Roundtable

There's a lot of "white noise" swirling in cyberspace about the value of social networking. Four REALTORS® who have leveraged the marketing value of social networking joined moderator Joel Singer, executive vice president of C.A.R., to clear the air: Kevin Boer, broker/owner of 3 Oceans Real Estate; Butch Grimes, real estate broker, marketing expert, entrepreneur, and radio talk show host; Krista Miller, an agent with Windermere Real Estate, Berkeley; and Laurie Manny, an agent with Prudential California Realty, Long Beach, who was named one of the top 12 female bloggers in 2007 by the Sellsius Real Estate Blog. Here's what they had to say about why social networking works for them and, if you dare to venture in, could work for you.

Singer: Please introduce yourself and describe your current position and years in the real estate business.

Miller: I work in the Berkeley area "anything residential that surrounds the East Bay" for Windermere Real Estate Bay Area. I've been in the business for four years, utilizing as much technology as I can, trying to figure out how to make it all work.

Boer: I wear two hats. I am the independent broker/owner of 3 Oceans Real Estate in Menlo Park. I've been in real estate about five years; I started a real estate technology consulting company about a year ago. I work probably 20 hours a week on the brokerage side and 40 to 50 hours a week on the consulting side.

Manny: I've been selling real estate for seven years. I discovered blogging and social networking about a year and a half ago and fell in love with it. It is absolutely the most incredible thing that has ever happened.

Grimes: I've been in the business now for about 23 years. My company is called Team Equity L.A. Property. I'm based in Inglewood. My niche is as an urban market specialist.

Singer: Describe how you use social networking media.

Grimes: I'm on ActiveRain and a number of other sites. However, I've really focused on the podcasting end of it, mainly because of the radio. It gives me an opportunity to be the authority in an area and utilize the partnerships that I've always tried to create. I think it's important that real estate professionals understand synergy is important, creating partnerships and being able to blog and to podcast, as well as gather information. I'm never going to know everything about everything. I do shows with the IRS. I do shows with the FBI. I do shows with a number of other entities that can bring that professional information in. It takes the pressure off of me.

Manny: I've really pulled back on the social networking. I find that social networking is more REALTOR® to REALTOR®. If it works for you and you want to run a business based on referrals, then it's probably a fine place to be. I don't take in referrals, although I've made tremendous friends around the country. However, I find that it takes too much time away from my business.

My blog is sensational. I?m pulling in between 3,500 and over 5,000 hits a day, from which five to 20 people sign in to search for properties. I went from zero to 190 miles an hour and couldn't staff up fast enough. ? The business is pouring in. I need help.

Singer: Where is the business coming from?

Manny: It is all from the blog. "The search terms that people are putting into the search engine [show] they want properties, they want information. They are putting specific numbers, addresses, MLS numbers. They're putting "condos in Belmont Heights under $400,000," and they're coming up because I have an RSS feed off the MLS with that on it.

Boer: I focus probably 90 percent of my efforts on blogging. I maintain a presence on the social networking sites ActiveRain, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Whenever I meet somebody at a conference, I typically send them an invitation to "friend me" on those networks, or they send me an invitation. I'm always accepting those invitations and slowly building up my network. I believe that there will be business value for me on Facebook. I just don't believe I've yet discovered what that is. But when I discover what that is, I'll be in a better position because I'll have more friends on there. I know people will disagree with me, but I think it's definitely worthwhile for people to be spending time on there, but it's not something you should necessarily be spending one or two hours a day on.

Miller: I'm fairly new to the social networking realm. I'm on Facebook, LinkedIn, ActiveRain. You absolutely have to have that presence out there, although I have a hard time keeping up with it. In the last two months I?ve actually had referrals come in off of my LinkedIn profile. This business is all about relationships. You've got to keep those relationships going. There are so many venues out there that you've got to find out what works for you and focus on one of them.

Singer: What tools did you use initially to start blogging?

Miller: I started on Blogger. It's easy to use. I just went on and started.

Manny: Same thing. I started on Blogger and floundered through it.

