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• Daniel R. Odio
• Danilo Bogdanovic
• Heather Elias
• Frank LLosa

Video of event:

Audio of event:

Transcription of Event:

Welcome everybody to the social media panel. My name is Ainsley McDougal. I am the online communications manager for NVAR.

Let me tell you a little bit about the speakers today. We’ll start with Danilo Bogdanovic. Danilo is a member of the Information Management Committee at Virginia Association of Reatlors. He is a Founding Member/Advisor at Center for Real Estate and Social Technologies (CREST) and a Real Estate Consultant and REALTOR at Market Advantage Real Estate.

00:00
Heather Elias is a full time Realtor with Century 21, Redwood Realty in Ashburn. She writes about Loundon County Real Estate on her blog: www.localmusings.com and she writes about local market stats at www.localmarketstats.com Heather has spoken about social media in RE Tech South in Atlanta, Georgia and various real estate bar camps across the country. She writes for the Virginia Association of Realtors blog which is www.varbuzz.com as well as forwww.agentgenius.com. She has a heavy emphasis on online marketing and social media usage. Roughly 75% - 80% of her business is generated from these efforts. Heather graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in Journalism.

00:58
Next I will introduce Frank Llosa. He is the principal broker and owner of www.franklyrealty.com He is a graduate from the university of Virginia at School of Commerce. Before entering Real Estate, Frank was a professional photographer with photos featured in National Geographic Traveler, Time Life, Esquire, GQ, and Petersons Photographic. Frank then went on to create two successful dot com sites for real estate. He began his career as the MBA Rookie of the year for 2003 in sales. Just last week In Man announced that he was the finalist for two awards, one for his blog entitled “Trust Me, I’m a Realtor,” and for his www.franklymls.com site which was the first wiki mls site and his blog has been quoted in Business Week, CNBC, and dozens of other publications.

01:59
Last but certainly not least, Daniel Odio who is the founder of DROdio Real Estate, Inc. which is a real estate brokerage. He is the founder of Cardéa Commercial Real Estate Advisors which is a commercial real estate brokerage specializing in replacement properties for investors. Daniel is a registered securities representative series 22 and 63 licenses. He has been featured on CNN, CNBC, TLC,The Wall Street Journal and many other publications for his innovative use of technology and social media in the real estate business. Daniel is the creator of www.IdealRoute.com which has been branded by VAR and it’s a tool that allows you to use the most efficient route when showing properties.

02:49
Let me start out by taking a poll of the audience. Here is the first thing we want to know: how did you all find out about this? Could you raise your hand if you found out about this from twitter? A couple of people. Did you all get the e-mail we sent earlier this week that prompted you? OK. What about Face Book? Did any of you get the Face Book invitation? A few of you. And what about www.nvar.com? Wow. We’re going to work on our website.

03:22
Before we begin with the different topics that we want to talk about, the panel would like to know how many of you use, primarily to communicate with your clients, e-mail that is your primary form of communication? What about texting? What about phone calls? Still tried and true method. Instant Messenger? And who of you are currently blogging? How many of you use Twitter? Those of you on twitter today can see that we have a has tag. What you see on the screen back here is the stream for everything that’s being posted to the hash tag. You’ll see several of the panelists put things up on there and if you have a question you can put it up on there. I’ll keep monitoring it and see what happens. Who of you uses You Tube? Now let’s differentiate. Who of you uses videos on your websites? One hand. Who uses Active Rein? Is there anything else that I didn’t cover that you all are using?

05:23
All right. I think we’re going start off pretty big and heavy. Everybody is here to hear about social media, so do you all actually find that there is a return on investment for use of social media?

05:40
Daniel Odio: Let me start by saying I’m really excited to be here with you guys because there is so much opportunity for you to use these tools that we live by to really increase your business. It’s a very exciting thing to be here. Specifically for the ROI question, absolutely. We wouldn’t be dedicating a lot of our time to it if it wasn’t really, really effective. I’m sure we will talk more about that. For example, our firm hardly ever does any traditional marketing, i.e. flyers, and that sort of thing, postcards, we do it almost all electronically now. That gives you an example of how effective it is for us.06:37Heather Elias: Obviously in the opening remarks she said that I generate about 75% - 80% of my business from my social media efforts so obviously I’m seeing a return on investment. I view it as a tool to reach out to my clients, but also to prospect for new clients. Definitely like Daniel said we wouldn’t be spending an inordinate amount of time if we weren’t seeing real active business from it.

07:05
Heather? Is that 75% - 80% return clients or new or combination?

07:11
Heather Elias: That is newly generated business via social media efforts. I’ve been in business for five years so I’m at the point in my career where I don’t have a lot of repeat business yet, so I’m using it as a way to generate new business. That’s all new business.

07:34
Frank Llosa: I’m in the same boat as Heather. 75% of my new business comes from social media or online efforts. I don’t do pretty much any direct mailing, post cards, print ads, none of that, all the traditional marketing. I know it works for some people. I came from a company that has used it for 20 some odd years and it’s still working for them. For me that’s just what I prefer. Not to say that you can’t mix the two. I believe the return on investment is greater because the cost of newspaper and paper is just going up versus everything online. Social media is actually cheaper if not free already. That’s why I think the return on investment is much greater.

08:26
Danilo Bogdanovic: I also question absolutely but with my blogging it’s so integrated into my business I can no longer segment it down to see what part of my business is that. It’s all part of it. You don’t say what percentage of your business is your phone. Once a week I’ll get an e-mail that says I just finished reading two or three hours of your blog and I want to use you and I want to use you next week. They’re asking me to sign an exclusive agreement because because I have a blog saying why they should sign an exlusive buying agreement. I reply to their e-mail right away and so it changes the way you do your business.

09:18
Daniel Odio: If it’s OK I’d like to just add onto what Frank is saying and define what social media means to us. If I were sitting in your shoes and if I hadn’t been using it, I would be curious as to what exactly it is. So maybe I’ll just start with that and then we’ll all add in. Social media is a tool like the telephone is a tool. You have to think about it as a tool. It’s not some crazy, not understandable thing. Just think of it as another type of telephone. The way that I approach social media is by really focusing on the content. What I mean by that is we are all experts with our profession. We have so much content inside of our heads and it’s so hard to get that content out of our heads and into the hands of the people that need to know about it when they’re making a purchasing or selling decision. Social media is that vehicle that allows us to communicate the expertise that’s in our heads and put it into the hands of the people that need it while they’re making that choice. That’s the beauty of social media. For example, at www.DROdio.com/lowball there is a video that I spent an hour and a half putting together; longer than I would ever spend talking to a client about a topic if I were meeting with them. I really put a lot of thought about what I wanted to say into that video. A lot of new clients that are very price-sensitive I just sent them that video. That’s my expertise from my head transferred to You Tube so that clients can now get it 1000 times over and I only had to spend an hour and a half once. So that’s an example of using social media like Frank was saying writing two or three hours on a blog about things he talked over with a client and then 1000 or 10,000 people can read that blog over and over again. It’s really working in your favor.

11:07
Frank Llosa: It’s not only the 10,000 people that can read it, but also the three people that would want one hour of your time for you to explain it to them one on one. So it’s two different audiences. One is like the random surfer that finds it and two is someone who asks a question that requires a long answer. You have to then spend ten minutes on the quick version or one hour version talking about the pro’s and con’s or what we do it spend about eight seconds sending a link to something that I wrote that talks about it that took four or five hours to write and is in depth and updated. Initially they might be put off, “You sent me a link. How impersonal.” But when they actually go to the site and read it they understand that I wouldn’t have been able to write that e-mail from scratch just for them.

12:07
Danilo Bogdanovic: I’m going to take onto what Frank said. A lot of people may wonder how long do we spend doing this. I’m not a writer. I don’t know how many hours. This of it this way: in a conversation about short sales, you could probably talk for four hours to somebody asking a question about it versus taking two to four hours or even longer if you’re just starting out and worrying about how to write, but when you have enough stuff posted, you just send them a link. That’s true for any and all things. How’s the market? Funny you mentioned that. I just published a blog about that yesterday. Here’s the link. You’re spending time up front, but in the long run you’re actually saving a lot of time so that you can show property and do things that truly translates directly to money and then this brings the clients in and you get a following from that. People start reading it. I’m sure Frank and everybody here can attest that a usual e-mail or phone call will be: “Hey, I’ve been reading your blog …” You have no idea that they’re out there. They’re just kind of watching you. Not like Big Brother. All of a sudden they call and they say: “Hey when can we go and see properties. I have a pre-approval letter from XYZ bank, I’m good to go, I know what I want, what are you doing this weekend.

13:30
Daniel Odio: The craziest part about it is that it’s like a warm referral. They act like warm referrals. These are cold leads that are acting like warm referrals because they’ve been reading about all this stuff that’s been inside your head.

13:55
Heather Elias: When you walk in the door and someone has had the time to look at what you’ve put online whether it’s video content or a twitter stream or a blog, they’ve already sort of been introduced to you so you don’t have to put your expertise forward in the first 15 minutes you’re in the door. They already have a pretty good idea about who you are. A strict definition of social media from my standpoint is it’s another way to meet clients that I otherwise wouldn’t have had an introduction to whether it’s someone who e-mails me because they’ve been reading my blog or if it’s someone who is looking for help in buying or looking to relocated to the area. Those are people that I would have never met if they hadn’t read my blog or found me via twitter or something along those lines. From my standpoint it’s a means of communication. It’s no different than having a conversation with someone you just met at the grocery store. You just have to have a computer.

14:58
Daniel Odio: If there is one thing that you take away from this conversation today from my perspective it’s just that this is supremely accessible stuff. There is no cost or very low cost. Everybody in this room can walk out today and go do a You Tube video today and get that information out of your head and into the hands of the people that need it. It’s very, very doable stuff. So that’s my hope that you leave today feeling empowered that you know how to do this.

15:25
Danilo Bogdanovic: Just to touch on what social media is, think of it this way, media is a way of basic communication. Rather than the Chamber of Commerce meetings, rather than the telephone, rather than going out to happy hours and luncheons and dinners and meeting a friend of friend at a cocktail party or a kids birthday, those are all ways to communicate and we’ve all been doing that for years. Now we’re just taking the same type of communication and we’re just putting it online. So it’s the conversation you’ve always been having, you’re just doing it online. The social aspect of it is – first you start doing this stuff and then, all of a sudden, people start commentating and reading. Then you engage in conversation online. That’s really the social aspect of it. So that’s basically what social media is, at least in my opinion. It’s just a different means of communication doing the exact same types of communication as you have been for years.

16:28
Frank Llosa: I see it as everyone having their own HGTV channel and you’re the host. Everyone is watching you like they watch once a week and you are driving the ship. You become the CNN. They go directly to the source that CNN is asking which is you. One might ask: well why are we telling you guys how to get on social media because then you might be competing with us and taking away our readers. It doesn’t work like that. The more content that you put out there, the more knowledgeable consumers are and the more likely it makes them to buy because the biggest hindrance to buying is information, I think. So the more information you have the more likely they are to get off the fence. Also the more you write, the more people there are reading, the more content there is out there which makes them more likely to read out stuff. So it all works together for the betterment of everyone.

17:21
Heather Elias: Here is the great thing too: when you put yourself out there if it’s in a blog or whatever vehicle you’re using for doing that, that puts your own voice out there and that’s why it’s not us teaching what we are doing. It isn’t a competitive thing because no one else can be me just like no one else is going to represent you out there. You will attract clients that want to work with you. They’re going to respond to what you’re writing and that’s what’s going to cause them to email you.

17:52
Ainsley McDougal: So if I could put a caption around what you all just said basically social media regardless of the tool that you use whether it be Face Book or Twitter or blogging it just means that you’re putting yourself out there for whoever to read it and whoever wants to follow along can and that’s a way of communicating not only who you are as a person, but the institution and experience knowledge that you all have gained through your real estate career.

18:24
Daniel Odio: Just to put a finer point on that, it’s very importantly not just existing clients, but it’s those people making that purchasing or selling decision. So I always say it’s getting that content out of your head and into their hands.

18:38
Heather Elias: You could view it as having a store that’s open 24 hours a day and that blog is my store front. Somebody might see something they’re interested in so they’re going to shop a little bit. It’s not a product, but it’s the product of my expertise. I don’t have to be monitoring it constantly for someone to come on and find me.

18:55
Daniel Odio: Just to give you one example, who here works the Herndin market where we are now? 10 of you. How many buyers and sellers are there in Herndin right now looking for property at this very moment? 50? 500? Why don’t they know that you work Herndin. They should know that. That’s what social media allows you to do.

19:33
How do you start a blog? Everybody has a website. How do you cause it to have a blog?

19:39
Daniel Odio: We’re going to get into a lot of the details on how to handle the specifics. I don’t know if we want to structure that answer.

19:50
Heather Elias: We’ll get into the specifics later.

Ainsley McDougal: I think the next thing that I want to get is how did you all start? Before you ever got into blogging or Twitter, how did you all start? What did you choose to begin with? Did you already know? Did you have an idea of where you wanted to start or did you just start?

20:16
Heather Elias: I sort of fell into it and it grew. I saw a few people raise their hands and say they were blogging with Active Rain. That’s where I got started. I started writing there and I think my Twitter account came after, but I would say starting the original blog on on Active Rain was how I got started.

Danilo Bogdanovic: The question is: Do you have to be a good writer and the answer is absolutely not look at Frank! That actually ties in with what Heather said. I started out blogging. That was my first thing before Twitter and all this other really cool stuff now. I was the absolute king of run on sentences when I started blogging. My one sentence was a paragraph long. So it took a long time, I asked a lot of questions about what other people wrote. I was horrible. I had to learn how to write. Here I am today so it can be done. There are people who specialize in Journalism and English hit the ground running that’s fine they fail in other aspects such as statistics and mathematics. I focused more on statistics to get comfortable with it rather than the long writing.

