I will not join your mafia, tend to your crops, find your lost puppy or swap aquariam fish with you. Can’t you get the hint…. Knock it OFF and LEAVE ME ALONE!!! Everyone must understand that all of these addictive little games they sign up for spam everyone on their contact lists.
Stop sending me requests to be a fan of your favourite causes, celebrities or your friends businesses.
If we have never met, never ever talked, in fact I dont even know you existed till now why would I be your Facebook Friend. Facebook is for personal contacts. I share my personal photos, thoughts and information to FRIENDS ONLY…. GET IT! Stuff I want to share with anybody who is interested is done through either a fan page, Twitter or a blog.
If you are an affiliate marketer just wanting to flog me stuff, a spammer of any kind, a pornographer trying to get me to watch your latest video……. I WILL DELETE YOU!!
There is no prize for collecting the most Facebook Friends or Twitter Followers. How can you follow 20,000 people on Twitter? Have you no life at all that you spend all your time reading other people’s tweets? I WILL DELETE YOU!!!!
Exactly like in real life I dont like being stalked on Twitter or Facebook …. If I delete you, say no to your request to be my friend and you keep coming back trying to be my friend and follow me I will block you and report you…. I PROMISE
Linkedin is a Business network of people you have done business with. You say that we worked together in your company but I would remember it if we worked together taking photos of properties in Perth I really would…. BUT I DON’T KNOW YOU!
You absolutley do not have to ReTweet everything. I checked out Twitters terms and conditions and nowhere does it say that you have to retweet everthing that someone sends you. How about being an individual and just SHUT UP IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO SAY YOURSELF.
I know I have a profile on LinkedIn but that does not mean that I want you or your recruitment company to find me a new job. I dont want to meet with you, I dont want to send you my CV … JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!
Whether it be on Facebook or Twitter, if you post 10 or 20 times per day you are ANNOYING THE HELL OUT OF ME and you should know by now what happens next..
One of the biggest real estate auction events in the Southern Hemisphere is about to happen on the Gold Coast.
Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach are holding ‘The Edge’ on Saturday 17th April 2010 at the Gold Coast Convention Centre.
Brett Clements from PropVid sent me the ‘Hot Off The Press’ promo video yesterday.
Now for such a big event I’m sure that there has already been a lot of promotion done by the Gold Coast Network in the lead up till now & it looks like there is going to be a whole lot more promotion done between now and ‘The Edge’.
But I thought I might throw my 2 cents worth in & share some ideas on how Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach could leverage Social Media & the web more effectively to help spread the word.
Here’s ‘The Edge’ video promo.
The video went live on the PlatinumHD.tv site a few days ago & was uploaded onto YouTube 3 days ago. Whilst I think the video is really powerful there are a couple of things that could be changed to improve its conversion.
Changes to the Video: Within the video I’d have the agents website address GoldCoastNetwork.com.au appearing underneath the Ray White Broadbeach, Ray White Commercial Broadbeach, Ray White Mermaid Beach slide (which appears at the 2 minute mark within the video).
Also, towards the end of the video a slide appears saying “Spaces Limited Book Now”
Whilst I think it’s great to include a call to action. It’s important to define what you want people to do. Are they wanting vendors to book their property in now for the auction? Or do they want buyers to book their seat now? Or both?
On the web there is no room for confusion. It’s important that people watching the video know how to Book Now.
Improve Online Conversion: One suggestion could be that if you include the agency website address within the video, then on the home page of the Ray White website they could embed ‘The Edge’ promo video into the top right hand corner (probably cutting out the end of the surf life saving flag or surfer image) and then have a button underneath to say Click Here to Book Now for ‘The Edge’.
I would then send them to a long copy sales page that features some of the benefits of why they should be involved in ‘The Edge’ and provide an opt-in section which identifies if they are a buyer or a seller.
This will allow Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach to leverage the traffic that they already get to their website from Google and their other marketing, plus improve conversion from the people who view their professionally produced ‘The Edge’ promo video.
