RealtyTechBytes.com

Build brand awareness with social media

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 14 May 2012 02:00:33 +0000

I’ve got something a bit different for you this week. And agents, this may not be for you (it might be, though) so if it isn’t, please pass this along to your broker, because this is definitely something that they should be looking at doing.

We all KNOW the importance of building our brands to the point that we are the first thing that people think about when they are looking for the service that we provide. We also know that the traditional methods that we used in the past are nowhere near as effective as they were even a few years ago. And finally, we know that social media has become the darling of everyone looking to build brands, acquire new customers and to solidify relationships with existing customers.

We know all these things, yet the promise of social media has yet to be realized by most agents and brokerages. There are just too many unanswered questions about where to be, how to get started, what to say, when to say it, how often to say it and so on.

Too many of us have tried to go it alone by attending seminars, “camps”, classes and meetings hoping to find that “pearl of wisdom” that will lead us down the golden path. Some have succeeded to one degree or another, but most have failed.

I recently spoke with Chitra Rakesh, who is the Founder of Chitsie, a startup whose business is built upon the effective use of social media to build brand awareness, about these issues and how her company could help real estate brokerages.

Chitsie has a revenue model that is very similar to that of the real estate industry in that they offer a 100% performance based model (as well as a fixed price model). They build brand awareness through the use of contests, business games and exciting brand campaigns revolving around your brand. You can see the three current campaigns on http://www.chitsie.com. Please take a look, and to get an idea of what they are doing, go ahead and interact with the three brands. Who knows, you might win a cash prize or a merchandise prize. (Prizes are provided by the brand).

Given that Chitsie has a performance based model (Sounds a lot like our commission based model doesn’t it?) your brokerage could get some real professional help to build brand awareness without the huge cash outlay that traditional social media agencies typically charge.

Seems to me that you need to at least contact Chitra to find out if there is a fit. Drop me a line and I’ll put the two of you in touch.

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Build brand awareness with social media

Monkey with your business card for better results

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 07 May 2012 02:00:35 +0000

Ever wondered what happens to those business cards that you pass out to people that you meet? My hopes were that the person would take the card and sooner, rather than later, use it to contact me!

Of course, the reality is much different. Unless someone has an immediate need to get back to me, what most often happens is that the card gets “filed” somewhere. That’s because there is no immediate need for them to get back to me when they take the card. The problem arises when they do want to reach me and can’t find my card. It would be a heck of a lot easier for all concerned if my card could somehow “magically” get into their address book with the click of a button or a tap on the screen.

There are products on the market that allow you to to have an online business card, but they often only offer a download of a VCF format file which very easily imports into Outlook. VCF doesn’t always import easily into the other forms of address books that people use. Also, many of those do not show you tracking statistics, offer QR codes, and give a way for a person to receive automatic updates when you change you contact info.

This is where a Canadian company called Contact Monkey comes into play. Their product takes your contact info and your picture and displays it in an online business card. The magic that they apply is that the person viewing your card has the option to download the information in any of 19 different address book formats. In other words, they make it extremely easy for someone to store your information in the address book that they use every day, be it their Blackberry, Android, Windows or iPhone, as well as their Google, Yahoo, Outlook, Salesforce, ACT!, Goldmine and many more other formats.

After they access and save your info, they are also given the option to receive email updates when you change any of the info on your card!

Once you finish entering your data into your Contact Monkey card, you are given a QR code that links to your online card as well as a link that you can use in your email signature. Here is the email line they suggest that you use:

Add me to your address book – it’s easy! http://contactmonkey.com/jerrykidd

The service is free for individuals and is $3.00 per month for a business. The business does get a few “extras” for that subscription fee, most notably the Contact Monkey branding is removed and replaced with your company branding and colors. Companies can also maintain a directory of employees and staff contact info which can be published on your web site!

A pretty sweet deal all around. And if you haven’t already done so, please click on the link to my card above, and add me to your address book. You never know when you’ll need my services!

MagicPlan takes the work out of creating a floorplan

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 02:00:18 +0000

I am constantly amazed by the iPhone apps that keep appearing. The brilliance of the designers and the versatility of the iPhone just blow me away sometimes.

Case in point, I just ran across a FREE iPhone/iPad app (MagicPlan) that will allow me to to create floor plans by just using the iPhone camera. The usage reminds me a bit of taking a panoramic photo. You start by identifying a corner, then another corner, a door, windows etc until you have the entire room “mapped”. You can add hallways, additional rooms, even furniture an appliances.

The finished floor plans can be downloaded as pdf, jpg or files that are compatible with CAD software (Computer Assisted Design). One hitch, the finished floor plans may NOT be used commercially. If you want to use it for your own private use that’s ok. But, if you are an agent wanting to use it in connection with your real estate business, then you need to purchase a license. Fortunately, even the single use license is cheap at $2.49.

