Yesterday, I read this message from Chris Smith about Facebook’s plans to roll out one-to-one email capability for Facebook Fan Pages.

“Just Announced via Mari Smith: Facebook will begin to allow one to one messages to be sent from a Facebook Business Page to anyone who Likes the page. So for example, if you have 1,000 fans you could technically now email them via Facebook. This is monumental in my opinion as most people did not Like Pages knowing they would get messages from them, even one to one messages. Will this cause a mass unliking of Pages that suck? You betcha! Could even cause anyone on the fence to completely leave Facebook all together. I know their are Pages I liked years ago that if I now started getting emails from them I would be very upset. How do you all feel about this it literally just broke?”

So what this means is that you will soon be able to connect with your Fans via email, which is great news for Facebook Page Admins who are also good at marketing because it provides another way to connect with your fans.

But, WARNING: it’s also a Kamakazi (Crash & Burn) Marketing Tool for admins who think it’s a great idea to start spamming fans with poorly thought out email notifications.

Personally, I really like the idea that it will enable my FB fans to email me if they want to ask me a question privately rather than posting a comment publicly on my wall.

Plus, maybe (just maybe) send a Thank You message to each new fan for joining in individually (BUT even the message within that email would need to be very carefully constructed because it’s normally so early within the relationship).

This new functionality could also provide an opportunity for FB Fan Page admins to individually notify competition winners and/or notify existing fans that they are in the running to win any new competitions (as a Value-Add) that the Page administrator may be conducting from time to time in an effort to entice more NEW fans to join their page.

Beyond that, at this stage I can’t see any other instance where I’d use this functionality personally…BUT I know for sure that some Facebook Fan Page Admins are going to misuse this new function and stuff up big time.

I think this is great for individuals or businesses using Facebook Fan Pages but be warned…if placed into the wrong hands or misused, it could dissolve your Facebook fan base very quickly.

Interested to hear what the B2 community thinks about this latest update on Facebook?

There are already plenty of blog posts about the topic (including some excellent posts on Business2). And, there are already plenty of rhymes. But, until now, there has never been a rhyming social media blog post. (as far as I know)

It is, therefore, my distinct pleasure to introduce to you this world’s first–in its global premiere.

World’s First Rhyming Social Media Blog Post

“Social media, should I use you?”
That is my query.
Tumblr. Twitter. Facebook.
“YES!” is my theory. (1)

On this climb start many.
Many give up.
If I paid you a penny,
would you Tweet me to the top? (2)

They say to study others,
Learn from the barely surviving.
So your tail is well covered,
Put in toe before diving. (3)

You must talk, talk, talk, talk.
It’s 24/7.
Cluetrains don’t stop,
Even if a rest would be heaven. (4)

What’s cheap is expensive,
When you’re paying in blood.
Not to cause apprehension,
Customers can now make your name mud. (5)

Follow the lessons Gary has given.
Go online with compassion,
And up, up, up sales will be driven. (6)

This is really just for fun, and I’m no poet. It does, however, point to some truths. Below, I give a little more information about each verse.

Verse (1)
For 100 years or more, traditional media let businesses broadcast messages in one direction. Social media let us start two-way conversations.

Many people in real estate already understand how this will change their business. For example, I am doing some consulting work with LJ Hooker, and I have been impressed by the excellent social media training they offer their network. I’d be interested to hear what other agencies are doing, as well.

Verse (2)

Lots of people have tried social media marketing. A Burson-Marstellar study of 20 excellent corporate brands found this:

“A large number of companies have dipped a toe in the social media arena without following through. The study revealed a lot of inactive accounts, which could suggest ad-hoc efforts with no clear strategy for online stakeholder engagement.”

Many people who try and then give up blame the medium, and say social media is too immature to be useful. That’s like saying a trumpet is broken because the first 100 people who pick it up suck, as Gary Vaynerchuck wrote in The Thank You Economy.

Luckily for you, you have the world’s first ever rhyming social media blog post and Business2, the world’s best real estate blog, to help you figure it out. Nothing can stop you now!

