Real Estate Marketing Blog

Should Realtors Participate in the Social Media?

Do you want to know if you should enter the social media space?

Ask your clients and prospects. Send out a postcard in a farm mailing. Are they Tweeting? Are they uploading pictures in Flickr? Have they ever commented on a blog? Have they created a review space on Yelp?

I suspect that your answers will be very different in Seattle and Mountain View, than answers in Torrance, CA or Malibu.

Chances are that if your peeps are anywhere they are on Facebook. And...drumroll please.....they are not actively searching for real estate. They are reconnecting with old friends.

Decide then and there if you are willing to engage them in that space. Do it wrong and it could be like trying to sell someone in the middle of a church service.

Real Facebook&Blog Marketing Strategies

In 1992 the average consumer received 3,000 commercial messages per day. Today, we receive 30,000 commercial messages per day.

Sony used to spend $5 million to get 30% market recognition. Now they have to spend $30 million for the same market recognition.

The cost to get out front of your prospects has tripled.

Actually, that's wrong as these figures are pre Twitter and Facebook and the social media, 2.0 explosion. Let's face it, we get hammered by messages daily.

So it is more important than ever to start with a strategy. TO jump onto Twitter or Facebook without a "big picture" first is a doomed plan.

To blog without a foundational strategy is doomed. TO just get on and write is not marketing.  Sure one might trip over a deal or two for being a early adopter. But seriously can you scale it? Can you measure it? How can you manage your business without measuring the results?

As online marketers we must start with the end in mind.

• Why are we doing this Twitter or Facebook thing?
• Why are we blogging or running an IDX website?
• And then how will you build it?
• What is your voice?
• What is your content plan?
• How will you scale it?
• And finally how will you measure the activities for improvement?

Considering that Email, Blogging, Website IDX, Social Media (Facebook, Twitter), Forums, Article Syndication, Press Releases area all intertwined and are all marketing activities that through publishing can be a nightmare to manage without an overriding strategy and purpose.None of these tactics are a business all by them self. They are just busy work and singular events that will sputter within minutes of their activity.  But working together these tools cut through the daily barrage of noise that each of us receive.

And make your message and you a trusted voice in the war for relevancy.

The Founder of the Web on Social Media

I said the web, not the internet.  Marc Andreessen invented the modern browser. He speaks about the death of print media and Facebook and Twitter to name a few. Listen in and as one of the web's big thinkers gives his view of the future.

How My Identity Got Stolen on Facebook and how I got it back

 Not 1 minute ago I just received this from the FaceBook team:

 Thanks for your report.......... ...Our systems indicate that your Facebook account has been compromised by cybercriminals attempting to impersonate you. These criminals often will try to trick your friends into sending them money by claiming that you are stuck in a far away location and in need of assistance.......

 Yah that's how my day has been. But even worse for someone who might have been scammed by the SOB's who took over my account or others. Fortunately it looks like the if the thief's dastardly deeds were foiled.

Let me explain~

This morning I couldn't sleep. It was as if I intuited what was going on. So I got up early and while waiting for the my magic morning black brew I poured yesterdays remnants and "nuked" it to get a jolt before sitting down to this magic TV like box I call work.

 I barely was through deleting my first email before I got a call from a local number. It was like 7:15 am. Why is a local number calling me this early? It was Ami Lynne Carroll.

We had just connected through facebook just yesterday and I had suggested that perhaps we should do a podcast to discuss her unique business. Unfortunately, that was not why she was calling.

She called me and said she is chatting on FB with a person claiming to be me, under my name, my account and he says he was mugged and that he needs money to get out of London.  "Um but I am in Torrance!".

Unfortunately,I found from some Googling that this is one of the top FaceBook scams.. Long story short remember that all these applications we are asked to join may not be a good thing. Run your virus and spy checkers often.

Thanks to all those wonderful people who helped me in getting control back. You showed that there is a community. And in the Cyber community you are from the good side of town. Especially Ami Lynne Carroll, Alex Howansky from Bird View  who also called me, and
Christopher Barnes who showed me how to get back control of the system.

AR: Net Idealism Meets Economics

The Fight For Free Dumb

First off... looks like Facebook backed off  their new terms to own all you put on their site.

