To listen to this podcast episode, visit Ep 56: The Facebook Fear Factor with Dennis O’Neil.

Kevin Oakley  0:12  

Welcome to Market Proof Marketing – the weekly podcast from the marketing minds at DoYouConvert.com where we talk about the current state of all things digital and how they impact home builders and developers around the globe. We’re not here to sell you, we’re here to help you and to try and elevate the conversation. I’m Kevin Oakley and with us as always, is what? I’m Kevin Oakley and with us as always, is the the ad doctor, Andrew Peek, who rewrote that?I thought my mind was melting. That is not what I normally say.

Andrew Peek  0:41  

That is not what you say is I don’t even know what you normally say. Cuz I remember I took over the last episode. I’m like, I read it. This it felt amazing. I’m like, I’m reading this. I’m so privileged. So honored. And then I had to put in what you normally have, and I just tried to write it out. Ah,

Kevin Oakley  0:58  

It all makes sense. That all makes sense.

Andrew Peek  0:59  

But the Yeah, this is 56. And we have Jackie this week.

Jackie Askews  1:03  

Hi, everyone, it’s great to be back, as always

Andrew Peek  1:08  

as always, as always, yeah. Another one. Should we jump into some story time? I feel like we always have really, really long episodes and even if we try to make them shorter, it’s not gonna happen.

Kevin Oakley  1:17  

No, I think this time we have a direction we try to make the longest one possible. I feel like I haven’t regretted anything and so long because the whole train up I we had PCBC then I was in DC, now I’m going on summer vacation at the end of June. Just more travel than normal. I’ve been the holdup. But I think I wrote only one story out but I have three so we could make this the longest one yet. If we want to.

Andrew Peek  1:20  

longest episode ever. That could just be the name of it. Three hours. 

Jackie Askews  1:42  

Three-hour long episode. That’s right. I just have to tell my in laws. I’ll be there by like eight tonight. 

Kevin Oakley  1:52  

I feel like we should title the episode “Payback.” You know, like you didn’t hear us for so long. This is payback.

Andrew Peek  1:58  

Right? Part 1, 2, 3? That’s awesome. That’s awesome. All right, Andrew, kick us off. Yeah, kick us off. So this is a fun one. I just think I keep on

Yeah, kick us off. So this is a fun one. 

Kevin Oakley  2:10  

I’m making you a t-shirt, by the way, that says “this is a fun one.”

Andrew Peek  2:13  

everything is fun. That’s how you should live your life, you should be filled with joy. Right? You should be fun. So important. There you go. So this is a mucho fund one, or actually it can be quite frustrating. This opposite. This is a very frustrating one. I think it’s important for people, when they’re having conversations about cost per lead, or just the number of leads or attribution, that “A” word – it’s almost a four letter word in my mind, because it’s so complex – to to understand and actually apply it to, to your business, but just you separating the types of leads you have when you are looking at cost per lead or conversion rates, or, Hey, where did that lead actually come from? So in my mind, there would be, I guess we could say, three or four different categories of leads. They’ll be brand term leads, like if you’re bidding in Google Ads, that’d be like just the name of your company. Right? So that should have really high conversion rates, and really low cost per lead. But you’re kind of just robbing from organic search. Sorta. Right? Yeah, I think we all agree.

Kevin Oakley  2:18  

I think some people see it as boxing out competitors who are, and there’s a little bit of that. But for the most part, when you see that happen, you end up seeing the paid ad right above the organic result. So it’s a little bit like an old school times, we would put weekend directionals out and then in front of the neighborhood, you might put two, it’s like you’re here now. For sure.

Andrew Peek  3:41  

Yeah, exactly. So then you’re just kind of in my mind, you’re really just shifting where the leads, what bucket they’re in. And so some agencies might do that, where they’re like, Oh, you know, leads, cost per lead is amazing from paid search, but kind of leaving out the the asterisks that like, Oh, 30, 40, 50% of these are actually brand terms. So the cost per lead is actually this. And that would be the other type of lead would be non brand term leads, kind of those those two buckets. And then within that, if we look at it at the community level, there would then be coming soon leads, which should be relatively inexpensive, just depending on if it’s Facebook lead or a Google AdWords lead. So where did it come from? And then if you’re using a landing page, or not a landing page, and you could keep adding all these different rules to it, but sure, coming soon community versus a normal, actively selling community, because one person is just getting on a list, the other person is reaching out saying, Hey, I’m interested I possibly want to visit or make an appointment. So the cost will be different conversion rates will be drastically different. So just having all those boxes separate, and understanding that they will be different. And that’s okay. I think is,

