Real Estate Related • August 14, 2009

I’m not the only one not reading the News Paper!

by Michael Fanning

Interesting times that we live in today. After going through our latest meetings with Windermere Owners about advertising in the world of realtor.com I still am shocked at how the newspaper keeps coming up in our conversations. I just don’t know what aversion we have to limiting how we participate with the news paper. Notice I didn’t say get out of the newspaper but rather how do we still appeal to that very small group that still read the paper and see a return on our investment? I realized that it starts with education.

Here is a great article that can help to explain what is going on with the newspapers both print and online. I think it is fair to say that News Papers are failing today in the print world. What about their online world? Many think they will just put the news on line and move the eyeballs over. This isn’t what is happening however. Subscribers on the whole are just plain leaving the paper both print and online as well. This graph below is from Comscore website. After reading this article you can see that as a company that has to market daily to our customers we need to be looking at different Internet based solutions and understand that as much as we may like our Sunday morning coffee and paper the eyeball isn’t there like it use to be.

As Print Newspapers Decline, How Does Digital Fill the Void?

So why is this happening? There are many reasons but let me just give you a few that show you just how the customer is getting news.

RSS feeds are pretty amazing. Today with handheld devices like blackberrys and I phones you really have access to real time information just a click away. Sites like NPR RSS. or Yahoo News RSS, and Newsgator the I phone app are tools that allow the handheld user access to real time news and lets me the reader choose what news I’m interested in getting. Yes the 3.0 world of News.

CNN just had an article talking about the decline on a national level but also states that

” Paul Gillin, a social media consultant, said such losses are to be expected for an industry that has failed to adapt to the influx of online publishing tools and social networking sites.

“Information has become democratized today,” said Gillin, who has predicted print newspapers will disappear by 2015. “You get a lot of advice from your friends, blogs and multiple media sources. Who reads just one newspaper?”

So my concern is that as we move forward in this ever changing world we can’t just be deaf, dumb, and blind to this change. We have to react and work together to figure out how we are going to market in this new age of Social Networking sites and the world of on demand news and advertising. I would love to hear what Ideas you as the reader has, please share.

Real Estate Related • August 14, 2009

I'm not the only one not reading the News Paper!

by Michael Fanning

As Print Newspapers Decline, How Does Digital Fill the Void?

So why is this happening? There are many reasons but let me just give you a few that show you just how the customer is getting news.

CNN just had an article talking about the decline on a national level but also states that

” Paul Gillin, a social media consultant, said such losses are to be expected for an industry that has failed to adapt to the influx of online publishing tools and social networking sites.

Real Estate Related • July 9, 2009

Building relationships takes time.

by Michael Fanning

As I’m out in the field with real estate agents talking about the importance of Social Networking, one of the common push backs I get is this. “Well you don’t sell real estate so you have time to be on facebook all day, I’m busy and don’t have time for that stuff I have a business to run.”

I understand where the frustration comes from but the fact of the matter is your business is based all around the quality of relationships you maintain with your client base on an ongoing basis. I won’t deny that we live in a very busy world and that our time is precious. That said the numbers of individuals who look to social networking to connect to get information and share information with their close friends are growing by leaps and bounds. A recent study I read talking about how we tend to trust those that are more like us.

So how do your 250 friends know how alike you are to them unless you interact on a regular basis. Keep in mind when I say interact I’m not talking about interacting with your friends on on a professional level but more on a real basis. Friendships and relationships are not just about keeping in touch on a topical level but more about all the stuff that makes us who we are. Your hobbies, your interests, likes and dislikes. The deeper the connection the more comfortable people are to work and interact with you on all levels. How strong is that message when it is sent on a post card or on a calendar vs seeing a picture a few times a week of you enjoying a hobby that happens to be a hobby that 30 of your friends also enjoy. Or getting a link to a great article about whats going on in a specific community that you happen to live in along with 20 of your friends who also just read that link you sent to them. It is about getting involved and contributing value. Relationships don’t last if they are one sided. In order for relationships to exist you need to be involved so the point to my post is real simple. Embrace change and understand that Social Networking is here to stay and it can be a big advantage for you to enhance the current relationships that you don’t seem to have time for now, just by making micro connections through out your day. You might end up being surprised how much time it doesn’t take.

Similar idea from Amy Chorew “the conversation is important“

Real Estate Related • June 18, 2009

It is all about Micro interactions and embracing change.

by Michael Fanning

I recently saw a great slide show by David Armano called Micro interactions in a 2.0 world. After looking at his presentation it hit me that currently today we struggle to get into the Web 2.0 world and we have to figure out how to get there.

Think about what we still do. We still advertise in news papers, we have meetings to talk about how we are going to divide up add space in a newspaper, we still have agents that want to have their pictures on their business cards, or buy banners that talk all about how great the agent is. We use acronyms that even today the customer still does not have a clue what they mean.

I say all this because we have to be open to change and understand that the way we did business 5 years ago isn’t going to continue to work. David makes some powerful statements in his presentation such as. ” The consumer is changing form a passive consumption to active participation.” This means that they want to be apart of our business and contribute so I ask you, should we have to allow that to happen? Unfortunately the consumer experience varies so much from deal to deal that we would say “no we can’t let them talk about us and make that viewable to the public.” I ask why not? Remember “A brand is not what you say it is, it is what they say it is.” according to David.

We have to start looking at how we interact in small micro interactions in many different places. Social networking, websites that currently attrack large amounts of eyeballs to real estate information. How do we make sure in these environments we show up consistently, professionally, and with integrity. As there are more and more places to interact on line it allows for further fragmentation of our brand and creates even more confusion for our customer.

It is important that we think like business people and make sure that we understand our customer better. We also have to be aware of all our touch points with the customer and remember that all of them add up. David says this..

I do believe that we are at a crossroad and we have to begin to think differently about how we interact with our customers. We need to embrace social networking, we need to understand blogging and begin to engage the customer not as a transaction but as a person that can help to enrich our consumer experience by allowing them to give us useful feedback that will enhance our processes. David has a slide that really shows what this shift should look like.

to see all his slide refer to the link at the top of this post.

Real Estate Related • March 11, 2009

why check e-mail when you have facebook?

by Michael Fanning

I have e-mail, I also have a facebook account, and a myspace account. In my facebook and myspace profiles I can control and limit the people that have the ability to communicate with me. Because I control that arena that communication becomes far more important than much of the mail that hits my inbox. There are far to many “friends” out there today that assume if they have my e-mail addresss then I must want to know more about what they have to market to me. This is the main reason I’m more focused on facebook and myspace instead of my e-mailbox. A great article on this topic was on mashable today by Adam Ostrow and his title read,

Social Networking More Popular Than Email

I find this to be the case in my world on a daily basis. I would much rather see a post or a message from a good friend than the 100 messages I have to delete daily from my inbox of mail from people I kinda of know or don’t know at all, and they just want me to see what they are marketing. So what is my point with this post? Real Estate agents please remember this, when you create a facebook account, the individuals who have be-friended you do not want to see your new listing, or get daily posts of you trying to persuade them to come look at your million dollar listing on the lake, or see a detail page posted of beds and baths and sq footage. That honestly is the fastest way for me to de-freind you. They be-friended you because they want to know about you and what you are doing. They want to know your person and reconnect. It’s great if in that discovery they learn you work in Real Estate but don’t make that the focus. Lets try to keep face book a social networking place and not a giant advertising vehicle.