Verse (3)

It pays to learn from the mistakes of those who have blown it. Take the same precaution with your social media strategy that you would before jumping into a swimming pool: dip your toe in first.

Start small, test the waters, and learn to swim. Then begin to take on bigger challenges.

Verse (4)
Social media look cheap, but they take their payment in blood.

Opening a Twitter account is as easy as checking your email. But, it’s a bit like hiding inside of a refrigerator. It’s easy to get in, but once the door closes, you can’t get back out.

To use social media productively takes a lot of time and dedication. It will probably also require some changes to your business that go beyond adding your Twitter account to your business card.

But, yes. It will be worth it.
Verses (5) and (6)
Word of mouth today has much more power than before social media. Tools like Facebook and Twitter give your customers the ability to say things about your brand persuasively and to a huge audience. Before, it was limited to the people they could conceivably talk to, email or call on the phone in a day.

Overwhelm them with kindness and excellent customer service, and they will become loyal fans and customers. Give them crap service, and they will make your name mud.

The Gary I mention in verse (6) is Gary Vaynerchuck, founder of tv.winelibrary.com and author of the The Thank You Economy. You could write a book about this topic, but he’s much smarter than I and has already done it. It’s the book about social media I have liked best.

For now, I hope you enjoyed this rhyming blog post as a bit of fun.

PS: Some real experts regularly read and contribute to this blog. If you have any social media questions, I’m sure they or I would be happy to respond below in the comments field.

At the recent F8 Conference Facebook revealed a new look at some new features to the world. The changes it brings in makes your profile look a little more snazzy and you can have a nice big header image. These new features will be rolled out over the coming weeks. As a Facebook developer (anyone can be one), I was able to get into the new feature immediately and take it for a test drive.

As mentioned in an earlier article, the point of a little competition driving innovation and regular updates shows us again that in every sector of life and business – competition is the key and Google Plus has certainly drivin Facebook to get off their backsides and provide many updates people have been screaming about for years.

Here are some of the new features:

Header Image
The first thing everyone will notice is you have control over what you profile will look like by managing and editing the main image header. I like this, it gives your profile a new personal look and feel.

Hide Updates by Third Party Apps
The worst feature of Facebook, is that when you like a celebrity or a page your newsfeed is then filled with junk mail and posts from these third party apps. So if you don’t want to see these or are tired of people who feed their twitter tweets in as Facebook updates you can get rid of them immediately! If you are viewing your newsfeed and see that an update is from an app you can click on the dropdown arrow next to the update and select the Hide All by fillthisspace. Nice!

Custom Lists
You can now sort your feeds into Custom Lists, Family, Friends, Wannabees etc. You can create a custom list and add it to your favorites and then click on those lists to get that lists news feed. It would be nice if you could make one of these your default news feed though!

Privacy Overhaul
Firstly, everything you do, forever and ever, is saved on Facebook. If you use Facebook, you must understand this. If you haven’t looked at this already, you should. Go to your Privacy Settings, and Edit Settings for How Tags Work. Turn on Profile Review and Tag Review.

You can review your tags, by visiting your profile page and, under Wall, you will see an option for Needs Review. You can then click on this to see any posts, photos, and other requests that need your approval.

Facebook is making you do the work with privacy, so you cannot complain (in their eyes) if people see things you do not want them to see.

Timeline Profile
As you can see from my screen capture your new Facebook profile features a timeline of you and your profiles events by year and month. A little creepy if you share life’s intimate secrets, like how many times you are in and out of a relationship etc, who has friended and unfriended you and when (ouch).

There are also more options for events in your life like relationships, children and the like. I prefer to keep all of this pretty private, but some people just love telling us these things. So for those of you who want to share life’s events in gory detail here are some other options. You can also create your own!