Boer: I also started on Blogger, then switched over to WordPress after two months. I thought about starting a blog literally two and a half years ago, but I suffered through one year of "blogger stage fright." It took me a year to understand that I don't need to be a John Grisham-type novelist to have an online presence.

Grimes: I did just the opposite. I'm a networking person and I was not able to keep up with the folks that I would meet on a regular basis. I started putting those business cards into a database, and it grew. I have about 153,000 contacts. Then, I started sending out e-mails and more e-mail blasts. People were responding because they wanted more information.

As that evolved, I jumped into blogging. Most REALTORS® could start out with their basics, their business cards. I immediately went into WordPress and started e-mailing my stuff out. However, I'm a video guy. I carry a small video camera in my pocket. I can capture video at any time. People they like to watch. They don't want to sit and read. They want to watch it on television and YouTube.

Singer: You take a pretty broad-spectrum approach. Web site, podcasts, a radio show. How do you allocate your time?

Grimes: I have three virtual assistants. I'm able to write and put my thoughts together, and they will upload them.

Also, I'm not a competing broker and consider myself the marketing arm of my business. I have about 25 agents, and I'm the person that really puts technology in front of them to help build their business.

Singer: How tech-savvy do you have to be, for example, to get into the social networking/blogging arena?

Manny: You can learn.

Miller: You learn it as you go along. You don't need to be that tech-savvy. What you don't know, perhaps the person sitting next to you will, and they can help you out. That's what's great about all this. Everything on the technology side I have learned from social networking. From that perspective it's been really helpful for me, but to keep it up, that's a whole different level.

Singer: What else do you maintain in terms of helping consumers find you?

Miller: What helped my business tremendously was video marketing. I started doing walking tours of my listings. Instead of hiring a professional company, I took my little digital camera and did a walking tour. You could hear my heels clicking on the hardwood floor. I would talk about the neighborhood, totally unedited and raw. I received great feedback.

I've started to turn that into more video marketing. I market strictly to my database. I?m in contact with them constantly. Instead of sending out just a newsletter, I would actually interview somebody in the business. For example, I just interviewed someone who's in the professional organization business and e-mailed that out. That's what gets people's attention. I link it in my blog. It's linked everywhere. People are responding to the video marketing.

Manny: Can I ask you how many hits you were getting on those video tours?

Miller: In the smaller demographic, I would say up to about 4,000.

Manny: That's incredible.

Singer: For the uninitiated, what should be their first step into social media and what should they continue to do the same?

Boer: I think most agents can probably just trash their existing real estate Web site. It really is not doing anything for them. It's probably getting 40 hits per month, and 30 of them are from somebody with the same last name. My main piece of advice would be to just get out there and do it. Stop being overwhelmed by it. The worst that can happen is you try it for a month, it doesn't work for you, and so you stop doing it. No harm, no foul.

Singer: Some people cannot blog for whatever reasons. What can they do if they do if they can't blog?

Manny: They can go do Q&As on Trulia and Yahoo! Some agents are having great success on Trulia. I think it's a little on the dangerous side. Quite frankly, I think that if you're going to answer a question on Trulia, you'd better know what you're talking about. E&O covers you when you're in a transaction. It doesn't cover you when you're dispensing real estate advice on the Internet.

Miller: I agree with what's been said. I think the Q&A is definitely a good place. However, with the Q&A, the public can come in and critique what you say.

Boer: There's an increasing use of essentially hiring somebody part-time for a marketing team. That's appropriate as long as you're transparent and say so-and-so is my Internet marketing specialist, and let that person take charge of writing. It's a little controversial because blogging in its purest, rawest, most essential form is all about you and your personality. This puts more of a corporate spin on it. Done correctly and transparently, I think it's appropriate.

Grimes: Real-time streams are phenomenal. I'm trying to get my agents to start using them at open houses we use Ustream. That's where I find that some of the agents [new to this] can start.

Singer: How important is video?

Grimes: I think it's really important. People like to see raw footage and every REALTOR® has an opportunity because they all carry digital cameras. But I like the raw, uncut stuff. With YouTube, people want to really see you that's why we're so infatuated with reality TV.

