Real Estate Tools & Technology By realistiQ http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/blogid/d8f8e3dc-19b9-f916-adbd4f442dbfa88f/categoryname/real estate technology/title/Real Estate Tools & Technology By realistiQ.htm Understanding A Few Technologies That Can Help You Grow Your Real Estate Business
What is Drip Email Marketing & How Does It Work?
Drip email marketing is typically referred to as drip marketing, but drip marketing theoretically doesn’t have to be in email format. They call it drip marketing because it is a method of marketing made up multiple pieces, scheduled to reach the intended audience at strategically determined points in time. So, essentially, you could set up a drip marketing campaign made of tweets. With that said, email marketing is one of the highest regarded marketing methods by marketers today because of its proven effectiveness. It is especially popular in the real estate industry and that is why we chose to include a drip marketing system in our intranet solution, iQ Office. However, agents often spend too much time with drip marketing programs, and that is why we have created a “set it and forget it” capability that allows agents to simply add their contacts to a campaign and let the company and the system do the rest.
What is a Blog & How Does It Work?
“Blog” is short for “web log”. A blog is a “log” of content posted on the internet often for other users to share, borrow or comment on. Google has however, changed its algorithm to penalize blogs that are standalone logs of other people’s content. Blogs can be standalone or they can be a part of a web site. The latter of the two is more effective if your end goal is to drive your audience to your web site and not simply to your blog for two reasons:
1)      The search engines will eat up the fresh keyword rich content you post to your blog
2)      If your “followers” (some like to refer to your blog followers as your audience or passive pipeline) like what they read, they can simply click on a link to access what you are offering through your web site. They will be less likely to do so if the link takes them away from the window they are currently in.
What is Social Media Networking & How Does It Work?
Some people use the term “social media” interchangeably with the term “social networking”. They are different actually. Social Media is a term used to describe a tool used for social networking. The most accurate terminology that encompasses “social networking”, as we know it today, is social media networking.
The effectiveness of social media is often still debated. Real estate companies are doing very well at using their pages and their agents’ networks as recruiting tools. Agents however, are more likely to generate buyer or seller customers through using social media. Where agents are more commonly less successful than they could be is using social media strategically to build a passive pipeline for future business and continued growth of their Social Media Network. That is where a company can assist it,s agents, as you can supply all of your agents with valuable content while they focus on closing the business you help them generate.
What is Lead Management & How Does it Work?
Lead management ends at the point transaction management begins. Lead management can be broken down into five phases:
  • Lead Generation – The interest in your product or service and the potential to do business is established.
  • Lead Capture – The lead’s information has been submitted and is captured by your system.
  • Lead Distribution – The lead’s information is then sent to the appropriate person per business rules.
  • Lead Scrubbing – The recipient of the lead engages the lead to heighten interest in product or service.
  • Lead Conversion – The lead decides they want an agent with your company to represent them.
It is vital to your conversion rate and overall efficiency to have a strategy in place that consists of:
1)      The proper tools, configuration, automation, content and personnel in place to manage each lead.
2)      A task based action plan based on the tools accessible to you and your agents.
3)      Properly trained agents that know what to do and how to do it.
What is a CRM & How Does it Work?
A CRM used to be a digital rolodex. Then it became a digital rolodex on steroids. Now, a CRM can do so much more. iQ Office offers features for querying your database, organizing your leads/contacts, storing lead information, marketing to and interacting with your leads and much more. What makes our CRM so special is that it is a part of iQ Office and it is tied in with most of the marketing tools you and your agents will need to run your business at an optimum level.
What is Mail Merge & How Does it Work?
Mail merge is actually a feature of most CRMs, but it deserves to be highlighted. Mail Merge is an excellent way to quickly establish an individual effort to market to one or more of your leads or contacts via email. You can also use a similar feature called label merge with our system for creating a printable document of multiple mailing labels for direct mail or some other type of print marketing.
If you use the mail merge tool for sending out emails, you also can save email templates for future use. Additionally, with our system, you can copy the “promote” source code from the promote tab on each of your listings that is also used for creating Craig’s list adds. However, you can click the “source button” on the email editor, past the source code and send out a mass email to a specific contact type through mail merge that contains agent and property information along with clickable lead capture sources. A great example for using this feature is when you want to quickly promote a new listing to existing agents.
 http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/514ae528-9b21-f804-bd9d28eb45e80158.htm Wed, 13 Apr 2011 04:55:53 -0800 How To Add More Value To Your Real Estate Business Using Technology
Agents spend way too much time creating exposure for themselves. If you want to increase the bottom line, you may want to consider what you can do internally or with outsourcing, to help your agents increase their leads while allowing them to focus on signing customers and closing deals.
While the list of features of iQ Web & iQ Office is growing, brokers can currently manage numerous facets of their agents’ businesses by using our solution effectively. You MAY get a little pushback from your agents, but you should consider applying the following ideas to your business and so should they.