Kevin Oakley  4:56  

you know, I just think there is a special place, in H-E-double hockey sticks for people who try to directly confuse

a thing, but it has a special place there for marketers or ad agencies who tried to confuse intentionally owners division presidents, whoever, by merging those streams and not clarifying that in any way. I think that’s, that’s the part where, especially like landing page, no landing page, that’s an easy, it should just be an Asterix. In fact, about a year and a half ago, I joined a Facebook group, I think it’s called Facebook Ads Betterment Society, I think Will Duderstadt even introduced me to it and I hung out there because it was interesting to see what other people might say, but just yesterday, someone posted in there a question to the group. And it was, I’m confused why I’m still getting low quality or erroneous email and phone information from Facebook lead ads, even when I tried to make a higher intent ad. It’s still not right. And I just feel like it makes no sense. Because if people are giving me contact information, don’t they want me to contact them? And I just cracked up, like, laugh out loud. Like, you don’t get it?

Andrew Peek  6:10  

That’s

Kevin Oakley  6:11  

you’re trying to just get a conversion as quickly as possible with as little context as possible. And you know, they don’t. So they don’t want even marketers in Facebook groups like this one apparently don’t understand sometimes the difference between what you just broke out so yeah,

Andrew Peek  6:27  

I would think like understanding that is easy to explain to whatever level if you’re having to go up two chains of like, executive or whatever it’s making report for them, they will totally get coming soon versus normal, actively selling community. It’s not something after like, Oh, I’m gonna protect them from too much data. I think it’s totally fair. Yep. End of the fun story. 

Jackie Askews  6:53  

Love it. Awesome. Do you want me to

dive in? Yeah, go for it. Okay, so this week, I’m going to go into the power of word of mouth. And like, last story, this kind of has the same context with the carpets. So this past week, I had a family member get her carpets cleaned by a well known highly marketed company here in Pittsburgh. And unfortunately for her and them, she had a horrible experience. And when they cleaned the upstairs carpets, they used an overabundance of cleaner solution that went through her floorboards upstairs and dripped from the ceiling down on to the hardwood floors on the first floor.

Kevin Oakley  7:39  

Oh my god, you’re gonna say they sucked up their cat in the machine. This is worse.

Jackie Askews  7:45  

Well, exactly.

I didn’t either. I didn’t either. And so when

Kevin Oakley  7:51  

did you guys have to memorize poems in middle school? Or maybe a fifth grade? Remember the poem, spaghetti, spaghetti all over the place? No. Just me. Everyone wanted to do that poem that was just about spaghetti coming out of the pot, like filling up the whole house and under the chair.

Jackie Askews  8:09  

That’s what you immediately though of? Yeah.

Well, so what happened was when she went back to the company to see if they could either come fix clean up or help with a solution, they didn’t do anything, they explain that that’s how much they use. For every house, they didn’t really factor in the padding different things with the carpet. And they just said sorry. So in this hyper connected world, where was the first place, she went to vent after coughing up that $600 and being told tough cookies, where

Andrew Peek  8:41  

I think that facebook, facebook,

Kevin Oakley  8:43  

she has a Twitter account, it’s gone there first, but probably exactly as Facebook,

Jackie Askews  8:47  

Twitter would have probably gotten the step by step in the live, like live feed. I feel like if that was the case, but instead, it was this really not very nice Facebook post about the company just warning her friends in a sense, which I don’t blame her 600 bucks, I’d be pretty upset too. And so the post was shared by six friends. And I was following along because again, it being a family member, I totally understand. But one of the friends I didn’t know, was going on and saying she was just horrified and actually cancelled her upcoming appointment with them. So I don’t know if you guys noticed this too. But I’m noticing an increase lately with people on Facebook who are posting for recommendations. They want to know, you know, from the people they know. So I was I was amazed I was by, you know, going through some of these that people are asking for recommendations. And I was surprised by how many people actually speak up when asked. And just another one off the top of my head is recently someone posted about a barber any barber recommendations in the local area, and had over 60 comments on it or so just made me think of the Nielsen reports about that 92% of consumers believe suggestions from friends and family more than advertising. And people refer others because they want to share something they love, not just because they might get a discount voucher for it for future use. And that same goes with something negative when that happens as well. So there’s much more to word of mouth advertising and marketing than just I think some people go in with do a good job and hope for a referral. And just 65% of consumers some I forget where exactly I heard this, but they cut ties with the brand, sometimes over just one single poor encounter. And so it’s important to create an amazing customer experience and sharing it. So for homebuilders, I think it’s the testimonial side of things. Now taking the time to collect and prominently displayed the honest reviews of the product. And even if it’s someone is willing to shout about the business, make sure you know that people get a chance to hear it and take it capitalize on the good. Since so many people I feel like now are quick to post negative.

