Online Real Estate Technology

It’s called Social Media, but sometimes the people who use social media are not social at all. You put a lot of work in setting up your profiles on social media sites, making sure that you include all the relevant information, contact numbers, email address, great looking photo, update it regularly and then – Nothing!! that’s because you do not introduce yourself or work the room. Ahh, have I got your attention with that comment?, you have just entered the biggest conference or social event in the world and if you stand in the corner and do nothing, that is what you will get out of all of your efforts.

Get out and create the handshake, that’s one of the secrets of networking yourself on social media sites. You are not stalking other users, they are there to network just like you and get information from like minded people on all kinds of interests and passions. The more you network or meet people on the web, the more followers you will generate. One of the things that I  notice when I talk to people, is they can talk passionately about the subject that is closest to them when they are face to face, but as soon as they get in front of a computer, they become totally different people.

Twitter, Facebook, Blogs are all big social events and you need to get out and create traffic by inviting and following other users. Start conversations with them, invite them to connect with you and network. This way you will start to build a following and this in turn creates more followers, as like minded people will find you and your sites. Take Twitter as an example, by using Twitter Grader you can find other Twitter users in your area, or better still look at their profiles and follow them, chat with them, share your information or expertise with them and they will respond. Check out my post The Green Green Grass of Home- Try Twitter Grader  for a refresh on this.  Update often, but make your updates relevant, don’t waste their time when they start to follow you, for instance, I made a decision when I started this blog, not to include gossip or to criticise other portals when I post, this blog has always been there to provide you with helpful and useful information on technology and internet marketing, and I’ve stuck to that theme. I only update or post when I have something to say that is relevant to you, my readers.

This networking also applies to your listings, they way you write, structure your content etc, all impacts on the way your listings will be viewed. So get out there, meet and network these social media users, introduce yourself and create conversations. Here’s a great video that will help you get to terms with how to work the room.

Good luck and please let me know your thoughts on this post and wether you found the information helpful.

This post now available as a podcast

As I meet and chat with lots of real estate agents, I discuss the opportunities that exist for them with a strategic social media strategy. My intention is to open up new communication channels for the offices and agents I deal with, and to help them understand the options available to them on the web. Occasionally like yesterday, I come across the so called “bean counters” who cannot see the value of an integrated communication strategy using social media, or how the groups they work for can benefit from this type of exposure. I put that down to them looking at the web from a very traditional viewpoint and not looking any further into the future than today.

During my presentation yesterday I was asked what is the ROI on this type of strategy, a very good question to ask, and because the use of social media strategies in Australia is very limited at the moment in the real estate industry, there really is a limited understanding of how an integrated and corporate social media web strategy can work to drive leads, communicate with the on line real estate searcher, build brand awareness and word of mouth, not to mention the impact of effective backlink building on your SEO.

I intend to post more about this in the next day or so, but in the short term, I researched yesterday the number of social media or networking opportunities available to you as a business, and at last count there were more than 350+. Now you can’t possibly use them all, but as a bit of fun I thought I’d post a link for you to research what is available, so have fun and I’ll post more about this in the next few days:

http://mashable.com/2007/10/23/social-networking-god/

I’ve been chatting to real estate offices lately about including social media into their long term communication and web strategy and as I’ve mentioned in my previous post on SEO How Important is An Effective SEO Strategy to Your Real Estate Business  you can use social media to build traffic to your web site instead of paying Google to do so.

Given that you may have the best real estate web site in the country, how do you use social media to drive lots of traffic to it. Here are a few tips and suggestions to help you, as long as you have great content and your site is up to date. There are more social media sites out there than you can possibly use in a lifetime, so lets look at the ones that will have a major impact for you.

Social Bookmarking sites: There are lots of social bookmarking sites for you to use on the web, so bookmark and tag all your content. Sites such as  delicious.com and Mr Wong are a great start to expose your content to other web readers, Mr Wong also allows do follow links which will help with SEO for your blog.  Stumbleupon.com is another great site to use, you should also leave a review of your content. Make your tags as broad as possible to allow users to find your site.

Blogs:Do they really work? Integrating a blog into your web site is a great way of bringing new content and visitors to your site or blog. The trick to blogging is to always provide good quality content in a consistent manner. Once you start cranking out consistent quality content, you can then start to submit your posts to news sites such as Digg, Reddit and Mixx.com, which will open up new audiences and web traffic for you. These are really good sites for exposing your content and will generate backlinks for your web site.