Content Creation & Provision

 
Company Driven Content: Drip Email Marketing
While iQ Office, our intranet solution, allows the technologically advanced agents to create and manage their own drip email marketing campaigns, it also allows companies to drive their agents’ drip email marketing efforts through company campaigns.
All the agents have to do is add their recipients to the company campaigns. That can be a done through a very simple process realistiQ calls “Set It & Forget It”. The emails go out to the agents’ recipients from the agent with the agent’s information. All emails include unsubscribe options, so the agents do not have to manage a Do Not Send list either.
Company Driven Content: Website Content & Blog Posts
Every agent receives an auto-generated web site with iQ Web that has an agent blog associated with it. The agent web site alone is a time and money saver for the agent, because it is included in our offerings and the web site doesn’t take any time to set up. If the agents wish to point their existing domain names at their website, they can. If they want to build onto the site, we offer a Content Management System that exists inside iQ Office that offers a lot of flexibility. New and fresh content is important and your company should offer content pages like, area information pages, or even videos, that your agents can borrow and integrate into their own sites.
Blogging will also help agents to establish a passive pipeline and steady stream of traffic to their web site. While iQ Office, our intranet solution, allows the technologically advanced agents to create and manage their own blog, it also allows them to easily import company blog entries into their own blog. Essentially, agents can have their own blog, without ever writing a single entry. They can also have a hybrid blog with some company content, and some personal content. Again, if they wish to have their own content on their blog, they can do that too.
Company Driven Content: Social Media Networking
Companies may want to consider pulling their agents’ time away from social media networking and allowing them to focus on closing deals. This does not mean companies should encourage agents to abandon their social networking strategy. It means they should play a heavier role in it.
There are some free and rather inexpensive tools out there today that can help you get more involved. If you are blogging as a company, you are already creating valuable content for your agents to share on social media that will help them to establish themselves as knowledgeable agents. So, for now, let’s use the idea of pushing blog entries to your agents’ social networks as a company.
Two tools your agents probably are not already using are Ping.FM (It’s Free) and Hootsuite (It’s free, but you will want to get the paid version which allows you to manage multiple accounts). If they are using it, the alternative steps to the following steps will be obvious.
For those who do not already use Ping.FM, you will want to schedule a couple hours out of a day for the setup of your agents’ Ping.FM accounts.  During that session, you will ask your agents to sign up for Ping.FM, connect their existing social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) to their Ping.FM accounts and then to provide you with their login information to their Ping.FM account. Then you can connect your agents’ Ping.FM accounts with your company Hootsuite account and publish tweets, status updates, and blog posts to every one of your agents’ social media accounts with one post.
This does NOT mean you will have access to their Social Media, other than posting relevant content to their pages. If they are sensitive to this, they may want to create separate business social media accounts and give you access to those. Then you could post only to those business accounts and work together with your agents’ additional efforts on their personal accounts to create more business. If the company does its part successfully, agents may gain trust and relinquish their efforts to you and focus more on closing deals.
One of the catches here will be whether or not you want to post a link to your company blog or directly to the agents’ blog. If you wish to drive people to your agents’ blogs, any admin could handle this responsibility with ease, and the effectiveness of your company efforts will increase as it will keep your agents’ audience within their view. Hootsuite allows you to connect multiple RSS feeds to selected social media accounts. This means by simply taking the time to write a company blog post, your agents can automate their blogs to import your material, you can automate your hootsuite to pull in an RSS feed from their blog and distribute the link to every social network they have connected to their ping.FM account.

Company Driven Content: SLWS vs. Virtual Tours
Our single listing web sites (SLWs) can save your agents time and money and they serve the purpose professionally. If your agents adopt our SLWs, they no longer will have to purchase virtual tours for each property. Agents who purchase domain names with the street address of each property included will no longer have to pay for the domain names either. While the cost for each of these items is relatively small, it can add up over time. But time is the big money saver here.  
Our Single Listing Websites, included in iQ Web, prevent agents from having to spend the time setting up virtual tours and their domain names. Every one of their listings has an auto-generated SLW and domain name for it that includes the street address. Our company web sites and agent web sites automatically generate a link to the SLW, the SLW includes social media sharing, it includes lead sources tied into the lead management system which funnels all leads from the SLW straight into your agent’s iQ Office intranet account, there is a branded and unbranded version of every SLW, the SLWs include lists of schools and businesses and their information and the SLW has a mobile version and their standard versions are quick loading because they do not use Flash technology.
Company Driven Content: Online Document Storage & Sharing
No longer should agents need to come into the office to get a copy of a document that is readily available for everyone in person. iQ Office offers secure, unlimited online document storage and sharing for both the agent and the company. Companies can share documents with staff and agents and all users can share documents externally. Our document library also includes a search tool that allows you to search the text within all of your text documents, not just the titles of the documents themselves.


