Online Real Estate Technology

One of the vital ingredients of on line marketing is your web site which has to be attached to a domain name. This week I’ve been conducting on line marketing audits for agents in North Qld and one of the checks that I conduct is whether you own your domain name. Surprisingly I’ve found that in most cases the business owners don’t. Not owning your domain name is the same as not registering your business name, someone else can come in underneath you, register the domain name, effectively stopping you from ever using your own name for your web site domain, worse still, they can then try and sell it to you for exorbitant fees.

So get on to the domain registration sites today and buy, if they are available, your business name,your own name, and all the variations within your suburb or area of operation, and buy all of the domains, including the .com, .com.au, .net, .net.au and the .mobi versions.

Protect your self and your business.

If in doubt ask me via this blog and I’ll help you.

I’ve just spent the last 2 days conducting seminars in Sydney NSW on the future of internet communication channels and how to effectively use them to network your real estate business, and one of the ideas presented to the attending guests is using social media sites such as facebook as a networking tool.

I’ve also looked at, and in fact recommended, the use of banner advertising or facebook adds, but today I’ve decided to look a little closer at this for you and find out if they really are effective and also look at new products that facebook is providing in the market, and how that will affect what and how you use the web site. Lets have a look at Facebook Connect, this product allows it’s members to log onto other sites using their facebook log in and see their friends activities on those sites. Connect also gives members the opportunity to broadcast their actions on those sites to their friends on Facebook.

A number of web sites will be integrating this feature into their pages including sites such as Discovery Channel, the company says that this will assist with the emergence of a new “Social Web”, because friends will be able to penetrate sites that have not been social in the past. So how will this really work, lets say that mike andrew is watching a show or video on a web site, I can alert my friends on facebook and invite them to join me to watch and/or comment on the show as it plays in real time.   

Facebook is not the only social media site that is planning to do this, Google,Yahoo and Myspace have all announced plans to release a similar platform, and they will use common standards to allow other web sites to reduce the work needed to integrate each system.

“Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “They can build their own social capabilities, but what will be more useful for them is building on top of a social system that people are already wedded to.”

So now we have that part explained lets look at how effective advertising has been on facebook for businesses around the world.

A survey last week from the research firm IDC suggested that social networks were a miserable place for advertisers: just 57 percent of all users of social networks clicked on an ad in the last year, and only 11 percent of those clicks led to a purchase, IDC said. And it turns out that marketers are not so interested in advertising on pages filled with personal trivia and relationship updates.

I personally believe that by tapping into user groups or creating your own groups and inviting current users to join you within facebook that are relevant to you and your business, and then networking to that group, is a better way of using the potential of facebook.