Kevin Oakley  11:18  

Yeah, that’s why the businesses have to go beyond because it also feels kind of ridiculous to go live to Facebook and say, yay, this company showed up when they said they would, right, like that’s. And and yet businesses all the time, not just home builders. So businesses are like I don’t understand I’m doing what I said I would do. And I’m not getting enough good reviews and well Hmm. Showing up, while, perhaps exceptional is not something that someone else wants to brag about for you. Right, that’s just…

Andrew Peek  11:49  

I agree.

Jackie Askews  11:49  

It made me also think of a lot of the referral programs that I’ve seen come up across and I know being with a home builder in the past,, I know that we’re very big having those referral programs in place the realtor programs. And I think it is true. The fact that I know where we built our house, we had everyone ask that, you know, friends and family. How was your experience? Do you recommend them? And I also know a handful of friends that built with the same company that you know, got it mixture of good and bad. I know Andrew, you’ve gone through this. It’s fresh in the brain for you too.  So your friends, I’m sure friends and family are hearing about your experience. 

Andrew Peek  12:32  

Which is crazy, because it’s like, just our area, I’m sure it’s just like that where you are. It’s like, half of our friends could be possible buyers for this. It’s crazy.

Kevin Oakley  12:40  

Yeah, I’m telling you.  It’s obviously the reticular activator system in my brain because it’s what I do. But if I go to a soccer field, if I’m if I’m at a party, someone is talking about real estate, and someone mentions a community of new homes somewhere and I’m always like, it’s like radar. So like, like every where it is. It is and there’s so many. Yeah, just keep keep going on that word of mouth is is obviously huge. And it’s the hardest to hack. Yeah, I mean, you can go viral. But that’s different than getting positive word of mouth. Have you heard is different than you have to hear like, these are the best folks ever.

Jackie Askews  13:20  

That maybe as you get older you life gets crazy. And you have less time to research as much. So the first thing you do is talk to friends and family. I think just making sure that customer experience is a good one and trying to fix any mistakes you can if there’s something that you I was just shocked that the company didn’t give her some discount or money back or someone else. Now, I know every situation is different. But that just stuck with me. You know, that’s not good. And I feel like that probably really hurt the company at the end of the day.

Kevin Oakley  13:50  

Yeah, well, and the triple down bad thing that this company did is in a way they kind of blamed they didn’t just take no blame themselves. They kind of blamed your friend by obviously alluding to the fact that it must be her home or her carpet of course, like it’s not us that caused the problem somewhere. I remember when the Dyson vacuum cleaner first came out to Yeah, at Heartland people would call up all the time about you know, a bunch of fibers or the carpet being pulled up and the carpet installers like you know, you are using Dyson, Well, those are just too strong. They just suck up the carpet. Too much and so sorry. Don’t use, I mean, I don’t know what to tell you but your vacuum. It’s like

Andrew Peek  14:29  

that’s all first thoughts. Yeah, the carpet like Exactly. Everyone’s buying this vacuum. Now this is not going to work..

Jackie Askews  14:36  

Well, the hype was real for that.

