Forest Home Media Blog

Infographics Are A Cool Marketing Tool

December 13, 2012 by Nancy McNulty

Infographics are a great way to take a complicated or important point and create a visual to communicate your message in a concise and clever way. Forest Home Media is working with Middle Tennessee’s only real estate company, Benchmark Realty, which allows its agents total freedom and 100% commissions. We chose to create an infographic to communicate this progressive idea to help attract new agents to this forward-thinking company.

Begun in 2006 by broker Phillip Cantrell, the company was established out of frustration with the traditional brokerage model. Since this time, through a huge economic downturn, he has grown his business to over 340 agents using his unique business model and was named in 2012 one of “Best Places To Work” by the Nashville Business Journal.

Forest Home Media was recommended the graphic arts services of Bart Smith, Bart Smith Design, by the marketing director of Logan’s Roadhouse. Ironically at the initial research meeting, Smith revealed his wife is Benchmark agent, Linda Lurker. This fortuitous meeting helped in the creation of Benchmark’s infographic.

Smith, a Lipscomb University art grad, has been creating infographics for various uses over his thirty-year career. He quickly grasped the importance of the infographic in comparing how Benchmark pays its agents as compared to the traditional brokerage company.

“I love the USA Today feel of being able to understand information at a quick glance with the pictures telling the story,” Smith said. “Infographics are a fun, helpful and easy way to get a point across.”

No-brainer is how Smith summarized the pay and employment comparison between Benchmark and traditional real estate companies outlined in the infographic below.

Infographic Great Marketing Tool — This cool infographic, generated by Forest Home Media, illustrates the progressive way in which Nashville real estate company, Benchmark Realty, pays and employs their agents.

“The infographic comparison helps the audience understand it is a no-brainer when you look at the choices between the traditional brokerage and Benchmark. You get a much better deal,” Smith said. And, Smith says he is living the difference with a wife as a Benchmark agent.

If you have a home industry related marketing challenge and want to talk about a customized solution, gives us a call at 615-500-1517 or fill out the form below.

Tips For Creating A Great Business Photo

October 31, 2012 by Nancy McNulty

Creating a great photograph to represent and to communicate your business’s objectives takes special attention to detail and composition. One of the many creative services of Forest Home Media is coordinating photo shoots. From simple headshots and press conferences to home exterior and interior settings, we carefully approach, style and customize photos for news announcements, media kits, advertisements, magazine covers and social media outlets.

Truly engaging photos have depth and originality to catch the eye of your target audience, hold the attention for your message and ultimately persuade others to keep it or share it via Facebook or Pinterest.

Here are some points to consider when creating a visually strong photo, and, in some cases, the tips are applicable to upcoming Christmas or Hanukkah photos.

Choose A Bold Color And Pop It! The eye is naturally drawn to a photo with great color. If you have a tone-on-tone room, choose a bold color like turquoise or red to bring great drama to the eye. If appearing for a television interview and you prefer wearing all black or navy, grab a bold tie or scarf.

Greater Nashville House & Home Magazine — The tone-on-tone colors of Nashville’s 2012 Southern Living Showcase Home, built by Castle Homes, has shades of turquoise used by designer Jerome Farris for the needed pop-of-color which helped earn him the magazine cover. Photo by Peyton Hoge with Forest Home Media.

Forest Home Media, Nashville, TN — Both pretty ladies are wearing black. Pictured with Alison Krauss at the Vince Gill & Friends benefit for STARS, STARS Development Director Erin Daunic smartly wears a pop-of-color and is a photographer’s favorite for pics! Photo by Forest Home Media.

Create a tapestry. A picture of a chair is pretty boring. However, add a book, musical instrument or a glass of wine, and, voila!, you have a tapestry. When creating a picture of an inviting setting, try weaving in elements of food, music, literature, candles and fresh flowers. In my daughter’s two-year-old portrait, she was leaning on her great-grandfather’s leather ottoman, holding a rose from my garden and wearing a baby pearl necklace from her godmother.

Hughes-Edwards Builders, Nashville, TN — The lovely outdoor living room of Hughes-Edwards Builders earned great media coverage and is a popular Pinterest pin. A beautiful porch with fresh flowers, food, tons of color and original art by Jade Reynolds created a lovely setting. Photo by Peyton Hoge with designer Jane Greenway and Forest Home Media.