Facebook, Myspace,Linkedin and other networking sites are all smart places to submit your  blog to, all your connections will be able to see your content and blog. Twitter.com is another great resource to share your posts, for both business and pleasure just check out my profile at http://twitter.com/mikeandrewre to see how Twitter works.

Make sure you set up RSS feeds and email subscription links to allow readers to continue to recieve your posts and content once they leave your site. 

Hopefully this may answer some of your questions on how to set up an effective social media strategy for your office. A good social media strategy will help you build good quality backlinks to your web site that will also help your Google ranking. 

Good luck with your planning and let me know if I can help

News from the USA that Myspace has laid off a number of its employees, in what the company says is a simple restructuring. The lay offs took place in the Los Angeles and New York offices and social media being what it is, the laid off employees checked their ex bosses Myspace pages for messages of sympathy. 

Portfolio.coms Jeff Bercovici reported the ex employees discovered brand new and jarringly chipper status update messages.

Jeff said, the company’s senior vice president for marketing, described her mood as “focused,” with this message: “just another manic monday. after a sublime weekend. can you say SUNNY LA.” Meanwhile, sales and marketing president Jeff Berman seemed preoccupied by Malcolm Gladwell’s new book. His message, punctuated with a big smiley face: “loved Outliers — great read.”

Talk about lack of sensitivity by management to ex employees, maybe they’re better off not working for the company, so be careful what you say on your social media sites.

Know any management like those in Myspace? If you do then please let me know, and no smiley faces please.

Today I start back at work and tomorrow I’m off to SA to conduct some office audits, so the new year will start off busy again for me. This year I’ll be running more of the domain.com.au sponsored breakfasts as well as some workshops which will be more hands on, so watch out for notification of those events.

Social media and how to use it in your real estate business will be a featured theme again this year and I hope, through this blog to provide you with interesting ideas and tips on using technology to generate more leads. I’ve got a lot of ideas I will share with you on this, as I’ve had a lot of time over the past 2 weeks to research the net, also looking at how agents are not using the web to integrate their advertising so I’ll have a look at that over the next few days.

But lets start off with an interesting stat from the US on PC usage over the past 3 months. We all think that kids and teenagers are the users of technology and PC’s, but out of the US comes some interesting results. Females overall are the greater users of PC’s with 51.6%  and males coming in at 48.4%. Males have more user sessions than females with 69 hours a month compared to females at 64 hours.

The really interesting stat is the amount of time spent on PC’s by the older ages, those in the 35 – 49 year age group spent 90 hours a month, with the over 55′s at 79 hours a month and the over 65′s 72 hours a month.  

Some interesting stats to start the year off.

Source: Neilson Online

Around this time of year, a lot of people and blog writers all look back on the year that was, so to do something a little different, I’ve decided to look into the future. I’ve pulled out my crystal ball,well actually it is pewinternet.org’s crystal ball and gone forward to 2020. This great research group has looked at how the internet will evolve over the next 11 years and what we can look forward to. Here are the results of the survey, taken by asking some of the leading internet experts in the world today and the invitations to these experts was via Facebook and used social media to interact with these contributors.

Here’s the key results from that survey: 

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the Internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing “arms race,” with the “crackers” who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who’s connected, and the results will be mixed in terms of social relations.
• “Next-generation” engineering of the network to improve the current Internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

There you have it ladies and gentlemen,the way the experts see the evolution of the net into 2020. If you’d like to read the full report, click on the link here: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_FutureInternet3.pdf

Thanks to the great research undertaken by the team at www.pewinternet.org

Now here’s my take on the next 12 months for real estate offices and agents:

1. Video will become more sought after by consumers and agents will start to look at how they can integrate this media into all their on line marketing as well as the integration of office video profiles.

2. Use of social media tools such as blogs, podcasting and vlogging will impact on office marketing. Facebook and YouTube will also become part of the daily marketing routine.

3. Agents will have to work smarter with their property marketing and employ best practice policies within their on line marketing. As the online consumer gets smarter about the type and quailty of information they can get from the net, they will demand more from agents. Frequently updated content will be a requirement.

4. All real estate agents will need to look at their SEO and SEM and take a more indepth look at their own web sites and how to use these as a local marketing tool. Agents will need to demonstrate the “Local Market Expert” tag. Start to work your own marketing and not rely so heavily on the major web portals to deliver leads.

5. On Line Reputation Management will become vital to all on line business’s not just real estate. This is the practice of monitoring, managing and reparing your on line reputation.

6. Real Estate Press will slowly start to lose business as real estate agents realise that by moving away from this medium they don’t lose market share. However, you’ll need to start embracing more on line marketing techniques and improving your current marketing attempts to capture a greater share of the on line researcher.