Other examples include:

• Got Engaged
• Got Married
• Add a Child
• Add a Pet
• Add a Job
• Graduated
• Military Service
• Moved
• Bought a Home
• Add a Roommate
• Add a Vehicle
• Broke a Bone
• Had Surgery
• Overcame an Illness
• Learned a Language
• Got a License
• Traveled
• Achievement or Award

To me most of these options are welcomed, but beware this is all recorded, so share what you want, but keep in mind it is forever As for business pages, it seems they are still being left a little behind, but you can be sure

Download Timeline PDF File

Facebook currently has over 500,000,000 users, yes that’s 500 million! An almost unbelievable statistic, coupled with the fact that most users are active it is an Internet behemoth and will almost certainly be a very profitable machine.

Twitter has fewer active users but their figures are also very impressive with a user base of around 200 million.

Both of these platforms outshine even online newspapers for breaking news and events to family and friends, so much so that online newspapers are actually becoming slightly less relevant than they were just a few years ago. You only have to take the recent Osama Bin Laden death to know that most of us get a lot of our news directly from our online networks on both of these platforms.

Creativity Vacuum

Where I think Twitter and Facebook fail is in their business models. The current thinking (or lack thereof) is that build up users and then start displaying advertising from 3rd parties amongst the content on various pages.

Google was the first large Internet player to do this successfully and have reaped billions and billions of dollars in advertising revenue on this model and will continue to do so. Why this is successful is very simple, users search for information and Google displays as close to relevant information back to the user as their algorithms allow.

Newspapers do the same thing, they attract visitors to their websites and then display advertising amongst and over (annoying their users) content and generate most of their online revenue from doing so.

This model is a problem for Twitter and Facebook and Online Newspapers because users do not use or behave the same way on these sites as they do on Google and other search and retrieve related entities. We use Twitter and Facebook to inform others on what we are thinking, what we are doing and where we are going, we gather news from Online Newspapers to share ones that interest us to our networks or to keep ourselves up to date. In short we generally have conversations on Facebook and Twitter and we use newspapers to gather information on the days events.

What is needed from these entities is a creativity revolution, one that value adds the offerings to those of us that want to become power users.

Online Newspapers

I am going to use the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age Newspapers as these are clearly the best newspapers in Australia. Each day I visit both of these websites to read up on news and events and each day I try to avoid any annoying ads across these sites.

What if I became a member of either of these websites? I really get nothing in return, making the added value proposition worthless. However what if the hierarchy thought a little differently about their business model.

What if for say $100 per annum, I could get an enhanced mobile version for both my smartphone and my Android or iPad tablet? What if my membership included the ability to sell my unwanted sofa quickly and easily? What if I could sell my car, engage a real estate agent, advertise open positions at my company? What if all of this was included in one simple interface and for one simple price? I don’t know about you, but I would pay this money without a second thought. Why? Because I trust the company, I know they have the biggest user base and I know I have one place to go to do all of these if and when I choose!

Facebook

If you read the above with interest, could you imagine if Facebook did the same? This would send shivers up the spine of any newspaper across the globe, simply because newspapers have lost control of their users and have been slow to innovate. Facebook could very easily do the same thing and to be honest, I think they would win this battle. Facebook currently has the dumbest advertising platform of all of these entities combined.

As an example if you ever had the miserable pleasure of adding some of your favourite movies, books or music to your profile you will immediately notice your Facebook wall being filled up with junk advertising from related advertisers. They must have been up all night thinking about that one – pathetic!

Facebook is so bad with their business model that it only serves to annoy their base and this is a true crime in the online world and may someday open themselves up to competitors. It also will cost them billions in the long term as users will simply change their behavior.

Facebook should also offer an enhanced version one with stronger privacy cooler profiles and a tranche of new offerings including the above, classifieds, cars, jobs and houses. I should also want to store with the options to share HD Videos, HD Photography and enhanced mobile versions all for a simple annual fee.

Twitter

Twitter worries me, it is no longer a must-be destination for the average Joe consumer or small business. It is slowing down dramatically and may only useful in the future for disseminating news and events. Sure it is still relevant but it maybe just a niche player in a few years.

For the power user it still offers some great insights and I do get great information, but more so from a select group of people I follow.