22:26
Heather Elias: We’re going to talk about etiquette.

Daniel Odio: One thing that I would say is that I completely understand how intimidating this can be to make a You Tube video. All it is is an extension of yourself. It’s an extension of the stuff you already have in your head. I would say that you should start with the stuff that you are the most comfortable with. Are you most comfortable with writing or are you most comfortable being in front of a camera or just doing an audio when you’re driving to see a client and you think about a short sale piece of content just record that and get somebody to transcribe it into text for you. Even if you just take a video of your cat walking across your desk. Just make yourself take the video and upload it to You Tube and then you can check that off your list and say you’ve done it. It’s not worth anything. It’s a cat, but I’ve done it.

23:28
Frank Llosa: It’s what I call the hello world blog post or video. There are two hurdles: one is creating your YouTube account and creating your blog and the second one is writing something monumental. Well remove that and just people the camera in front of yourself and say: “Hi, test, hello world,” end. Get it up on YouTube and you have officially started your You Tube Channel. The second is writing something monumental which we’ll talk about later what to blog and websites you can post. Your first post should be “Hello World.” and then submit it to Ainsley and she’ll have some kind of contest.

24:23
Daniel Odio: The last thing on this for me is: you do not need to be intimidated you do not need to be perfect. I personally think the more real the video looks the better. I, as a consumer, if I see a polished video it looks like a marketing slick to me. But if I see someone who just has a camera and is saying something to me that is really valid I tend to gravitate towards that more. So don’t be intimidated by the professionalism piece of this because that’s what you’re selling; you’re selling yourself.

24:52
Frank Llosa: No editing. Just take the video camera, shove it in your face, stutter, skip, mess up and just post it straight raw. If you try to get into video editing it’s just never going to happen.

25:06
Ainsley McDougal: So would you say that video is a good way to start for those who may be intimidating by writing?

Heather Elias: I was going to make another suggestion that these guys didn’t mention and that’s doing a photo blog as opposed to a writing blog. Just go and snap pictures of the neighborhood that you work in and put those up, one picture a day. You’re showing that you know your area and that you’re in your area. Not everybody likes to use video. I do some, but that’s not a main focus for me. If you’re intimidated by the writing and you’re intimidated by the video, that’s another option as well.

25:45
Daniel Odio: It’s whatever you’re most comfortable with. If it’s Twitter, if it’s a blog, if it’s video, whatever is easiest is the best thing to start with because honestly the biggest enemy of doing this is: “I’ll get to it later.” That’s the biggest enemy especially when you’re busy with clients and your traditional business. When transitioning into social media, you have to do something that is easiest enough that you just do it now. Like Frank is saying: do not edit. It’s an hour of editing for every minute of finished video. It’s not worth it. Just redo the video if you have to, but don’t even do that. Just put it up there. People will appreciate you.

26:19
Danilo Bogdanovic: There is never a right or wrong thing to do. Photo blogs, videos, writing, whatever you feel most comfortable with is what you should start with. The more comfortable you are with something, the more your voice is going to shine through. The more your voice shines through, the more people are going to realize how genuine you are. That will eventually translate into your clients following you. Whatever you’re comfortable with, just go with that.

26:50
Daniel Odio: Here is one of the big things from me which is – and I know we have some differing opinions so let’s definitely share them – I think that it’s very likely that you may start this and get frustrated because you’re not seeing a return on it. If you’re going to be blogging, you may have to write several hundred blogs before you really see a measurable result from it. A lot of it depends on: are you blogging about a neighborhood, are you blogging about foreclosures because there is a lot more competition for one versus the other. So a lot of it depends on how you angle this, but this is an investment that you’re making. If you can convince the world, and specifically Google, that you are a subject matter expert, then when people start searching for those terms you will be returned as the expert. That’s when this virtuous cycle starts and people start coming to you and saying: “I want to use you.” You don’t even know who they are. “I want to use you because I know that you know what you’re doing because I saw you do it in this example on your blog.”

28:00
Frank Llosa: I’m actually in the process right now of creating a mini TV show. HGTV is doing a show called: My First Place so if I find a road to them I can hopefully get on the show. It’s suppose to be like a behind the scenes look at buying a house. Well I’m doing a behind the scenes of behind the scenes. So I’m actually taking a video camera to every initial meeting and video taping what they thought of it and I’m going to make a separate You Tube channel of every single one of my interactions with this couple. That’s just something else different that’s constantly changing and evolving.

28:46
Frank Llosa: If you like a video that I’ve done you can post it in your blog. If you want to write about short sales you can link to somebody else’s blog. If the customer knows you they’re still going to come back to you, but they’ve gotten my four hours of information. That’s allowed. That’s fine. You always have to have permission to link to something.

29:39
Daniel Odio: In terms of just linking to someone else’s content we do that all the time without asking because it’s taking the visitor off your page and onto someone else’s so you’re running the risk that someone else might get that client. You can run that risk if you want. Frank would probably love you to run that risk. Now if you were to repost his content that’s plagiarism and obviously we all know about that.

30:00
Frank Llosa: People do it.

30:02
Daniel Odio: OK, maybe we should talk about that. Another reason that you may not want to link to his content is because from Google’s perspective, you get very richly rewarded for original content and you get no points for using somebody else’s content. But they do. So if it’s important to you to try to become that subject matter expert you can’t just link to Frank’s content. But if you just want to give the user knowledge about what Frank wrote about then you absolutely can.

31:11
Daniel Odio: Irene said a buyer doesn’t wake up looking for Daniel, they wake up looking for a house. So that gets to this subject matter expert question or theme that we’re talking about. That buyer is going to find you because of that knowledge that you’re making available to them that has nothing to do with you. It doesn’t have to do with Irene, but it has to do with the fact that you know local-specific information and here’s what it means. It’s something that leads people to you. It’s like bread crumbs that you’re spreading across the Internet with your knowledge.

32:00
Danilo Bogdanovic: Actually no buyer in the world wakes up and says I’m going to go online to fine a house. That’s not how they start the whole thing. They start their process by finding out how to buy a house. They all know where to find a house. Everything is ingrained in their heads. They know they can type in the search engine: “Homes in such and such a place.” But first time home buyers are going to go online and search about anything in that particular community that they’re interested in. They’re looking for so much information that has really nothing to do with looking for listings on line. That’s where your blog comes in. You provide them with information that is hyper local to your area and you can go a little bit outside of that as well. But you’re providing them with information that they would need for the entire process, the entire transaction. That positions you as a credible Realtor who has knowledge and experience and that’s what brings them to you through Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, all the different search engines. So that’s the first part. Then they go looking for a home.

33:26
Ainsley McDougal.: So social media is not just online marketing?

33:29
Heather Elias: Absolutely not. It’s personal marketing more so than it’s online marketing. It’s not a vehicle where you say here’s my listing I’m trying to get this sold. You don’t do that on social media. Social media is about presenting yourself and creating relationships.. It’s developing a relationship that ends up in a transaction later on down the line. A lot of the time with social media too there is hot leads where it’s I’m looking for a house today let me find a Realtor online. It’s more of an ongoing OK, they’ve read my stuff for six months and now they’re at the decision point. So it’s more of a slow simmer rather than a fast boil.

34:11
Frank Llosa: Also I have a site called www.franklymls.comwhich integrates the MLS searching into social media. What that does is allows anyone from any company to have reviews about a neighborhood for example. If you’re an expert in a neighborhood for example, you write about it, you post it on the site, and your neighborhood review will be attached to every single home within that neighborhood forever. Your name is going to be at the bottom. So if someone hits a house in a certain neighborhood and they scroll to the bottom and you’ve written a review, what better person to contact than the person who have written that review. The site also allows you to review homes to individual listings so that’s where the MLS search and social media comes together.

35:10
Frank Llosa: If someone just goes towww.homesdatabase.com it will have the name of the listing agent. If you have an account onwww.homesdatabase.com you pay them $400 per year, it gets rid of the listing agents name and puts your name on every single listing. But this is a little bit different. This puts your name on every single listing where you are the neighborhood expert regardless of who comes in.

35:40
Daneil Odio: I’m realizing based on what you’re saying that we may have a bit of a different view of the traditional Real Estate which is listing focuses. We do a lot of buyer representation and I personally look at listings as content. It’s nothing more than content and content is currency. So whether it’s a listing or whether it’s a You Tube video that I’m making of all offers or a hyper local post or whatever it is, that’s just another piece of currency and we tend to get a lot of our buyers from that. A traditional agent will focus a lot on getting listings. We tend to have a lot of buyers coming to us because of all the content that we’ve put out there on the web. So maybe there is a little disparity there on how your business is. If you want to talk to the listing piece.

36:38
Heather Elias: Whatever the focus of your writing is is what you’re going to attract. I think the neighborhood specific information works from a standpoint of people who are thinking about listing their houses as well. I look at it from the standpoint of where you focus your business. If you want to get more specific that’s fine. I can cover all of Northern Virginia but I write about the area that I know about the best. From a listing standpoint I most likely to get people that are within the county that I write about. If it’s buyers they can be coming from all over the place.

37:42

She’s asking where the inquiries come from whether it’s from people who are local or outside the area.

Danilo Bogdanovic: To touch on that real quick, for a number of reasons I know there are plenty of Realtors that focus on Maryland, D.C., and Virgina but in all seriousness, how can you know all that like the back of your hand? You can’t. If you write big posts you’re going to come across as vague and it will not reward you because they are looking for specifics. The more specific you are the better they will treat you and the more you will come up in search results. So when you’re talking about a specific area that you’re most – you want to become an expert, that’s the whole point of it. To become an expert you are going to show people that you really know this one area whether it’s Arlington specifically condo’s, etc. That’s where expertise is going to come through and people are going to notice. So I think you should really focus on the area that you know best and run with that.

39:00
Daniel Odio: The reality is you guys probably already know the answer in your head. It’s just getting it out to world. You already know what you’re good at. You probably have certain buyers that you could work really well with. You know certain areas. It’s not anything crazy. It’s just you everywhere so that people can find you.

39:50
Frank Llosa: The point that he makes about everywhere is actually very important so I want to highlight that. Often times the people that find me have found me in four different avenues so it’s advertising 101. If I hit the customer three times. So if I advertise through a blog and then they find you on Face Book. Has anyone seen the Arlington Wrap? The You Tube Video? That is not me, but he’s my client. He lives in my condo. He lives across the hall from me and he found me on Face Book. That’s real. It’s call the Arlington Wrap. You just look that up on You Tube.

40:03
Which of your social networks is your favorite?

40:20
Heather Elias: I have actually seen the way in which I use Face Book change a lot in the course of the last two months in terms of driving traffic to my blog. Face Book has a personal and a business page. Actually I just did a panel discussion on that earlier this week. Face Book pages versus your main profile. I do have a business page set up and I put very different content on that than I do my regular Face Book page. Just to give you a short run down on that, I don’t want to inundate friends and family that I’m connected with on my main Face Book profile with a lot of business information. So I set up a Heather Elias fan page. That’s where I put the business content because if people have opted into that to be a fan I figure they have asked for that business content. So that’s where I stream the links to the blog and update the links. So that’s a great way to separate business and pleasure on Face Book.

41:40
Ainsley McDougal: Do you find that a lot of people who are your fans on your business site ask to be your friend on your personal site?

41:46
Heather Elias: I guess because the fan page is so much newer they have already befriended me before they became a fan although I will say that there are plenty of political area folks that have signed up to be a fan that I have never met before that are a friend of a friend and I think that’s probably where the greatest benefit comes from. There is an introduction that takes place there that I don’t even have to be part of but now that they know who I am are getting my expertise that way.

42:11
Daniel Odio: I would actually answer the question very differently. The question I would answer is what’s one of the most useful technology tools? Who here does not listen to their voice mail? Who here reads their voice mail? I have not listened to a voice mail message in two or three years if you can believe that. There are several services, the newest is called Google Voice. But there are some others like www.phonetag.com and www.callwave.com. When some calls you your voice mail message it is transcribed into text and an e-mail is sent to you with the audio file attached so I can listen to it if I want to. I can’t tell you what a time saver that is, especially in this business. If you’ve ever had ten messages waiting for you, that’s just completely gone and you can forward the voice mail. For example, if a listing agent leaves an offer on a property I’ll forward that to the client so they can actually listen to the message because it’s about the offer they made. So things like that where you can actually re-purpose that content and just be able to forward it along is just amazingly valuable. So phone tag is probably your best option. It’s like $20 a month and it replaces your existing voice mail. People don’t even know the difference when they’re leaving the voice mail. It works very well.

Frank Llosa: I use a service called Answer Connect so that if you call my phone and don’t reach me it rolls over to an actual operator somewhere that will answer with your company name, take a message and sent it to me via e-mail. So that’s what I do. I don’t have voice mail either.

Ainsley McDougal: I want to get back to the marketing thing because I think it’s important to highlight the fact. How do you all use social media to supplement the little traditional marketing things you do?

44:58
Danilo Bogdanovic: To start off we talked earlier about saving time much like you could do a lot of this traditional stuff where you send post cards, etc. Imagine putting a picture of a house you just sold in a particular community on a post card along with a link to your blog or your website and sending it to all the neighbors. Then having details that are important to the neighbors on the blog or website. So you’re now advertising as selling the house as you have been doing for years, but you’re pointing them to your blog. So them come to your blog and they start reading and they see that you are really knowledgeable and know the community and State. So basically you can add it onto what you’re doing currently and eventually what will happen is that you realize that the return on the social media is greater than on the traditional you may want to shift the focus and shift the money. There is a lot of ways you can supplement it. Also while you’re out talking at traditional places like the Chamber of Commerce or whatever it is you can just hand people a card – that actually do not have a phone number on them so that people don’t bug him with phone calls for feedback.

