Online Real Estate Technology

The slowing economy is having an impact on advertising revenues in all mediums, but the hardest hit appears to be newspaper classified advertising revenue. According to new figures released by the American Newspaper Association, newspaper advertising revenues fell to their lowest levels in 14 years.

Print advertising dollars fell by 17.7% to $34.740 billion and on line advertising fell by 1.8% to $3.166 billion in 2008.

It is not surprising then that 4 major US newspaper groups are in bankruptcy protection, the most notable is the Tribune Co, owners of papers in Chicago & Los Angeles. Seven newspapers have closed or are about to close and switch to an on line model to survive due to losses in advertising revenue.

Real Estate sections in the press have also been hit hard with newspapers advertising revenue from real estate falling 37% in 2008, car adds fell 29% and employment 42.5%. In total, real estate advertising and employment classified advertising has fallen more than 60% since 2006.

I’m sure these figures will give the Australian newspapers cause for concern.

For those of you just starting out, trying to get an understanding of how to formalise your social network strategy, can be a very confusing journey, So I’ve decided to post a few articles to help you understand how it all works. 

My previous post was to help you “listen” and “understand” how to start to engage, this post is to help you define your strategy. So firstly, before you go off and create lots of blog posts and join all the sites, lets set up your strategy.

You need to define who your target market is before you start:

People – Who is your target market? Look at their social activities!

Objective- What do you want to achieve out of communicating with your defined market? What do you want to accomplish?

Strategy – How are you going to influence your market, Plan for how relationships with your consumers will change.

Technology - Decide which social sites to use.

Apply the principles of POST to all the sites you decide to use, once you have done your homework, you’re ready to start.

Before you go and log in to all the sites available read this post first.

I’ll cover your first steps in the next few posts for you. If you need any help just ask.

Download this post as a podcast here

During my seminar presentations I probably sell the concept of a social media strategy like a salesman, get you on a high and all excited about the potential it brings to you and then leave you on your own to do it. That’s the impression I’m getting lately, the more i do of the seminar presentations the less time i get to actually spend time with agents in their offices advising on where to start, so I’ve decided to post about the steps to take to get you on the road.

If you are wanting to start your blog or social media strategy, first thing to do before you set up, is listen.

Listen to conversations on blogs that are of interest to you and your business or the area you want to enter into. Search for conversations from like minded blog writers and a good place to start is to sign up for Google alerts, create the alert on the subject you want to “listen” too, for example, if you want to follow real estate blogs, then create the alert on Google for “RealEstateBlogs”, sure your email inbox will fill up with blog posts in no time, but this is a great place start and to see what topic is being written about and who is doing the talking.

Follow the conversations and take note of the way the writer structures the information, more importantly, take note of the content and whether it provides you with really good information or advice that you find useful. Once you have decided what you like, then start to engage.

Do this by commenting on blog posts you like, giving a blog writer feedback joins you in the conversation that blog writer is having with his or her readers. Join Twitter and Facebook and any other social media site you’d like to participate in and listen.

Now, once you have all the research and are aware of how the conversations take place, is the time to get your hands dirty.  It’s time to create your own masterpiece and dive into the conversation.

Make sure your information is engaging, challenging and stimulating, continue to listen and join in conversations on other blogs, and you’ll be on your way.

Next, I’ll talk about designing your strategy and target market.

The next Mike Andrew real estate internet marketing seminar will be held on Wednesday 25th March at the Boulevard,121 Studley Park Road Kew Victoria.

Topics covered will include, On Line Reputation Management, Integrating Social Media &  Blogging into your Corporate Communication Strategy.  

Registration will be from 9:15am for a 9:30am start. To attend contact Tino on ttabacchiera@domain.com.au or mobile 0409 417 001

domize domain name search

One of the problems I’ve encountered when searching to find if a domain name is available, is the time it takes to search for it and then find all the variations. Well to help you do this a lot quicker, here is a great search engine called Domize  that you can use to find domain names and all the variations available.

All you do is type in any phrase or word that you want to search, and the site will come up with domains based on that name or word, and suggest shorter versions of the domain for you, the site picks up on all .com and related top level domains, but unfortunately, does not yet pick up .com.au domains. We can’t have everything!!

It also includes a power search feature that uses brackets to encompass various search terms, so instead of searching each domain combination separately, you just add the words in brackets and the site will search them all for you. You can also “star” a domain site for checking or reference at a later date.

Domize is linked directly to Godaddy.com, so you can buy the domain names on the spot.  So give it a try, it will really make your domain name search a lot easier.

