registering a url for one of the current 22 TLDs can be done online in minutes with a credit card for just a few dollars. This new gTLD process requires the perspective owner build a gTLD strategy and once awarded, setup and look after the domain with sufficient resources for hardware and infrastructure to support it. As a result, for now, gTLDs will be limited to those with the resources needed to keep the venture operating. With that in mind, you can bet that the ICANN requirements will be closely measured for every submission.

Still, even though the entire TLD process is complicated and difficult to understand, there is a huge opportunity here for innovative companies to accomplish something truly breakthrough here. For those companies that want to be those leaders, we look forward to talking from you.

You can download the ICANN gTLD applications here.

“For over a century, STANYS has been an invaluable source for educators in our state by providing leadership and classroom resources” said, PIE’s Managing Partner and Creative Director Bradley Hajart. “It’s our mission, to help transition STANYS, whom has primarily used offline methods to inform their members and attract new teachers to an online centric model ”

PIE will draw on their strong strategy, branding and digital experience to develop a robust website for the association that delivers the member benefits to science teachers around the state.

“STANYS was looking for more than just a web design agency. In PIE we found a partner that understood our challenges and needs and could use that knowledge to help us transition our business model to deliver the online experience that our members are looking for,” said James Overhiser, Past-President of Science Teachers Association of New York State.

This year STANYS will hold their 116 Annual Conference at the Rochester Riverside Convention Center November 5-8, 2011 and will continue to build on the success of highly rated past programs while initiating new activities. The new website will include functionality to help members choose workshops and field trips to attend and guest speakers to hear, which will enhance participation at the conference.

STANYS membership of Pre-K to University and Informal science educators creates a collaborative association that promotes excellence in science education in New York State. STANYS’ mission is to work with educators and communities to provide opportunities for all students to participate in and learn science.

About PIE
Founded in 2006, PIE helps challenger brands of all sizes by blending strategy and creativity into integrated campaigns that showcase a brand’s strengths and helps them stand apart from their competitors. PIE’s challenger marketing approach empowers brands to reach new heights and to challenge industry leaders through integrated programs that use the strongest mix if marketing disciplines for each individual client.

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While there are numerous tools that allow you to automate syndication of your content to single platforms like Twitter or Facebook (as reviewed in Part 1 of this series), this article focuses on platforms that allow you to manage multiple social network accounts, post content and gather analytics from a single interface.

Shoutlet

Shoutlet is one of the most comprehensive tools currently on the market. It allows companies to manage all their social media efforts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more than 100 other social sites. The platform includes social network management and automation, CRM tools, Web Apps admins that allow you to generate social apps instantly. It has a pretty good eCommerce tool and better-than-average measurement and analytics tools all wrapped into one single platform.

http://shoutlet.com

SpredFast

This SpredFast Enterprise social media management system that allows an organization to manage, monitor, and measure its messages across multiple social media channels. They also offer a white label option for agencies. SpredFast also provides insightful white papers to help you get started as well as video tours of their platform.

http://spredfast.com

Awareness

This platform centralizes your social media efforts by allowing multiple users to publish, manage, measure and engage across multiple channels. In essence, Awareness is a collaboration hub that provides advanced workflow and automation, allowing a brand to stay ahead of the content generation and syndication curve. One of the things I love is with all these features they offer two levels of service under $400 per month.

http://www.awarenessnetworks.com/

MediaFunnel

MediaFunnel offers an easy-to-use, enterprise level social media dashboard tool for Facebook and Twitter that supports multiple users per profile and allows for editorial review. It helps a team generate more consistent and relevant content to reach your audience by making it easy for multiple employees to engage with fans and followers with Tweets, Facebook posts and other social media content. It integrates with platforms such as Salesforce.com, Zendesk, Twilio and Klout to streamline the engagement process. MediaFunnel offers somewhat different pricing than some of the other platforms reviewed. Pricing is based on the number of users and platforms used and for smaller brands cost for this platform is often under $10 per month.

http://mediafunnel.com

HootSuite

This social media dashboard allows you to manage social content and engagement on multiple networks with team workflow and statistics. This is one of the most widely-used platforms for marketers and agencies alike. Monitor and post to multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter using the HootSuite dashboard. Draft and schedule messages to send when your audience is most likely to be online. And with HootSuite Pro and Enterprise plans, you can batch-schedule up to 50 unique messages at one time. The basic version is free and the Pro version is only $5.99 per month so both levels can fit into anyone’s budget.

http://hootsuite.com

These are just some of our favorite tools and platforms that allow us to streamline, syndicate and automate content across social media platforms for our clients every day. It’s important when evaluating a platform to first understand what you hope to get out of social media marketing automation. Is it really just saving time or could it be engaging on a deeper level with your fans, growing your fan base or maybe measuring ROI? Once you have your goals, finding a platform that fits your needs can be the first step in building a more effective social media strategy. Some of these platforms offer a free trial period, so take advantage of the offer when possible to ensure the platform you choose is best fit for your needs.