Find the focal point and emphasize it. When preparing for a holiday staircase photo which will hit the news stands in the next week, the festive garland limited our angles and choices. In the end, it served the photo best by focusing on the garland and allowing the setting to wrap around it instead of capturing a sweeping photo of the charming stairs of the Charleston Single. Find the eye-catching element and allow the setting to naturally develop around it. (I’ll add this final photo when available.)

Create A Good Description. This is helpful to media outlets who are understaff and over engaged! When submitting a picture to the media, posting on your website or pinning to Pinterest, be sure you include a yummy description which helps evoke emotion or interest. This tip is also helpful when submitting photos to Craigslist.

Here is the Pinterest description of the exterior photo above. “Architectural roof with curved detailing, mortar rub finish, copper gutters & lanterns, board & batten shutters and beautiful stack stone create a striking French Country exterior. Hughes-Edwards Builders French Country Home – Charity Tour of Homes Nashville.”

Here’s the description of the above picture often repinned in Pinterest. “The patina of the dramatic 12-foot copper hood becomes more stunning with age in the Hughes-Edwards Builders gourmet kitchen. Hughes-Edwards French Country – Charity Tour of Homes Nashville.”

In the end, choose elements which resonate with your purpose and add dimensionality. These are the pictures that earn that coveted coffee table spot! Need help with public relations, marketing or advertising? Contact us here.

History of Social Media Infographic

October 19, 2012 by Nancy McNulty

One of our favorite resources at Forest Home Media for content marketing is Copyblogger. They had an amazing infographic today of the history of Social Media. I thought this was a great visual history of how social media started, evolved and sparked other start up ideas. What surprised me was the inclusion of Carly Fleischmann’s blog Carly’s Voice on their timeline.

carly fleischmann — Photo from Carly’s Voice the blog of Carly Fleischmann.

Carly is a non verbal young woman with autism. At thirteen years old, her parents discovered that she could express her thoughts by typing on a keyboard. She has gone on to write her popular blog, a book, is very active on social media and is an inspiration for families around the globe who have loved ones with autism who are non verbal. She is leading a movement to redefine this silent group of people. They are in there, they are smart, they are loving, they have dreams and goals, they have feeling and heartaches, they are fighting to be heard. I know. My son Zane has autism, and is non verbal. Thank you to Carly for inspiring my family to push through with Zane. We have been encouraged by your success and Zane is now typing independently on an iPad. We have a long way to go, but we have a great role model to follow. Thank you to Copyblogger for including a very important person in the world of autism on your history of social media infographic.

Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.

5 PR Lessons From GoDaddy Hacking

September 11, 2012 by Nancy McNulty

The first rule of crisis management is to provide your base with a response so you are the definitive source, and, in the case of GoDaddy’s hacking by AnonymousOwn3r today, to assist millions of frustrated customers losing a great deal of Ecommerce.

In December 2011, Social Media Week and a host of others criticized GoDaddy for not responding directly to their customers during the “Leave GoDaddy Day” PR crisis.

“It’s hard to say exactly what GoDaddy could have done differently to avoid this disaster. Perhaps they could’ve posted a statement on their site and enabled commenting from the community. They definitely could have been better about listening to their customers and responding in real-time,” Jennifer Charlton, Social Media Week

Fast-forward to today’s hacking crisis and GoDaddy has still proven themselves slow to respond and take the lead role in providing information. Look at this Google search sample where they have no direct presence in the crisis.

Go Daddy Hacking Google Results Forest Home Media — Companies should work hard to be the source of information in your crisis.

Today, GoDaddy has been flooding Twitter with direct messages to their customers with things like “thanks for your support, we are working on it” while providing minimal informative updates. On Facebook, GoDaddy opened the dialogue for direct feedback from customers but again little in the way of informative updates.

GoDaddy Twitter Response on crisis- Forest Home Media — GoDaddy has flooded Twitter with direct messages of thanks for the support.

While it is admirable how quickly their little fingers are able to direct response, it would be more helpful if informative updates were also being sent. They need to number or identify their updates like “Update #20, sites are going back online incrementally.” Something more helpful than the barrage of “thanks for understanding.”