Assistance with Lead Generation & Lead Management:


Lead Management: What Can You Do To Help With Driving Leads?
We have already talked about supplying your agents with website, blog, social media and drip marketing content with the intention of saving them time. But another area where supplying content can help agents' businesses is how these efforts will also assist their marketing efforts, and in turn, drive leads to your agents.
Every blog or social media post can work individually and create an immediate response, but they also work to create a long term effect with constant benefits. Agents’ sites will not only improve in organic search results by improving their page rank, but your individual efforts will remain online, so the number of tentacles out there for developing a long-term passive pipeline will continue to increase and work for your agents.
Lead Management: Nurturing Leads
There are different ways you can use lead management systems. We are hearing about high conversion rates from our customers using the hybrid approach. The hybrid approach allows agents to nurture their own leads, while allowing the company to scrub company leads as opposed to routing them off to agents. This has proven to be highly effective because the company can oversee, develop and refine its response process to general leads that come into the system and continue to warm the lead up before the agent even touches them.
The alternative is to allow your agents to receive these leads that are generated by the company web site that would otherwise be scrubbed by the company. You can configure the system to keep track of the agent as well. The success of this approach lies HEAVILY in training and internal marketing and understanding of the system you are asking your agents to learn.

Agent & Staff Training:



A system like iQ Web / iQ Office offers a tremendous amount of features. Knowing when, why and how to implement them is essential in increasing the efficiency. So, is the understanding of these factors from top to bottom. Learn the tools you are providing your agents. Get your staff involved. Then train agents how to work together with your staff to operate their business at their full potential. This training should come to them internally. You and your staff know your business better than anyone, and engagement is a huge key to success. But it is hard to engage your agents if you cannot speak the language you are asking them to learn. Proper knowledge of the ins and outs of your agents = one of the greatest values you can offer your agents.

Below are a few examples of features we encourage our customers to train their agents on, in order for them to understand and use our system to their advantage.

 http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/4bfd2b99-f484-af79-69a2ff4aae915a15.htm Tue, 12 Apr 2011 04:12:53 -0800 Do You Work For Social Networking Or Do Social Networking Sites Work For You?

Let me first say this. I stand corrected.  I come from a background of small business where I was the product; granted with a team of professionals that I outsourced, business partners and affiliates. But when people sought what "my company" had to offer, they sought me. Even though my customer list consisted of customers of all sizes across the nation, the fact is, I was marketing a different animal than what I am marketing today.

After months of  researching and writing about social networking sites and trying every trick in the book, I have come to the same conclusion as my boss had already come to before he was gracious enough to let me learn on my own. Maybe he was investing in proving the truth. Who knows? But the conclusion is: social networking sites today are (for the most part) what web sites used to be to companies years ago. I know, because that is what my business offered--web centric branding solutions.

In the beginning, that average web site was not nearly as functional as today's average web site. They were mainly online brochures. That changed quickly, but the fact remains in the beginning it was easy to sell web sites by simply saying "This day and age, you pretty much have to have one." Programmers have been developing the most functional sites all along, albeit many were not user friendly, as designers were designing prettier web sites that were relatively useless and were nowhere to be found on search engines. Bottom line--in the beginning, web sites really didn't generate that much business and they were extremely expensive.

The same goes for most social networking pages for most companies. To properly manage business pages on social networking sites, it requires man hours that can add up, often with little ROI. Now stop right there. I am not saying you should discontinue marketing your business through social networking sites if you are an individual who owns a small business or if you are advertising a product that appeals to the masses by using something like Facebook Ads. If people follow you, your service(s) or your product(s) on social networking sites, this may be a valuable way for you to connect and promote your product. But Social Networking for the most part is a person to person activity. Sometimes, the B to C relationships form through advertisements, but that is in special cases.
If you are a decision maker for a company and are considering investing in social networking, I challenge you to heavily consider this question: Have you tried investing in other proven and heavily supported alternatives? If you already have someone spending hours on your social networking, I ask you to consider the former question along with the following question: Are those efforts currently driving business to your company and generating ROI?