46:28
Frank Llosa: On the business card it says special card just for showing for feedback please send an e-mail with a link to the property and there’s not phone number on it except for people who check it online and then they end up talking to someone in Ohio who tells them to e-mail me. So it all integrates and works together.

46:45
Danilo Bogdanovic: You can take stuff on your business card and really make it prominent for them to go to your blog or to Twitter or wherever you want to point them and that’s how you can supplement it. Primarily for me it’s saving time.

47:00
Heather Elias: I don’t strictly use social media as my entire basket of eggs in terms of marketing myself. I do still occasionally do print media or postcard mailings. You can put your blog address on any traditional print advertising that you do, at the bottom of any letter that you do, mailings to your clients. That’s getting it in front of your clients without having to send them an e-mail without having to tell them to visit your site. Traditional marketing can back up your social media efforts.

47:37
Frank Llosa: My business cards have my Instant Messaging address on it and clients that are technologically savvy appreciate that. I have a new card coming out with the cell phone numbers in such small 3 point font so the whole point is don’t call me. I have one card that says: “Frank Llosa Google me” and the other side says: “I’m kind of a big deal!” A great way to make fun, cheap business cards www.overnightprints.com they put out coupons every once in a while. I just made for a client a just moved card for a pack of 50 for $12.00. The front and the back said the greatest Realtor in the world helped me buy this house with a link back to my blog. They’re going to mail it out to all of their friends.

49:08
Daniel Odio: Are you referring specifically to using camera’s and blogging and things like that? The reason that we invited you to bring laptops because I think some of us are more than happy to stay after and help you set some of this up. It’s so easy to say it sounded really great, kind of confusing, I don’t have any idea where to start and we don’t want that to happen. So if you want to stay afterwards and you have a laptop we can help you get set up. Right now I’m capturing this content using this voice recorder and I actually just wrote a blog about all of the equipment I use so if you go towww.blog.danielodio.com there is a post there that talks about the type of camera that I use which is the one on the tripod over there and the type of voice recorder I use and why. So that is a great way to actually get some specifics. It’s a total of $230 of equipment that I use so that you can take that content out of your head and share with the world. The reason I’m capturing this is because our firm is looking for tech savvy agents and that’s a very hard combination to find, but I know that if I can capture this content and put it up on the web, I’ve got a much better chance of agents finding our firm because they’re seeing this content. So this is just an example of what we’re preaching today. That’s why we’re capturing this today so that people can learn from it even if they couldn’t be here today.

51:28
Danilo Bogdanovic: To touch upon the question: you guys have no idea how easy you have it today in 2009. In October 2006, everybody here has been blogging for a while, there was nothing. I mean no support, there were maybe 20 Real Estate bloggers in the country and it was hit or miss. I don’t how many times I screwed up with my blogging but I made mistakes and it looked horrible when I published it. I had to go back and delete what I just did and I spent hours and hours and hours. Now you guys can go and literally just Google and it says how to start a blog. You will get hundreds of results, videos, tutorials, other blog posts, countless resources that you can read. It just takes some time. One thing before you really get going with a blog, the first thing you should do is read before you write. You’ve got to read before you write. Go get ideas of topics and you will see how people write, how their blog is laid out, and you will see 30, 40, or 50 blogs and you can take little pieces from each one and say: “I would love to integrate this into mine.” Get a better idea of what you want yours to look like and also a better idea of what you want to talk about and what it’s going to sound like. You might see a blog that’s heavy on video and thing that’s really cool. So you’ve got to read before you write and don’t ever be afraid to ask. The blogging community is very open with what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Technically we are all competitors, but we’re not. Her clientèle is going to be different than mine even though we’re in the same county. We each have our own voice, but we share ideas, we link back and forth, and talk about what worked and what didn’t so always ask.

53:51
Frank Llosa: Would you like a You Tube account? We’re going to set it up for you right now. We’re going to show you exactly how to set up a You Tube account. I have a video camera and we’re just going to have you say for three seconds what your name is. You’re the most eager we’re going to go with you. I guess there are three excuses: not finding the time to do it, not being willing to do it, and not having your makeup set!

55:00
Heather Elias: There is nothing wrong with preparing before you do it.

55:06
Frank Llosa: So our goal here is just to make a five second video saying: “Hello world, my name is …” and then just say your name. That’s it. We’re just going to do something like that. I’ll tell you when to start: 1, 2, 3, Hi I’m _ hello world. So that’s it. We’ve created the video. The next step is the memory card in here. We’re going to take the memory card out and give it to Ainsley and she’s going to show you the steps for creating an account. The card goes right into the laptop or you can just plug the camera right into the computer as I’m assuming you all are comfortable with that. As far as the You Tube account name you can do it with the name of the town that you’re like Arlington homes or something like that or just your user first name last name which is probably the easiest. We’ll just do that right now. So Ainsley is going to set up an account for you in the background.

56:15
Daniel Odio: While Ainsley is doing this one thing that I would say in terms of how to get started is I think you’ve got two main goals here with leveraging social media. The first larger goal is to become viewed as a subject matter expert so be viewed as a subject matter expert so that when people search for something real estate related, your name comes up. That’s a long term goal. That requires a lot of content to be posted by blogging and You Tube. But the more immediate benefit I would say goal as well that you should have is: how can you save time by doing this. So I would say that the next time that you have a client ask you that same question that you answered 100 times, whether it’s “What’s a short sale?” “What’s an REO?” “What’s in the neighborhood?” Whatever that question is that you’re always answering, I would say that Henry Ford would love blogs because it’s like an assembly line; you do it once and you can use it 1000 times. So next time you’ve got that, why don’t you say to the client: “I’m going to really compost a thoughtful answer for you.” And put it to a blog or do a You Tube video and just make that the content that you put up and send them the link. Just try that. I think you’ll find that when you do that a couple of times, you’re going to feel so refreshed that you don’t have to launch into that whole thing.” In fact, when you do talk to a client about it, you can talk to them about the more advanced pieces because they’ve already read the two hours that you put into that basic information and you can talk to them about the details of a short sale instead of having to go over the basics.

58:02
Danilo Bogdanovic: A quick tip a wise blogger once told me a while ago: keep a pen and notepad handy and when you get that question that you are tired of answering like Daniel said you’ve told 1000 times jot it down. If you’re ever out in a neighborhood and you see new constructions or great incentives, jot it down. So keep something handy where you can write it down. Whether it’s that day, the next day, or a week later, you have that pen and paper so you know what to talk about. I think we all go through writers block. Some weeks there is nothing to write about. At least in my head I don’t think there is anything to write about and all of a sudden one day it’s like I don’t have enough hours in the day to write everything that I’d like to. You can spread that out.

58:50
Frank Llosa: People have different styles. Some people will write frequently once a day or once every other day shorter posts. I tend to write longer posts and it takes me two or three weeks to get them out. I have a blog just for typical questions. I don’t want to bug my regular readers with that. I have a Realtor-focused blog on the latest gadgets, tips, and tricks that I don’t want to bug my regular readers with. There are different ways to do things.

59:32
Heather Elias: Can we bring the twitter feed back up for a second. You can find people that have already come before you that will help you with it. I just send out a quick message and can people say hi. These are all people that are on Twitter that helped me figure out how to do what I do now, that got me from starting active writing to have my own blog. There are so many people out there that will be perfectly happy to answer whatever questions you have along the way. All you have to do is reach out to them.

01:00:10
A really nice thing about this Twitter feed is that it’s there forever. Every post that you see people are putting a hash tag and a key word in their post so you can find all this content, tomorrow, a year from now and the way you do it is you just go to search.twitter.com. In the search box you just type in the hash tag which is NVARwiki and since everyone is putting that key word in on all their posts today, which is why they’re coming up here, they will also show up when you do that search as well so you’ll have that whenever you need it.

01:00:55
Heather Elias: I also want to insert that www.VAR.buzz.com the Virginia Association of Realtors puts a lot of content in there and it’s worth reading. Having said that, last year they did what they called the “Crest Survey.” It was a two-part survey of bloggers in Real Estate. What they discovered is the most successful blogs post between five and ten times per month. Maybe once or twice a week. Any more than that and people tend to unsubscribe because it’s too much information and they don’t have time to read it all. Any less and you’re like the second most successful group. I think it’s important to say that even though it’s important not to get writers block, it’s not like you have to be posting every single day. Once a week is a great expectation to start with.

01:01:45
Daniel Odio: I think everyone has their own style so sure it seems perfectly fine although what I would say is a great way to figure out what you’re going to write about if you don’t have a client question to answers is read other Realtors blogs. You’ll come up with all sorts of things to write with something that a Realtor wrote. Just go read any of the blogs up here and you’ll have plenty of thoughts to write about.

01:02:18
Danilo Bogdanovic: The other thing you can do is to turn your e-mail into a blog post. So if someone asks you a question about what they should do, take their question, post it on your blog, change the name and answer the question there. Instead of sending an e-mail back to the person send a link to what you just wrote and tell them to post any follow questions they may have on your blog.

01:02:49
Frank Llosa: So we’re on You Tube right now and we’ve transferred the memory card to the computer. That might be a step that some people might not understand how to do that part yet, but you have to know how to do certain things like getting the memory card into your computer. Now to set up the user account you enter the user name and press check availability. The account is available. So you enter your zip code and your birthday. You Tube will send a confirmation e-mail once you have signed up. Accept the user agreement. Type in word verification. Go to your e-mail and check for the confirmation e-mail. After your e-mail is verified, click here to manage your account. Go to www.YouTube.com after verifying it and then your account is right there. So you can go straight to upload. He already has an account confirmed and we are now going to upload the video file by pressing the upload video button. We put the video on the desktop to find it easily. You’re going to have to name the video. This is how people find you on You Tube so you want to use a keyword, a specific word so people who search for that topic can find it. The more specific you are the more likely that you will come up higher up in the search. Scroll down and there is something called tags where you can put words that describe the video. Pick a category. Share with the world. Press OK. Save changes. And it has successfully uploaded. To watch the video go to the user name at the top. It says my videos. Press play. It might take a couple of minutes to process. Now you have a You Tube channel. The website address is www.YouTube.com/ your user name. That’s the process. You can choose your resolution. Different cameras have different resolutions. You Tube compresses it by 90% so it’s going to bring it down big time. Usually just use the middle setting and you’ll be fine.So what you can do is take your video camera and walk through the house, taking a video of the home and you can post it on You Tube or all the Realtor sites and it will be a video instead of just still pictures. That’s www.videosbyaddress.com Right now it’s free.

01:07:09
Daniel Odio: By the way it looks very much like since we’re up here and we’re the experts there is a community of Real Estate Agents that live this way and we very much feed off of each others tips and tricks. So thank you for contributing. What Doug was saying is you can go to Hulia and there are questions there posed by buyers and sellers and that can be your content to write blog postings. That’s an excellent idea.

01:07:57
Frank Llosa: Another way to start blogging is to go to each one of our blogs and write a three or four sentence reply to your three favorite posts. So that’s you starting a blog by commenting on someone else’s blog post. You don’t have to have an account or anything. Just add your comments. Add your feedback. That’s a great way to start blogging. Different Cameras have different resolutions. You can choose your resolutions within the camera it will have higher and lower. You Tube will compress it 90%, so it’s going to bring it down big time. Usually you just find the middle setting. We can help you on the camera. The middle setting in fine and and if you don’t know, just use what’s on there.

01:13:49
Danilo Bogdanovic: The cameras are all good with video. I have a Flip Mino HD. It’s $200. It’s real easy because it has basically one resolution that it’s set on and it’s not that high even though it’s HD. Hit one button to power it on. Hit the red button to start recording. Hit it again to stop. Then what you do is this USB comes out and you plug it right into your computer. It brings it right up what’s called “Flip Share” it’s their software and it’s cake to upload a video. Once it’s uploaded you can actually make a movie with it, and put a title and credits at the end. It will ask you where you want to upload it; You Tube, Face Book, where ever you want to do it. Just one click of a button and it’s done.

01:14:38
Frank Llosa: The five steps that we did he just moved down to two steps. There is no card.

Danilo Bogdanovic: It’s a Flip Mino HD. I recommend getting this new one with the HD. The new one is black and the old one is white. It’s $200.

01:14:58
Daniel Odio: Also on thatwww.blog.danielodio.com on my social hardware page I talk about an alternative to Flip that you can use if you’d like. I do have it here. It’s a Kodak camera. The software is a little better on the Flip. There are some thing that I personally like about the Kodak. If you get a little more advanced with your video and you want to be able to swap cards in and out the Kodak can do that where the Flip can’t, but by all means, the Flip is a great way to start. It’s so super simple. This Kodak camera is a little bit better for being able to do some more advanced things. But either way you can’t lose.

01:15:32
Frank Llosa: I’m posting right now the video camera that I like which is the Samsung NV24 on Amazon for $140 and the benefit there is that it’s a super wide angle camera. It gets 80% more of a photo in than other cameras. So it’s a huge difference. Also with a video there is a lot of shaking problems and the wider the camera, for some reason there is less shake. So even video taping yourself on a wide angle you’ll see more of you and it will shake less.

01:17:24
Daniel Odio: You have to walk before you can run. All the things that we’ve been telling you are super basic things that we’ve been doing for a long time, but it’s a great place to start. Once you’re comfortable with blogging and You Tube there is a whole other world of Google search engine and optimization for very advanced things that we’d be happy to talk to you about. You’ve got two goals. One is to be that subject matter expert that comes up when somebody Googles short sales, but that second goal is much more attainable which is to save you time. Really that’s where I think that’s where you should start so you’re not answering that same question over and over again.