Meanwhile, some blog banter going on out there on Active Rain's new pathway to revenue.
Seems they are now seeking some cash in new members after seeking it through ads and everything else.

I have always thought it bass ackwards to offer free when at some point you know when the Angels stop their propping up, you will need to show something. Call me crazy and I know thats how they do it in cities with silicon in its name. But it just is not sustainable.

 

Pat Kitano gives his tips on how Twitter might get some revenue. As Twitter is the most obvious site that you just know is busting at the seems in growth. But it too cannot show any cash.  I am not in the VC game, but I can only imagine it a tough go to get any of those folks to open up their purses on 3 to 4 years of negative cash in an era of no credit. Which is about what many of these top of mind sites have been doing.

Limitations of Hosting New Media
The free is what is part of the driver. The attraction.

 So why would anyone pay thereafter? Put another way. Many serious folk have been jumping on Facebook and Twitter of late. Wondering what is all the buzz. Would they still do it, if not for free?

I have an alumnus from high school who told me he jumped on FB because it is free and there is no way he would join Classmates. And as someone who has been my high school class reunion coordinator for the ten and twenty year, that frustrates the hell out of me. But human nature is what it is.

Three Ways Out
1. Offer a service to sell.
2. Offer ads
3. Sell the clunker

Inevitably, the way out for most of the free social sites is to first sell the service. Then sell various forms of ads. While the lucky ones sell out for their big payday. Letting the buyer deal with the mess where they usually just strip the technology off the carcass and let the thing die.

I do think the challenge that AR has is that it is a "me too technology". It was unique to the community when it started but it does have its free competition these days with a number of similar 2.0 social communities. (Great world we live in when for profit companies compete to not charge anything  ;-).

WordPress MU is a blog cult favorite along with a bunch of free software that implies the promise of running your own Active Rain.  OK sure you have community over there. We will see how loyal that is. But it is always hard to go from free to anything paid. The psychology is all off. That's like going from flat fee to a percentage. It is possible, but it is a ton of work.

To make themselves unique, I think they would be much better off by offering a premium blogging system with full and unique IDX integration, and a CMS. This on first pass seems so "me too". However, no one that I know of is actually offering all this on a wide scale(OK maybe that is how we can get more comments in this blog. Here come the offers folks lol). But alas, it may be too late in the game for them to get geared up for that backbone.

At the end of the day, the fee model should have been the start and perhaps the free come later. Many of the premium site template hosters offer this. Alamode and Point2 offered free I believe. But they hold out a large enough perceived value to bump up. And that is in my opinion the challenge that AR faces. And it is only indicative and a peek into the future of the net. As idealism meets economics.

Lessons to the agents. Get your own web presence that is branded. Everything on site and elsewhere serves to create you as the authority for your market and gets your visitors to want to raise their hand to at least hear more of your good stuff. If not actually ask you for your business then and there.

Facebook Puts a Road Block in Disintermediation

I just read a disturbing article called, "You Post it, Face Book Owns It". It has been my concern for a long time that the free trade of information may be brought to a standstill if one of the 2.0 players decided to lay claim to the users content.

I alluded to this as a potential problem with Realtor favorite ActiveRain.com a long time ago.  Many folks build their entire brands on free websites without concern that the free ride cannot go on forever. (This is a re-edit as I think I should put a notice here that Active Rain is now charging as I predicted they would )

Especially when many of these entities struggle for a revenue stream. Just recently Facebook quietly changed their Terms of Service stating that they have the rights to the users content. So I guess that picture of your kid they not only own, they can also sublicense. Or can you imagine the issue if one of your business pictures are sublicensed? Is that possible? Not so sure if this true as the story alludes. However, I bet many will not be so fast to post up their Alumni pictures. Maybe their new TOS will become one of their more popular pages as we all try to see what we just gave away.  What a tangled web this Internet really is.

The question looms. What of Youtube, Twitter, Picassa, Flickr and the hundreds of other Social sites that hold your content? By the way It is not uncommon for sites to cache our content. Google has done it for years. But never has anyone layed claim to it before ( as far as I know).So I suppose more and more people will be linking to files for now on and linking to their good content on their own server space.

 

Web 2.0: What is it?