Studies have shown nearly 90% orketers prefer drip email marketing over other means of marketing that exist today. Why? First of all, it is a relatively inexpensive marketing method for the amount of exposure you can create. Second of all, it is easier to target your audience. Third, you can control the timing of delivery. Fourth, you can automate the delivery. Fifth, well I will stop there. But believe me, I could go on all day. Sure, there are challenges to drip marketing, but there are solutions to those challenges. The most unique challenge to drip email marketing is building proper lists to protect your IP address from being flagged as SPAM. The rest are typical of any marketing method.
Blogging is another form of marketing that should be implemented first, before moving on to social networking if you are trying to market your company. Blogging can be a less expensive means of marketing than drip email marketing, because there are free blogging tools out there. But if you have a system like realistiQ’s iQ Office, it comes down to man hours because both are included in our system. In that case, blogging could be more expensive if you do it effectively, because you have the overhead of at least one person that has the time to constantly focus on research and writing, the ability to properly write interesting content and the technical background it takes to understand how blogs work and how they can improve your web site rankings among many other things. Your ideal marketing person should have experience with blogging, drip email marketing and managing social networking sites.

You may be thinking, wait a second. I thought BLOGs were social networking sites. Well, that brings up a common misconception. There is "Social Networking", which is most commonly referred to as the act of using social media to network. Then there are "social networking sites" which are sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. BLOGS are not commonly referred to as social networking sites. That's why they are called BLOGS (Short for Web Logs). "Social Media" is a term that encompasses both social networking sites and BLOGS. Any type of social media can be used for social networking. It is important to make this distinction when looking at your social media budget. If you are trying to make decisions on where it is best to allocate your company marketing resources, remember this: Social networking sites = less effective. BLOGGING drip email marketing = highly effective.

You also may be wondering, what does this have to do with Real Estate? Everything. If you are a real estate company owner, social networking sites are mainly useful to your agents, because they are a part of the product they are selling. Leave it to your agents to spread their brand along with yours across social media. Sure, give them a company business page to form an official affiliation for all of your agents, but unless your company has a Facebook App that promotes your listings like the one realistiQ is currently developing, you are wasting your resources by doing much more than that. Even an app is more useful to an agent than it is to a company, because agents are constantly putting their selves in front of a targeted audience on Facebook. People are not on Facebook searching for applications to help them with their real estate search nor are they typically looking for real estate companies on Facebook. Reports show, real estate buyers being by visiting search engines looking for a web site of choice to search for properties, or they already have one or more they regularly visit. The percentage of property searches that begin on a web site of choice is only increasing while printed listing publications have almost been abandoned. Studies further reveal that the agent search is the next step and that typically happens through word of mouth or through the same web site the consumer is searching for a property on.

So, our suggestion to those that have to make choices with their marketing budgets is to create a business page on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for your agents to affiliate with and leave it be. Your agents will be the ones spreading your brand across the endless pages of social networking sites, while you invest your dollars more wisely in web site development, search engine optimization, lead management, blogging and drip email marketing--in that order.

 http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/3ccaee4f-d98d-d5fd-a449a11ced9747e2.htm Thu, 11 Nov 2010 01:15:21 -0800 Look Who's Talking - Part VI

This is Part VI of a 6 part blog campaign to help you with ideas on HOW to engage and listen to your online audience, WHY you should listen to them first before creating your own content and WHAT to do in response to their voice. In PART I of Look Who Talking , we outlined five key benefits to forming relationships with online readers by first researching and posting existing content to social media. Part VI of Look Who's Talking will cover the fifth of these five key benefits.

Establish a following for you to directly contact. Wait, can contacting your audience directly be passive? Yes, you can still contact an individual directly and be passive. There is a huge difference between contacting someone to sell them something, however, and contacting them to thank you for joining your Facebook page, for following you on Twitter or joining your newsletter list, furthermore asking them directly what type of content it is they would like to or are there to read.

We mentioned Allan Dalton's video earlier. I highly recommend watching this video. Sure, he emphasizes the face to face conversation which is ever important. He actually downplays analytics and technology a bit in my opinion. But keep two things in mind here. One, he is using technology to push this video to you, so he must believe in it. Two, he really delves into the psychology behind conversation and will help you with your online as well as your in person conversation. His overall message is a good one. Engage people at a core level. Get to the root of things. What do they really want?

 http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/4caf27ee-0110-8d29-8f435f49d8380ee7.htm Fri, 18 Jun 2010 01:10:34 -0800 Look Who's Talking - Part V This is Part V of a 6 part blog campaign to help you with ideas on HOW to engage and listen to your online audience, WHY you should listen to them first before creating your own content and WHAT to do in response to their voice. In PART I of Look Who’s Talking”, we outlined five key benefits to forming relationships with online readers by first researching and posting existing content to social media. Part V of Look Who's Talking will cover the fourth of these five key benefits.

4.  Establish a following for your original material.

I have created followers two different ways. The second of which, I can promise you, is the easiest. Originally, I began writing articles. I received good feedback on them and felt they were well thought out and original in style and thought. But I had to write and post these blogs all over the place and it was extremely time consuming. It took FOREVER it seemed to get a following.