7. The industry should demand more from the on line portals next year, these sites have had it way to easy for too long,  demand better up to date technology, more tracking tools for agents and more accountability. Rates are going up, but in a lot of ways service and technology has not improved. Products are being released not to help you or the consumer, but to find ways to take more money off you, But do they really work??      

 As always, let me know your thoughts and ideas on these suggestions.

I refer back to my previous post about Claim Your Online Real Estate Domain Name and how important this is to your future on line marketing strategy, well don’t be overly concerned about not putting this in place, because even the minders of George W Bush the current president of the US of A make mistakes. Now this really drives home my recomendations that all business owners of real estate offices and franchise groups should buy all variations of domain names that relate to their area of operation and/or franchise group and/or geographic region.

It appears that a North Carolina based web development company called Illuminati Karate had bought the domain name www.georgewbushlibrary.com domain name for less than $10.00 and sold it back to the library’s contracted web developers for $35,000 who had accidently let the domain name expire. It’s the same as a very good friend of mine who registered the domain name www.primeministeraustralia.com.au .

So, you have been warned, register that domain name and all variations of that name, because there is only ever one domain name on the web, and if you lose it, watch out. You have been warned. By the way www.ichuckedapairofshoesattheuspresident.com is still available!!

I will not vouch for the accuracy of this story, however, it does make a really good post!

As you may have gathered from the posts on this blog, I’ve tended to look at the serious side of social media and it’s impact on word of mouth or brand building from a real estate agency viewpoint, and the obvious benefits that social media has on search engine rankings in your geographic area, but every now and then, you have to stop and look at the funny side of  internet marketing and there are some very funny videos available from various sources. Of course the inspiration for this post comes from a discussion I had this morning whilst conducting an internet audit for an agency in Perth WA, the question was asked of me ”How much of yourself do you reveal on social media sites?”, Now there’s an interesting question and in itself another blog post, but in the meantime here’s a great video for you to enjoy on that “One Last Click”, The video was made as part of a UK campaign sponsored by the TUC called workSMART. This video was from a component called NSFW or Not Safe For Work dealing with aspects of IT Security as it may affect employees.

Please enjoy!!

I don’t often cover stories like this one, however due to the increasing power of social media sites such as Facebook and Myspace, I thought this story was worth a run. The Race Discrimination Commissioner has urged the government to implement laws that allow monitoring of social media sites for racial vilification and other discrimination as the practice is becoming widespread. Tom Calma was responding to the claim that scores of racist groups are using social media as both an outlet for their messages and to recruit new members. Some Facebook users who posted opposing messages and comments to the groups had been threatened with violence and there is a fear the sites could be used to rally groups to riots etc, Facebook has not responded to the cliams nor has it removed or deleted any comments placed on the site by its members. The Australian Communications and Media Authority has said that on line regulation policy is a matter for government and the standing committee of attorneys-general, and the committee was considering wether the National Classification Scheme should be amended to include specific measures to cover racial material online.

So watch this space!

Back in October I wrote how to set up Google alerts to monitor you and your brand on line,heres a reminder of that post, On Line Reputation Management – How To Set Up Google Alerts For Your Business , and looking at the growth of both consumer ratings sites and social media sites in Australia it seemed a good idea to revisit this. Setting up Google alerts to monitor your brand will give you lots of valuable information on what and how your brand is being used on line. I have an alert set up for this blog and of course use lots of social media sites to help me promote the blog, so I like to know where and when I’m mentioned. I get about five mentions a week across the web on who uses my name and links to me, and thankfully to date, it has all been positive, but to me having a monitoring strategy in place is now so important to any business owner not just real estate. Well you can now add a new site to help you monitor your on line brand it’s called social mention and here’s the link for you to do some research. http://socialmention.com/

Social Mention is a search engine that scans user generated content such as blogs,bookmarking sites and comments. You can search on all social media sites by using keywords, phrases  etc. I entered the search term for my blog, mike andrew’s real estate tips & technology and got a search rank of 35/100 and a result which indicates at least one mention every hour, I’ve been as high as a rank of 80/100 or 1 mention every 10 seconds, you can also set up RSS feeds for a particular search term and follow your mentions on line. Below you’ll see the search result for mike andrew’s real estate tips & technology.

Mike Andrew Real Estate Search Result

My recomendation is to set up your Google alerts and then add social mention, this will then be able to track your blog,bookmarking and comments etc on the web. 

As always let me know if you need futher information on this.