It is unfortunate and somewhat understandable that their website was also unresponsive but it seems after the previous crisis, they would be able to provide a better response mechanism on their webpage. After checking on and off all day, I apparently caught the webpage message at 5:45 p.m. CDT and I’m betting Danica Patrick is wishing her pic wasn’t part of it. This message must have only been posted briefly.

GoDaddy Hacking Apology- Forest Home Media — GoDaddy’s apology page captured at 5:55 p.m. CDT.

It is also ironic at 1:33 pm (CDT) a GoDaddy email blast was sent out entitled “Today’s Lesson” which I immediately thought would be a crisis response. However, not so much, it was just another 20% offer.

GoDaddy Email blast fail- Forest Home Media — GoDaddy’s email blast with the ironic name “Today’s Lesson.”

The top five PR lessons learned today from the GoDaddy hacking which a company should contemplate for a crisis management response plan are:

Be the first to break the news or respond officially ASAP.
Outline a game plan in your announcement.
Cancel any embarrassing or inappropriate activities as soon as possible. For example, an event, party or in the case of GoDaddy, an email blast with “Today’s Lessons” which make no mention of the crisis.
Have an alternate news site available to provide customer information. As evident in the Google search, the voice in the crisis was being owned by other voices and it wasn’t GoDaddy’s first time at the rodeo.
Yes, provide your affected customers, group or base with an outlet to express their frustrations and seek assistance. When responding back directly, be helpful and less automatic.

At this point, Forest Home Media has made the decision to remain with GoDaddy for our website hosting. We are predicting site security will be a top priority.

Local Business SEO Secrets

August 17, 2012 by Nancy McNulty

OK, so these are not REALLY secrets because anyone that is a student of search engine optimization can easily find these tips out there on the world wide web. But, I did want to share with you some of my top tips for Local SEO. If you own a local business, that serves a local geography you should take some steps to make sure your site is being seen by potential local customers. So how do you do that?

The very first thing you should do is claim your Google Places listing and link it to your website. Google Places is the area where the business owner can log in to their Google listing to add photos, business information and reply to google reviews. This is in the process of all being rolled into Google +, but for now you claim your business and update your information in Google Places. This will add authority to your listing and help you rank better.
Speaking of Google +, Google is now displaying results for local businesses in Google +, set up an account, set up a business page and verify that site with Google by linking your website to Google +. This will give you some search engine juice pretty quickly. Another pretty cool feature of Google + is that if you post a new page link to Google + it will be indexed by the search engine very quickly, sometimes the same day. No surprise that Google is crawling its own site.
Set up your business listing in Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, Merchant Circle, City Search, Angie’s List or any other directory relevant to your industry. These listing show up very well in local search.
Make sure your website pages are titled and tagged with your local geography. For instance, instead of title-ing your site “Joes Bar and Grill”, you might want to call it, “Joes Bar and Grill Nashville TN Restaurant.” If your current customers are searching for your website online, they know your name and will search for “Joes Bar and Grill” and you will be easy to find. But, what about all the people who don’t know you and are just looking for a “Nashville TN restaurant”, now you will be relevant for that search engine result as well. Make sure your site has copy written for local searches with local geographical keywords. You can mention your location. Reviews from local customers, the fact that you use products grown locally in Nashville TN. So now you’ve got a local identifier in your title, you’ve got local keywords in your copy, so last you want to make sure you use local tags. Add tags/keywords to your posts with phrases grouped in parenthesis and separated by commas like this: “nashville tn restaurant joes bar and grill”, “joes bar and grill on main street nashville tn”. Do some keyword research using Google’s KeyWord tool if you need help with this.
Ask customers to go online and review your business. 80% of people conducting internet searches say that they read the reviews. Another plus is that businesses with more than 5 reviews tend to rank much better in search engine results than their competition. Put some thought into a review campaign strategy. You could put signs up in your business or hand out pre-printed cards asking for reviews.

Think of local search as today’s replacement for the Yellow Pages. Instead of buying the back cover at $100,000 you can now do a little leg work and have the equivalent in free organic business listings and search results. Good luck. Need help with your internet marketing in Nashville TN? Contact us. We would love to talk to you. [contact-form] [contact-field label=”Name” type=”name” required=”true” /] [contact-field label=”Email” type=”email” required=”true” /] [contact-field label=”Website” type=”url” /] [contact-field label=”Comment” type=”textarea” required=”true” /] [/contact-form]

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