Then I tried the methods covered in this six part blog campaign. What these methods allowed me to do was create an audience for the material I planned to write. I haven't just created any audience either. The methods I have outlined for you have also helped me to establish a QUALIFIED audience.

The best analogy I can think to use is any type of live performance. What good does it do for you to perform in front of zero audience. A couple blog posts are not going to get you the search engine traffic or viral traffic you desire. So, coming out of the gate writing blogs is similar to performing in front of a very thin audience. Many people begin with quantity over quality. Well, compare that to performing in front of an audience there to see something else as opposed to an audience there to see you. The methods I have outlined in this blog campaign will help you establish both quantity and quality more quickly--depending on how heavily you invest your time into building your following by posting links.

Either way, you will already have established an audience that will find your original material useful. When you finally begin writing original content, you can begin posting links to your own blog on social media via Hootsuite. Your existing audience will deem you as simply adding more value to the conversation than you already were, while your new and future members of your audience are brought in by your original content as well as third party content you have been sharing. This is when you begin driving qualified traffic to your blog, which hopefully is set up underneath your company domain. The search engines will love this. http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/4846bb2a-b3a8-9150-5932e0f5d12a1431.htm Thu, 17 Jun 2010 04:38:01 -0800 Look Who's Talking - Part IV This is Part IV of a 6 part blog campaign to help you with ideas on HOW to engage and listen to your online audience, WHY you should listen to them first before creating your own content and WHAT to do in response to their voice. In PART I of Look Who’s Talking”, we outlined five key benefits to forming relationships with online readers by first researching and posting existing content to social media. Part IV of Look Who's Talking will cover the third of these five key benefits.

3.  Post links to relevant material on social media to increase efficiency. 
Hootsuite allows you to post to multiple accounts and social networks with one click of the button. That opposed to logging into and posting to multiple accounts is a time saver alone.

Also, it takes much less time and can be more effective initially to hand pick and share links to existing literature while also giving you the opportunity to form and share your opinion of the material. This prevents you from spending too much time writing articles on material that may add little value and disinterest your audience. And no worries. Authors of these posts you are sharing will most likely be happy you are sharing their material. Even though the material you are posting is not original, your readers will realize that you did spend the time to locate, read through and share the information pertaining to their interests.

NOTE: One thing to keep in mind as you are doing this though is to post from different resources. If you post too much from one resource, your audience will just wind up going straight to that site. http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/3d7f115e-95b3-f8b6-554568eeb09a47c0.htm Tue, 15 Jun 2010 02:23:44 -0800 Look Who's Talking - Part III This is Part III of a 6 part blog campaign to help you with ideas on HOW to engage and listen to your online audience, WHY you should listen to them first before creating your own content and WHAT to do in response to their voice. In PART I of “Look Who’s Talking”, we outlined five key benefits to forming relationships with online readers by first researching and posting existing content to social media. Part III of “Look Who’s Talking” will cover the second of these five key benefits.

2.     Begin effectively communicating with a passive, yet measurable strategy. 

When researching what information has already saturated the internet and posting links to your resources on social media via Hootsuite, you will not only learn what content your audience has already been reading, but you will also receive feedback from your audience without them ever contacting you. How? Hootsuite allows you to view the number of clicks per post, per social media account. So, by analyzing the subject matter of what links were more popular, you learn more about your audience’s interest. It is important to post your links around the same time, however. Otherwise, you will have to consider the time of your post when conducting analytics when there is no need to complicate things.

It’s commonly known that people spend most of their time on the internet at work and the best time to post material is during or right after lunch. Some people take breaks at their desk and surf the net, while others go away to lunch to return to their computer and surf before going back to work. You probably have heard this. What you may not have heard or considered is paying attention to time zone differences if you are marketing nationally or internationally.
 
If you are in the Pacific Time Zone, it may be better to post in the morning, so you can reach your audience on the East Coast during lunch and your readers on the West Coast when they get to work. The main thing is not to post during hours where people are most focused on their work or not even in front of the computer. Most people are ready to go home at the end of the day.

You may want to experiment, however, and post the same article in the morning one month and then int the evening another month to gage when your readers are clicking on your posts most often. You want to give it a good month though, so you have a good set of numbers to compare. One week vs. one month is obviously less data. Once you figure out what works through analytics, go with it and be consistent--but continue to measure your strategy.
 http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/23a46f50-e4dd-7cb5-e51b617f45f07dbb.htm Thu, 10 Jun 2010 01:54:25 -0800 Look Who's Talking: Part II This is Part II of a 6 part blog campaign to help you with ideas on HOW to engage and listen to your online audience, WHY you should listen to them first before creating your own content and WHAT to do in response to their voice. In PART I of “Look Who’s Talking”, we outlined five key benefits to forming relationships with online readers by first researching and posting existing content to social media. Part II of “Look Who’s Talking” will cover the first of these five key benefits.

arn what existing content is redundant.
bsp;
While you are sifting through existing content to share with and build your audience, you not only learn more about your industry, but you also learn more about what content has already saturated the internet. If you find the same subject matter in many blogs, chances are your readers have already read it—and that tells you what your readers don’t want to read.

