Social Media Starter Moves for Real Estate
Disclaimer right up front: I’m not in the real estate biz, so I’ll write this from the perspective of what I’ve observed and what might be useful. Some REAL real estate pro can come and fix this on their own blog, and it’d likely be better. Why would I ever let a simple thing like inexperience get in the way of sharing my opinion?
Show Me the House
The first and most obvious thing I think the real estate world can (and should) be doing is buying video cameras and shooting their own walkthroughs. You don’t have to be a pro. You DO have to know how not to make something look horrible, but that comes with trial and error.
Pick up a Video Camera
If you don’t already own a video camera, two ends of the spectrum that I’d recommend for realtors are:
Sanyo Xacti VPC-E1 for a nicer rig (around $400) , or the Flip Video Ultra Series Camcorder for around $160.
The Xacti is a higher end picture. The Flip is YouTube quality. Honestly, the Flip is the camera for the job, but some folks want the best, so it’s up to you. Me? I’d buy the Flip. (Personally, I use a digital camera’s movie setting to shoot most of my stuff).
Editing
Now, to actually do it, you have two options: learn how to edit things easily in iMovie (Mac) or Windows Media Maker (PC), or pay someone to edit what you shoot. Benefits of A are that you can do it when you need it and your time is all you pay. Benefits of B are that the editor will be good at what they do, will save you time, and will know what to do next. Drawback of B is that it costs and you have no control of when you get back your files, depending on how professional your person is.
Posting the Video
Last step to putting a video up is to find hosting for the video so that you can then embed it on your blog. YouTube makes sense for two reasons. One, it’s easy and most people can navigate it. Two, it becomes a second market for your homes if you’ve added captions at the end that show how to contact you.
If you want a different look and feel from YouTube, you can try Blip.tv, Brightcove, Vimeo and a gazillion other companies who host video and have a nifty player.
I could probably write a series on just how to add video to your world, but I’m in the middle of another series, so let’s leave it there for now. If you want helping DOING any of this, let me know and I’ll point you to the right resources.
Ways Your Blog Will Help
First, blogging about certain properties you’re hoping to move will give you an obvious potential return, but that might be limited. Instead, think of what buyers and sellers might need to know, and what they might need to know about you. You’re likely going to weigh this information heavily on the sell side, and that’s okay, so make your website a great place to learn about things like “curb appeal” and how to declutter a home for better show-ability. Give people ideas that have added thousands back to the sale price of your clients’ homes.
Testimonials
People are so itchy about asking for testimonials. Don’t be. Ask. Ask your clients with whom you’ve had a great business experience to comment. Want to get really edgy? Be willing to post someone’s negative comments about your business with them, and don’t be defensive. Instead, just thank them.
The Secret Sauce
As a media maker, you can do things that will add to one’s impressions of a potential new home. You can shoot video of the general neighborhood, add Flickr photos of some selling points of the town, record audio reports of people’s general feelings of the town. Can you imagine the impact that might make? You could potentially take a “normal looking” house and demonstrate the value of the home’s setting through media.
Will everyone care? No. WIll you have a chance to reach more folks? I’m betting yes.
What’s your take?
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The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo credit, dry icons
Social Media Starter Moves for Freelancers
Opportunities for entrepreneurial spirits, freelancers, and consultants are on the rise. A weaker economy (as we’re experiencing in the US right now) is one reason, but another is the flexibility such employees offer companies who might not have the resources (or want the overhead) related to taking on full time staff for certain roles. And yet, with our attention forever dividing, how can you rise above the fray and be not only seen but selected for the opportunities you seek? Here are some thoughts on the matter.
First: Professionalism, or Not
Before you even start in on this whole thing, determine whether you’re a fun-loving soul, looking to make a few extra bucks on the side, or whether you’re seeking to build a sustainable stream of revenue for you to sustain yourself and possibly a family. If A, skip pretty much everything I’m about to tell you. If B, read on.
Your Blog, Your Storefront
If you’re in the business of delivering a service, such as coding skills, design, marketing expertise, sales, etc, there’s a whole lot of factory work that you do that’s not easily displayed. And yet, you need a storefront to productize what you do (hat tip to my friend, Liz Strauss for talking with me today about her passion for turning what someone does into a product).