Aussie Banks About To End First Home Buyers Party

Today whilst conducting some office visits, I mentioned to the teams I was working with a story I came across last night on Crikey, regarding Australia’s leading banks and their move to end the first home buyers party.

From Monday, headed by the Commonwealth bank, banks will not recognise the the $14,000 for an existing home and the $21,000 for a new home government grants as proof of saving. The banks will now require first home buyers to have saved 3% of the purchase price over 3 months leading up to the application. This move has been brought about by the overwhelming number of home loan applications banks have received over the past few months.

I don’t normally cover this type of story, but given that the agents I spoke with this morning were not aware of the move I decided to post it today for your information. 

The full article written by Glenn Dyer is available for you to read by clicking here

TweetDeck

For those of you just starting out with Twitter and would like to share your Tweets directly to your Facebook page, you can download the new beta version of TweetDeck. This great tool is very useful in cutting down the amount of time it takes to update both Twitter and your Facebook page

Here’s how it works: Firstly download the beta version of TweetDeck here, you can then click on the Facebook icon at the top of the screen and, once you have signed into Facebook and given TweetDeck authorisation, this will add a new column full of each of your friends most recent status update which updates automatically once a minute. From here you can email the update out to anyone, tweet it out over twitter, view the users online status and if they are online right now click on their name (or the green online status indicator) to open Facebook chat right within TweetDeck.

The other element is the ability to direct your tweet/update to post to twitter or facebook or both directly within the tweet window. Note: direct messages will not be sent via Facebook even if you have the Facebook check box ticked.

I’ve been playing with TweetDeck over the past 24 hours and although it is a beta test version, it appears to be working very well. I’ve updated my Twitter profile via TweetDeck  and it seamlessly updates my Facebook page instantly, saving me a lot of time. I’d recommend you check it out and save yourself a lot of time.

Step right up and read all about it, a little while ago I mentioned that a number of the US’s newspapers were in trouble financially and the current owners were trying to either sell the paper or would move them to an on line model. Well news today from the US is that the Hearst Corporation, owners of the troubled Seattle Post Intellingencer have been unable to find a buyer and have decided to move the paper to an on line version effective from today.

According to the paper, “the last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will be published Tuesday. The Hearst Corp. announced that the P-I will become the nation’s largest daily newspaper to shift entirely online.”

It will be worth watching the move as this could well be a model that other print based papers may have to follow to stay afloat. May make a few print supporters in the real estate industry here in Australia start to look at these trends.

Just a reminder that my real estate technology seminar series continues next week in NSW. The location and timing for the seminar is as follows:

Maximising Your On Line Marketing for Real Estate Professionals, Tuesday 17th March at Parkside Ballroom A – Sydney Convention Centre NSW.

If you would like to attend, please contact me here, we already have close to a full house but some seats are still available.

Look forward to speaking with you on the day.

FryPhone

Whilst doing a presentation this afternoon in Perth on social media, the subject of quantity vs quality came up, in relation to the number of followers I and other users of social sites have.  

It’s a really good question, and it got me thinking about this post, strange where ideas come from some times, so is it really about quantity or quality?

Some celebrities using Twitter and other social media have thousands of followers, Stephen Fry, the British comedian, for example, has over 290,000 followers on Twitter alone. Not long ago he caused a major stir in the UK when he wrote about his dislike for the Blackberry Storm mobile phone on Twitter, calling it “Shockingly bad. I mean embarrassingly awful. Such a disappointment. Rushed out unfinished. What a pity.”  After the review had circulated, the BBC accused him of having the “power to kill a gadget”, due to the effect that review had on sales.

Social networks bring like minded people together, and people looking for information will find you via blogs,social sites or even the search engines such as Google, and they will follow you if your information is relevant to them. But, if you set yourself as an expert and try and enter a social community, you had better know your stuff. These sites will sort you out fast if you are a fake, but if you have good quality information and you engage with your followers, they will respond to your posts and information and will follow where you lead them.

So, in my mind, I’d rather follow someone, that provides me with great content that I find useful and informative, than hear about what they had for dinner that night.

I compered myself to another Twitter user I know last night, and got a little disappointed that he had 10 times the followers that I did, but then when I looked at the bios of the followers on each of our sites, one thing really struck me, that was the difference in the quality of our followers. We both provide marketing and technology advice and talk about social media for the real estate industry, but the difference in quality of our followers was amazing. 

So it’s not always about the size of your following, it’s more about the quality of those followers. If you are just starting out using social sites or Twitter, then work on the quality of your information and engage your followers regularly, if you’re good at what you do, they will find you and they will follow you, and more importantly they will go where you lead them.

So, to answer my own question, I believe that size is not always better!