01:18:41
Frank Llosa: Google mathematically will look at the keywords on your blog posts as one of the variables. It will also look at how many things you’ve written, how many years you’ve been writing, how many people link to you. So Google will mathematically calculate in all of these variables who gets up first. You can buy your and blow a $1000 really quickly so do not buy ads unless you really know what you’re talking about. Don’t hire someone for pay per click ads. You think $1.00 to pay per click is not a lot, but then you come back and your bank account is wiped out. You don’t realize you didn’t set a maximum. Don’t be buying ads. I guarantee if you buy local people are looking for that stuff.

01:19:43
Heather Elias: What you’re really asking about is search engine optimization. It’s also called SEO and my shameless plug is that NVAR in its June addition just did an article on it.

01:19:53
Daniel Odio: The short answer is you do nothing, but write really good content. The long answer is much more complicated.

01:20:00
Frank Llosa: And tag it appropriately. It’s a great answer.

01:20:06
Heather Elias: Keyword tagging at the bottom of it is what’s going to show Google what you’re writing about as much as the content itself.

01:20:14
Frank Llosa: Does everybody know what we’re talking about? If you look at Google search result page you see the stuff at the top and then at the side and then there’s stuff in the middle. Everything on the top and the side, those people have paid to be there. Everything in the center is what we call organic and we’re talking about how to get up in the organic search results. Like Daniel said, it’s good content, correct keywords, and correct tagging.

01:20:38
Danilo Bogdanovic: Organic means like ground up.

01:20:40
Frank Llosa: Yeah organic means that basically you haven’t paid for it. Google has their secret algorithm which they claim changes every quarter and they basically index your site, which is they look through your site and your blog posts, look at the key words and then based on that they reward you how long you’ve been writing. The longer you’ve been writing, the more they reward you. It’s one of these, it’s kind of like a J curve. You start out real slow and then all of a sudden you get picked up and then boom! You start heading up.

01:21:12
Daniel Odio: It’s actually a lot like Real Estate. Are you renting that space on google or are you buying it? If you’re renting it it means that you’re paying Ad Words which means a dollar per click or whatever when you stop it goes away. You don’t get any lasting effect from it. Buying it is you’re actually getting Google to think that you are the best possible results or return for that query and that’s what we’re talking about here. We’re big, big SEO’s (Search Engine Optimization) fans.

01:21:48
Heather Elias: Everybody up here comes from a slightly different background. SEO is important. I’m not saying that it’s not, but don’t feel like you have to become and expert on SEO as you get started. That’s something that you can grow into as you go along.

01:22:04
How long are you on the computer everyday?

01:22:07
Heather Elias: I use blogging as my way of prospecting. What’s your primary method of prospecting?

01:22:14
I do a lot of mailings.01:22:16Heather Elias: OK. How much time do you spend a day on mailing? From my standpoint I using social media and linking to it through other social media adverts is the way that I prospect for business. That varies by day, but that’s the time that I set aside to grow my business. Some days it’s three hours a day, other days it’s not as much, some days it’s more than that. My husband would give you a completely different answer. But that’s where my business comes from so that’s where I spend my time. I think that’s probably average.

01:23:13
Frank Llosa: You Tube is owned by Google so they’ll love you even more.

01:23:25
Frank Llosa: One thing I do is for instance if you do a video on You Tube you can then embed it into your blog post, but when Google goes through your blog you’re not going to get rewarded for that video being on there so you’re going to want to maybe do an outline of the main topics in that video with the keywords because then the keywords will be picked up and you’ll get ranked higher. But then if you link back obviously your You Tube will be embedded, but you also have the URL back to the video on You Tube because sometimes people who work in corporate America in a cubical aren’t’ even allowed to look at You Tube videos. Some companies have that policy so they can’t actually see the video so they can click on there and save the URL for later. You’re rewarded doubled if you do it correctly versus being penalized.

01:24:17
Heather Elias: SEO is very complicated. Don’t get overwhelmed by it.

01:24:20
Daniel Odio: Just for those of you that are already using You Tube whether it’s for business or pleasure, once semi-advanced tip is I actually have a wonderful woman in Kentucky who transcribes all of my audio and video into text. The reason I do that is because Google cannot yet search through video to pull up those key words. This audio right now that I’m capturing will be up on our blog and will be transcribed as paragraphs and paragraphs of text within about one week. That’s how we do part of our SEO for example. So that’s kind of interesting.

01:25:06
Heather Elias: So who wants to set up a Twitter account. Did you notice we had somebody in the room setup a Twitter account as we were going along? There was no picture posted so I can’t tell you who it was.

01:25:50
What blogs do you guys read?

01:25:53
Frank Llosa: We are going to have a website up after the class. Where we went through what blogs we were reading and what blogs were the most influential or good examples and also blogs that give you resources on how to blog and how to use social media. Those would be the answers to your question. They are from all across the country and some international. It doesn’t matter.

01:26:32
Heather Elias: Check out: www.NVARwiki.com

01:26:34
Daniel Odio: If I can just take a second to give props to NVAR here. To walk into a training classroom and have reserved seating for laptops is just amazing and to have a wiki created I just think it’s unbelievably phenomenal. Five years ago it couldn’t have been done. Congratulations. A wiki is a website that anybody can edit and add to. Like Wikipedia. If you wanted to you could change an entry on Wikipedia right now. If they agree with what you said. That’s the beauty of wiki. It allows for collaboration.

01:27:23
Heather Elias: So we’re putting deep minds together to collaborate. What you can do is go on and comment on the post if you think something is wrong, but the editing remains with the geeks.

01:27:41
Frank Llosa: Steps to creating a blog on www.wordpress.com orwww.blogger.com are free or www.activerain.com used to be free, but it’s still well worth it. The reason why Active Rain blows away everyone else is there is a built in audience of realtors that participate and comment. You can have hundreds of people read your other blog and get zero to one comment and on Active Rain you can have 100 people read the same thing and you’ll get 10, 15, or 20 comments and comments make you look good because when people are reading your stuff, it makes other people want to read your stuff because I want to read what other people are reading. Who is going to read a blog post with zero comments on it? It feels like you’re in a graveyard, but not on Active Rain. Don’t be worried about competition. Don’t be worried about competition. If you write on my blog post about how you disagree with me, you can get business from that. Don’t worry about that. I want you to do that.

01:29:35
Heather Elias: If you set up a blog on Active Rain and you’re writing to talk to other realtors then that’s not necessarily something that you are going to put forth to your clients. It’s a matter of knowing who your audience is. Active Rain is a fantastic resource. Even going on Active Rain to search for information on how to start a blog. That’s a great thing. The consumer side of it is where you’re tagging your keywords a little differently. You’re writing to a different audience; you’re writing to your consumer. You’re not really competing when you’re writing content on Active Rain itself. You just have to keep in mind who your audience is when you start writing.

01:30:15
Daniel Odio: And guys you just have to keep in mind that you shouldn’t be worried about the 73rd thing you should be doing. Let’s just get you on. I understand with traditional Real Estate there is a lot of competition, it’s not like that at all online. It’s a very helpful community. We’re up here spending our time trying to get you guys into this world because it’s great. It really is great. It will save you time. You will make more money, all of these things that everyone wants.

01:30:48
Ainsley McDougal: I love the way Heather says they’re: “Paying it forward” from the people that came before them and taught them to do what they’re doing. Don’t even worry about competition. There are so few Real Estate Agents who utilize this technology well or at all. One half of one percent according to www.realtor.com have agents that actually use these technologies.

01:31:15
Can you put a blog on your own website?

01:31:17
Frank Llosa: You could do that where you could actually create a tab that links to your blog and you could frame it out to make it look the same or you could integrate directly, but actually a lot of people who have done that are just getting rid of their static website. I guarantee I can show you a couple static websites and you couldn’t tell me which one is a blog and which one is a static website. They are awesome.

01:32:06
Daniel Odio: I’m a big proponent of that if you don’t have a website presence. Don’t even worry about the website. Focus on the blog. That blog is a system than can continually be updated. The content is what really matters so just focus on the blog. Start with things you have to answer. We all focus on different things, so you’ll find your niche and your comfort zone by just answering questions in the blog and sending the link if that’s all you ever do. I save myself three hours a week by doing that.

01:32:48
Frank Llosa: Getting more clients.

01:32:50
Heather Elias: I just wanted to clarify Internet marketing in and of itself. I have a stack of websites that I started back in 2004 or 2005 and then I started the blog separate from that so I really had two completely different sites. The blog was my voice and the static website was my home search, featured listing and all of that jazz. What I found is that in the beginning of ‘04 and ‘05 I closed a lot of lead that came from the static website. Clients weren’t going there anymore. I wasn’t generating business from it anymore so I actually killed the statics site and directed it to my blog. The only things that were being used on the static sites and the “about me” portion of it. I haven’t seen any decrease in business.

01:33:43
Frank Llosa: Websites are very 2005! The cost factor is ridiculous. There are some things that cost money. Let’s not completely – to get more fancy making your blog a domain name as opposed to your name .org or .com.

01:34:21
Danilo Bogdanovic: But they’re a static website.

01:34:24
Daniel Odio: The cost is about one quarter of one mailing for all the stuff we’re talking about. It’s not a lot. Domain name is $5.00.

01:34:21
Frank Llosa: Or you can get a free branded IDX on www.franklymls.com where it’s your name, your phone number on every single listing but it still sayswww.franklymls.com01:35:34Heather Elias: She is asking how to put a search function on a domain name. You would have to choose an IDX provider or Frank’s free option for doing so, but that’s a matter of embedding it in the site.

01:36:00
Daniel Odio: This may sound flippant when I’m saying it, but when you have a neighbors child or somebody who knows technology that you can pay some money to to help you with this, do that. Or you can use Craigs List. It’s a great way to get very inexpensive help. You can put a job posting on Craigs List saying I want to do some web work, but I don’t have any idea where to start and probably a high school or college student will help you for $50 or $100 dollars.

01:36:38
Heather Elias: Some of you with larger companies probably have technology people that can help you with it too.

01:37:08
Heather Elias: How to create a blog on Word Press: enter a user name, e-mail address, password, accept the terms of service, your address will be: www.username.wordpress.com

01:37:46
Daniel Odio: You could make your domain name Loudon County Expert if you wanted to. It doesn’t have to be your name.

01:38
Heather Elias: Having the privacy button checked will mean that only people you choose can see your blog. No one is going to find it until you start using key words, so just go ahead and make the blog public. You will get an e-mail sent to your inbox that you have to click on to complete the sign up process. Then it will bring up the menu in which you can change the theme and start writing.

01:39:55
Daniel Odio: I think we’re getting close to being out of time so is there anything from anybody that you really wanted to know, but you don’t feel like has been covered?

01:40:05
Heather Elias: We had two questions from Twitter that I wanted to get to: how do you get more twitter followers? Are we going to do an advanced class on social media? The new social media manager for NVAR Andy Kauffman has said that on October 27th we’ll have a website up soon and we’ll be posting on the www.NVARwiki.com

01:41:26
Daniel Odio: To get more twitter followers I have blog post that tells how to do that. Just go to: www.blog.danielodio.com and search for the word “Twitter” on the page and you’ll find that.

01:41:35
Frank Llosa: See, that’s an example of saving time.

01:41:40
I just saved everybody a ten minute answer.

01:41:50
Danilo Bogdanovic: Don’t get wrapped up with getting more followers. It’s not a popularity contest. If you give good content, much like a blog, they will find you and you will find people that are quality as well and you’ll see who they’re talking to. Birds of a feather flock together. If you see someone who is just tweeting ads all day long they’re probably not going to have a lot of followers themselves so it’s not a popularity content per se.

01:42:30
Frank Llosa: With quantity my blog might get 100 or 200 visitors a day, but I might only get 10 or 15 people watching the video a day, but the people who sit and watch the videos for five or ten minutes on short sales are fifty times more likely to contact me than the 400 people surfing through the website, so if your counter is not high don’t let that set you back.

01:42:57
Daniel Odio: There is a service where basically anytime somebody tweets about something you care about, they charge five cents for this, it will let you automatically send them a tweet with a predetermined answer. Now some people might not like that because that’s Twitter spam, but I would say that you should have two Twitter profiles, a personal one and a business profile. You can have as many Twitter profiles as you want to. We have one profile where we tweet all the MLS listings, that’s one profile. We’ve got one that’s just for that. There are about 20 tweets per day based on the key words that I set up.

01:44:00
Heather Elias: Obviously we do thing differently. There are people who will immediately follow. The important thing in using Twitter or any other social media is to make sure that you’re genuine and you will connect with people that way.

01:44:25
Frank Llosa: Here is an example of how I use Twitter: Twitter is now becoming more of a search engine where Google might have thousands of things, but sometimes it’s five year old stuff. On Twitter you can actually search once you’ve logged in. You can search real time for keywords. If I were to buy this laptop from Dell Outlet I found a 15% off coupon. I found 100 results and all the results were expired. I went to twitter and searched for Dell Outlet coupon and I got $45 off this Dell laptop that I got for $235. So that’s another way to use Twitter and I wrote a blog on how to do that.

1:45:15
Heather Elias: There was also a question about how you use Face Book in your business.

01:45:25
Danilo Bogdanovic: Obviously everyone is going to use it differently. My Face Book is a mix of personal and business so there is a fine line of what you can say on there and what you let your friends say on there. The safer way to do it is having a business page and if you have clients on Face Book you can direct them to that page. The same with Twitter. A lot of the time you can feed your tweets to your Face Book. There are certain softwares that directly link them all of the time or you can do it sometimes. I use the one that only does it sometimes because you don’t want to inudnate your customers and friends with all this noise. To me Face Book is the personal side of me that I use to get in touch with prospective clients and stay in touch with past clients. If you have already dealt with me in business and they’re really cool I want let them in on the personal side of me. That’s going to make them want to call me in five to seven years when they need an upgrade or downgrade in a house.

01:46:50
Frank Llosa: If you want to create a Face Book account I just posted a video on how to set up a Face Book page in five minutes exactly. How to mess up and make sure you don’t do it wrong because you can accidentally e-mail all 1000 people that you have ever e-mailed in the history of your e-mail program so uncheck that box and it walks you through that. So again, an example of not repeating yourself and sharing that again.