Ads, Sidebars, and Widgets
Before we get down to tacks, let’s do some cleaning:
- Kill “random” ads. If you’re a successful freelancer, why are you trying to make beer money with your site?
- Kill random widgets. To simplify, tidy the hell out of your blog so that it looks clean and professional-ish (you can have fun, and be engaging, but consider your buying audience).
- Kill the calendar thingy. NO ONE navigates by it.
- Look for useless widgets. Your “phases of the moon” graphic slows down your blog and diffuses your intent.
- Enable comments and make it as easy as possible.
Posting Ideas
Now, let’s talk about your blog as your business engine:
- Start writing posts that cover your space and establish yourself as the thought leader, only humble. Be the “thought learner.”
- STOP writing posts that are horribly off-topic, or at least keep it a 10:1 ratio of on- to off-topic.
- Link to other blogs that cover your space as well, and say complimentary things when you can. This is an abundance mentality space. Sure there are plenty of folks who aren’t the best like you, but when you say it, it makes you sound cheap.
- Make sure your passion shows through. That’s what people buy.
- The more you explore NEW ideas in your space, and further, explain right out in the open how people can make money, reduce costs, etc, the more business you’ll bring in.
About and Contact
Make your about page read like a great (somewhat brief) testimonial. People want to know first and foremost what you can do for them. Write it as if the person reading it is asking, “I like Sonia. How do I work with her?”
If you can, include a recent headshot. If you don’t have a great one, buy a throwaway digital camera for $20 and shoot shots of your head until you get a good one. It’s not THAT hard. Don’t do one of those scary Glamour Shots (no offense to the organization) or those grownup versions of school photos with the weird cloud background. Here’s one spot where you can be somewhat creative in what you put up there. Make it somehow reflect what you’re hoping to portray.
Put your CONTACT information everywhere. On the main page. On the About page. On the Contact page. Make it really easy for people to reach you and do business with you.
Promoting Your Blog
Here’s a quick list of ways to get a little more love and attention to your blog:
- Add your blog URL to your signature file for your email.
- Add your blog URL to your LinkedIn profile, your MySpace page, your Facebook profile.
- Use Facebook tools like FlogBlog and Blog Friends and Feed Heads. they all expand your reach.
- Get a Twitter account.
- Get a Flickr account.
- Join a few blog directories (google for these)
- Share links via email with folks.
- Use FeedBurner and put a “subscribe by email” option on your blog.
Community Building: Beyond Your Blog
Get active on other people’s blogs. Build relationships with other people in your space. If you’re a freelance musician, get really active on people’s MySpace pages, their blogs, their fan forums. Be where the people you need to reach are, and then be part of that scene. Some suggestions:
- Twitter - Say what you will, but Twitter is a way to get to know other people (mostly in the tech scene, but you’d be surprised. TONS of knitters on Twitter, for example).
- Ning - There are plenty of groups and shared interests in this white label social network platform, and more and more people using it.
- Facebook - Groups there can be active, and/or can go quiet fairly quickly (my experience, overall).
- Yahoo! Groups - Don’t forget this very 1.0 method of reaching active communities of people.
- UPDATE: Laura and Jeremy said lots of people get a great community– and business! — out of LinkedIn.
Real Time Social Gatherings
Now more than ever, opportunities to meet and connect with people in the real world are important and valuable for your ability to meet and do business with others. You don’t have to go in like oldschool networkers, eager to suck in as many handshakes and business cards as humanly possible in the shortest amount of time, but you SHOULD consider how this will all relate back to your strategy of building business relationships that might result in appropriate work opportunities for you. To that end, some thoughts.
- Conferences are great (I produce them for a living, so of course I’ll say that). Get to know lots of people in a short amount of time, while hopefully being educated on topics that matter to you. Check Upcoming.org and Eventful for lists of conferences that relate to your space.
- Make decent looking business cards. Your hack job Staples photocopy cards are quaint, but immediately tell me that you were unprepared. (I’ve been this guy twice over the last 2 years). And by decent looking, “clever” only seems interesting while I’m shaking your hand. Cards that tell me how to reach you and how you and I might do business are awesome. Provide your cell number, no matter what.