Summary

In summary I think the advertising model is flawed across Online Newspapers, Facebook and Twitter and needs some real creativity. I am convinced the model of the future for sites that have massive user bases is enhanced offerings all paid for with one simple annual fee.

The need to leverage social media for a real estate agency is really a no-brainer these days. In 2011 Facebook is one of the easiest ways to connect with clients, potential clients and the community.

Unfortunately many agencies have failed to setup their business correctly. Businesses really need to be setup as a Business Page, not a personal profile and your choice can hamper its effectiveness.

There are many reasons why your agency should be represented by a Business Page not a personal profile but here are a few..

1/ Facebook Can Delete Your Business Account if its created as a Personal Profile

Facebook states that maintaining a profile for anything other than an individual person is a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

They also state that If you don’t convert your profile to a Page, you risk permanently losing access to the profile and all of your content.  You have been warned!

There has been one report of a Victorian agent having their substantial account deleted because they did  not follow this rule.  As that agency found out if your business’ profile gets shut down by Facebook for violating this rule, your friends list will vanish with it. All your hardwork is gone and there is no way back.

2/ Personal Profiles are limited to 5000 pages

Now there are not too many agencies out there with thousands of fans but in a few years time this will become more and more common.  Personal Profiles are hard limited to 5000 friends but Business Pages have have as many fans as you want.

3/ Business Pages get widgets, visitor stats and demographics and adverts.

Facebook Insights allows you to view alot of information about about the  user activity on your page. This is not just visitor analytics but also the demographic break-downs of your visitors, all of which is not available to individual profiles.

Facebook also offers a range of widgets for businesses to integrate into their websites driving more fans business page. The latest Opengraph widgets rolled our recently convert at much higher rates which means that those who use a Personal Profile for their business are missing out on a huge avenue to grow their audience on Facebook.

4/ Better Design and Feature Set for Businesses

Facebook pages have recently undertaken a number of overhauls and more are planned for the future.  You can now navigate and interact with other areas of Facebook as your Page such as like and comment on other Pages as your Page.

Till recently those who used a Personal Profile for their business were stuck  as the conversion process to a business pages was complex involving manually inviting all your friends to become fans.

Facebook has now created a conversion tool to allow you to convert a Personal Profile to a Business Page.

This is great news for people who incorrectly setup a personal page as a business page.  If you don’t convert your profile to a page you will run the risk of permanently losing access to the profile, all friends/fans and all other associated content.

To convert your personal profile first read everything on this help center page http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=18918.

This page also provides you the necessary link to start the migration process.

The question has been posed does sex sell real estate but rather I would prefer to ask the question “Would you employ these agents to sell your property?”

Please be aware the video is very revealing.  (My sincere apologies upfront if I offend any B2 readers by sharing this).

Behind the scenes, I have been in touch with the agents in the video and the video production company and will be putting together the results, thoughts and some of the feedback within a separate report/article.

In the meantime, I’d be very interested to see what B2 readers think of this…

Twitter
Twitter is a little on the nose to me and I am going to predict a sharp decline in 2011. Sure, Twitter will exist in some form or another well into the future but to me it is finished as a mass marketing tool and will eventually be relegated to some important niche communications. Twitter’s revenue making announcement early last year completely lacked any corporate imagination and signalled to me to be the beginning of the end for the company (and a multi billion dollar entity) and unless they innovate well I cannot see the service lasting in its current format for too many years. It is great for cross communication and breaking news alerts and it should play on those strengths.

Google
Google has made a great move in move with Eric Schmidt stepping down at Google and being replaced with Larry Page. Schmidt has made just about every web developer nervous (including me) as some of his comments were against every moral grain the company had built over the years and some of his recent comments were just idiocy! Hopefully Larry Page can get the company back on track, his communication is poor, but hopefully he has worked on this over the years.

Eric Schmidt did an amazing job in his initial years of organizing the company and building revenues and profitability, but he has shown he struggles with communication and needed to be replaced.

Facebook
Facebook goes from strength to strength and has now reached a valuation of around 50 billion. It does however make you wonder how they are going to satisfy the demand from all investors for revenues, especially in the light of them recently raising another billion of dollars. This places pressure on the company to massively increase revenues when they already should be very profitable.