I have read too many articles that tell you to keep your content original in order to create and retain an audience. Well, first of all, that has been said by many people, on many blogs. So, how "original" is that concept really? Fact is, there is more to writing your own content than writing it yourself. Original content, in my opinion is offering a unique and original perspective and key points, if not overall context.

Sure, much like clichés, the same things are said often because they are usually true. The point of this post is not simply criticize other authors. The point of this post is to establish the reason why I suggest beginning with research and posting links to articles. Research is HOW you find out what content is truly original. Posting links is how you establish yourself as a resource for a VARIETY of relevant information. Using a tool such as Hootsuite is what allows you to listen to an audience. Then, you can be certain your content is not only original, but what your readers want to read. http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/1e1377eb-ec05-a5da-e2920f141e4c4241.htm Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:57:59 -0800 Look Who's Talking: Part I Are you sick of reading the same things that are said virtually the same way? Are you sick of being sold the wrong information? Internet police should start performing redundancy checks and handing out citations for redundancy. Hopefully, you readers will get the humor in the structure of that sentence!

If you want to retain readers, your material must be comprehensive and original. The reader must take away something from your piece that speaks to them repeatedly and in a way few others do. In fact, if I spend too much more time talking about original content, I will be a hypocrite posting evidence for the world to see by offering you little more than many other blogs, social media posts and email newsletters have offered me and you.

So, let us get to the meat of how you form a good understanding of what content is interesting to your reader. There are some very good points made by Allan Dalton, President of Top 5 Marketing, in this video about face to face conversation. I agree with Allan that face to face conversation, and the way you handle it, is invaluable, but so is your conversation trough technology. Think about it. Conversation through technology often ends up fact-to-face covnersation with many people. That is a huge benefit of properly utilizing technology among many others.

Yes, technology is more than a form of fishing. It is a means for communication—and to be a good communicator, you have to be a good listener. To be a good listener using technology, you have to create a platform that enables you to build an audience, to measure actions of that audience and to directly contact that audience. I suggest beginning with social media and research. If you are just starting to build your audience and learn their interest levels, coming out of the gate and writing a blog seems counterproductive doesn't it? So,a good start is to post links to your research on your Facebook Business Page, for example, through Hootsuite. Hootsuite allows you to conduct analytics by providing you information on how many clicks each post received. It is a free tool that generates simple, yet powerful information. They offer a lite (free) and full (paid) version of the iPhone application too.

The key benefits to forming relationships with the reader by first researching and posting existing content to social media are that this process allows you to:

  • Learn what existing content is redundant.
  • Begin effectively communicating with a passive, yet measurable strategy.
  • Post links to relevant material on social media to increase efficiency.
  • Establish a following for your original material.
  • Establish a following for you to directly contact.
The above benefits will be covered in more detail in future posts throughout this week, as this is Part I of a 6 part blog campaign to help you with ideas on how to engage and listen to your online audience, WHY you should listen to them before creating your own content and WHAT to do in response to their voice. But to summarize PART 1... look who is talking when you begin engaging people online. If you are trying to learn about your audience, it shouldn't be you. http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/1585bf07-f62f-981d-062910c68eeed385.htm Mon, 07 Jun 2010 08:06:13 -0800 Now What? For years, the internet has served as the front door to the real estate transaction process. As the percentage of internet home searches has increased over the years, advancements in real estate technology and the buying process has changed.
  • Justyn Howard reported in his publication Sell Smarter 2009 that “82% of mareketers consider email their most important advertising tactic” as it generates “3x the ROI of traditional marketing efforts”
  • Realtor.Org reports “The NAR is aware of the demands the industry has for improved technology”.
  • Social Media has outgrown mega sites such as Google.com for number of daily visits.
Today, prospects often want to remain anonymous until they are ready for human to human contact. How do you get and remain in front of prospects without being invasive? By passively engaging them with educational information. Information technology, such as blogs, call capture systems and social media are ever increasingly popular technology tools that real estate professionals are using to establish passive relationships and credibility in prospects via the provision of information as the first step of the buying process. Such tools allow prospects to gage your level of knowledge, your approach and your work ethic long before you contact them or they contact you.

But wait, information technology is supposed to make your life easier, right? How does one manage so many accounts and tools with efficiency? How does a technologically challenged, person-to-person type real estate professionals manage technology and marketing effectively?