- Write some great blog content the days leading up to an event, so that when people read your business card and see your blog prominently displayed there (you knew that, right?), they’ll check you out and realize you’re the right person to hire for that blog redesign project.
- Go to more than just conferences. Attend social media gatherings, local events, meetups. Don’t be afraid. LOTS of new folks show up. If you can, find a Twitter user or a blogger or someone you can learn about ahead of time. Build the relationship BEFORE you go, and that will help with some of the anxiety.
Rich Media- Video and Audio
If you’ve got the time and inclination, make a podcast or videoblog about the space you’re passionate about. Want to hear a great marketing podcast? Check out Marketing Over Coffee. I’d here those two guys in a heartbeat to train a traditional team to do new stuff. Want to know about a great personal development trainer? I’d check out The Bigg Success Show.
Video? Gary Vaynerchuk is the poster child for demonstrating authenticity while building trust in his personal and business brand. Another great example overall would be what Ben Yoskowitz is doing at Standout Jobs. Learn from that.
Video and audio are great tools to build up an experience with your potential audience. It gives people a sense of how you might be in person. Even though you could edit the hell out of your media such that you’d still show up as polished and professional, it’s one more wall coming down between a “no” and a “yes.”
Some might ask whether this opens people up for potential discrimination. Absolutely. I have no doubt. That was what kept LinkedIn from putting up optional profile pictures for a long while too, but after a while, it’s a question of whether or not you just want to put who you are out there and call it good. That’s your call. My take? They’re going to meet you at some point, right?
Strategy Point: Give to Get
In the world of freelancing, my take is that the best way to build relationships and get more business is to help other people get business. This has nothing to do with social media. It has everything to do with humans. If you’re helpful, and if you’re out there giving people ideas, tools, insights, and passing on connections where you think they’ll do the most good, you’ll likely be in someone’s mind when something good comes along.
Part of this goes into the space of thinking about “free.” Don’t be so eager to get paid for every little thing you do. (Disclaimer: I’m teetering on dirt broke most of the time, so maybe this isn’t sound FINANCIAL advice.) I believe that there are lots of “long tail” opportunities out there. It just becomes your duty to decide which ones are eventually going to pay off, and which ones to stop doing.
So that’s my sermon on free.
Lastly, Ask for the Sale
If you’re not out there LOOKING for customers, don’t moan that you don’t have many. Don’t be overly aggressive and barracuda-like, but by all means, if someone’s courting you a little in the comments section or the email section, ask if there’s something you can help them work on. It’s not rude. It’s not overly aggressive (okay, maybe on first contact, but if you’ve been playing email footsie, then go for it).
If you’re saying you want to use your blog and social media tools to get business, ask for business. I promise, the results will improve on that front the moment you get over that glitch.
Summary
If you’re a freelancer hoping to use social media to get work, here’s a quick summary:
- Make your blog your storefront.
- Kill all the extraneous stuff from it.
- Write posts that establish your experience and abilities in the industry.
- Write other posts that promote other people, too.
- Contribute beyond the walls of your blog.
- Attend real time events, too.
- Consider if you want to add audio and video.
- Give to get.
- Ask for the sale.
What else do you successful freelancers ( a strong segment of people who come to my site) want to share with people seeking Starter Moves? What’s your take on this advice? What can YOU do to help freelancers?
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The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
If you think this post would be helpful to someone you know, please don’t hesitate to forward them a link.
Photo Credit, Thowra_UK
The Community Ecosystem
There really aren’t many secrets to how things work in social media. There are skills to learn, and then there are human traits to re-learn. And yet, when people jump into this space and try to get results for their efforts, they’re sometimes surprised and frustrated. Sometimes, when we’re rushed, we forget the “nice” parts of things, and yet, in a community ecosystem, that’s what will drive your results. Some thoughts.
Contribute Where You Can
Brian Solis is an upstanding member of this new world. He’s been in it for almost 10 years with his forward thinking new-PR company, Future Works. When Brian comes to a gathering, he brings his monster camera and a great eye, and he snaps TONS of photos. But it’s what comes next that proves my point. Brian shares his photos on Flickr, and he shares them with Creative Commons permissions such that you can pretty much use his photos for anything, provided you give him credit.