Obviously, with only 6 weeks to go till ‘The Edge’, to allow for the 4 week cut-through marketing campaign that they mention in the video, all sellers would need to be contacted straight away to include their listing in ‘The Edge’ marketing campaign.
I can imagine that the agency will need to have all properties listed by 20th March, but due to the size of the promotion & the incredible exposure there’s a possibility that they could include a few extra listings within a few days after this cut-off date. But, that’s obviously up to them.
Here’s a few other suggestions…
YouTube: One of the first things I noticed is that the video could also be optimised a lot better on YouTube. The wording used in the description & tagging has no chance of being found on Google by someone searching for real estate on the Gold Coast & I’m not sure that having it uploaded under the Entertainment category is going to help either?
Blogging: They should integrate a WordPress blog within their company website. This will not only help to market ‘The Edge’ but it will help with their SEO.
They should write a daily blog post about some of the build up towards ‘The Edge’ and ask all the staff to tweet or share each article with their followers on Twitter & their friends on Facebook.
When sharing the articles on these sites they could also ask people to click the like button when uploading onto Facebook and ask the followers to ‘Please RT’ their tweets on Twitter.
When posting daily updates on the blog it’s important to leave the comments section open on the articles because this may get people asking questions about how to be involved & could provide an additional lead generation strategy.
This could also provide an opportunity to set a deadline for the last day before properties will be allowed to be submitted & could create an extra sense of urgency for potential sellers and/or could encourage friends to tell friends to contact the agency so they don’t miss out on ‘The Edge’.
To protect the integrity of the event, Ray White Broadbeach-Mermaid Beach are the administrators of the blog so they have control to monitor comments too.
Facebook: I also noticed that Ray White Broadbeach-Mermaid Beach have a personal profile on Facebook. Whilst they currently have 67 friends, they should really have this as a Fan Page, because Facebook has a limit and once you get to 5,000 friends you have to change to a Fan Page.
Any company thinking about creating a presence on Facebook should start off with a Fan Page. They are better for business.
Celebrities, etc should also create a Fan Page. eg. One of my friends on facebook, Jack Canfield sent me an email the other day to ask me to join him at his fan page because he had reached his limit of friends.
Jack now has the task of getting all 5,000 of his friends that he has built up on his personal Facebook profile to go over & connect with him on his new Facebook Fan Page.
( Update: I found their company Facebook Fan Page – See Update at bottom of this article )
Twitter: With regards to Twitter I can’t seem to locate a company profile for them. At this point there appears to be no Twitter account linked to their site & no blog within their site.
Whilst ‘The Edge’ is an amazing concept, there are so many different things that Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach could do to make this the most incredible real estate event ever through Social Media.
(Update: I found their company Twitter account as well see Update at bottom of this article. I searched both facebook and Twitter for Ray White Broadbeach and Ray White Mermaid Beach. I finally found them under the Gold Coast Network.)
Print Media: Having seen the magnitude of the print media campaign from last years event, Ray White Broadbeach-Mermaid Beach should be advertising something like,
“For the daily inside scoop on ‘The Edge’ become a Fan on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter” within their campaign.
This could help them to build a huge network of people connected to their company who live within their service.
It’s never too late: Even though ‘The Edge’ is only 6 weeks away, when you think about the real-time nature of Web 2.0, there is still a lot of time available for Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach to leverage the power of the internet & use this impressive Video Production from PropVid to generate the most amazing impression within their marketplace.
2 last things: A geo-targeted Pay Per Click campaign on Google could help overcome some SEO issues, plus a targeted Facebook Ads Campaign would help drive targeted traffic to their video campaign and/or their Facebook Fan Page.
The amount of ‘Free’ online PR that could be generated around ‘The Edge’ could be massive.
If Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach get this right, ‘The Edge’ could become so much bigger than they could have ever imagined.
And, if you tallied up every strategy that I’ve mentioned, they could make a huge difference to their whole campaign for around $500 – $1,000 plus time spent writing a daily update on their blog about ‘The Edge’.
PS: There’s a few more ideas I have about what they could do on realestate.com.au and other strategies, but at this point I just wanted to paint the picture of what is really possible, if a real estate agency embraces Social Media and uses the power of the internet the right way.