For instance, I play pool, and I stop, and I have my little video cam going, and I'll say a couple things on podcasting, why you should be doing it or whatever. Just to show that I'm human and that this is what I do in my off time.

Manny: I haven't figured out how to do that to upload it.

Miller: I figured it out by mistake. I was at a listing taking pictures and saw the video camera and thought I'll just do a little tour. I didn't know it had sound until I played it back and, suddenly, there was sound. I thought, "this could work."

Boer: If you're a perfectionist, you're going to have to dial back on that if you want to enter the blogging and video world. It'll take you a year, like it did me, before you write your first article. It'll take you two years before you do your first video. You've got to be comfortable with having something out there that's less than perfect. For instance, you've taken a video, it's not professionally edited and you hear [your heels] on the hardwood floors. Once you're comfortable with that and over that learning curve, things get significantly easier.

Singer: Many REALTORS® want to meet clients face-to-face, but they want to have the benefits of what you do, without doing it. Can that be done?

Manny: It's a lot easier now. It's been simplified and so much has been written about it out in the social media that the directions are out there. There's no excuse for anybody to not try it.

Grimes: Right.

Miller: I totally agree with that. It's very easy.

Boer: The flesh-to-flesh marketing is tremendously important, will always be tremendously important, no matter how prolific technology becomes. I think they're a complement to each other. For instance, you're at a social event and talking with somebody, they find out you're in real estate, you exchange business cards. If that person is of a certain demographic, they'll check you out on LinkedIn and on Facebook.

If you're not on Facebook and LinkedIn, or you're not blogging, because it's going to take time away from doing the flesh-to-flesh, you're basically cutting off your nose to spite your face because you're actually, in all honesty, diminishing the prospect of getting work from your flesh-to-flesh marketing. It's not an either/or, it's an and.

Grimes: I would even take it a step further. You have to be Googleable. When people meet you, the first thing they do is type your name in a search engine and say, "Oh, there he is."

Singer: What are the implications for the customer service expectations and performance expectations?

Manny: They expect a professional. They trust you harder. They are much more comfortable with us because they have been reading us for months. They know they're not hiring someone who may have been in the business for a month or two and is telling them they're been in the business for 10 years. They know they're not getting a fraud, imposter, or a rookie. You can't copy what other people are writing. You're going to get nailed. If you can't write, you shouldn't, and they know.

Boer: My experience has been it's just that the client tends to come into the transaction much better prepared. They know a lot more about me than they would have, let's say three years ago, but also they know a lot more about what to expect. They understand because they've been reading what I've been writing and other people have been writing. They know how a home tour works. They know why it's inappropriate to call a listing agent to show a property. They know about the basics of a transaction, about disclosures and that kind of thing.

Miller: Clients know more about me than I know about myself. There are things that I?ve written that I've forgotten about; then someone will say, "Oh, you remember when you wrote about that?"

I have always done my business transparently. This actually eliminates the first step in what we used to do with the face-to-face. Before you get face-to-face, they do know a lot about you: how you work, your style, the areas that you work.

Singer: How many hours do you spend weekly maintaining your social networking presence and your technology?

Boer: I spend probably five hours a week.

Miller: Not enough one week, too much the next week. I do a lot of reading and research for it. I would say a good chunk of my day, a few hours a day.

Grimes: Definitely 10-plus.

Manny: I spend very little time on the actual social networking. Most of my time is spent reading. I probably dedicate 20 hours a week.

Singer: What's the absolute first thing you would do if you were entering this space?

Manny: I would hire a professional "RSS Pieces" because RSS Pieces has a platform that's ready to go. All the search engine optimization (SEO) is done. Somebody is there to guide you through in a hurry to a very successful blog, teaching you how to actually blog as well as how to SEO your site.

Grimes: I'd say collect data. It's great to go on the Internet and shoot for the stars. However, a lot of our business is right in front of our nose and we tend to not take advantage of that.

Miller: Read other people's blogs.

Boer: Spend a couple hours a week on ActiveRain, Trulia, and reading a couple of blogs.

Singer: How do you measure in a meaningful way the readership, the traffic and, more importantly, the business you generate?

