Get Some Raving Fans Talking For You
I had an interesting experience the other day. I had become a fan of a builder’s Facebook page but had not interacted at all on the wall of the page. At the time of this post – the community has 75 fans.
This message below showed up in my Facebook inbox.
This prospective customer is using alternative means to get real world feedback. I think this an awesome example of the use of these miniature digital communities.
This potential buyer is looking for validation through word of mouth. They want to hear what the experience is like straight from a customer, not just the company or sales executive.
The challenge for everyone in the real estate industry, especially those who are building or representing entire communities, is to encourage interaction from past customers and clients. Many are nervous about what customers are going to say. Building and/or purchasing a home is a complicated transaction that can have several points of contention (negotiating price, chinese drywall, warranty issues, delays in closing, financing debacles etc.) not to mention the “crazy” customers (everyone has them!) it is hard to open your business up for comments.
There are always going to be issues, but you still need to find those raving fans and get them participating. I would venture to say this is some of the best “marketing dollars” you could spend.
Do you have any Social Media stories to share (good or bad)? What are your concerns?
If you are looking for a positive example – take a look at this video of actual customers that was shot a while back. Scroll down and check out the comments. Good stuff.
Video Tools for Selling Homes (video)
Are you looking for creative ways to connect with potential customers? Time to start producing those videos. Fortunately, it is much easier to produce good video content than it used to be. In this quick video (imagine that) I share the tools that you can use to stand out from your competition.
Here are the links to the tools I was referring to in the video. (not the only tools, just some that work)
Also, check out www.eyejot.com for a great video email tool. I did a post on this a while back – click here.
Kodak Zi8
( I said “z1″ in the video it is actually “zi” my bad)
Logitech Quickcam 9000
Are you a budding producer? Share the videos you have created in the comments section below.
Control Who Sees Your Posts on Facebook (video)
When talking with those in the industry about Facebook, one of the most common questions is “How do we keep our personal information separate from our business information” and vice versa. They are excited about all the possibilities of networking and using Facebook but have concerns about professional connections seeing pictures of their kids, vacation, Halloween parties etc. I am a big advocate of showing your personality on Facebook and sharing that information, but there are definitely times when you want to keep things separate. (if for any reason not to annoy one set of connections or the other)
The great thing about Facebook are the many uses. One might use it primarily to connect with those in the professional world and others might use it only for personal connections. Many times, people want to use it for a little bit of both.
Until recently, many had to make a clear choice of how they were going to use this tool. Now Facebook gives you the option to control WHO sees your posts.
Each time you share content on Facebook, you can now decide who can see it by using controls in the Publisher. Watch this tutorial to learn more about these new Publisher privacy controls.
Of course, first you will have to set up and use your “Friends List” to segment your connections. Once that is done you can start controlling the message better. How can you see yourself using this new option?
You can ready more on Facebook’s blog here: New Tools to Control Your Experience
Google Launches Real-Time Search (video)
With all the new information being shared in real-time updates from networks like Facebook and Twitter and the vast amounts of blog posts, it was becoming apparent that Google would need to change how it displayed the search results. In previous search results Google gave more authority to sites/pages that were not only relevant but had been in the space longer. The problem becomes outdated information can be returned at the top of the results instead of the most timely. In many cases, this becomes a limited experience for the end user. It’s not that those older pages don’t deserve to be there, just that they need to be supplemented by the latest news and information.
We saw that start to shift earlier this year with Google indexing new pages a lot faster and hinting around on their new developments. Yesterday, more big news announced by Google.
Take a moment to watch this video by Google:
…we’re excited to share a few new innovations in the areas of real-time, mobile and social search that we feel are important steps in the evolution of information access.
Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we’re announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.
So, if you weren’t motivated before to create and maintain all of your social media sites, you show be motivated now…at least by fear. As search shifts – you will need to constantly be producing high quality content to show up in the stream.
The results seen above aren’t available to everyone yet – but it is rolling out in the next few days. Has anyone seen these changes yet in their search results?
Tweetdeck – Outlook for Your Social Messages (video)
This piggybacks off my last video post where we talked about Tweetdeck as a power tool and the new changes coming soon. It is quickly becoming an "Outlook" tool for social networks. If you are serious about your social media presence and want to save time and energy, this is a great tool for Mac and PC.
I just did the update and here are the major changes (from Tweetdeck)
• LinkedIn integration – Add a linkedIn column to see updates from your network, send status updates and comment on updates from your contacts
• Twitter List support – Create & manage Twitter Lists within TweetDeck. Follow & unfollow Lists, Create List columns and even get suggested members based on your List title
• Geo-location support – Show an inline map for tweets that contain location data using the new Twitter geo-location setting
• Twitter Retweet support – Flexibility to perform both traditional retweets with edits, or the new-style retweets, with both types shown in your columns
• New improved Add Column screen – Old toolbar icons and drop down menus replaced by slick new Add Column screen
• And many more smaller updates and fixes
Also, check ou the quick video on the release as well. Happy conversations!