Or, you could “like” them on Facebook and get one free floor plan commercial use license. It looks like a great way to build “Likes” on their fan page and give some incentive for doing so.

Go download the free version and noodle around your own house to get a feel for it. It’s actually very intuitive and easy to use, and it produces some very well done floor plans.

Who’s got access to your Social Accounts?

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 02:00:10 +0000

It all starts out innocently enough, a game asks for permission to access your account, then an email app does, then another game and before you know it there are countless numbers of third parties who have access to your social accounts.

Most of these are harmless enough and they don’t really cause any grief, but the part that I found worrisome was that in order to keep track of them on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others, I’d have to know many different ways of tracking them down. For instance, on Facebook I have to get into my Account privacy settings and then know where to look to find the App controls. It’s the same process with the others. I’d need to know where to look.

Knowing where to look isn’t the whole story though. What is really needed is an easy way to check on the apps that I have given permission to access my accounts. Without having to memorize a bunch of different ways to do it. Because, what I (and you) need to do, is to frequently check which apps are using your accounts so that WE can decide to if we really want some game poking around.

Here is where MyPermissions.org enters the picture. Just go to the site and click the icon for the account you want to check. If you are already logged in you will go directly to the place where you can manage the apps within each social service.

There is even a place to drop your email address so that they can send you a monthly reminder to go check your accounts.

Looks like an easy way to keep my “Social House” clean. And, oh by the way, it’s free!

If you want to give them permission to clean up your apps, they will do it for .99 per month which is certainly cheap enough, but I find that installing another app to clean up previously installed apps is just a bit over the top for me!

18 Cool keyboard tricks that your iPad can do! (That you didn’t know about)

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 02:00:38 +0000

I was teaching an “iPad for beginners” class the other day and found that none of the students knew about the secret keyboard tricks that the iPad can do. So, I thought I’d share them with you here, in case you didn’t know about them either!

I am referring to the keyboard that pops up on screen when you are typing an email or document, and not to any external keyboard that you might be using.

To start off, let’s make sure that you are set up to use these tricks by tapping on the “Settings” icon (usually on your home screen) then tap “General” (about half way down the page on the left), then scroll down the resulting page until you see “Keyboard”. Tap on it. Make sure that Auto-Capitalization, Auto-Correction, Check Spelling, Enable Caps Lock and “.” Shortcut are all enabled.

That will get you set up to try these tricks! (You can always go back and turn off a feature if you find it annoying).

Open up a blank email, Notes document or Pages document to try the following:

To set a Caps Lock, double tap quickly on the Shift key. It will turn Blue with a white up arrow if you did this correctly. To return to the normal function, just tap the shift key again. This works with either shift key.
After you have typed in some text, double tap the spacebar to insert a period and space.
Need an apostrophe? Simply tap and flick up on the comma key. (You could also just press and hold the comma key for the same effect)
If you need a quotation mark just tap and flick up on the period key. (You could also just press and hold the period key for the same effect)
Press and hold any vowel key to see options for foreign languages.
Press and hold the y, s, l, z, c or n keys for foreign language options.

Next, tap the ‘.?123′ key (either one) for these next tricks:

Press and hold the 0 key to get the degree symbol
Press and hold the – (dash) key for different choices of dashes
Press and hold the $ to get different currency symbols
Press and hold the & for a different symbol
Press and hold the period key to get an ellipsis
Press and hold the ? to get the upside down version
Press and hold the ! to get the upside down version
Press and hold the apostrophe for different styles
Press and hold the quotation mark key for different styles.

Next, tap the ‘#+=’ key (either one) for these next tricks:

Press and hold the % key for a different style
The following keys work they did above when you press and hold them: period, question mark, exclamation point, apostrophe and quotation mark.

One more cool trick is that when you are using Safari to visit a website and you are typing in an address, a keyboard appears. It already has the .com key which you can tap to enter that, but if you hold the .com key you can choose from .net, .org, .com, .us and .edu!

I hope that you found this information useful! And, if you know of a keyboard trick that I left out, please share it here!

Who is mentioning you?

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 02:00:39 +0000

I found a cool way to monitor any mentions of your name, your brand, your clients, your competitors and virtually any keyword you choose.

You can monitor mentions on blogs, websites, videos, news feeds, forums, images,Twitter and Facebook. You can do this online or you can download desktop clients for Windows, Mac or Linux machines. You can even do it for free! The free version will limit you to 1,000 mentions per month, but that should be enough for most of us.

This is similar to Google Alerts, Nutshell Mail and Social Mention which I covered in a previous blog post at http://realtytechbytes.com/what-are-they-saying-about-you-2, with one big difference. This tool has a component called “Anti-Noise Technology” that learns from what you delete so that it can ignore non related search results. In other words, if you mark a result as being not related to what you want to see, it will ignore similar things that it finds in future searches. Eliminating the “false positives” will greatly speed up the process of monitoring by eliminating things that you don’t want. Like the others, it will send you email alerts when it finds new mentions for your stored searches.