Manny: My platform has an incredible backend. I know when people have linked to me, how many hits I'm getting from those links. You can roughly check out what other people are getting in the way of traffic through [their sites] a site with Compete.com.

Grimes: The backend, of course, but because we're so diversified with the radio show I use a lot of autoresponders. I use a program called 1ShoppingCart that also mans my books and product. I can monitor who's actually opted in, who's purchased product. We track our listenership. We do surveys on the air as well as through the Internet.

Our buyer leads are definitely coming from our radio show and the exposure that we've built. We are basically referral-driven.

Miller: I'm not much of a tracker. I do the basics, go onto YouTube and see how many people looked at the particular video. I have use Google Analytics and the counters.

Singer: How have you changed the allocation of advertising and marketing dollars given the use of the technology we're discussing?

Boer: Rather than spending money, I'm spending time. The reason it doesn't make any sense for me to spend part of my marketing budget on newspapers is for $800 I can get a lot more advertising done online with Google AdWords, etc. I always was a reluctant spender on newspaper ads. Now, I spend nothing on newspapers.

Miller: That's exactly what it is. It's time, figuring out where to put the time.

Grimes: I do very little print advertising, but what I have found is the advertorial, an ad with education added. These have been phenomenal because it opens up another door to back link to my blog.

I still write for a number of newspapers, because my market is a little unique and a lot my audience is still not online. I try to make sure I cover everyone: We spend time on both newspaper and online advertising.

Manny: I completely stopped [print advertising]. I had annual contracts with the gazettes. I was a heavy marketer, beautiful, heavy glossy cards. I was sending them out sometimes twice a week, sometimes every two weeks. Business was coming in furiously.

Then, dropped dead, and I was spending almost $20,000 a month on marketing and advertising. That money couldn?t keep going out. I stopped it altogether when I got into blogging.

No matter how we talk about our blogs, need more of a presence than that in order to promote listings. I consider that to be part of my basic real estate business, not an Internet presence in social marketing. I'm going to go back (print) in a small way into my specific farms. Every quarter or twice a year, I'm going to send them a reminder that I'm alive: Hello, I'm still here, check me out online. I can give you so much more.

Singer: When you go out on a listing presentation, what are you saying you're going to do online with the listing?

Manny: vFlyer, which syndicates the listings. Oodle. You absolutely have to use Craigslist religiously. StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, Del.icio.us, Technorati, [Skiddoo Lenses ph].

Grimes: A number of the ones she?s using. We use craigslist. Point2 is another one. My market is different so I really use my online presence more for education and outreach.

Miller: Same places. You've got to be there.

Singer: What do you say to the comment that there's no more entry room for other people to blog?

Manny: There's a lot of room! There are only 10 spaces on page one of Google. Trulia and the other ones are ripping up there. But that doesn?t mean you can't get there. You just have to be good at what you do. There's nothing wrong with page two. It's a presence better than what you have now.

Boer: I find that argument interesting because agents have never said, there are 45 other agents advertising in my local paper this weekend, ergo, I'm not going to advertise in the paper this weekend. Nobody's ever tried that logic with newspaper advertising, so I don't know why they would do it online. Secondly, another perspective on this is, yes, it might be very difficult to compete with Laurie Manny for Long Beach real estate and hundreds of associated phrases. But there are millions of phrases out there. You're looking for your niche. Your niche might be a neighborhood, a demographic, a type of transaction. You've just got to look for your niche.

Miller: If somebody is saying that, they should not be blogging.

Grimes: But it's not about just the blog. It's about marketing yourself; it's about presence, and how do I get the biggest bang for my buck? That's really the direction that people need to look at. It's the start that stops most people. They need to just do it, try it, at least they got out there. Then they can see where it takes them.

Singer: What's the biggest mistake yo'?ve made with your blogs?

Boer: Starting on Blogger as opposed to WordPress.

Grimes: Not having a plan on how to blog. I would have probably done it differently.

Miller: My title. I learned the hard way. "Juicy Real Estate." Juicy got flagged a lot as spam.

Manny: Not anticipating the traffic coming in as heavy and not being ready for it when it came in. Really, I'm not capable of handling the leads. I never believed that this could happen.

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