01:47:56
Heather Elias: I think one of the key things that people using Twitter and Face Book are still trying to figure out is what level of transparency do you have between your personal life and your business. I think the answer to that is different for each person in the room. So it’s a matter of how much of yourself are you willing to share with the online world whether it’s through your blog or your Face Book profile or anything else. So you sort of have to go forward with whatever you’re comfortable with. I don’t want to spam my friends and followers on Face Book that aren’t’ business contacts by putting too much there. That’s why I think the pages are good; having separate pages for business and personal is a good option.

01:48:40
Frank Llosa: When you start with Face Book, don’t play with all the new toys. Don’t play with anything.

01:48:55
Heather Elias: That’s a great way to get people to not pay any attention to what you are saying.

01:49:00
Frank Llosa: Sit back and relax and don’t spasm, you can see what happens when they play samurai warrior.

01:50:11
Heather Elias: It’s after 2:00 and I want to respect your time so are you all OK to keep asking and answering questions?

Danilo Bogdanovic: Have you seen Frank’s blog post about Never Too Busy?!


Frank Llosay: I once had some people from Germany contact me because I wrote that blog post about never being too busy. It’s an actual video of me just looking at the camera for three minutes and then the computer said: “You’ve got mail!” People actually have thought that I was too busy and did not contact me so I made that video and picked up an $850,000 client because of that video. The video just had me staring at the camera for a minute. I just stood there and looked at the camera and there was a title that said I’m Never Too Busy For you.

01:50:15
Daniel Odio: This is a perfect example of how your personality shows through and it should be that way. You don’t need to put a front up, just be yourself.

01:50:22
Ainsley McDougal: Heather is always talking about softball on weekends.

01:50:30
Heather Elias: My life is transparent.

01:50:37
Daniel Odio: I personally can’t stay much longer so if you need to go, go. I’m a big fan of Linked In, but not as much on the Real Estate side as the technology side. It’s very, very active with technology.

01:50:56
Heather Elias: We sat down and talked to each other about what we were going to talk about and Linked In was brought up and we all sort of just looked at each other because none of us really use it, but it’s important to have a profile there because clients would probably love to see if you’re there. I don’t actively participate in groups there, but I do have a profile. There are probably some Realtors that would tell you they generate business using Linked In, but I’m not one of them.

01:51:29
Daniel Odio: I’d say that’s exactly right. Set up your Linked In profile so you can reserve that user name especially if you have a more common name. Create that profile, put some information about yourself up there and then don’t worry about it anymore. If you get invited is it rude to say no? I don’t think it’s rude to say no.

01:51:53
Frank Llosa:If you say no to someone they don’t get a notice that you said no. You can just say I lost it in my spam folder.

01:52:10
Heather Elias: I just want to repeat that we’re going to have a lot of information about this session on www.NVAR.com as well as how to contact all these people. I don’t want you to inundate them.Frank Llosa: We don’t mind. We’re not too busy! We’ll just send you blog bites!

Daniel Odio: Can you count how many people have been on your blog? There is a free program called Google Analytics.

Heather Elias:Google Analytics is good, but you do have to add a piece of HTML code to use it. Word Press (I don’t know about Blogger) has got stats built in so when you’re on your word press dash board there is a link that says Word press stats on the side and it will show you how much traffic you are getting and did they come from a key word search, a link from a different site, it’s a great way to see. It’s not going to tell you exactly who.

01:53:37
Daniel Odio: Just really fast before most of you have to go, do you feel more comfortable now than when you got here? Yes. That was our mission. Tell people in your office to go to www.NVARwiki.com and they can watch the entire two hour session.

01:54:00
Danilo Bogdanovic: We’re going to be working on wiki over the next few days, so give us until maybe next week. We’ll fill out the content so just check back next week.One way to practice your writing is to go to other people blogs and then write comments and then you evaluate your paragraphs and you’ll probably be better in the end. Don’t be intimidate.

Frank Llosa: If you’re the king of run-on sentences like me, Twitter is the best cure for that.

01:55:40
They claim that you can get business through free websites, but I don’t really think you can. A blog is an indirect interview and they want it to be updated constantly.

Daniel Odio: Otherwise we would be using it.

Danilo Bogdanovic: Be careful of lead-generating ads.

Daniel Odio: It’s so easy to spend a lot of money really quickly with all these tools. Not to say that they don’t have value because some of them do, but the best thing you can do is starting get that content out of your head and onto a blog.

01:56:17
Ainsley McDougal: Picture yourself in the shoes of the consumers that are out there doing those searches. Are they more apt to search for the answers that they ask specifically or look at the organic results on Google because when I look at it I don’t see the paid ads across the top or down the sides. Or are they going to go to a lead generation where they’re just filling out a form and throwing it out there in hopes that somebody is going to call them back.

01:56:40
Heather Elias: I think most consumers are savvy enough at this point if they’re shopping that that’s not the manner in which they’re going to contact people.

01:56:46
Daniel Odio: I think I speak for all of us when I say we want to see your blogs and we want to see your You Tube videos so please send them to us when you’ve done them.

Frank Llosa: Tonight you should have a hello world You Tube video up. So each one of you tonight do a five second hello world video or blog post. Ainsley will find some prize for the best post.

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Social Media in Real Estate: A Panel

Part 2 of 2

Frank Llosa: Just get a video.  Have your cat walking across the table if you need to.  Just get that step done where you have an account name.  The account name can either be your name or whatever area you specialize in or your company.  Just get one little five second video clip up there.  That’s a baby step.

Then you can try to post something where you’re talking about the latest trends in the market place.  In the blogging world, write about the exact neighborhood you live in.  You are the expert.  “You can tell that these two sets of homes were built at two different times; one in 1971 and one in 1972.  The second builder put in different additions.”  You can talk all about that and Google will find that stuff.  That’s something that you can start today; making a post. 

Audience Member: A three part question: #1 What’s the name of your camera?

Frank Llosa: There are two Flip Cameras way back there because they’re not wide-angle, and my wide-angle camera is up in the front.  I’m a little bias.  I like super wide angle cameras.

Audience Member: Can you please tell us the name of your cameras?

Frank Llosa: If someone could Twitter this up there. This is the Samsung NB24HD.  You can buy it for $140.00 on Amazon and I have a link to it on www.blog.franklyrealty.com.  Let me know if you buy it through there I’ll put the $4.00 to charity.  Then that one is: Kodak V-570 or Kodak V-705 and there’s pro’s and cons for each one of those which I won’t explain because I wrote a blog about it.

[laughing]

Audience Member: My other question is, and you were kind enough to answer e-mails.  First of all, I’m very impressed with you guys; you never run out of things to blog about.  I think I would shut down after a couple of days.  My other question is: How long is the blog?  Would you say it’s like a three page type thing?  How long is a typical blog?  Everyday do you write three pages typed or what?

Frank Llosa: Everyone has a different thing.  Some people do one paragraph once a day.  I tend to do a once a month long manuscript that’s multi-just super long, but it works for me.  People say: “Oh, don’t write long things, they’ll get bored.”  I keep them from getting bored by writing jokes in it or Homer Simpson saying: “Dough.” I had a picture of me pulling my hair out and I showed a before and after with Rogaine, you know, with stuff in my hair.  It keeps people entertained and brings them down the pace.  So for me I make super long ones, but then occasionally I’ll have a separate sub-blog called: www.questions.franklyrealty.com where I’ll post my questions and then I’ll have a separate blog which is more realtor to realtor feedback.  So I’ve got several, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that.  You  can start with word press.  I use blog spot, but it’s now old school so I’m going to be switching over to word press.  My website has horrible designs so don’t look at it for prettiness.  It’s really ugly.

Audience Member: When you have a listing, what about social media is better than the traditional forms of marketing and how?

Heather Flynn: I don’t look at social media as a way to market my listings, ever.

Audience Member: Oh, you don’t?

Heather Flynn: No.  I look at social media as more of a way to communicate with people than to prospect for future business.  I mean you can.  There are a bunch of different schools of thought as far as social media is concerned.  Some people are very business forward and use Twitter in different ways.  You can have a business oriented Twitter account that feeds listings to it.  You can have a Twitter account where you’re talking about going out with your clients to look at houses.  It’s all in how you use it.  Personally I don’t use it to market my listings.  The audience of people that I have listening to me wouldn’t appreciate that.

Rick Bosl: I agree.  I don’t use Face Book or my Blog to post my listings on there.  I use social media more just to build a relationship with people who are listening.  If I try to start posting listings on there and then they’ll think that I’m trying to sell them something.  I don’t want to do that.

Daniel Odio: I’ll actually walk you through what my answer is step-by-step because I think it might be very illustrative for everyone in the room.  Let’s replace social media with exquisite content.  So you see we’re listing as teachers about it that you would love the world to know, right?  What are some of the things that are great about your listing?

Audience Member: Oh, you want me to tell you something?

Daniel Odio: Yeah.

Audience Member: 5000 square foot house.

Daniel Odio: OK.  Great.  So there are unique characteristics about this listing that are great.  So you’re probably going to make brochures, right?  What if you could tell someone who is searching on Craigslist that there are 5000 square feet in this house, right?  So remember, it’s not social media.  It’s just a tool.  It’s exposing content.  You can expose it via Craigslist or you can expose it via on the actual  “For Sale” sign by putting a writer that says: 1234 Mainstreet.com so that when the husband and wife are driving by and want to get inside, but they don’t have a Realtor yet, they can just go online to see 50 pictures of the interior.

So just think about different ways that you’re exposing content.  You could put it on Twitter, you could put it through www.ping.fm through all these different avenues, but you’re just exposing the content to a wider percentage of people, that’s all you’re doing.

Dewita Soeharjono: I want to add to that actually Heather is right because you can’t put stuff on there because people will just leave you and I think the social media platform is actually what they call: “User generated content,” basically they pick and choose what they want to read.  In a way, if you coordinate your Twitter with Face Book, I use my Face Book with my friends so they can actually see what I’m doing, but a lot of times: “Oh!  You’re a Realtor!  Really?”  You don’t have to tell them, they can pick and choose.  They see it all the time.

Frank Llosa: With video, I heard www.realtor.com saying that one tenth of one percent of their listings  have video on them.  That was a video example that Kathy right here made and it’s all free.  It’s grabbing one of these cameras and walking through the property.  You can put those videos on Craigslist when you advertise.  You cannot put them in the public remarks, but you can put: “Ask you agent for the video tour,” and then put in the Realtor remarks and the Realtor might want to save a half an hour drive and just be like: here, take a look at this video, do we want to go see it or not?  That’s just easy, free, no brainer stuff.

Audience Members: Could you talk about your experience with clients?  The simple fact-based questions like: you tell someone about a sale or something.  We would all be inclined to have patterns that they fall into over and over and over again.  Is that something that you’ll blog about or talk about?  Like the list price, no matter what the list price.

Heather Flynn: Not while you’re actively working with them.  They will find it.  I haven’t had that happen to me personally, but I’ve had tons of friends who have said that they tried to write about experiences that they’ve had.  They can change the name, they can change the location, but if it’s somebody who is at all Internet savvy, they’re going to find it and come back to you about it and that’s just not something that you would want to have happen.

Dewita Soeharjono: Wait until it closes.

Heather Flynn: Yeah.

Audience Member: Just a quick question when you’re talking about getting started blogging, like me, I hate typing.  Is there any software that you can use that transcribes well; like you could just talk and it turns it into the words that you post?

Daniel Odio: There are things like Drag and Actually Speaking, but I don’t use that.  That’s from Microsoft.  You could try it.  I am desperately looking for a service where I could upload a video and it transcribes it into text.  I don’t think that exists yet.  If anybody knows, please tell me.

Frank Llosa: All I know about is www.oDesk.com people will do it for a dollar or two an hour or something like that and they’ll sit there and type up every word.

Daniel Odio: So there is no automated way that I know of, but there are services.

Moderator: I think that’s what Frank was saying: “Don’t worry about it, just go ahead and post the video.” Or send it out to India to have it transcribed.

Audience Member: Do you guys have an opinion for blogs on your website using an external blog or having it as part of your actual website?  Frank suggested blogspot and some others.

Moderator: OK.  Let’s turn that question into: What’s the difference between a website and a blog and how do you coordinate those?  I’d like to ask that one next, so who would like to take that?

Rick Bosl: Well, a blog is a website.  A blog is short for: Web Log it’s just a particular type of website that has postings and people can leave feedback and has gained popularity since the war in Iraq.  As far as whether to have a internal one or external, there are two schools of thought: mine I like to have as part of my site so it’s my website domain/blog.  I just feel it gets a lot more traffic that way because Google will pick up the domain name and it will stick to that.  Some people think it’s better to have external ones so you can have links going back and forth, but I don’t know if there is any right answer for that.

Daniel Odio: I think a lot of it depends on how advanced you are, and don’t let that decision just get in the way of getting started.  So if it’s easier to go to blogspot or wordpress or wherever, just do it.  You can always go to something more advanced later, but it really doesn’t matter.  It’s still early; we’re in the first inning of social media, so just doing anything right now is what’s important.

Heather Flynn: I actually got started with a static website template base for my feature listings and I had that for three years and I killed it this week and redirected everything to the blog because not the blog can search for names.  I was afraid to do it because of the fact that I had established that site, but I think moving forward, that wasn’t capturing the attention of the leads that it used to so I get more response out of the blog so I moved in that direction.

Audience Member: Do you have any guidelines as to what people should put up and what they shouldn’t put up about themselves?  Or some guidelines that you use that are just not good for safety issues and those types of things. 