Kevin Oakley  14:38  

Yeah. Uh huh. I’ve got I’ve got some positive word of mouth to share my own actually in my story. So sweet. If you remember, I think it was Episode 54. We talked about the the Dor “d-o-r” product that you could put as a thermal camera above a doorway to do counting of traffic units. Oh, yeah, yeah. And so quick review, right, found an email in the spam box, I set up a call had the call. They’re like, we can’t tell you pricing someone else to tell you hadn’t heard back from them since then, about three weeks ago. And an email shows up. I think in the promotions box. I don’t know where it came from. But Michael, the CEO of the company sent an email now it looked like it came from a CRM, there’s a graphical header of the company logo, it’s got his picture, and then a footer. So it looks like a form letter that you get all the time from CEOs. And he’s talking about, you know, when they started the company a few years ago, where they got in the business, that they’ve had some things but they’re working, make it all better. And at the end, he says, if you have a moment, I would enjoy hearing your biggest challenge with growing your business just hit reply. And let me know. And of course, as marketers, and somewhat skeptical folks. I’m like, you know what? Like Michaels not getting this email, but I’m going to go ahead, I’m just going to go ahead because I, I hadn’t heard back from them. I know a couple other builders had reached out and had similar conversations are like, well, I talked for 10 minutes. And I supposed to hear back from some else with pricing. And I was just like, I’m gonna hit reply. And I’m going to tell Michael. And I think this is nice, I’ll just tell you exactly what I said. I said, I’ve referred many companies your way. And yet no one seems to be able to get actual pricing or order units yet. They keep getting stuck with someone else will follow up, but they never do. That’s my biggest challenge. And to their credit, in two minutes, Michael emails me back, and includes other folks from the team as well. And I think one of them is the head of their sales department. And so he hops in is like, hey, let me know who these people were will take care of them. I’m on a call with a builder partner, so I can’t get back them right away. He goes ahead and look through the CRM and finds two of them in there. And it’s like, here’s the latest with them. Here’s who talked to them. He even goes back. And he’s like, I’ve listened to the podcast, sorry to hear. And we ended up in the spam folder the first time, but super responsive. And I was like, okay, timeout guys, I separate these into two different bodies. It’s now I still want to get home builders access to your product and information and see if this works or not. Because if it does be great, but at the same time, on a separate level, you’ve impressed me tremendously, because I’ve replied to CEO letters before and get nothing because it just goes to the black box mysterious, you know, home or no one ever replies or looks at it. And so I was like, Hey, here’s the deal. Here’s who we are. Here’s what I’d like to help you with, potentially if your products great. You want to come on the podcast? And I’m like, Sure, yeah, you know, so I think I think the CEO is gonna come on weeks and talk to us, but I just was like, okay, as much as this is a kind of a technological product. We talk a lot about tech, we love tech and how great it is. And even though tech in the CRM sense was the thing that probably sent that initial email out, they had to have the human beings on the back end. And it changed around everything. Because up until that point, I was starting to just slowly, not a huge deal to me really, but slowly getting more and more annoyed, as frustrated. I’ve now put this company’s name out there. I know some people are reaching out. And I don’t want anyone to have a bad experience. So I thought that was awesome. And I’m looking forward to having him on. And we can talk about how their product works and other industries that have used it and just kind of the idea of counting traffic in general. And anyway, that’ll be me.

Andrew Peek  18:17  

That’s awesome. Yeah, that’d be awesome. It’d be cool to have a few builders up and running. And then kind of like be able to tie those two episodes together. That’d be like, Yeah, all in one.

Kevin Oakley  18:28  

Yeah. No, it’s great. Okay, so like I said, I’m just going to keep rolling because I got I got two other funnels. I got a bunch when I was at PCBC had dinner with Steve Shoemaker. Who else was there? That sounds like fun… Steve. Steve’s owner, Vernon. Better? Yeah, even better. Those are two of my favorite people in this industry. And we started talking about Disney the company, and how great it is. And one of them had even talked to Disney about doing training. I think Matt Riley was there with us. Maybe that was another one. Anyway, we were talking about how great they are and how good they do with customer service. And it kind of threw out there this idea that I don’t think Disney the company could be a thing that started today, because it’s so inefficient, how they do things, it’s so incredibly inefficient, that it’s incredibly expensive to go visit a Disney park. Because it is such a unique experience. Right? They don’t, they don’t scrimp on anything, they repaint the park wherever necessary. Every night, they, you know, everything is cast members are just sent out to cause random acts of magic to happen. And if you were to tell a group of investors that we’re going to do this incredibly inefficient thing in today’s hyper efficient hyper technology focused world, I just don’t know that anyone would be able to start a company like that from scratch today. And so then we were like, Well, let’s think about the last decade, what companies kind of come close to that. You could argue that Apple while over a decade over the last decade has transitioned to Amazon, right? Those are the two that we came up with. Yet Amazon is all about the business of not creating human interaction. Like the magic, original magic of I order something it showed up in a box quickly. And that was convenient, is not wearing off. But there’s no actual brand loyalty that I have to Amazon, the product delivery part of Amazon, I think amazon prime video, I think I use Amazon photos. There’s other parts of Amazon, that would be stickier for me. But if another company at scale said, we can ship you a product in two hours. And it’s easy and quick. And we’ve got a great app experience and reviews and ratings. And it was 5% less than Amazon by Amazon, right? Like it’s not Yeah, true. It’s not the same emotional level that when when Steve was talking about it, you know, they went around in a circle. And with their sales team, and everyone shared their Disney experience and like half the room cried taking the family to Disney.