There are many opportunities for Facebook and it will be interesting to see if they show a little more imagination than the Twitter crowd. I think adding personal related services that are paid for makes just as much sense as the boring old advertising model favored by investors.

I prefer to use Facebook for just family and friends, however I now see some really good opportunities there for our business and Facebook give developers the tools to build out some pretty cool applications. Here are some of our recent Agent additions from my company. You should talk to your developers to get them to build out some apps for you just to test the water. All you need is your own page (not your personal account)

RWM Mosman Facebook Page
Raine and Horne Facebook Page
Ristic Real Estate Facebook Page
Graham Lynham Facebook Page

Will Facebook continue it’s amazing growth? Maybe, however, I see a more local version of my personal life, something that is open source and that I have 100% control over who has access to what. I havent seen it yet, and really do not know what it is – but it definitely is not one company controlling my whole digital personal life.

Groupon
How many companies are offered a buyout of billions of dollars only to reject it and see their valuation plummet in the ensuing years?  Yes, many we have already forgotten about. Groupon rejected Google’s billions and now have to compete with that very same company as Google has just announced they will be launching a competing service. There is a moral to this story – sell your bloody company when you get a decent offer. There are many businesses/ideas you can build with a few million/billion dollars.

Linkedin
I will stay on this site as long as it is free, but to me it is just a chest thumping load of junk. Currently it ranks below my own company site as far as referring traffic (all of the articles on this site are linked to my linkedin.com profile) and from what I can tell this is useless fro business to consumer. For business to business we might see something, but not for the real estate industry.

MySpace
Rupert got his money back on this investment early. But in the ensuing years MySpace has cost him big big money and he can kiss it goodbye as it is currently burning through 100′s of millions of dollars a year. It was a lame duck from the beginning (disorganized, spam) and is a perfect example of why you sell early! Listening to Rupert speak about technology is excruciating. He simply doesn’t have a clue, quotes like Facebook being a fad, Google struggling once it matures and then his continual assault on free news (BBC< AC etc) is childish and gets him nowhere.

Your own blog
If you have a real estate website and you are not blogging about local market, local news, local events then you are missing out the the biggest opportunities for personal and business growth. If you want to start on the ground floor, get a FREE WordPress.com blog and start playing. If you want a professional blog under your own domain name speak to your developer.

Wikileaks
Isn’t it wonderful that we have one news organization in the world that actually operates like all major news organizations once did? I hope there are many more years to come of people leaking information we should already know to organizations such as Wikileaks. Stand up for these freedoms we enjoy at all times and never be a hostage to your own motives!

ANZ Bank has fired back with their own Real Estate iPhone Application,, the ANZ Property Tracker – and it is proving to be quite popular. It looks very pretty – which you would expect from a bank with a little spare change and it plays quite nice. You can view it here and download it immediately from your ITunes Application of iPhone.

Just by following us here at Business2.com.au you will have noticed that all the major banks are getting in on the iPhone Real Estate App Marketplace and for good reason, research indicates that this is where young people get their information – although most young people do not have the money to buy a house, they can now have an app to find that house they can’t afford!

Some nifty little features of the ANZ Property Tracker are:

• Get the last sales price of properties for free (not sure for how long), but this is a pretty good reason in itself.
• It allows users to share properties of interest with family and friends via Twitter or Facebook
• There is also a diary function for organising open for inspections, auction dates – times, and providing reminder alerts.

Would be great to have a schedule for those days of house hunting that allowed a user to plan their day on a Google Map, possibly by integrating with a calendar.

All in all a solid start from ANZ bank

During the recent UK general election (American friends of mine were amazed at how quickly it was over, English friends bemoaned how it dragged on for weeks), I read a Guardian blog post which berated parties of all hues (“tribes”). The writer loathed one tribe, but was saddened how his own tribe had left him, and he wasn’t really interested in the third one either. Hence the inconclusive result I suppose.