Frank Llosa: Well, you definitely have to think about Fair Housing Violations.  It’s easy to mess up on that by saying: “This is a neighborhood with a bunch of young people.” Boom!  You’re done.  So yeah, you’ve got to watch out for that, but as far as pushing the envelope, you just have to know that everything that you write is going to be up there forever and just like you wouldn’t misrepresent a client verbally, you’re not going to say anything improper written. 

Just expect everything that you write will be saved forever.  As far as the domain name, I don’t know why I have my main page anymore.  I’m glad that Heather took the lead because I might do that as well.  If I were to start from scratch it would just be a blog, maybe a little about us in a sub-section, but to have a front page, who cares.  Now it’s like dead and so 2002 having a website like that.  What’s on there?  It’s stale. 

They want to know now what happened last week; up-to-date stuff.   So if I were to start from scrach it would be a straight www.straightdomainname.com and not www.myblog.com.  And I don’t like having five different domain names in my e-mail.  My e-mail has this domain name or that domain name.  Try to keep it down to one or two, but if I were to start from scratch, I would just have a blog.

Dewita Soeharjono: I actually started doing this when there was nobody out there and people would ask: “What is a blog?” because that was the cheapest way for me to position myself up against everybody else who was already a Realtor.  So I just use blog and I’m still using blog.  It’s $15.00 a month, but it’s worth it.

Heather Flynn: I was just going to say about interaction online and the information you put out there.  Keep in mind that your online interaction should be no different than when you’re talking to somebody face to face.  There just happens to be a computer in between.  So don’t share anything online when you’re talking with someone, with anyone because on the other end you’ll find a person.  I think that’s a really good guideline.  As far as all communication goes whether you’re e-mailing with people or on Twitter, don’t let you brain fall out of your head as soon as you go online.  You’re talking to people the exact same way as you would in real life.

Audience Member: This is a little bit of a paranoid question, but I’m wondering Nationally or Locally, because of the walking through the house on You Tube and the videos and stuff,  have we heard of anybody’s house getting robbed and blaming you for putting it on too many sites?  Do you guys have a generic disclaimer that you make the client sign during the listing process or in the listing agreement you say: “We ask for your permission to put it on Face Book, You Tube, Craig’s List, whatever.  Are you worried about that at all or not particularly?

Frank Llosa: I’m in law school because I am worried about stuff like that, but no, if someone wants to see you, they’re going to see you.  But if you do a really good job, such a good job marketing the house that it gets robbed then you’ve done your job well.

[laughing]

Daniel Odio: As a listing agent it’s your job to be representative of the clients’ best interest and by not putting it on all these other avenues, are you not doing your job?

Audience Member: So in your listing agreement do you write sentences and ask permission about where you’re going to advertise?

Daniel Odio: Not at all.  As much as this is about the media, it’s still about the personal relationship.  If I thought the client was going to have a problem with that, I probably wouldn’t take him as a client.

Rick Bosl: I was going to say: we all have photos in our listings now is that an issue as opposed to putting them online?  A video is not that much different.

Frank Llosa: We actually have some representatives here from NBAR and they are other agencies that have as an eight ball in their listing agreements a line in there saying: “Just in case it’s not obvious, we’re going to put photos of your house, inside and the MLS.”  I have requested for NBAR to add that sentence to our contracts, just for the paranoia and to cover ourselves.

Moderator: OK.  There are a couple of things that we wanted to do and then we’ll open it up for questions and answers for about the last 20 mintues.

What blogs should this audience be reading on top of what’s happening out there?

Heather Flynn: I think that Active Reign is probably a a great jumping off point.  That’s where I got started.  You can go in there and search and you can find answers to any questions about how to get started blogging.  You’ll find too that the community of people that have already gotten started are generally pretty helpful to help you get under way because we all asked those questions at the beginning too.

Frank Llosa: They just started charging by the way.  Active Reign was free and now it’s $20 or $30 per month.  They’re suppose to be running some promotions soon so just keep that in mind.  One of the other benefits of Active Reign is that there is a point system.  You get five or ten points every time you post a comment on somebody else’s blog post. 

So it’s very interactive and it’s a great way to make your blog more active.  There’s nothing worse than putting a block post out there and your tracker said that 100 people came to it, but you have zero comments.  So the next visitor that comes thinks that no one is reading it, so why am I going to read it? 

If you post on Active Reign, you will get several comments and I had one appraiser, I bugged him, and he finally put – I found him because he had a one paragraph thing on this one community and he said: “You know what?  More people have contacted me because I have one paragraph about this community that I wrote about a year ago.  Maybe I should do some more.” 

I bugged him and he wrote a full thing, about ten things for Realtors not to do in listing and he got 92 comments when he woke up in the morning.  It’s not normally like that so don’t be expecting that stuff.  But he just started, got 92 comments and when a National consumer goes to that page to consider hiring him and they see how many people comment on his thing, it makes him look good.

Rick Bosl: Another great site everybody should check out is: www.realtytomato.com.  They’re a company out in California and they make blogs for Realtors.  There’s tons of information about what to write about, how to write, just great advice for Realty bloggers and also plenty of examples of successful bloggers all across the country.  They also do training classes too if you want to go that route.  It costs $3000, but there’s tons of creative information on there.

Daniel Odio: To re-emphasize what Heather said, blogging locally and even micro-locally like when we’re talking about community names is really effective.  Heather does it, I know quite a few other people who do it.  I don’t do it, but if I were specializing in a particular location I certainly would be and I recommend it.  If you know of a certain area, call the HOA and ask them: “Are people not paying their HOA dues because we’re all in foreclosures?”  Or just put that kind of real content onto a blog that’s very specific with lots of key words and I guarantee you will get warm, interested buyer leads off of it.

Dewita Soeharjono: If you want to use local experts but not Realtors you can check out www.jdland.com. She is a Washington reporter.  She’s actually working in a computer room or something, but she has this blog that chronicles the development in the South East.  It’s very rich in information.

Heather Flynn: I was also going to point you in the direction of www.agentgenius.com which is a multi-international blog that’s written by Realtors, for Realtors.

Frank Llosa: Starbucks.

Heather Flynn: And that was what I was going to say next, of course, www.varblogs.com.  The Virginia Association of Realtors has a blog that everybody should know is there, but they’re still getting the word out about that.

Daniel Odio: If I can just put a little promotion in for the Virginia Association of Realtors which is amazingly progressive from a technological standpoint.  If you haven’t visited www.varealty.com recently, it probably hasn’t changed yet.  They’re redoing the site with things like short instructional videos.  Frank can put up a video about how to take pictures of homes with a web camera that we can all learn from.  I would really beseech you to contact VAR and tell them how great a job they’re doing because it truly phenomenal for Virgina to be leading on the National stage.

Moderator: What about some books that you’ve read lately that you would recommend?  Any books?  I know Rick just read one so that’s why I’m asking. 

Frank Llosa: On my blog in the lower right hand corner there is a link to books.  There is Wikinomics; The World is Flat.

Rick Bosl: I just read: “There’s 33 billion people in the room.”  It’s all about the Face Book phenomenon.  It’s interesting and it’s an easy read too.

Daniel Odio: How many of you have heard of a gentleman named Paul Graham?  Does anybody read anything written by Paul Graham? Paul Graham is the creator of the Yahoo shopping cart and sold it to Yahoo and is now and angel investor and he helps text start-ups become successful.  He writes some of the best essays I have ever read being an entrepreneur.  So we’re all really entrepreneurs.  We work for other companies but we’re responsible for the company’s success.  I do highly recommend his essays.  He’s probably got 20 or 30 there that take 15 minutes to read.  So Paul Graham.  Just Google Paul Graham Essays and you’ll find them there.  They’re incredibly good.

Dewita Soeharjono: You can use the RSS tool actually to feed your Google reader or different applications to read for free.  You can read the Washington Post or the New York Times or whatever you want.  Or people who are actually successful in the business, other Real Estate Agents.  It’s free.

Moderator.  OK.  So I’m going ask you to explain that better.

Wikipedia: RSS is an abbreviation for Really Simply Syndication.  It is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video.  An RSS document includes full or summarized text plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.  Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an RSS reader, feed reader, or aggregator, which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile device based.  A standardized file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs.  The user subscribes to the feed by entering the feeds’ URL into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process.  The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to  monitor and read the feeds.

Daniel Odio: What a user can do is they can do a search for a certain query and then they can get an RSS feed which is basically always doing that search for them all the time.  So they can put their RSS feed into their in box for example, most mail programs can do the RSS. 

What you’ll see here are people who are talking about Alexandria Virginia listings.  So if I were to hit “feed” for this query, DRodio is coming up.  So I tell a client: “Hey, if you want to find a home in Alexandria Virginia and you just want it to pop into your e-mail and have it come up, this is a way to do that search using Twitter.  They just feature this query and it allows them to get a direct link to always send them new results as they pop up.  Does that make sense?  Does that not make sense to anybody?

Audience Member: Why would somebody choose to do that instead of having a Realtor find the property for them?  So they do the work and you don’t?

Daniel Odio: Well the reason that we are doing this is just to try using Twitter to see how it works.  So where you guys may be, for example, blogging, its where I am with Twitter.  How can Twitter be useful?  How can I use it to make money in the real world?  So this is an experiment that we’re doing.  I’m curious to see if Google rewards us with SEO results for using Twitter.  That’s one of the reasons we’re doing it.  It’s also just a great, easy search tool.

Moderator: So, let’s open it up.  We’ve got about 12 or 15 minutes, so what did this bring up for you?  What questions are you left with?

Audience Member: I guess my question is: how do you all do this stuff and have a life?  What I’m find is that I’m getting way over stimulated and frustrated with having 70 emails and I’m trying to do blogging.  I like it, but I don’t want it taking over my life.  I don’t like it that much.  So I’m really trying to find a balance.  I love Face Book, but I have to say: I can’t be on Face Book all the time.  I’ve been in real estate for a long time and I know how it can over take your life.  I’ve managed not to let that happen.  So how do you keep social media from taking over your life?

Frank Llosa: You make time for what’s important to you and with your e-mails you have to really understand a lot of these e-mail tools and make sure that your inbox is as clean as possible.  I’ve turned off all of my Face Book sending stuff to my e-mail.  So if I’m not your friend immediately, don’t be offended.  I wait for the once every few days that I might hop onto face book to see if there’s anyone who wants to befriend me. 

So I keep my inbox as clean as possible.  I have a lot of filters so that things that are automatically sent to me will go to a folder and I’ll see them when I want to see them.  So you have to manage your e-mails.  I have multiple e-mail addresses and some of the important ones come to my cell phone.  The other ones don’t.  So it’s a whole different panel of discussion on e-mail management.  But as far as finding the time, you know.  But it’s a balance that you’ve got to find.

Daniel Odio: So I would say that there are two facets to the answer.  One is: be more efficient with technology and the other is: replace online activities.  So for those of you who are more advanced in the room, try using keyboard shortcuts.  I’m not kidding you – you will save a week every year by not touching that mouse.  That mouse if of the devil! 

[laughing]

Daniel Odio: Every little time you click a button you could be using the keyboard short cut to do that.  Go learn that.  It’s the hardest habit you will ever have to break is not using the mouse, but then you can go on vacation for one week every year and be more efficient than other people, seriously.  I am a big champion of keyboard shortcuts.  Microsoft is designed for people with disabilities to just be able to use the keyboard so it is possible to do everything on the keyboard.  You don’t have to ever use the mouse.  That’s one thing.  So just be more efficient with the technology.

But also, how much time do you spend driving to see a client to get signatures?  Or how much time do you spend marketing an offline traditional means?  So whatever you can replace with oneline activities.  Instead of – how many of us in the room have gotten questions about lead paint where people want to know what this lead paint disclosure means again, right.  So instead of spending the 15 minutes to answer them, go spend three hours like Frank does and write a blog about it and then figure how much 15 minutes times 100 times per year would be.

Audience Member: I appreciate and I respect the opinions that you all have done.  I can see the  prospecting and using technology, but what happened to the human interaction variable?  When do you decide to actually have a real phone call?  Why can’t you call people to ask for signatures?  I can understand.  I’ve done the e-mails.  Do you get to hear what’s in their voice, what they’re thinking about and check in with them?  Because not everyone expresses themselves written.  I got a call from a guy last night.  I could have handled it through e-mail, but obviously he was concerned.  He didn’t want another e-mail because I had already e-mailed him the answer, but he wanted to be reassured in person or over the phone.  So my concern is: how do you replace having real consulting and advisory conversations with people?  I don’t think you hear peoples feelings if you’re getting a text as opposed to an e-mail. 

I mean no disrespect with this answer.  I love the way that you are thinking because that means that there are fewer of us doing it the way we are doing it and that means there are more clients who are craving Realtors that understand the way they live.  Clients that use the instant messaging.  Clients that would prefer to interact by e-mail.  Clients that want to be able to vet a realtor without actually having to listen to that Realtor over the phone.  They want to be able to go somewhere and find an expert trove where they can make their own decisions.  I can completely understand your perspective and there are clients who aren’t right for this social media aspect, but you know what?  I’d be willing to say that there are a lot more clients out there that want the kind of interaction that we’re providing than want an old-fashioned phone call.  So you take the old-fashioned phone calls and we’ll take the rest.

Audience Member: Wait a minute, I want to rebut that.  What I’m saying is: I can understand it in terms of lead generation and providing ….

Frank Llosa: When you’re in a transaction you can have a relationship and use the phone.

Heather Flynn: You have to talk to people the way that they want you to reach out to them.  Some people are looking for it one way and others in different ways.  I have clients who are going to call me when they want an answer and I have others who say: “It’s easier for me to send a text message.”  It’s not so much what you want it’s what your clients want and you being able to respond accordingly.  Absolutely you still pick up the phone and talk to them when they want to hear it.

Frank Llosa: That’s just going over board if they call you and you hang up on them and ask them to send you a Tweet.