Andrew Peek  20:59  

Yeah, I feel like Disney the film, the characters spanning How many? I don’t even know generations. This is what the conclusion was, but like without that Disney is not Disney. Like Yeah. Like Yeah, like a great grandmother all the way down to the Grand child. That’s a year to and it’s like, there’s that character for everybody. That is yes, like the the core.

Jackie Askews  21:25  

And I think even just growing up, I think back to my favorite family vacations. And I’ll I’ll sit here and say mine were was going to Disney with my whole family. So I definitely 

Kevin Oakley  21:34  

and that goes back to why I think it couldn’t happen again. Because the inefficiency. And then the requirement of decades of that inefficiency continued to happen before you reach this tipping point of multi generational, nostalgic, shared experience thing happening. But then the conversation also switched over to this amazing technology, which I’m just going to call an iPad on wheels will put a link in the show notes what this is, but it’s you know, basically a Segway like looking device wheel base with a long pole, you put an iPad on top, or an iPad, like device has two cameras on it. And we were talking I think it’s good all homes has used this in the wild. And we’re talking about its use as basically an online salesperson letting someone come into a property, you open the door through that code. And here is this iPad on wheels and the online sales persons faces. They’re kind of like FaceTime, talking to you and and following you around at least the first floor because they can’t go upstairs of the home answering questions.

Andrew Peek  22:37  

Yeah, and really weird. It doesn’t

Jackie Askews  22:40  

I don’t know if I’d like that yet.

Kevin Oakley  22:43  

Right? And we’re, we’re more techie folks. But Vernon said, you know, the first minute was a little bit strange, he said, but then it just became very, very natural to him. And he was he was, there’s like someone else was there and they were talking to them. And it’s relatively inexpensive. I think around three grand plus the iPad, I don’t know if there’s a another service expense, monthly service expense to make it run. Anyway, we’re talking about that. And the next day, this is a long story. This is what longest episode ever. Next day at PCBC, we’re talking about the the keynote speaker was talking about, you know, change and disruption and technology and, and talking about how humans and human thought and how important that are and storytelling and the human connection and, and it just kind of brought it all back to me that Disney would never use an iPad on wheels to welcome you to Main Street USA. Right? That would be way more efficiently. Not Yeah, it would be way more efficient. But if you’re going to pay thousands of dollars to go on a trip, like that’s not happening. So I think it to me, it cemented this kind of new core thought process, which is, as marketers or sales people are technologists, we always want to find the best current solution using technology. But we also have have to constantly remind ourselves that the best solution is a human solution. And so while the iPad on wheels may solve a problem of we can’t hire a salesperson to hang out at every inventory home that’s an hour away from each other, just to wait for someone to walk by, I understand that you’re not going to do that, that that might be how Disney would approach it. I don’t know. But this might be the best solution for now. But we can’t just say well check that off. We’ve solved that problem with technology. Because the best technology would be more like Uber saying, Hey, I’m in route to go to this home in the next 10 minutes and find a way using technology to connect its sales person who’s available to show up and be there. live and in person.

Andrew Peek  24:48  

Yeah, especially if they didn’t have to drive that person. So that sales person can still kind of if they’re working, they can switch tasks, if that makes any sense. Hmm. Like their offices moving. They could just be in an Uber all day just go into different spots. I’m driving while working answering the phone, which is really what

Kevin Oakley  25:06  

it’s how the existing home market the used home market functions.

Dennis O’Neil  25:11  

Exactly. Yeah.