This is a cute video in no words that explain web 2.0. Enjoy.

Frittering Away on Twitter

There is a black hat SEO term that you should know about. It is called Parasitic hosting. That is you parasite off of one web property to grab their traffic to get to your money page.

In today's Social arena that is the point. Anything else is frittering. Perhaps Twitter was aptly named. OK sure, networking is important, but the only way to real ROI is to put content on your social nets that will build your brand and bring the people(are you targeting/friending the right people?) back to your Branded website.

And there are some agents out there that will say that they answered a question on some social site and got a prospect. Yippee! After all those hours and hours of  work. Good job. Try door knocking or calling expired listings if you are that easily impressed.

Now there are ways to get in some of these other networks to get somewhat easy terms to rank in the engines. If you know what you are doing you can get ranked easily in You Tube, Wordpress, and similar so called "authority" web properties. We will be discussing these techniques in Real Estate Guerilla Coaching Club.

Profiting From Social Media: Advice I Gave to a Recruiter

This is from an email I wrote to a friend about how to effectively use social networks for gaining new clients. It is unedited other than making it more readable:

1. In Facebook and others join groups and then make friends.As a recruiter find groups where your potential clients are hanging out.
2. Do a search under groups for their business name, then their specialty. IT, Network Administrator, etc, keep searching
3. Join and lurk to see if it is vibrant
4. This is where you figure out what is the conversation and you figure out how to enter it.The old marketing advice comes to mind: Enter into the conversation going on in your customers head
5. Ask yourself "what problems need solving?"
6. Start participating, answer questions, solve problems
7. Add commentary that is of value, not salezy.Give your expertise, and your personality to the conversation
8. Do not be just another Indian, be the Chief
9. Soon you will have your own tribe
10. That is adding to the community.Now you are a "friend".Get known as the advisor for job hunting
11. you have just built a personal brand in this group.Now it is easy to ask for help in placing or getting job orders.

This really should not seem like anything new. It really is networking 101 only digitally. Hence the words "social networking".

Do you really want to blow it up to the next level? Add video and  audio and such to take your personal brand into the stratosphere.

Obamas Propaganda Machine?

President elect Obama has been heralded before on HouseBlogger for his net savvy ability to get the grassroots to come out and vote. Now, politics is always a polarizing issue so please put away any bias you may have and please come with me as we appreciate his marketing ability. Because thats really what matters is the marketing and how we can mimmick superior online marketing of others for our purposes.

Obama took his original website and changed it to http://change.gov in an attempt to keep the buzz happening. The site recently released a new application that to me kind of shows the limits and also the manipulations that are possible with social media.

The newer system is a Digg.com like system whereby visitors can vote and deny commentary.  I will let Politico.com explain what has happened:

President-elect Barack Obama's Transition today launched "Open for Questions," a Digg-style feature allowing citizens to submit questions, and to vote on one another's questions, bringing favored inquiries to the top of the list.

It was suggested when it launched that the tool would bring uncomfortable questions to the fore, but the results so far are the opposite: Obama's supporters appear to be using -- and abusing -- a tool allowing them to "flag" questions as "inappropriate" to remove all questions mentioning Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich from the main pages of Obama's website.

The Blagojevich questions -- many of them polite and reasonable -- can be found only by searching words in them, like "Blagojevich," which produces 35 questions missing from the main page of the site.

"Given the current corruption charges involving Blagojevich, will 'serious' campaign finance reform that takes money completely out of politics through publicly funded elections be a priority in the first term?" asked Metteyya of Santa Cruz, California.

"This submission was removed because people believe it is inappropriate," reads the text underneath it....

.... Community reporting systems like this are often vulnerable to abuse from committed partisans -- YouTube has wrestled with a parallel problem -- and the only solution is conscious efforts to remedy it.

Some call user generated content and the new media the Democratization of the web. Maybe, but it also can be a giant propaganda machine. Intended or otherwise.

Other interesting articles:
The Webs Influence and Social Web: A New Thing?
Pat Kitano on Social Media Podcast
Social Distortion
Interview With a Social Media Pioneer
Twitter
The Obfuscation of the truth.......& The Orgy of Free:The CIA owns part of Facebook?