And so it got me pondering the state of how we get our information these days, and how quickly media has changed. The blog itself is something I would never had read without the advent of the internet (itself only a 20 year old invention). By the time I read it, it had already attracted 50 comments.

On election night (morning in Australia), I found myself searching #ukelection and #ge2010 twitter themes to read what people were saying as the results came pouring in. Most of them were watching the same telecast I was half a world away (I found the BBC player online somewhere which had been blocked on the official BBC web site). They were reacting to the same commentators and politicians pontificating in front of us, which we were all viewing in real time. Yet, it was these live twitter comments and reactions which drew me in. They had far more validity and were much more entertaining and “real” somehow. They were from people who I did not know and would never meet, but whose opinion had more power and meaning than the pollie spruikers set up in adversarial mode by an aggressive media front man bating them into actually saying something.

Opinions poured forth over the twittersphere – every minute I could refresh the screen to read dozens more updated “tweets” (those 140 character short messages served up by twitter users).

I turned to an ex school friend of mine (a passionate Liberal Democrat and someone I’d not physically met in 30 years and only recently got back in touch with thanks to Facebook) and discussed the outcome with him and his ‘friends’ (we have only one in common, another ex school friend I’ve not seen in 3 decades).

As we collate information (on anything) directly from the sources of individuals whose opinions are as good as anyone else’s ‘in the media’, so we are simply returning to our tribal roots. It’s where we all came from (and still are really) – learning, teaching and sharing.

Of course, this is devastating news for traditional media who have much invested in their print presses, TV and radio stations. Over the past 100 years (a miniscule time frame in the grand scheme of things) they have informed us on what they believe we want to hear, read and view, and when we can get that information too. Our grand children (and maybe our children) will think it quite twee that we all once sat down together with our families at the predetermined time to watch TV programmes (I remember what an ‘event’ the 6pm nightly news was every night in our household in the 1970s). Those days are over.

If someone wants real information on property, who better to tell you than your knowledgeable local ‘tribe’ member? The person selling real estate who lives around the corner from you, the property manager who’s seen everything a thousand times and in a patient manner organizes the leaky gutters to be fixed for the hundredth time. They are the experts, and they ‘know local’ like no one else. 20% of those looking for rental properties in Australia search rentals on twitter. Of the 7 million Australians on Facebook, half tune in every day, and more are aged over 40 than under 20.

If you’re not there, you cannot be noticed or listened to. In this way, twitter, facebook, blogs and the like are merely tools of communication. No silver bullets. No one can give you the scripts and dialogues, but if you view this all in the right manner, you’ll know what to say when the time comes. You’ll make mistakes. You’ll learn it by doing (and listening). Join the conversation. We like to pass on interesting snippets, we like to help, we are good people. It’s tribal, it’s in our nature, it’s who we are.

Photo Credit: Maasai Tribal Dance

I discussed the ugly side of Twitter about a year ago and in that article I said “Social networking and the internet in general has allowed a voice for everyone including your biggest critics”. Realestate.com.au found that out better than anybody as the new site went live.

Now this article is about that handled their complaints but to be fair there was a lot of praise amongst the twitter stream and facebook  as well.  But like always its the mud that sticks the longest and what people remember the most so its important that any company handles its complaints well even when they are the size of REA and there were a ton of complaints. The really impressive part was that it appears they were prepared for it and had an action plan in place that was executed brilliantly and agents should take notice. .

Someone was actively searching Twitter for any references to the relaunch and responding directly to the tweets concerned. They did not just respond to tweets directed at there twitter account of @realestate_au but they were actively seeking out anybody tweeting to their followers about the site, good and bad.

