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

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

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]