Please feel welcome to share your thoughts & ideas.
UPDATE: After writing this article I noticed that Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach do in fact have a Facebook Fan Page under ‘Gold Coast Network‘ and a Twitter account at Twitter.com/raywhitebroad with their username as ‘Gold Coast Network’. It’s great to see that they have established a fan page and a Twitter account.
At the time of posting this update, they have 97 fans on Facebook and 23 followers on Twitter, but unfortunately all the company seem to be posting is there sold listings & providing a link to the Open Homes that they have on each weekend.
Their Gold Coast Network Fan Page could become so much more engaging and simply because of its name, Gold Coast Network, it has the potential to become one of the biggest real estate fan pages on Facebook if they shared some other information about what’s happening on the Gold Coast as well.
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues that if you count people you “maintain a stable social relationship” with then you can never have more than 150. These 150 individuals may change in personnel, but at any one time, 150 is all the ‘friends’ you’ve got.
This is because our human brain can only handle around 150 meaningful relationships – that is, you know how the 150 people fit into your life, and they know how they fit into yours.
Apparently, this is a “direct function of the relative neocortex size” meaning the brain can only process a certain amount of information on stable friendships. This includes all close friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances, as well as past colleagues, school friends and people you might want to reacquaint with should you meet them again.
For some, his theory has become a “Law”. 150, that’s it.
We see the 150 number cropping up throughout history. In his original 1992 paper, Dunbar showed how early non-human primates grouped into clusters of 148. Later, neolithic farming villages tended to contain no more than 150 people (the ‘DoomsDay’ Book showed this too), and the basic size of Roman armies topped off at 150. Property managements max out at 150 per manager don’t they? Realestate.com.au account managers look after no more than 150 accounts. [So you see, it must be law!]
Dunbar further showed that for a group to have cohesion, it should have no more than 150 members. Companies or groups that grow beyond that size need to be physically broken up into smaller units in order to retain cohesion with that organisation.
Think about your own lives and its implications.
How many people do you have a meaningful stable relationship with at the moment (in real estate, technology and beyond)? Even for those with hundreds and thousands of ‘Facebook friends’ and ‘Twitter followers’, how many do you think they/we actively engage with? What does this mean for client relationship management (CRM) activities and software? For those real estate professionals with thousands of contacts that receive their regular blasted enewsletters, ebrochures and the like, what sort of meaningful interaction is going on?
Lots of business can be done by being the local real estate expert forged through solid, meaningful and trusted long term relationships. Maybe in our rush for technology, we over complicate matters, and rush to seek short cuts to contact loads of people, shotgun style? Should we just be happy with our 150 ‘meaningful relationships’ and make the most out of these contacts?
Disclosure: our company has 150 clients. Now I know why…
For More:
Dunbar, Robin. (1992) Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates, Journal of Human Evolution 22: 469-493.
Dunbar, Robin (1998). Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Harvard University Press
Gladwell, Malcolm (2000) ‘The Tipping Point’ . (Dunbar’s Law forms a central part of Gladwell’s argument and probably first made him famous)
This article is ‘Part 3 of How to Get More From RealEstate.com.au Without Paying Extra Money.’
In Part 1 of this series, I covered how to get the best coverage for your agency within the Find An Agent Section settings and in Part 2 I discussed an important internet marketing strategy where you can improve the number of visits you can get to your listings.
In that article I also covered 3 simple internet marketing concepts, the first of which was ‘The Image Catches Their Eye’ which leads me to…
You Lost Me At ‘Hello’
Have you ever seen that part in the movie Jerry Maguire where Renee Zellweger says to Tom Cruise “You had me at Hello?” If not, here’s a quick snippet from the movie.
Well, with this phrase in mind, I can not stress how important it is to grab a buyer or sellers attention over the web, especially on realestate.com.au.
Ultimately, you want to aim to ‘Have them at hello too’ which means that they will continue to keep reading about your listing.