[end of audio]

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Social Media in Real Estate: A Panel

Part 1 of 2

Frank Llosa: Hello.  I’m Frank Llosa, www.franklyrealty.com  I do a lot of blogging; video blogging.  I do a little bit of Twitter; not that much, a little bit of Face Book.  I don’t go crazy on those things though. 

Dewita Soeharjono: I’m Dewita Soeharjono, with [xx] I do a lot more blogging a little bit of Face Book and more on Twitter.

Heather Flynn: I’m Heather Flynn I’m with Century 21, Redwood Reality in Ashburn and I’m pretty well on every piece of social media out there; Flickr, Twitter, Linked In, and Face Book.

Daniel Odio: Hello everybody.  My name is Daniel Odio.  I am the owner of DROdio Real Estate.  I’m actually not a Realtor at heart.  I am a tech guy who got into real estate so that’s my background.  I’m a broker in four states, I have a securities license and I do residential and commercial.

Rick Bosl: Hi.  I’m Rick Bosl.  I’m an Associate Broker with Keller Williams Realty in Arlington.  I’ve been in Real Estate for about six years now and before that I had an IT background.  I’m getting into all kinds of social media; Linked In, Face Book, and I’m starting to get on Twitter too, so a little bit of everything. 

Pam O’Brien: All right.  I’m Pam O’brien and I’m the team leader at Keller Williams Realty in Arlington.  I’m very pleased that we could have such a nice bright group of people all together.  I very much appreciate you all showing up. 

Just to get us started, what is social media?  Who wants to take that one?  What is social media?  I’m sure most of you saw the flier: “Using Social Media in Real Estate,”  and you may have been thinking I I sort of know what that is, but not really.  Heather.  You said you’re on everything.  What is social media?

Frank Llosa: People may not know who she is … I read her blog.  She is the www.VARbuzz.com

blog buzz winner of Virginia last year.  So this is definitely.  She took me out in the third round I think.

Heather Flynn: Frank’s is up there, but he’s not better though!  Social media, from my standpoint, is a means through which I can reach my clients in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise reach them.  Also to meet new people, new clients, network with other agents; other agents across the country even.

Rick Bosl: We have all been described as being the fourth generation of computing.  Then 70’s had mainframes, the 80’s had PC’s that centralized everything, then in the 90’s the Internet came along and now the fourth wave is Social Media.  It’s big.  I think right now there’s one hundred and fifty million people on Face Book already and it’s growing by millions every week.

Daniel Odio: I would actually like to answer this question by asking a question of all of you which is just to just to understand the composition of the audience.  I would love to know a couple of things, so if you could raise your hands.  How many of you blog for your real estate practice specifically?  So what is that?  About one third of the room.  How many of you Twitter either for real estate or personally?  Six.  So blogging, Twittering, do any of you use You Tube?  It looks like most of you blog, some use You Tube and a few of you Twitter. 

The majority of you in this room I would imagine, are very curious about this phenomenon and wondering how you can apply it to your businesses and your lives.  What I would tell you is that trying to figure out how to use Social Media in a vacuum is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.  So let me kind of re-frame the question: in my mind the value of social media is that it exposes the content of the organization to the people that want to see it.

So when I think of Social Media, I don’t think of Social Media, I think of exposing content.  I’ll talk a lot today, personally my view about why exposing content is such a big deal and so underrated.  Just think that the people who want to see your expertise can see it not only when they’re making a purchasing decision, but also when they’re choosing what Realtor they want to use.  The content is there, at the right moment, and social media is the vehicle through which it’s being delivered. 

Heather Flynn: Let me follow up with that: how many people are on Face Book here?  Is there anybody that’s not yet? Oh wow!  OK.

Pam O’Brien: Here is going to be our challenge: that you have to go back at the end of the take just to sign up.  It’s really not scary.  It’s free and it’s easy.  I’ve even done it, so you can do it.  Any other social media forums that anybody else is using that we haven’t mentioned yet?  Something that you see as a social forum that we haven’t mention yet?

Audience Member: Linked In.

Pam O’Brien: Linked In.  Yes.  I think our consensus on Linked In has been that it’s kind of been superseded; that it was the business networking forum, but it has now been surpassed by Face Book.  Face Book has kind of come up and taken that away.  I see that Daniel has a comment on that already.

Daniel Odio: I was actually going to ask about another one that I just started using for the really progressive types; is anybody using www.ping.fm?  We’ll talk a little bit about www.ping.fm today.

Heather Flynn: Also Flickr is another way you can reach out to your community if you’re taking picture of local monuments or your downtown area.

Frank Llosa: Also regular old school instant messaging.  Consider the old school.  I use that more than all the other ones combined for my business.

Pam O’Brien: I’d like to go ahead and expand on that if we could Frank.  Go ahead and talk about how you use the instant messaging and how it saves you time because I think that maybe something that a lot of us can get some value from that we haven’t thought about much.

Frank Llosa:  I use a program called “Trillion.”  Trillion allows you to have one program running on your computer while you chat with five different systems.  Someone might be a Yahoo chatter, another one might be an AOL chatter; they all have different programs, but Trillion allows you to have one program to talk to whatever program they have.  So you’re kind of being reverse compatible so to speak.  

So I’ll have 50 people that are online live at any point in time on my Trillion account and I’ll be talking to one client who is using instant messaging who can’t talk on the phone because they’re at work but they do have G-Talk so they can chat with me that way.  They’re asking me a loan question.  Meanwhile I can hit up my lender on instant messaging and ask him a question at the exact same time that I’m chatting with my client. 

Then if there is a closing question, my closing company is on instant messaging and so I’ve got three windows open and people simultaneously having conversations and getting everything done within a matter of seconds as opposed to sending an e-mail, waiting for the person to actually check their e-mail, or make a phone call and leave a voice mail, in a matter of seconds, it’s all done via instant messaging.

Whenever I have an idea for a site or a page design, there is always someone up, even at 3:00 am that I can send an instant message to and say: “Hey, can you check this out?” and I get instant feedback.  So I use that as a social work environment.  You just have to make sure that you don’t get carried away and use it as just wasteful chatting, but you can actually use it as a business tool. 

Entire office can actually use it as a virtual office space by making all their agents have instant messaging so you know when the agent has been in front of their computer and has touched their keyboard in the last five minutes.  It’s actually set up so that it knows whether you’re away or online right now.  It’s just another way, rather than someone being in your office and walking past your office that you may not have called and may not have e-mailed and you’re like: “Hey!  I’ve got a question for you.”  It’s kind of like that.

There are also some headaches that you will have to slowly have to learn such as don’t expect an instant response.  In the middle of a conversation they might fall off and not respond again for a few minutes.  It’s just a different type of medium that you have to get used to.  There are some short cuts like: “OTP” means on the phone, which is what I use for anything like if I need to go to get some snacks in the other room I just say: “OTP” because it’s the shortest way of saying: “Hey, give me a moment.” 

So instant messaging I use a lot.  I don’t use instant messaging on my cell phone.  I drew the line there.  I don’t like getting beeped every second.

Pam O’Brien: I know that one of the questions that I had and I’m sure most of you are also wondering: how much time does this take?  Is this a time saver or a time killer?

Heather Flynn: How much time do you spend searching for prospects a day?

Pam O’Brien: Me?  Three hours a day.

Heather Flynn:  So that’s how I prospect for business. 

Pam O’Brien: OK, so in your book, it’s a time saver.

Dewita Soeharjono: Yes, I think even though you put time into blogging or twittering, it’s a time saver because with prospecting, you don’t know who is reading your blog, you don’t know who is going to send something to you.  So you are reaching out to people that you normally wouldn’t be able to reach.  So it’s like a mass mailing, but at their convenience.

Rick Bosl: I was going to ask the same thing: is it a time saver or a time waster?  By blogging you reach out to people all at once, but I know a lot of people get carried away on Face Book and just waste a lot of time chatting, but I think for the most part it could save a lot of time.

Daniel Odio: So to answer that question let me give you two secret tools that I use.  I would imagine that a lot of you don’t use them that I am willing to bet will be incredible time savers in your lives. 

Let me ask you who in this room has gone to visit a client to get signatures on a contract?  How many of you actually physically traveled to see a client?  For those of you raising your hands, I haven’t physically gone to get signatures from a client in four years and we also don’t have a fax machine in our office if you can believe that, so when ever something comes in, we scan it.  We use an e-fax program called: “Max e-mail,” that’s www.maxe-mail.com if I need to send a fax, I actually send an e-mail.  You actually send faxes through e-mails.  So Max e-mail is great. 

Couple that with electronic signatures.  When I first go to see a client, or even just via e-mail, I have them sign a sheet of paper that says that we have the right to stamp their signatures onto a contract.  We then e-mail it to them to approve.  They send us back an e-mail approving the contract where we can stamp their signature so we have something in writing linking the signature to the e-mail address and then we send the contract off.  So we use the combination of electronic signatures and Max e-mail and we don’t need a fax machine and we don’t need to actually go see clients. 

I just laugh when an agent says: my clients are out of town and I can’t get signature until a week from now.  We’ve had clients literally on the beach in Tahiti approving our stamped contracts via their Blackberries on the beach.  So that’s one approach that we use. 

The second is Call Wave.  Who in this room uses Call Wave?  OK so Google voice has just come out with a voice mail to e-mail transcription service.  The predecessor was www.callwave.com. I haven’t listened to a voice mail in two years. I read my voice mail.  When somebody leaves me a message, it gets transcribed into text and e-mailed to me.  So literally if you want to try this, you can call me right now and leave me a message and it will be transcribed into text and I will show it to you guys after the meeting.  So my number is: (202) 250-3846 sometime in the next hour try to leave me a message and I’ll show you what it looks like via e-mail.

When I get that e-mail/voice-mail, the audio is attached but usually I just read the e-mail and I can forward it along to the person who actually has to deal with the issue.  So call wave and electronic signatures coupled with Max Email are really big time savers.

Pam O’Brien: The topic that I wanted to go to next is: where’s the benefits?  Who else would like to talk about some of the benefits?  Frank.

Frank Llosa: I can expand on the time-saving concept.  Have anyone here had to spend more than six minutes explaining short sales?

[laughing]

Frank Llosa: Maybe it takes seven or eight minutes, right or maybe like an hour.  I spent three hours writing up a short-sale blog so that I would never have to talk about it ever again.  Now it takes me 30 second to talk about a short sale because all I do is send a link in my e-mail.  I say: “This is the link to the most current information on short sales.  Here is the background, here is the latest,” and that’s it.  Initially a client can find it a little bit rude, thinking that I’m not giving them personalized service, but when they actually go to read the blog post they’re like: “Oh, I get it.  I would take you four hours to explain this to me, and now I’m an expert!”  At the end they say: “I do want to do short sales,” or “I don’t want to do short sales.”  But I’ve saved tons of time. 

If my client has Instant Messaging and they have questions like: “This thing says ’short sale,’ what’s that?”  I copy it from my blog and paste it to the instant messaging window within eight seconds.  As far as hours being saved, that is priceless.  That HIT has gotten, I think 100 comments posted to it, and actually Business Week linked to it, so when business week links to it, that makes it look good too.

Daniel Odio: On the subject of blogging, there are three main benefits as far as I’m concerned: I always said that Henry Ford would have loved blogs because if you use it once, you’ll use it a thousand times. 

The second major benefit you get is that Google rewards you very richly for having unique blogs.  Google is thirsty for unique content.  If you want to appear at the top of Google results for a certain search, you need to be blogging and you need to be blogging a lot.  You probably need to write 300 blog postings I would guess to become a subject matter in Googles eyes, but it will return you in searches.

The third, more important than the other two benefits you get is that clients know that you know your stuff.  It’s just like referrals.  Imagine you get cold leads coming in and they’re as warm as referrals.  “Hey Daniel.  I saw your low [xx] offers video and I know that you know how to do this.”  How often does that happen when you get a cold lead?  It happens with blogging.

Heather Flynn: I just want to expand on that.  Depending on what topic you’re writing about, it can take a while to get ranked.  If you’re writing about local content or things like that, you can be at the top of the search rankings after one post if it’s something that there is not a lot of content about. 

But that definitely is true, you write it once – I’ve got one on short sales that I use exactly the same way that you do.  It’s not linked to by Business Week but it’s still good.   That’ was a post that I wrote a year ago and I’m still using it and it just makes it easier.

Pam O’Brien:I think that’s one of the time saving things that Frank and I were having a conversation about.  He was like: “Oh, by the way, your e-mails look like spam; read this,”  and he sent me a link.  Then he said: “Oh yeah, by the way, you need to learn about subject lines too; read this,” and he sent me a link.  I found that very helpful because for any interaction the reason behind it.  So once you create it you can link back to it.  So it can be a time-savers which is definitely one of the benefits.  

Moderator: Would anybody like to address how much time do you spend in an average week actually working at various social media sites?

Dewita Soeharjono: I spend a lot of time online.  If I’m not tracking out there what you would find is that I’m online.  I have choices, but that’s our idea of people is online.  Also I think at the same time it’s also a process to educate myself about the industry.  When you go out there and read all these publications, they are not Realtors.  What if a Realtor is not right about something?  So in addition to all these benefits this is a way to ensure that you are receiving accurate information by cross checking with multiple sources.  You also get exposure that you don’t have to pay for. 

Audience Member: Can you tell us what’s occurring on the screen?

Frank Llosa: What is going on is a twitter conversation live.  There is something called a hash tag which is the pound sign (#) SOCVA.  So if you’re on Twitter and use #SOCVA then it all gets brought into this one little forum.  People that are in the audience are sending messages that are being read across the United States. 

Daniel Odio:  This is actually one of my favorite uses of Twitter.  If there is someone in the audience who wants to ask me a question and you don’t want to raise your hand Twitter it and it will show up here as long as you put the #SOCVA.  That’s the search key that’s making all the posts show up here.  So again it’s always in content.  This content that’s happening in this room right now is being streamed live onto the Internet where it will be saved.  People who Google Social Media a year from now might find these pieces of content and can learn from them.