These are the questions arising in the real estate industry as technology becomes more and more a part of the engaging phase of the buying and selling process. There are many options for agents out there, but they typically are not comprehensive and there are other solutions available to real estate agents through their brokers that are even more helpful, yet they can still be challenging and cumbersome. These facts present a new set of issues for real estate agents and brokers to solve. And there will be different problems from agent to agent and company to company.

So, what you need is a technology provider that has a comprehensive answer for your particular problem. Such a company should focus on the following to provide solutions to the problems listed above:
  • Additional technical support for your agents will make their lives easier, as many agents are technologically challenged.
  • Marketing services that will free agents' time up and allow them to focus on what they were trained to do.
  • An intranet that allows you to manage as much of your business as possible within one account.
  • Technology built for professionals in your specific industry.
 http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/13f97e1a-f91b-908e-7e931fb2bba3e651.htm Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:53:24 -0800 Hyperlocalism

A pretty short blog post. Literature seems to have flooded the internet today regarding the concept of niche marketing, AKA, hyperlocalism. The key point is that as a Real Estate Agent or team, specializing in marketing certain neighborhoods or city areas seems to be the trend many are following and achieving success. With that said, how do YOU do this successfully as an Real Estate Agent or Team? How do you do this as a company that covers many areas?

There are many ways to do this, but our suggestion at the top of the list is blogging. If you are an agent, ask your Owner/Broker if you can contribute content to the company blog as well as your own. Find out as much information as possible about the area and continue to share it with the community. Make sure you use keywords, but there is a balance. You can actually be penalized for overusing them.

If you are an Owner/Broker... create categories within your company wide blog with the name of the community and allow your blog managers to post content specifically pertaining to the corresponding area. You can get creative with these blog posts and, depending on how your company is set up, promote the Real Estate Agents in your company that specialize in that area. They sky is the limit here, but your blog can be the foundation of how you begin creating content that generates followers and establishes yourself or your Agents' as specialists in specific areas.

 http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/847342eb-bc19-f15f-25828aef7cc15830.htm Mon, 10 May 2010 04:01:05 -0800 A Guide To Using Social Media and Blogging With Minimal Effort Social media networking and other technology tools necessary for helping your business stay in front are abundant. So, you need to create an automation platform. Sure, it takes time to learn the tools to help you do so (the general excuse most use to avoid doing so), but the facts are these tools can automate your sales process and generate much more business if utilized effectively.

WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKING TOOLS SHOULD I USE AND HOW DO I MINIMIZE MY EFFORT?

Minimizing your effort while producing the greatest value to your customers is key. Yes, it is hard to keep up with every social media networking tool and to do so while utilizing them all correctly, but the key is for your users to keep up with you while you focus on continually generating useful content, again, with minimal effort. There are many tools out there that can help you manage the major Social Media Networks simultaneously as well as many of the smaller ones. These are tools that are less heard of, but they are becoming more popular. Some may require minimal investment, but if you use them, they are well worth the money.

As most people are aware of, Facebook, Twitter and Linked In are the most widely known Social Media Networks used for generating business today. I have abandoned MySpace altogether, and I put Facebook & Twitter ahead of the pack, with Facebook being the front runner (If your business is music, throw in MySpace at the top of that list.). Again, there are many others out there that will take too long to type into this blog, but you can get a list of them at Ping.FM which is a tool that will make your Social Media Networking and your life much easier when it comes to updating your status, A.K.A. tweeting.

Ping.FM is a technology that enables you to sign up for dozens of Social Media Networking Tools and to populate them in the click of a button. The downside is, there are no analytics tools, but there is an API if you wish to program around this technology, as Hootsuite has. Hootsuite allows you to connect to Ping.FM, Linked In, Your Facebook profile and business pages, Twitter and even WordPress. Hootsuite also offers analytics, but you must use the Owly truncating tool within the interface in order to do so. Additionally, there is a Firefox plugin that provides an easy method for sharing links as well as an iPhone application. The free version of the iPhone Hootsuite app only populates Twitter, however.

Even though you can add for Facebook profiles and business pages, Twitter, Linked In and WordPress through Ping.fm, don't. Use Ping.fm to sign up for all of the other Social Networking Tools. Why? Because you will want to link your Hootsuite account to these tools, so that you can utilize the analytics tools that let you know which tweets were popular and begin strategizing. Signing up on both will create duplicate posts on your Social Networks and be careful--some of the other Social Networking Tools you sign up for through Ping.fm will post to your other Social Networks as well, creating multiple duplicate posts.

For more information on how to utilize Hootsuite to manage your social networks, click here.

OK, SO NOW I KNOW HOW TO MANAGE MY SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOLS, WHAT NEXT?

