social media

Social networking becomes less complicated when you break it into simple steps. Last week, I presented this concept at NAR to a predominately broker owner audience. As promised, I am sharing an edited version of the presentation right here.

Click here for a larger version of this slideshow.

The four categories, as we see them are:

Social Media Profiles… or more simply put, personal profiles on the various sites such as Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace. Building your profile is the first step.

Text Platforms… blogging, microbloging.  The second step is creating a platform to speak from and collaborate. WordPress and TypePad provide blogging platforms. Twitter is great for microblogging.

Visual and Imagery Platforms… add videos and photos to make your message more engaging. You Tube and Flickr bring your networking and your story to life.

Use Listening and Sharing Tools. Listen to what’s going on and spread the word. RSS, Digg are two of many tools that accomplish this.

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Each year that I attend the National Association of REALTORS® conference, I come away with some new buzz.  The conference is a great way to tune into buzz-worthy people, topics and catch phrases.

Here are my top 5 buzz-worthy take aways from this year’s conference.

Number 5:  www.tinyurl.com will convert long urls into tiny ones. Great for those hosted virtual tours, slide shows or web commercials that have dozens of letters in the url. Just go to this website and change the url to the street address or something else more meaningful. (For example: http://tinyurl.com/NARBuzz)

Number 4:  www.ping.fm will update your status on multiple social networking sites. Talk about one stop shopping!

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What an agenda.

This morning at 10:00 a.m. Sherry will be giving a keynote address at the Unchained Orlando Marketing Conference sponsored by the Bloodhound Blog guys. That’s taking place at the Crowne Plaza Hotel at the Orlando Airport.

Later in the day, Sherry will running a program, “Building and Managing a Network of Networks,”  at the NAR Conference. That presentation takes place from 2:30 – 4:00 in Room W330D in the West building. Sherry’s going to take the audience from the “tried and true” to the entirely new world of social media networking.

To top it off, this evening at the RISMedia PowerBroker dinner, Sherry has the honor of introducing one of the greatest Olympic athletes of all time, 9-time GOLD medalist, Mark Spitz.

Additionally, we’ve got a new spot in the Realogy booth #2816.

As Sherry would say, “Awesome!”

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So here’s another argument for social media…

In this year’s Edelman’s trust barometer results, they stated that, globally, trust in a “person like me” is 58%, where as only 20% of respondents trust corporate or product advertising. (ouch!)

Well, can you think of a faster way to connect to “people like me” than Facebook? Or MySpace? Or LinkedIn? Etc., etc., and so forth?

The Edelman report goes on to talk about how social media is on the rise. As expected, it is also more highly used and trusted by 25-to-34-year-old “opinion elites.” The very same generation that constitutes the echo boomers that will have to buy homes (like it or not) to house those families they will soon be making. Read the rest of this entry »

In real estate 101 training I was taught that you tell everyone you know what you are doing and then remind them every time you see them that you are selling real estate. One of my first lessons was to write down the names of everyone I  knew and then contact them to let them know I was now selling real estate. For many new agents today that is done instantly via their Facebook profile.

Now that real estate 101 and Facebook 101 have met, there are amazing opportunities. I admit, it took me a while to figure this out, but recently it dawned as me as I was watching the updates of my selling agent friends on Facebook. They’ve been posting their new listings as newsfeeds and sharing status updates on their latest work-related activities. Facebook has become the Web 2.0 delivery vehicle for just listed and just sold cards. Cool!

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Posted by Sherry Chris

At the upcoming NAR conference in November, I will be speaking about the power of networking and how it can have a profound impact on your business. One of the masters of networking is author and professional speaker Keith Ferrazzi who wrote the bestseller Never Eat Alone. Not only has Keith turned his natural networking ability into a very successful business, but he has managed to stay ahead of the curve by using social networking. If you check him out on Facebook he has thousands of friends and he just launched his own social networking site. Go take a look. We are fortunate to have Keith as a member of our advisory board. His wisdom and insight is invaluable.

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Posted by Kevin Doell

This morning I was listening to the August 18^th “For Immediate Release” podcast and heard about an interesting UMASS Dartmouth study on the uptake of social media. I thought it was pretty timely considering Sherry’s recent post on “Building a Brand Using the Power of Social Media.”

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In the pre-launch days of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, we were very limited in how we could communicate with the industry at large and what we could say. This blog became one way to let people know who we are and what we think about things.  It didn’t take long to figure out the important role social networking and social media in general is playing within business, and how it will become even more powerful in the future.

A Fad That Will Pass?
Some people would say that social networking is simply a group of people talking to each other.  That is partially true - there is a large group of us on Facebook all connected to the same “friends,” and the same goes for LinkedIn. Ditto for Twitter, and some might say the same for Active Rain and even YouTube.

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