Frank Llosa: We’re also recording the video, the entire discussion, and the we’ll put that on www.Viddler.com. 

Daniel Odio: This is also an example of crowd sourcing.  It could also be a great time saver.  Just this morning, I’m working on a web design for my website, so I gave a sneak preview to all my Face Book friends and asked for comments and feedback, you know.  Just within a few hours I got numerous recommendations of things I could do it and things they could like about it and what not.  So before I go live I’m going to incorporate all those ideas.  These are things I wouldn’t have thought of myself.

Audience Member: How do you decide, like for example, you just said: “I sent something out to my Face Book friends.”  So how would you guys decide if you’re going to do that on Twitter or Face Book because Twitter serves a certain demographics and Face Book another.  So how do you decide?  Or do you just do it on everything that exists?

Daniel Odio: Well you could actually set it up so that your tweets on Twitter feed right into your Face Book page.  It kind of brings up one of the other questions we’re going to get to: how do you divide between your personal life and your business life?  Face Book gets a little tricky.  It gets a little murky in there, so it’s not an easy question actually.

On Face Book, one of the things I’ve started doing is creating a separate profile page for my business, and that’s a public Face Book page.  You don’t need to be on Face Book to actually see it.  I’m trying to use ads more too.  But my friends at Face Book know I trust their feedback and it also gets the word out that a new site is coming. 

Heather Flynn: I was just going to say that you don’t have to use all types of social media.  Not everybody is cut out to be a blogger.   There’s writing skills that are involved and not everybody enjoys writing.  So that’s not necessarily going to work for everybody.  Just as Twitter doesn’t always appeal to everyone.  Face Book doesn’t work for other people. 

So you sort of have to decide where you want to be and while you’re there, the audience that you have around you is who you’re going to ask for advice.  I’ll go on Twitter and say “Hey, I just redesigned my blog, how does this look?”  And I’ll get feedback from there or I might go to face book.  It’s just a matter of who you’re trying to reach.  I probably have more local people and potential clients that I’m connected with on Face Book than I do on Twitter.  There are other people that I’m friends with in the business that would say the exact opposite, so your mileage may vary depending on what your goals are.

Audience Member: On Face Book they have to be your friends whereas on Twitter just anybody in the worlds in on it?

Moderator: Talk about how Twitter works because they have to sign up to follow you on Twitter.

Daniel Odio: These are very personal decisions and everyone is going to make them differently.  Again, I go back to exposing content you don’t have to be on social media to to expose content.  The more content and expertise you choose to expose to the world, the more people you’ll have coming to you asking for your services.  It’s just a personal choice.  I set up profiles on Twitter and Face Book so that I have different types of friends; I have a professional list, a family list, and Face Book takes care of the rest.

On Twitter, I’ve got different accounts: www.twitter.com/DRodio is my personal one.  We have www.twitter.com/DRodiohomefeed.  That is actually Twittering every new listing that comes on the market.  You can check that one out.  I’ve just set up there at Twitter a couple of accounts.  I would recommend, even if you’re not going to use Twitter, go to www.twitter.com, it takes 20 seconds, grab the domain.  Www.twitter.com/{yourname} even it you’re not going to use it.  I think it’s going to be a lot like domain names were where the good ones go fast.  You could grab 20 if you wanted to; www.twitter.com/{Arlington VA Homes} or whatever you want to do.  It doesn’t hurt, it’s free, it takes 20 seconds to do it.  Go get your piece of the Twitter pie so you can use it later. 

Frank Llosa:I just got a message from Fairfax saying that my posting was working and I wasn’t able to see it up there so I said: “Is this thing on?” and someone in Fairfax replied: “Yeah, yeah, it’s working!” So …

Moderator: Another question I have had when we were talking and putting this together is: Is it too late?  If I haven’t started it yet, is it too late for me to get started? 

Heather Flynn: I would equate it, from the Twitter standpoint, as a bar that never closes.  There are always conversations going on so you can never start too late.  The same goes for blogging because you’re putting your own voice out there and no one else is going to be able to do that in your place.  So you’re representing yourself online and your voice is going to come through so it’s never too late to get started.

Daniel Odio: And I would say that it’s like buying real estate in New York in 1900.  It’s like you don’t have to buy it in 1900, but if you wait until 2000 it’s going to be a lot more expensive and a lot harder to do.  It will require a lot more effort.  For example, how many people in this room have heard of DRodio Real Estate?  I’m going to guess it’s not a lot.  So it’s 10% or 20% of you.  If you Google any new listing, chances are that DRodio Real Estate is one of the first results, right.  So nobody knows about us in the physical world, but in the virtual world we’re getting 30 leads everyday.  Everyday we get 30 wire leads. 

So is it too late to start?  It’s not too late to start, but the longer you wait, the harder it’s going to be.

Rick Bosl: It’s definitely not too late to start as I mentioned before there are one hundred fifty million people on Face Book and I think probably fifty million just signed up in the past year, so it’s growing fast.  I think we’re all trying to figure out how it works now and how we’re going to use it in our business, but you just have to get on there and start doing it.

Audience Member: How many of those leads you’re talking about go to closing?

Daniel Odio: Well, I think there’s a whole conversation we could have about leads, right?  Probably everyone in this room has dealt with things like: www.justlisted.com. You pay $300.00 per month to get web leads, but the problem is that Realtors are really really bad at taking care of leads that don’t close immediately, right?  Because we have to be putting food on the table.  So we’re always working the three or the five leads that are going to be closing in the next 60 or 90 days. 

Web leads don’t close in 60 – 90 days.  They close in six to 18 months.  So the way that we’ve handled that problem is: when a lead comes in, we call them and if they’re not looking immediately, we put them in a type of drip category where when we write on the blog, they get that blog so we’re providing this expert content every time.  It’s kind of like a crock pot; we’re just keeping them warm.  Then over time there is a certain percentage that will trickle down and get ready to be serious.  That’s when we engage them with a group of agents that we have. 

It’s this whole other type of process that’s very foreign to most of the people in this room.  You can’t force a web lead because you’ll get more people than you want to, but if you can figure out a way to take care of them and call them over the next two years, they’re actually pretty decent leads.  It’s just not a skill set that most of us have.

Audience Member: So when do you have your first face-to-face meeting with these people?  Some people you never meet face-to-face?

Daniel Odio: We typically don’t actually meet these leads until they’re ready to start looking at specific properties.  We give them a lot of tools, like we loan out a free GPS machine so they can drive themselves around.  We make available to them “The Best Home Search Ever,” it’s available on iTunes so that wherever you are, with your iPhone, you can find out what properties are for sale in the area.  Things like that so that we’re not spending our time.  Remember, it’s all about exposing content so this all fits together because now, we’ve exposed so much content that we don’t have to be spending our very precious time dealing with these web leads.  There’s a lot out there for them to find.

Heather Flynn: I just want to interject too that not every lead that you’re going to have from the web is going to be a [xx] lead.  You will get listing leads too.  So you have to look at it from that perspective as well. 

Moderator: Can anybody give me a demographic on those?  Are you getting everybody?

Panel: Yes.

Moderator: Everybody. 

Heather Flynn: So I think we have a perception that we tend to get more younger people from these things and that’s not necessarily true.  Weren’t you telling me that you got a couple older people?

Frank Llosa: No.

Heather Flynn: I made it up?  OK, I made it up!  I swear somebody told me that they were really getting all ages, all demographics.  It’s not limited to just first-time home buyers.  It really is a little bit of everything.  People are looking for a way to kind of sift and sort through when they’re trying to figure out who they want to work with as a Real Estate Agent.  So they’re going to decide: who has content?  Who has value?  Who can give me information?  How can I get through some of this stuff before I  make my decision on who I’m going to work with?  So it really is all demographics.  Do you all agree on that?

Frank Llosa: Another thing is: if you don’t think you’re a writer, you have to find your own voice; find your own system.  You can also use You Tube.  You can grab any of these $150.00 cameras, put it on the lowest video mode, and talk.  You can post that on You Tube.

Another thing you can do is: you think you don’t know how to write a blog well, but yet you write long, long e-mails.  The other day someone wrote me a question about the market in Arlington.  At the end he said: “Feel free to post this.”  So what I did was instead of e-mailing him back, I took all of his questions, answered them, and then posted it to a blog called: www.questions.franklyrealty.com.

Just a typical question of the day and that is content.  So rather than just helping that one person it’s helping many people.  It’s helping many people, Google finds it, clients can see what a typical answer would be if they were to ask me a question and it only took one minute longer because I had to copy and paste it, but I didn’t spend any more time on it.  So even if you don’t think you have anything to blog about, just take your actual e-mails and post them somewhere.  Obviously change the information, change the location, change the city if need be; if you want to do things anonymously. 

But also, grab a video camera.  I attach one of these video cameras to my steering wheel and I post it on www.wheelestatecam.com.   So if I’m doing a 15 minute drive some where, and I’ve got something to talk about and I wanted to write about it, but it’s been three weeks on my “to do” list then I just get it done with the video.  I’m very casual about it, sometimes I’ve got funny t-shirts that say: “I think things up,” and stuff like that.  So it’s a different audience.  Initially people might say: “Well who’s going to respect someone who’s wearing a t-shirt and jeans and hasn’t shaved?”  But if they actually listen to your content, they’re like: “Wow! He’s wearing a t-shirt and jeans and he’s saying something good.  If he was wearing a suit and saying something good, I might not trust him!  But since he’s not trying to be all formal, it actually can make it more believable.”

Daniel Odio: Just to second that point, you don’t have to be professional about this.  In fact, I completely agree with Frank that that detracts from it.  People want to see you in your home office espousing knowledge.  It just feels so real.  It’s like you get the benefit of being written up in the Washington Post by just doing a You Tube video, literally. 

Then to just show an extreme of exposing content, which is my big there here.  What I will sometimes do is I will wear a label microphone when I go out with clients and I will bring just a small Olympus audio recorder and I’ll plug that into the mic and I will ask the client: “Do you mind if I record our conversation today?”  And if they don’t mind – some clients I wouldn’t even ask because I know the would mind - but sometimes they’re really cool about it.  I say: “There are so many other clients that would just love to tag along while I show you homes today.”  So I will the two hours that I spend with that client and then I will have it transcribed for $1.00 per minute into text because Google cannot index that audio yet.  Then I will post the audio on my blog and then text below it and then I get the benefits of the blogging and I’m exposing the content.  So people can listen to that audio and Google spiders the content and it’s cost me $60.00.

Frank Llosa: Here is the Wheel Estate Came.  I sometimes have like hidden messages in there a little pop up to try to make it fun.  Everyone is going to do things a little bit differently.  The shirt is actually a little bit of a riddle, my people can figure it out.

[Panel Laughs]

Frank Llosa: It says: “I don’t give a … the rat being the monkey.”  So I just talk.  I got the idea from a guy in Canada, and he does short little one minute super hyped up on caffeine, one minute little clips.  I do seven to eight minute things talking about what the latest is on bank bidding wars and how I just saw that there is 17 offers on a bank property and it’s content.  It stays up there forever and it gets a few hundred views and it’s fun.

Moderator: There is a question over here.

Audience Member: I just want you to talk a little bit about what you blog.  I am a former journalist so I have a hard time blogging my opinion.  I want everything to be objective, so mostly what I’ve been doing are facts.  So one of the questions I have is: you talked about taking a client out and getting permission to record them, but sometimes when you’re out with a client you’re so frustrated because they do something that all kinds of people do and you want to talk about it, but I don’t know if it’s right to put that on my blog that night.  Could you address that?

Rick Bosl: Frank mentioned that a great way to get content for your blog is that when a client asks you a question and you e-mail them the answer, just put it on your blog.  In case you don’t have clients asking you questions, just go to Trillion and they have a Q&A section there.  You know, just answer some of those questions.  Take one of those and

Frank Llosa: That’s a great idea and truly you’ll have 50 questions right there.  Answer them.  Your name will go up and you’ll get ranked according to how you answer the question.  Then you can take that question and put it on your blog and there you’ve got content to start with.

Heather Flynn: I also look at what the search terms are for the people that are coming into my blog and if there’s stuff in there that I haven’t written about yet.  I write local so I write for Loundon County.  There may be something that I haven’t written about yet, so I’ll get ideas from that. 

Talk about being a former journalist, I have a Journalism Degree so I know exactly what you’re talking about.  About feeling like you can’t put your opinion on there because you weren’t trained to write that way.  When you’re in the Real Estate Market you kind of have to, especially when you get into statistics and you’re trying to put out Market stats for a neighborhood or a zip code or something like that. 

It’s tough to get past that, but there is so much benefit to doing that; to showing your opinion and showing what you think of what’s happening with the market.  Once I got past that – I think I’ve had local musings for a year and a few months now - and it took me about three months to get over that, but I think that’s when I really started seeing the benefit payoff because then you’ve really got engagement with your reader because they’re hearing what you think. 

Daniel Odio: I know this stuff can be really intimidating.  I mean who is intimidated about all of this in this room?  Is that pretty clear to you?  So hey, it’s OK and just start with something really simple and maybe we can all just say what we think are really simple ways to start.  www.activerain.com is a great place to start blogging.  The blog is basically already set up for you.  So just start writing there.  Go to Twitter and just start writing. 

All you’re doing is exposing your own content.  You are the expert of your domain.  You have it in your head you just have to somehow get it out to the world.  That’s all you’re doing.  This is a tool that you’re using.  For those of you that are more advanced, www.ping.fm which I just started using and I love is basically an aggregate of all these different blogs and Twitters, so you just go to www.ping.fm and you set up accounts for Face Book and Twitter.  And then you can write one thing on www.ping.fm and it shows up across all the different media.  That’s for those of you who have already done this type of thing.

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