I'm sure you have heard content is king. Well it is, but it doesn't necessarily have to be YOUR content. Now, stop for a second, of course I am not saying to plagiarize other people's content. But it is perfectly acceptable to post links to interesting articles relative to the context of your blog on your own blog if the source does not prevent you from doing so. You can even post the entire blog posts from other blogs, if they are correctly cited. Blog users typically appreciate it as you are stroking their egos often as well as driving traffic to them by posting their links. Just be careful.

Now, you may ask, why would I want to post links to other resources on my blog? There are several reasons. For one, it demonstrates your sense of duty to educate your audience while creating trust between the reader, as you are not afraid to send them in other directions to find the information they seek. Two, it helps to establish you as an expert by demonstrating your  commitment to staying informed. Last it creates convenience and variety for your audience by providing one outlet to many other valuable resources for relevant information.

Notice I used the words, "helps to establish" you as an expert earlier. I used the word "helps" because, yes, you are going to need to create some original content to establish yourself as an expert. The good news is, if you go over 500 words, you better be writing some fantastic and highly useful material, or you will lose your audience. Here is a link that shows 5 secrets to writing a blog post in 15 minutes. This blog post is much larger of course, but that is because we are covering a very broad topic, and lengthy keyword rich and relative blog posts are great for search engines. So, it won't hurt to have a few long posts either. Just make sure the content is valuable.

So now that you have content in your blog and you have simplified the management of your social networking platform, it is time to tie the two together. You do this by copying the link to your blog post, developing a catchy tweet to announce the post and pasting it in the Owly truncating tool within Hootsuite. Hit the "shrinki it" button and it will paste the link at the end of the status update / tweeting field above it. Check the networks you wish to send to, including Ping.fm to send to all of the other social networking tools you have signed up for, and click on the send button. Now you have notified every follower or friend on every social networking tool that you have posted new material to your blog, and created a link to that blog that is trackable through Hootsuite's analytics tool.

A FEW OTHER TIPS FOR MANAGING YOUR SOCIAL NETWORKING EFFORTS EFFECTIVELY

Drip Marketing

Use drip marketing to create interest in your blog and to notify current subscribers of new posts. Include links to the major social networks on these emails as well as the title, short summary and link to each blog posts.

Establish a schedule for research and writing.

Most of your posts will not take more than an hour to write. And if you have gone ahead an bookmarked your favorite resources for relative information to your blog readers, it shouldn't take you very long to read their most recent articles and to decipher which content you would like to share or borrow. So, establish a good time each day to spend an hour or two creating content for your blog.

Timing is Everything

You DON'T want to send out your content at the end of the day. Sad but true, most people spend their time on the Internet while they are at work and if it is work/industry related, they are much more likely to read your content during work hours. So, if you are on the West Coast, don't tweet your fresh blog content at the end of the day. In fact, it may be necessary to do it in the AM, so that people on the East Coast read your tweets, drip emails, etc. upon arriving back from lunch, which is an excellent time to reach people via such communication efforts.

HERE ARE A COUPLE TOOLS THAT WILL HELP YOU DEVELOP SUCCESSFUL SOCIAL NETWORKING PLATFORMS:

  1. Only Wire (www.onlywire.com)
    Auto-Syndicate Your Content to Millions of Readers with One Button.
     
  2. Tweet Adder (www.trakim.com)
    Automate Twitter Promotion & Marketing
     
  3. Nearby Tweets (www.nearbytweets.com)
    Identifies Active Tweeters In Your Local Area
     
  4. Social Too (www.socialtoo.com)
    Assesses & Automates Your And Other User Follow/Unfollow Actions
     
  5. TwitterHolic (http://twitterholic.com/)
    Allows You To Compare Yourself To Other Twitter Users
     
  6. Monitter (http://monitter.com/)
    Allows You To Follow Realtime Conversations By Topic


 http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/03961391-eab8-1ecd-052f28c79e19c50c.htm Thu, 15 Apr 2010 03:28:06 -0800 Empowering Real Estate Professionals Through Technology & Intelligence Welcome To Our Blog.

First and foremost, realistiQ is here to service and provide real estate professionals with the knowledge and tools to succeed. We offer a completely comprehensive and integrated real estate technology solution, but this will be our only mention of it on our blog. If you are looking for more information about our real estate technology, please visit navigate throughout our site, contact Jesse Olive at 702.932.8201 or send him an email.

We believe this blog will add value to the real estate industry and hope real estate professionals and other technology providers will find our content informative. If there is a subject pertaining to real estate technology that you would like us to discuss, please do not hesitate to submit a suggestion.

We look forward to empowering you.


Sincerely,

The realistiQ Team http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/d91f717b-19b9-f916-ad69b6bface52fa4.htm Tue, 16 Feb 2010 03:31:41 -0800