Kevin Oakley  25:12  

So file this under interesting, just a story. But I think there’s something there too. As you listen that hopefully we spark some ideas in your brain. I’m going to save my third one for next week. But we have got so many more stories to share. Let’s let’s hop over to the news

Andrew Peek  25:32  

and I make my quick live update.

Kevin Oakley  25:34  

Oh yeah,

Andrew Peek  25:35  

yeah, just because like Lindsay just we haven’t closed yet on the house. But there’s been we had the private inspection. There’s some things that were found are getting that fixed that allow. Then Lindsay got a email from I’m 99% sure that division president which she should not have his email. That’s another story. Anyways, it seems like we have our delay. We’re supposed to close next Monday, next next Monday. The 24th. Yeah, it’s like, Hey, we should have a good idea of when that will be by the end of next week. We’ll keep you advised. There’s all the stuff he was referencing and the email. So yeah, why they possible today we’re going to be living in my parents house or her parents.

Kevin Oakley  26:18  

I’m gonna go along. Yeah. I guess the weekend July 15.

Andrew Peek  26:23  

Oh,gosh. Oh, man. I might find a hotel for amount of time.

Kevin Oakley  26:31  

Yeah, sorry, man.

Andrew Peek  26:33  

We’ll find out Ah, it’s good. I’m hoping that everything

Jackie Askews  26:36  

on your list of things that needs done.

Andrew Peek  26:39  

Yeah. Even if it means to two extra week or something just to have everything fixed when you move in. It was mostly easy stuff but except if remember back to the story of of having to get the trim corrected on the side, there is some roof damage to the shingles. So I don’t think any houses are currently be removed in the neighborhood. They’re all past that. So I I would assume that getting a roof out for that little bit is probably their sticky point.

Jackie Askews  27:05  

On the production side, no idea could be making it up. excuse. But it’s still hard though. Today’s regardless of a delay, I you know, especially waiting for house, I can imagine where you guys are at right now. You’re just so ready

Andrew Peek  27:18  

to thrown stuff in boxes, because I’m like, I’m ready to go get me out of here and don’t use and stuff that I’m done to secretly try to just, I’m gonna try to throw it away. Like we don’t need to open that we didn’t use it last time, but get rid of it. Good idea. Okay, end of that second story.

Kevin Oakley  27:34  

Well, the good news for everyone listening is that the updates on the house will continue for a little while because people love to hear about dates of

Andrew Peek  27:43  

updates. The Peeks

Kevin Oakley  27:44  

are going to ensure that continues. Yeah, yeah. Alright, moving on to the news article number one from realtor.com. The hottest housing markets in May may just surprise you. So funny.

So

I mean, typically usually see California, Austin, Dallas, Houston. Maybe Vegas in the past, obviously was a top 10 markets in Florida, North Carolina. Nope. Number one on the list right now. Rochester, New York, followed by Fort Wayne, Indiana. Followed by Lafayette, Indiana. Austin, Midland, Texas, Columbus, Ohio. Oh, yeah, box. Manchester, New Hampshire, Spokane, Washington, Yuba City, California. And Pueblo, Colorado.

Andrew Peek  28:33  

Those are very different. Yeah, markets.

Kevin Oakley  28:36  

That’s not

Andrew Peek  28:39  

Yeah. I feel like it’s an affordability thing? Some of those did a big jump from the year prior. It has the listings like yeah, Lafayette, Indiana was ranked 30. And now this year is ranked number three. That’s a big jump.

Jackie Askews  28:55  

Same with Fort Wayne 21 to two that mean? That’s incredible.

Kevin Oakley  29:00  

Yeah. Wow. credible job. This is no surprise. I’m just kidding. But definitely check out the link in the show notes. Check out on your own obviously, you want to look at how they’re determining what even hottest means that they did say as a group. realtor dot coms. hottest markets received 1.5 to three times the number of views per property compared to the national rates, they’re talking about people checking it out, not necessarily purchasing or moving. They’re just talking about views per property that’s on the market.