The ‘Hello’ part is so important over the web, because with a woman you have somewhere between 2 – 4 seconds to grab their attention, whereas for a male, it’s 5 – 7 seconds, yet unbelievably there are still a number of agents who are committing the cardinal sin on realestate.com.au.
What’s the cardinal sin on realestate.com.au?
I find it astounding in today’s world of digital photography, that some agents are still uploading their listings onto realestate.com.au without any images of the property at all.
What’s more, realestate.com.au don’t allow listings to be uploaded to their site unless their is an image & some agents actually go out of their way to upload a generic image instead, just to get the listing up onto the realestate.com.au site.
Some agents must be in such a hurry to get the property uploaded onto the web on a Friday afternoon, before the receptionist goes home, that they upload the listing without photos, without considering the damaging consequences.
Maybe the owner is super keen to have the property uploaded before the weekend, but uploading any listing onto realestate.com.au without photos of the property is a huge mistake.
The image is such a big attention grabber and having no image could actually put the ideal buyer off.
Plus, lots of potential sellers subscribe to email alerts and if they see a property that is poorly marketed by an agent then they could easily be put off from listing with that agent.
It’s the biggest database in Australian real estate – Use it.
REA has the biggest real estate database within Australia & they have hundreds of thousands of people who have subscribed to receive email alerts when new listings come onto the market within their chosen criteria.
Realestate.com.au include the first email notification via their email alert service at no extra cost to the agent. It’s part of the subscription fees & is a very affective part of an agent’s marketing strategy for matching properties to suitable buyers.
Now, if an agent uploads a listing without the property photos & wants to access the REA’s database to re-send the property details out with photos now uploaded, they have to pay (normally hundreds of dollars) to send out one of REA’s e-Brochures.
Even though you could always pay to re-send the property out to REA’s database via the e-Brochure in an attempt to try to rectify the initial mistake, you’ll never get a second chance to create that great first impression.
No matter what the circumstances, an agent should ‘never’ upload a listing onto realestate.com.au without photos of the property.
Quick Tip: To get the greatest exposure for your listing as it is emailed out as an email alert to the REA database, make sure you set your price guides within the admin section as far apart as you feel that you comfortably can without misrepresenting the price.
This will allow you to broaden your marketing out to potential buyers in a lower price range who may end up deciding to increase their spending range and/or market to buyers in a higher price bracket that may consider reducing the amount they want to spend on a property.
But, make sure you reset the price range within the system within the first week after the first email alert has been sent, as by this time you’ll probably have direct feedback from buyers and you should have an even better indication of the properties real price point in the market.
Obviously, use your common sense, sending an $800,000 listing to buyers with $300,000 to spend isn’t going to win you any friends.
Newspapers are on the decline! A very fast decline. Readership and revenues are down and profits seem very hard to find anymore. Because of that decline agents appear to be dropping their support of print media a little bit more every year. Read the rest of this article »
In the past month I have purchased a new Subaru Liberty 3.6R MY10 model and I took some time out during that process to check out how the internet, emarketing and social media is effecting the motor vehicle industry and I was genuinely surprised by the results.
First I tried to do some research on the make and model I was looking to purchase and found very very little information on the car itself outside of the standard manufacturers blurb. Even all the online driving reviews were only 10 to 20% original and the rest was padded out with the manufacturers press releases word for word.
I visited a number of dealer websites and they were flashy enough but provided very little substance or information. I found only one business based site that went to the trouble of creating unique content and conducted significant research. The only other websites that provided anything original were the enthusiast websites and forums.
I could not find any blogs run by Subaru dealers, nobody on Twitter tweeting the latest news for that manufacturer or any dealer fan pages on Facebook. No matter what I tried emarketing seemed to be non existent.
I started searching outside of Australia and found excellent examples of Motor Dealers embracing social media. Austin Subaru for instance has around 4000 facebook fans. Every time they post something to their facebook page 4000 local subaru enthusiasts get the message and when one of those 4000 fans comment or click on the “like” button all their friends get the message too.