You can contribute somewhere in the community ecosystem. Maybe it’s by sharing your photos. Maybe it’s by offering small business tips for new budding freelancers. Maybe it’s offering presentation advice. Wherever you can, offer up (for free and easily) stuff that YOU can bring to the community.
Communicate When You Can
The Zulu greet each other by saying “Sawubona,” translated literally to mean, “I see you.” It means, “I know that you’re there and I acknowledge you as another person.” The response back is, “Ngikhona,” which is literally, “I am here.”
Visiting people’s websites and/or just reading their RSS feed isn’t enough all the time. Make a point of commenting, of saying “I see you.” Sometimes (okay, often) I receive email from people saying that they don’t get any comments on their website and they wonder why they should bother. MANY people have the feeling they’re out in the wild doing nothing important. You might be contributing to this feeling by not commenting, even on occasion, on some of the places you visit.
So when you can, share a little “I see you” with the places where you interact. Because it will matter. It does come back to you. People do care.
Create What You Can
Participating, building, creating are all possible with these tools and with this way that people are seeing the landscape of work. We have the potential to be more connected to each other than ever before. And from this, we now have the opportunity to lighten the burden of others by creating things that others can use.
Some ways to create are to build things for people who don’t necessarily have the skills but you can see their need. Another way is to add value by contributing to an existing project. Other times, it’s as simple as organizing a gathering (either online or in the real world) of people with like interests, such that you can help catalyze the conversations and the shared experience. Create. Make. Do. And share.
The Community Ecosystem Isn’t About Money or Not
It’s not the question of free and hippies vs. money making capitalists. These things I’m mentioning work in both ways. You can do these things in the space where it’s just “nice,” and you can do these things in the space where the value comes back to the company in some other way. That’s not the point, because the skills required to contribute into this ecosystem are necessary in both places. In fact, they’re interchangeable.
So, how are YOU contributing? Where are you communicating? What are you creating? Come see us.
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo credit, Brian Solis, killer photographer
Social Media- Talk is Cheap for Businesses
There’s lots of talk about social media. Tons. The echo is nearly deafening at this point. Freedom. Openness. We have powerful tools to communicate. We are the media. It’s all about the conversation. We talk about this all the time. But at the same time more people are just starting to get into this, and so it’s all new and exciting and fresh all over again, businesses are starting to ask, “Hey, is there something here, or is this just another billable item like when we used to pay for someone to build us brochureware?” Businesses are asking how this stuff all threads into their world, their terms. They’re asking how we’re going to change their bottom line, deliver something to their top line, make this all worth it.
Do you have an answer for them? Here are some thoughts that lead down the path of helping businesses understand the value proposition:
Collaboration Tools- Internal
Things like blogs, podcasting, utterz, twitter, wikis, and more unified tools like Clearspace and BaseCamp are useful for internal processes and collaboration. I believe they are better than the tools most enterprises uses to communicate around a project. I believe the implementation of such tools is simple, requires little to no infrastructure (depending on security requirements), and most often can be cloud-operated, depending on comfort levels. These can be used for a number of use cases:
- Status messaging
- Informational training
- Project management
- Knowledge management
Social Networking Tools - White Label
For organizations who have a large customer base, a large partner base, or any circumstance where the audience is already fairly well defined (more often in B2C spaces), building a social network around your community such that you manage and maintain all aspects of the experience is simple. Tools like Ning and Mzinga and several others exist, can be implemented inexpensively, and deliver some potential value around a mixture of uses:
- Lead generation
- Customer service
- Community development
- Product development (Lego Mindstorm, Dell Ideastorm, My Starbucks Idea)
- Data collection (profiles and usage might drive more marketing insight)
- Recruiting
Social Networking Tools - Commercial / Consumer
The MySpace/Facebook/LinkedIN/Bebo/Orkut whatevers are all places where people gather. As such, one might use these areas as a place to market, a place to recruit, a place to understand the marketplace, a place to make relationships without strings (I know that’s crazy talk, but hey). Have they proven fertile ground for advertising? Not for B2B. How about for B2C? The results are mixed. Ad spending is shifting online. GM announced recently that they’re moving towards 1/3 of their ad spending to be online in the next little while. How much of that will show up in MySpace? Not clear.