So when tweets like these started to show up

NathanKrisanski: New realestate.com.au website live today. what do you think? seems a little busy to me, but it is quicker & easier to use. DM me ur thoughts

alcro: Hey Realestate.com.au, your new site doesn’t work #REAfail

glenn_batten: @realestate_au Technical issue with your new site which may be causing more than a few people problems. http://bit.ly/bzaHuC Please fix

Brett_Hales: What is up with #realestate.com.au – if I search for a property everything is left justified. Looks ugly, check it out http://bit.ly/3wqDg

AnnalisaW @realestate_au can’t get it to load properly. Cumbersome. Most of content blocked by office filter.

portek I think the realestate.com.au suburb select for rentals is broken. Airport west is NOT North MElbourne.

they responded quickly to each person with:

realestate_au: @NathanKrisanski thx for your Tweet earlier today. If you have suggestions on making it less busy wld luv to hear them http://bit.ly/98znQe

realestate_au: @alcro Sorry to hear you are having issues with search – let us know the issue here and we will look into it – http://bit.ly/98znQe

realestate_au: @glenn_batten Thanks Glenn – already looking into it. Will keep you updated.

realestate_au: @Brett_Hales Glad you have been trying the new site – if you have suggestions for the search results share here – http://bit.ly/csJ79a

realestate_au @AnnalisaW sorry to hear you’re having issues – if you can, try another browser. if still having problems, let us know.

realestate_au @portek ok, might be best if you drop us a line at enquiries(at)realestate.com.au – we can direct your issue to the tech boffins there. thx

Their facebook page had similar sort of comments the only difference was that because it was on their wall they did not respond to every single comment as that would have seemed a touch too contrite.

The fact that they took the time to respond to so many consumers and agents was really fantastic and I was not the only one who thought so either:

charispalmer Impressive: @realestate_au getting back to everyone that has commented on the new site on Twitter

Rolling out a site the size and traffic load of Realestate.com.au would be a huge challenge and predictably there were problems that cropped so they didn’t just listen to the complaints on the social media  but the technical team also used to identify real issues in a live environment. They were cross referencing live tweets with server logs to fix problems very quickly even before users filled out feedback forms..

I was a victim of one of the more obscure ones where an incompatibility between our isp’s proxy server and the realestate.com.au servers caused a certain css file to be delivered blank. This meant any search result pages had no styling applied at all and was just an ugly bunch of left justified text and photos.

Now I noticed the problem during the beta testing but since I never received an invitation I had to piggy back on a somebody else’s access I never reported it through the official beta feedback. But once the site went live I and others brought it to their attention of the technical team pretty quickly. Because I had some fantastic help from Nick here on this blog they they tracked down the cause very quickly and even went so far as to ring and work with individual isp’s to track down the problem.

There are certainly still problems outstanding that team are still working on including some fairly major suburb related issues. One of these causes absolutely no properties show for major suburbs but for the most part the site is running extremely well now.

So whether you like the new style or not you have to admire how realestate.com.au handled the complaints.  Up till recently large corporations would normally respond to each call or email with the obligatory “you are the only person to be experiencing that issue” stock standard reply. But social media like Facebook and Twitter means you cant do this anymore. Everyone is far more educated and word spreads like wildfire.

Real estate groups and individual agents alike can learn a few lessons from how Realestate.com.au handled the recent release:

1. No matter how good a job you do you are never going to please everyone and there are going to be days where no matter how hard you try you just make some mistakes.
2. Be prepared and regularly monitor Twitter for tweets good and bad about your agency and your brand. Realestate.com.au probably dedicated a staff member to this job over the launch but agents thats not viable. Twilert was really good for this but it closed down because it could not handle the sheer success of Twitter but it has recently relaunched again and is a fantastic way to monitor your brand on Twitter.
3. Similarly Monitor your facebook fan page for feedback from your fans. This is certainly easier because Facebook can email you with every comment as it has been added to your wall.
4. Respond quickly, professionally and most importantly listen and be respectful.
5. Ideally offer a different more private forum to receive further information on the problem and to discuss the issue.

Of course not everything went to plan and the funny thing is that if you are looking to handle complaints about the performance of your new website, directing them back to that problematic website was probably not the best idea in hindsight. Of course there is a lesson in there as well:

jasb @realestate_au i just submitted your feedback form and got could not be found! Check ur search results layout in chrome, its screwed!

Brett_Hales @realestate_au Thanks for the opportunity to provide some feedback – didn’t go too well upon submit http://twitpic.com/1fjap1

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