To give it a try, go to https://en.mention.net/ to set up your free account. Are you using any of these free tools to monitor what is being said about you? Or are you content to have people talking about you behind your back?

Scatter some pictures on your Facebook Timeline Cover

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 02:00:50 +0000

The new Timeline for business pages went active on Friday for most Facebook business pages. This change is a pretty radical departure from what was available before, and at first I was inclined to hate it.

But, since Facebook looks like it is going to become the “Borg” (of StarTrek fame), the quote “resistance is futile” led me to find a way to like it. Once I started digging in to the changes, I found that there is a lot to like, not the least of which is the Cover Photo feature. Facebook gives us a huge picture space to tell a story to our fans. The space is 851 x 315 pixels. That covers the entire width of the fan page and is tall enough to really convey a lot of information. But, Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh away…you can’t use the space to overtly market! No calls to action, no links, no “Like my page” … all of which seemed like a natural way to use all of that space.

Determined to find a way to use this valuable space in a way that would not violate the Facebook Terms of Service, I went on the hunt. I found a lot of resources that would help you create a Timeline photo, but none that offered a marketing slant…until I found PicScatter.

At first glance I thought “so what?” But, then when I saw that I could take a photo album and use it to create a collage, the light went on. If you have a listing that you want to put on Facebook hopefully you will have uploaded a ton of pictures for it. Why not use PicScatter to create a collage for that page. Here is an example of what I mean: http://www.facebook.com/3058LiveOakCourt. I used PicScatter to create the cover image from the photos in the album on that page..

The free version uses your Facebook account to login and will allow you to take photos from your personal account, your Facebook Friends or your Likes. For less than $5.00 you can have the pro version which will allow you to remove the branding from the picture that it creates, add your own branding and also to grab pictures from any Facebook fan page! There are 8 different effects that you can apply, you can change the pictures by clicking on them or you can shuffle the whole mess and you can move the pictures around to get just the right look.

I am pretty impressed with this little tool and maybe you will be too!

If you are interested in learning how to use the new Facebook Timeline in your business, there are still a few seats left for my Facebook Timeline class on April 4th. Go here for info and for the registration form: https://www.facebook.com/events/357857867590964/

Facebook Timeline Changes and you!

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 02:00:28 +0000

March 30, 2012 is less than a week away as I write this, and by the time you read this it may only be a few days away. What’s the big deal about March 30th? If you don’t have a Facebook business page, it’s no big deal at all. But, if you do have a Facebook business page (AKA Fan page) it’s a very big deal. That’s the day that Facebook will automatically switch your page from the way it looks now to the new timeline view. Along with the switch in appearance will come some big changes in the functionality of your page.

You may have noticed the sudden increase of spam emails warning you about this change, too. What I have noticed is that often times, the emails are providing some incorrect information. I decided to go to the source to see what Facebook had to say and what I found was a couple of really terrific resources that I want to share with you.

First up is this video which is a replay of a webinar that they held in which a couple of Timeline product managers answer the questions that came in from the live audience during the actual webinar. Although this will burn about 30 minutes of your life, I strongly suggest that you watch it as it will give you the straight scoop on what is happening and it will also give you insight into why things are being done the way they are. If you can’t see the video, go here to watch it directly: http://livestre.am/1kgiV

The next resource is a pretty cool walk through in the form of 5 interactive lessons. These are designed to bring you up to speed on applying the changes to your timeline. The course will take another 30 minutes of your life, but it does give you a chance to test your knowledge and to apply what you have learned. It’s baby steps and doesn’t cover everything, but it is worth checking out at: http://www.learnfacebookpages.com/

If you’d like a much more immersive and hands on learning experience, join me at the Bay East Association of REALTORS® on April 4th for a 3 hour, hands on, deep dive into what’s changed, how to apply the changes to your pages and more importantly, how to use Facebook in your real estate business. Here is a link to the registration details: http://www.RealtyTechBytes.com/FBClass

There are only 20 seats available for this class and some of those are already gone, so if this is something that you want to do, take action now!

I hope that this has been helpful to you as we navigate through yet another Facebook change! By the way, I’ve made the change both on my business pages and my personal profile. Click on the picture above to visit my Timeline business page and check it out.

HomeSpot just might hit the spot for your sellers

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 02:00:15 +0000

I have heard a few tales of woe lately from agents around the Bay Area about homes that have sold only to fall out of escrow due to what was found during the inspection process.

Many of the homes that appeared to be in excellent condition had thousands of dollars worth of deferred maintenance that wasn’t discovered until the buyer’s home inspector gave the house a thorough going over.

