See more in Conversations, Internet advertising.
Tim O’Keefe, over at the Real Estate Marketing Blog, is either serious or is caricaturing a dinosaur mentality on steroids, in this post recommending that real estate agents give away no information to people who don’t give up their name and contact info – i.e. turn themselves into a lead .
At the end of the day, a forced opt-in is about control.
Control over your business, your website and your future. The money is in your list of prospects that come from your blog, your website and IDX VOW websites.
Control is from you communicating your message to an opt in list. It comes from knowing the point of your real estate blog, or your realty website. In my opinion that is to gather names. Lots and lots of names. So that can talk with those names on your terms.
We’re afraid that he’s serious.
What real estate agents need to recognize is that control freaks are perceived by consumers as just that – freaks. No one wants to do business with a freak.
See more in Conversations, Worst practices.
You often see real estate agents yammering about trust and integrity, and it’s often just that – yammering.
I generally head for the door - or its Internet equivalent, my bookmarks – when I see a real estate agent going on about his integrity and saying he merits my trust.
How can a real estate agent demonstrate trustworthiness on the Internet in a way that doesn’t send people fleeing? It’s a question that takes on increasing importance all the time.
You’ll find some approaches to developing trust in an interview with Karen Stephenson, author of The Quantum Theory of Trust, at the HypergeneMediaBlog. A quote:
How do people learn to trust me? Well, because I write about things, I behave, I transact in certain ways that show I have integrity that I’m honorable, and I don’t take cheap shots, you know.
Things like that build a reputation. We can identify those criteria and institutionalize them - that would establish whether I’m trustworthy.
See more in Conversations.
Bob Darrow, a real estate agent who writes for the West Lakeview & Roscoe Village journal, was in our offices for a seminar the other day and asked whether it's OK to post information about his listings on the journal.
My answer was "yes" and "no," and we explored that a little before we both had to go off to other agendas.
From the looks of his latest posts, Bob's answering his own question pretty well, on his own. Instead of simply talking about his listings (I'm not sure they're all his), he's talking about real estate development in his neighborhood, and what's different and interesting about some of it, and about the fabric of the city.
See more in Conversations, Best practices.
We've neglected this journal for some time now, because of the press of launching Yo Chicago. Yo Chicago is now live, in skeletal form, and this site is an important part of it.
We need to involve hundreds - eventually thousands - of people who are knowledgeable about Chicagoland neighborhoods and housing-related topics.
Some of those people will volunteer for the sheer pleasure of it, or to share their knowledge with others, or to help improve their neighborhoods, but most will expect some commercial gain from investing their time. They'll write, or comment, or contribute photographs because they hope to establish business relationships with their readers.
We've set up a new site, Yo Chicagoans, to cover topics of interest to all of our volunteers, and to make it easy for them to use our sites and our tools to best accomplish their objectives.
This site focuses on helping our volunteer real estate agents, mortgage brokers, home inspectors and other local experts who are in this primarily to make a buck.
They need to learn - as we need to learn better - how to conduct a conversation on the Internet with business prospects. Mostly that's a matter of being sensitive to what people are looking for and helping them to get it. So simple. So complicated.
See more in Principles, Conversations.
Read this interesting post, and the much more interesting comments, from Scott Ginsberg.
See more in Conversations.
The Cluetrain Manifesto – 95 theses:
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
If you want to learn how to talk to people about real estate in a human voice there’s no better place to start than Lockhart Steele’s Manhattan blog, Curbed.com. It’s the best real estate read on the Web.
Business Week Online says that Curbed “dishes the dirt the brokers don’t." Who can resist a dozen daily doses of delicious dirt?
The Internet makes it possible for large numbers of people to listen to your end of the conversation about the real estate topics you’re expert in. The sound of a human voice is such a rarity when real estate professionals talk that people will tell other people about you.
See more in Conversations.
If you don't have time to read the entire Cluetrain Manifesto, at least break out a few minutes for the 95 theses. You'll begin to understand how to converse with the people you'd like to develop a business relationship with.
A sampling:
73. You're invited, but it's our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!
74. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.
75. If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.
See more in Conversations.