Blogging, Podcasting, Video, Getting the Word Out
Blogging, I believe, is one of the best (maybe easiest) use cases to support. There’s the customer service angle, like how Lionel Menchaca really shifted public opinion of Dell with the Direct2Dell blog. Bill Marriott of the hotel world keeps a decent blog. There’s a value to convincing companies to blog if they:
- Write genuine, conversational content that is not just me me me.
- Put the passionate person in charge of writing, not just the boss.
- Enable comments and be willing to engage in uncomfortable discussions (with a reasonable comments policy in place).
- Respond and comment on other people’s blogs often, too.
Podcasting has some great applications, both in audio and video. The infrastructure and the production effort for both is inexpensive compared to traditional audio and video means. People are expecting more of a YouTube experience than a movie theater experience, and the more personal and direct the material, the better people relate. Businesses are learning how video can sweeten the experience. Look at StandOut Jobs, a company working heavily with video to create quality job recruiting and placement services.
Traditional media has flooded its way into podcasting. Check out the Apple iTunes store and you’ll see it. Count in any section how many mainstream or mainstream-derivative products there are in the featured area compared to independents and you’ll get an easy snapshot. And yet, for businesses, there’s still a value there to pursue due to cheap production and cheap distribution opportunities.
The Staffing Issues
Where does one put a corporate blogger? Marketing? IT? Customer Service? Product Development? It depends, and yet, that’s a question when it comes down to figuring out payroll, HR, reporting structure, and what comes next. How does one MEASURE the effectiveness of this? Oh go ahead. Tell me you know. There are SOME numbers. Lionel Menchaca from Dell talked about the negative perception rating as a key metric they tracked during his blogging efforts (which Lionel helped reduce some 30% or more).
Oh, and good luck asking for a resume that will include the appropriate background for this. Where does a blogger or a community manager or a podcaster show their experience? They can DEMONSTRATE their capabilities, but they can’t exactly point to a past role (well, most of you can’t) and say, “Here’s where I shot video for Rocketboom.” Does this make it harder to recruit? And are there really HR teams out there looking for social media types, or is this coming straight from the product management skunkworks fund?
Here’s a square peg, round hole situation. If you’re the community manager, you’re in a position where it’s part customer service, part PR, part support, and part product development. You’re at once the customer advocate as well as the rah rah person for the company. And where do you get your training? To whom do you report? How does anyone give you a metric to cover what you do in a day.
If you’re in the tech space, do you send your community manager to conferences? It’s not business development. It’s not lead generation (as such). And yet, finance departments are receiving expense reports from people traveling to conferences just to do some “brand exposure.” How long will that last, if there’s nothing to measure on the other end of it?
Starting to get the picture?
Your Part In All This- If You’re Thinking Business
If you’re looking at this from a “working with businesses” perspective, I have a few things to say. You’re going to have to address all that stuff up top and a bunch more. You’re going to have to know how to convince Corporate IT departments to crack open parts of the firewall. You’re going to have to help write job descriptions that explain what these jobs do for these businesses. You’re going to have to get a whole lot less vague on the value you’re bringing to the table as a thought leader and strategist in this space. You’re not going to have an easy walk into the door of a not-so-Silicon-Valley place as a blogger or podcaster, so start upping your ante on skills and perspective.
If you’re a media maker trying to establish yourself, you go for it. There are plenty of people out there proving it can be done. Gary Vaynerchuk is all heart, and has an agent. Adam and Howard and team sold Wallstrip to CBS, got the go ahead to make a new show. Kent and Doug hit it so big, they’ve been given a feature film to mess around with. And there are plenty of role models to emulate, should you want to build a media business of value.
Where’s the Peace and Love and Kool-Aid?
There’s tons. TONS. But just decide to take that blue pill. If you do, that’s cool. There’s lots of fun to be had in making media, communicating, sharing your voice, reaching out and establishing new relationships. People do it all the time and it matters.
Back to the Red Pill
If you’re going to present yourself as a business professional showing the value of these tools to companies, step up your game. Do. Make. Learn. And build the appropriate “human interface” between what these businesses understand and what you’re offering. It’s there. You CAN do it. You have to be working at it from that perspective.
Okay. Thoughts? Agree? Disagree? Let’s have at it.
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo credit, w*a*a