The next thing for me to check out was the Portals. The motor industry online is dominated by several portals the same as the real estate industry but that is where the similarities stop. What I did not notice at first was that you do not see on the portals any dealer contact information anywhere. The portals completely control all contact between the dealer and the interested party. To make a phone enquiry you have to dial a number and punch in the car ID to be connected.
As a prospective purchaser this was downright annoying but it wasn’t till I realised that the portals were controlling every single enquiry so they could charge an enquiry rate that I was really disgusted as it made the whole enquiry experience very frustrating.
So how much was a dealer being charged for a single enquiry? What would you think would be fair? I was thinking $2 or $3 maybe. I naturally asked my dealer and was shocked with the answer. They told me car dealers are paying well over $30 per enquiry and apparently many are paying much more than that as well. That’s $30 for every phone call or email generated by the portal. Apparently it’s not unusual for a potential customer to continue to use the portals phone number to contact the dealer again which just magnifies the whole cost.
As you can imagine large car dealers are paying a serious amount of money to these portals every single month. It appears to me that because they have not created their own online presence or invested in other forms of emarketing they are locked into using these portals and their extortionate prices.
Now this is the part that really confused me. The keyword tools in my Google Adwords account tells me that the average CPC rate for keywords like subaru, subaru liberty and subaru impreza is under 40 cents so if you are going to pay that much for each enquiry from the dealers why dont they invest in pay per click campaigns targeted specifically at new car purchasers. Google Adwords allow you to geographically target your ads down to a particular town or city which is perfect for the car industry. Real Estate agents generally operate in much smaller areas, as small in some cases as one or two suburbs of a whole city. This means that geographic targetting can have mixed results for our industry but not so with car dealers.
I ran a few searches online for Subaru cars and all the ad slots were filled with the different car portals including carsales.com.au, carpoint.com.au, privatefleet.com.au and carsguide.com.au. Not one local dealer trying to generate enquiries at a fraction of what the portals would charge.
Now real estate portals use adwords too but because of the per enquiry charge rate of the car portals they are effectively engaging in a form of “Enquiry Arbitrage”. They buy an enquiry or a click for $1 from Google then they sell it to a dealer for $30. Now not all those clicks will convert to an enquiry but what if they get just a 10% conversion rate that’s still a 300% return on their investment.
Too often we look back and say that real estate agents as an industry have not done enough to insulate themselves against the sheer market strength of the real estate portals. But in light of how the motor industry are treated maybe we should be looking at the glass half full not half empty.
On another note, maybe REA should look at the motor industry. A corporation has to be constantly growing or its share prices suffer. Because they have saturated the Australian market they tried to expand overseas but was obviously no success and they ended up retreating out of some markets and blowing their investment. So instead of ramping the prices up on agents why dont they diversify in the motor industry. They have the experience in online classified advertising and their model would compete well against the per enquiry models.
Now I am the first to admit that my experience with the motor industry online is pretty limited so if anybody has anything to add on the subject I would love to hear it.
Harvard Business Publishing summarised the 360-degree feedback data on over 11,000 leaders from a study completed by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman. Here are the 10 most common leadership shortcomings. Interesting to note that the most successful and least successful differed most significantly in their energy and enthusiasm. How many of them apply to you or your leader?
1. Lack energy and enthusiasm
2. Accept their own mediocre performance
3. Lack clear vision and direction
4. Have poor judgement
5. Don’t collaborate
6. Don’t follow the standards they set for others
7. Resist new ideas
8. Don’t learn from mistakes
9. Lack interpersonal skills
10. Fail to develop others
I believe that in 2010, there is a great opportunity that exists within the real estate market for a franchise group or some forward thinking agencies to capitalise on a huge segment of the market that is just sitting there waiting for the right company or group of agents to come along & grab it with both hands.
You only have to read a little bit of the research done by Tom Peters or Marti Barletta, who co-authored the book Trends, to identify that there is a massive niche within the real estate industry that is currently be ignored by most of the major franchise groups.
Now, in no way am I suggesting that Ray White should become Raylene White or that RE/MAX should become RE/MAXINE, all I’m suggesting is that women have an enormous influence in the buying decisions within most households & over the past few years there’s been an enormous growth in companies marketing women’s only services.
