Social Media in Real Estate: A Panel (part 1 of 2)

Daniel R. Odio was recently on a social media panel, discussing real estate: …Part 1 of 2:

Here is a transcript from the event:

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.