Andrew Peek  29:30  

Some people demand I you could kind of interpret them as interest. Yeah, interest, interest. And

Kevin Oakley  29:37  

I do think you’re right, it’s being driven by affordability, people telecommuting, having the flexibility to work from home, or work remotely. And you know, our builder in Albuquerque has seen that for a while now. They have a neighborhood pretty far out. But it’s got gigabit internet. And so you know what, you don’t have to live in California anymore. You should come out here. And remote workers are like, That’s amazing. I need that in my life. Yes, exactly. So yeah, mid Midwest and the East kind of leading the charge here in recent months as things kind of adjust across the country. It’s just interesting to keep an eye on nothing in the south.

Andrew Peek  30:15  

I that’s not too surprising. No, Florida, man. Look in trouble again. Well,

Kevin Oakley  30:23  

I think everyone’s everyone’s article. News, article number two from the New York Times, on June 3, antitrust investigations are being started or researched by our national government, for Facebook, Amazon, apple, and Google, all for different variations. But part of this, you know, presidential, what do you call it?

Andrew Peek  30:46  

Trumpisaurus? I don’t know what

Kevin Oakley  30:48  

No, no, not not the current president just shoot on the Democratic side candidates coming towards nomination time. I know that there’s just a whole bunch of them, you got to get down to a few of them. Oh, my gosh, there’s like

Andrew Peek  30:59  

this, what is primary primary

Kevin Oakley  31:03  

season, that’s what I was looking for.

Andrew Peek  31:05  

They’re just begins, it began, a couple

Kevin Oakley  31:08  

of them have kind of publicly shouted from the rooftops that they believe that some of these companies should be broken up, in particular, a Facebook being split into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, kind of separating them so that there’s not centralized power, then that one of all these maybe Google, I think Google and Facebook are the two biggest ones on the hot seat. Because when’s the last time a new search engine started gaining any momentum?

Andrew Peek  31:37  

Does so weird, I need to learn more about anti trust to fully understand that. But it’s like that the people create the people. So the people, the users, like, there are alternatives, but they were not good enough to catch on and be good, right? Am I sorta but there’s more to it that I don’t understand. Oh, it is

Kevin Oakley  31:56  

it is obviously like all things political come a lot more complicated, then it should be. But the easiest example is Instagram and Facebook, adapting Snapchat, approach to social kill Snapchat, right? So they, like the small little company is gaining traction really becoming popular, and then is essentially made irrelevant through the monopolistic power of a Facebook Instagram, combined company. Okay. And Amazon with retail, right? Apple with their app store, saying you have to if you want to download an app, you’ve got to go through this ecosystem. And then Google controlling not just the largest, but the second largest search engine in the world, YouTube, it’s just there’s a lot of power to this trend in one spot. So just something to keep an eye on, you know, it’s it’s kind of a hail mary. I would I don’t know that anything is likely to actually come of it. But it is, if it does, like can you imagine Facebook and Instagram truly competing against each other? That and what that would mean in terms of innovation, new opportunities for marketers? I think both good and bad things come from that

Andrew Peek  33:06  

or Amazon competing against I don’t know if they have it? Yeah, there other than Amazon their logistics kind of messing with up I

Kevin Oakley  33:16  

think it has to do with Amazon basics. They’re saying look, you control the marketplace, you can’t you watch is you that beds in a box are selling like crazy. And then you can run generic Amazon bed in a box. And you can promote it above other similar products because you own the marketplace. Interesting. I’m so

Andrew Peek  33:35  

that’s very interesting. So like, the business pro business or for out of my mind. I’m like, so what, like, that’s the way it’s gonna be? I don’t know. It’s, I feel like it’s a competition. Yeah.

Kevin Oakley  33:48  

But again, stop and think if if Google and YouTube became different companies, and immediately Google says, You know what, we should get into video and YouTube says, You know what, we should get more serious about search. I don’t think it’s going to happen. I don’t know that is good. But as consumer, it excites me that I may get change and even better video experience, I may get an even better search experience. Whereas Google’s kind of been the same again, for how long?

Jackie Askews  34:13  

It’s only a matter of time that something new ends up starting to, you know, come to the forefront. It’s only it’s only a matter of time.

Kevin Oakley  34:20  

Yeah, it hasn’t. there really hasn’t been anything new. It’s almost impossible to like, go someone mentioned the other day, on a podcast I was listening to the doctor go is growing is like, yeah, and now encompasses, like, 1% of all searches. And that’s like

Andrew Peek  34:34  

that. The Secure ones. I think it’s like incredible where

Kevin Oakley  34:37  

they said they’ll never they’ll never sell your data to advertisers, you allow advertisers to

Jackie Askews  34:43  

be like Google would be a hard one to ever try to go into competition with.