Many companies outside of real estate, that have moved to a ‘Women – Only’ based business model have found it to be an extremely lucrative niche & have enjoyed the rewards from embracing their targeted point of difference.
For example, there are hugely successful women-only companies like White Lady Funerals, plus women-only gymnasiums like Fernwood & Contours who all seem to have taken huge segments of their marketplace by storm by using their “Women-Only Business Model”.
Billicorp Property Services Takes On The Big Boys
Currently, within the Commercial/Industrial sector of the real estate industry, (normally a male dominated segment of the industry), there’s been an emerging women – only company called Billicorp Property Solutions, founded in 2003 by a dynamic young agent, Kirsten Marsh, who successfully entered the market & built a women-only team to take on some of the biggest firms within the real estate industry.
For a small team within a single agency structure, they appear to be doing extremely well, considering the tough market place they are in & the impact the GFC has had on that segment of the market.
In recent times, Billicorp has also expanded its service into the residential market place, which will be interesting to see how this transition works for them.
Now, because most women are intuitive, extremely good at networking, more likely to be trusted & are often very well organised, you’ll find that there are already many women working within real estate sales & property management amongst the franchise groups/networks who are currently using their skills to achieve huge success in real estate.
Plus, like a lot of experienced agents would understand, they tend to appreciate that during a listing presentation, if the woman of the house doesn’t like & trust you then chances are that you won’t get the listing, no matter how good you got along with the male partner.
Whilst I don’t profess to be an expert on branding a company & nor am I taking sides about male v’s female agents, I simply see that an opportunity exists & think maybe a ‘Women’s – Only” brand within an existing brand could be a way forward for one of the franchise groups who may want to tackle this huge, untapped niche in the market.
The smart agent should always be looking to list stock that matches hot buyer activity. In 2009 this space was largely dominated by first time home buyers (given the well publicised FHOG), but what buyer groups are set to be hot in 2010?
A recent survey from the Bureau of Statistics and RP Data confirmed that upgraders are most likely to be the largest buyer group in 2010, along with an increase in investor activity.
The ABS Housing Mobility Survey suggests that a massive 45% of Australian home owners feel their homes are too small. The survey was conducted when interest rates were twice today’s levels, and upgrading was not as financially viable for many home owners, but with interest rates now significantly lower (despite the three recent small increases) it’s no wonder that upgraders are predicted to be very active in 2010.
So what do these buyers want? In addition to a bigger property, they also want a better quality property that is close to shops, cafes and transport and in a quieter location with better security.
Investors are also likely to also be in the marketplace in high numbers next year. The same survey also revealed the main reasons tenants are unhappy with their current homes: poor condition, lack of security, noise levels, traffic levels and not being close enough to shops and transport. In addition, 25% complained their property was too cold.
In short, tidy properties that are secure, on a quiet street (but still close to local amenities), preferably north facing (with light, bright living spaces, balconies and backyards) and within 15kms of a major CBD will be like gold dust in 2010, as smart investors should flock to them like bees around a honey pot.
All of us here at business2.com.au wish to extend to all of our visitors, regulars and the like a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We hope to see you again in 2010 and will be closed for new posts for most of the Christmas break. We will of course be releasing our Dumb and Dumber Awards for 2009 and a list of the decades 10 worst moves in real estate before the year is out!
So from Ryan, Peter R, Glenn, Pete, Brett, Greg, Leanne, Peter F, Robert and Sir Les have a great break and we will see you all in 2010.
Peter Ricci is the Director of Agentpoint.com.au, Business2.com.au, Ginga.com.au and ZooProperty.com and has been involved in designing and developing real estate systems and websites since 1997. In July 2001 Peter founded Business2.com.au to help real estate agents better understand the power of the Internet and the real estate landscape in Australia and New Zealand. Since then he has penned over 300 articles on a variety of subjects in the real estate technology industry. Business2.com.au is now the leading real estate technology site in Australasia.
Blogging: They should integrate a 
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