When most marketers think social media one of the first things that come to mind is “time drain”. Sure, social media provides an unparalleled platform to engage the masses and integrate your brand in ways companies have never been able to achieve before. But few small brands or understaffed marketing departments have the man-hours to fully harness its power. Many marketers instead spend their resources just responding to comments and maintaining their current social media presence instead of building programs and campaigns that fully engage their fans and followers.

But with current technology, some planning and the simple principles of marketing automation, you can create and easily syndicate content across multiple social media platforms. This saves countless hours and allows you to focus efforts on growing your position within the social media space.

In this two-part series we will look at two levels. Part 1 provides simple tactics to automate your social media content syndication. Part 2 will review complete platforms that allow you to manage the entire process from one single interface.

Twitter Automation

• Automate the sending of Tweets when you post to your WordPress powered blog using the plug-in Twitter Tools
• Twitter provides widgets for Facebook or your website. Add one to your business website to keep visitors up to date with what you are tweeting
• You can automatically add your Tweets to Facebook using http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/
• Automatically follow back everyone who follows you on Twitter using http://SocialToo.com or http://Socialoomph.com
• Automatically send a welcome Direct Message to everyone who follows you using http://socialoomph.com
• Twitter provides an app to syndicate content to LinkedIn. Learn more at http://tweets.linkedin.com/twitter
• FriendFeed allows you to import your Twitter feed
• Plaxo also allows you to pull in your Twitter feed. They provide dofollow links to your Twitter page, but provide nofollow links within the post itself
• Tumblr, a hosted blogging solution similar to WordPress, pulls in your Twitter feed as a daily aggregated post. The blog will provide dofollow links within the Twitter posts
• Don’t forget to submit your Twitter feed to RSS directories as well. Here are a few strong RSS directories: Feedage, RSS2, Feedest, RSSMotron, and Feedagg
• TwitterFeed allows you to syndicate content from an RSS right into your Twitter account
• Tweet Adder allows you to automatically find and follow people using specific keywords in their tweets that you determine are relevant to your brand

Facebook Automation

• The Networked Blogs App allows you to feed your blog posts (or anybody else’s) into your fan page stream automatically
• The Notes App allows you to pull your blog or any RSS feed into your stream
• Connect Twitter to your Facebook account using facebook.com/twitter
• Post-to-Facebook plug-In is a WordPress plug-in that provides the ability to post your blog content directly to Facebook
• TwitterFeed allows you to syndicate content from an RSS right into your Facebook Page

LinkedIn Automation

• Import your blog RSS feed to your profile page
• Add the Amazon.com app to pull the books you read and review into your profile page
• LinkedIn now provides the ability to incorporate your Twitter feed right into your profile. Just note that you have to list your Twitter URL as one of your "Websites" in order to use the "Blog Link" application. A visitor will not be able to see this feed on your profile unless they are logged into LinkedIn

YouTube Automation

• Make sure you allow embedding in your settings so people can grab the embed code to your videos and put them on their sites
• Make sure your videos are set to public not private
• Make sure you allow comments to encourage conversations about your videos
• Make sure you allow notifications so there is a Tweet generated automatically every time you upload a new video, subscribe to another channel or comment on another video

Multi-Network Automation

• Use Ping.fm to syndicate updates across many different social networks. Ping.fm services over 30 social network platforms and it’s free!

These are just some of the many tools that exist to allow you to easily syndicate your content across multiple platforms and save you time and resources, and new ones pop up every day. Look for Part 2 of this series where we review some of the top social media syndication platforms that allow you to manage all of your social media sites from a single interface.

The end result is that the more people like or comment on your content either on Facebook or using Facebook tools like the "Like" buttons found on many blogs nowadays, the better that content will perform in search.

What this means for brands is that in the future, having your consumers interacting with your content in the form of likes and comments can positively impact the results of a brands organic search rankings for their brand website and make these pages more visible to the consumers own social networks.

How important is this? Well, take into consideration these statistics:

We recommend integrating the "Like" button and Facebook comments feature into as much of a brands digital content as possible including their  website. Adding the "Like" button to every page and/or article page of a website is the first big step in capturing some of these the search benefits.

Bing has launched a commercial that describes their approach, which is essentially the same as Google's:

Bing Commercial

Here are some interesting articles on the topic:
http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-how-facebook-says-likes-social-plugins-help-websites-76061

http://searchengineland.com/google-expands-social-circle-in-search-results-including-page-rankings-65202