Over course this triggered another round of negotiations and in some case the buyers exercised their right to walk away from the transaction leaving a frustrated seller with huge repair bills to clear up.

My immediate reaction was to have no sympathy for the seller, after all, every home requires some preventative maintenance and if the seller fails to do that, then a day of reckoning comes when they go to sell.

But, as was pointed out to me by more than one listing agent recently, often times the sellers just don’t know what to do to prevent those huge remediation bills. A point that I hadn’t considered. That reminded me that I had heard of a free web service for homeowners called Homespot. The service offers a homeowner a way to record and organize home information; choose and prioritize projects and home maintenance tasks; schedule automated maintenance reminders; plan the weekend; create project specific shopping lists and find deals for products online.

I thought that you could tell your farm areas about this and give the owners a chance to take better care of their most valuable asset. But, while I was researching the site for this article I saw a link that asked if I was a real estate professional, so I clicked it and was taken to Homespot AgentPro.

While Homespot is free for sellers, Homespot AgentPro is a subscription service that you can purchase on a monthly or annual plan that will give you the following benefits:

Subscribing to HomeSpot AgentPro allows you to offer a free HomeSpot home maintenance service to an unlimited number of your valuable clients.

Whenever your clients use the free HomeSpot service, they’ll see your picture, brand, contact information and social media links. Your clients will also receive newsletters and maintenance reminders with your information prominently displayed.

This sounds like a pretty good deal to me…you get to help your prospective clients take better care of their homes and you get to stay top of mind while doing so. All for $8.95 a month or $74.95 a year.

It would be nice if all homeowners were on such a system. And if they were maybe those horrible inspection reports would be a thing of the past.

Go check it out and see if it makes sense for you. And no, I am not being compensated to write this. The owners of Homespot will find out about this article about the same time as you do!

QR Code Rant (And a tip for YOU)

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 03:00:34 +0000

A real estate magazine arrived in the mail yesterday and as is my normal procedure, I looked through it to see who was advertising homes in print these days. Now this rant is not about why you advertise in print, I get it. There are still some sellers out there who think that print ads sell houses. But, the latest NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers should put that argument to rest forever. You need to get it if you don’t already have it and be prepared to show the sellers Exhibit 3-9 on Page 50. ‘Nuff said.

No, this rant is about QR codes. This particular magazine trumpeted on the front cover that their QR code technology sends home information to any mobile device. While this isn’t entirely accurate (The mobile devices needs to have a scanner app installed) the idea itself is very sound.

The problem arises in the execution. When I scanned all of the QR codes in the magazine, some of them would not resolve into a website. They simply did not work. The issue arose when I was able to scan a QR code and was taken to a scaled down version of the agent’s website. Folks, think about this for a moment. Someone is reading a magazine. They whip out their phone (somewhat unlikely, but I’ll grant that Gen Y would do this) scan the code and get taken to a miniature version of what they could see if they simply entered the agent’s website address into their desktop or laptop computer! After all, all of the ads also contained a website address along with the other contact info.

In order to view one of these miniaturized sites a person would have to zoom in and then pan back and forth and then up and down in order to find something. If they are looking at your ad and decide to scan a QR code, then it is very likely that they want more information. Why would you then send them to a site that they couldn’t see? Maybe it’s because you simply don’t know what you need to do in order to make this marketing technique effective.

So here are a few hints. First of all, don’t use a QR to send people to your regular site. They were not built to be viewed on the small screen And scaling it down or miniaturizing it only makes it difficult to view. Secondly, DO have a mobile optimized site. A mobile optimized site is one where the navigation is large, easy to view and is limited to things that can be easily done on a phone. Like a Call Me button, a map and simple directions to the home being advertised, a way to send an email and some photos. Scan the code on this page to see an example of a mobile optimized website,or if you don’t have a scanner app, type this into your phone’s browser: http://jkfbmc.com/mdgre/

Another good use for a QR is to put it on your flyer box and have it send viewers to a page devoted to that one listing. That page could be part of the overall mobilized site or it could be a standalone site. Take a look at the flyer box in the picture to see what I am talking about. Here is the link to a dedicated page to that listing: http://jkfbmc.com/mdgre/gallery.php, again type that into your phone’s browser.

So, in closing, QR codes are a good tool that can be used to help you reach the Gen Y buyers and sellers. They want to communicate using the tools that they grew up with and they will respond when you give them a chance. But sending them to your regular website via a QR code only serves to tell them that you have no idea what you are doing…and we both know that that isn’t the case!

If you want to see what your website looks like on a mobile phone, simply type the address into your phone’s browser. If you don’t like what you see, don’t use a QR code to send people there! They won’t like it either! Then get in touch with me and I’ll help you fix the problem. Here is a link to flyer that will give you special pricing on mobile websites…but hurry because it is only good until 3-18-12!