Dennis O’Neil  34:48  

Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Oakley  34:50  

All right. But file the next one under. Kevin still feels like he’s right. I don’t know. Instagram. Now. Starting to allow  horizontal video. I still, I mean, until the TV becomes vertical. Yeah, I don’t see vertical, the dominant format.

Andrew Peek  35:07  

And this was yes, this was more. I don’t know if y’all use it IGTV? I don’t. Because I’m a weirdo. Personally, I have watched

Kevin Oakley  35:16  

some things but maybe like three shows ever.

Andrew Peek  35:19  

But it’s not like, I guess it’s for me, it hasn’t been a destination. It’s like, oh, that person put something on IGTV. That’s interesting. And it’s just a video. So I was the creators, I don’t like that word. There’s like, the people that make content the creators, were pushing for horizontal. And so IG will make let you do both, instead of only vertical.

Jackie Askews  35:39  

I was gonna say, Kevin, with your experience. Did you have any type of problem having it be vertical to begin with? Or is this? No, it’s just,

Kevin Oakley  35:47  

it is weird. It’s like you’re watching something through a keyhole? Yes, you naturally hold your phone that way. But your eyes are not a wide angle, vertical lens. They’re wide angle, horizontal lens. Yep. And so it’s just it feels not especially longer form content, like on IGTV. It just feels it’s kind of like when you put on a VR device for the first time. And you get this sense of being trapped or like inside of a box, you can still turn your head and look around. I don’t know, I just I think it just makes sense that when people are making long form content, again, IGTV is designed for several minutes up to I think 60 is the limit or 30 minutes long content, wow, to ask a content creator to make something that’s only going to be used here, which means it has to be vertical. Yeah, at that length. Like it’s one thing to make a two minute video in multiple formats. It’s another to make a 30 minute show in two different formats. It’s just

Jackie Askews  36:43  

and I agree, like just to think of that content. The space context is just very small and limited. And I feel like we’re creatures of habit naturally. I know anytime I have a video Come on, I want to turn my phone. I mean, I I agree with you. That would be it’d be hard to watch something for a full hour like that. Yeah. Unless it was exciting is now it’s horizontal videos.

Kevin Oakley  37:06  

Yeah, I hope they bring it to everything. Because I mean, I think at this point, Instagram, holding on to the square format is also silly. It’s like really? Square.

Jackie Askews  37:16  

I was so excited when you could zoom a picture out. I know when I was so excited. As soon as that feature was enabled. For the longest time when it first came out. I do you guys remember that? You could only have a certain template size.

Andrew Peek  37:30  

So yep, small changes.

Kevin Oakley  37:32  

Yeah. And the last article, Andrew, did you drop this one in there? I did not. But I tell you

Andrew Peek  37:37  

all about it. They’re just they’re, they’re simply splitting iTunes into a video, podcast and music. So it won’t be a single destination, you’ll have three separately, which is I’ve never really I never used iTunes. I don’t know why. Like, I just never Am I time ago. I’ve never used to it. So I’m like, okay, that’s cool. But I do have on my phone. I already have those apps to use. I don’t use me app, because I have I use Spotify. But podcast is the podcast app. I do use that one. So they’re just splitting it. I’m trying to I don’t know a lot of people that use iTunes. I know Spotify is a big one. But yeah, I think the podcasts and music more people it would affect them with article talked about is if you already own music, so if you purchase music versus I do the streaming thing $10 a month, Spotify however much it is I have no idea. But if you were to buy albums previously, you’re like, Whoa, what happens to my stuff? It just gets organized where it would belong. So they get three apps.

Have fun with three apps now. 1 to 3.

Kevin Oakley  38:37  

I’m part of that old geezer club. I think I have probably like $200 worth of music that I have purchased from over the over the years. Oh yeah, I mean, as late as

Jackie Askews  38:47  

at least this one going going to the same place. It’s not gonna lose it all.

Kevin Oakley  38:51  

Probably 2000 let’s see what year do you think I started using Pandora first I use Spotify but I would imagine is 2010 2011.

Jackie Askews  39:02  

Well, what are the iPod shuffles? I feel like iTunes that was so great to use for putting music on one of those Nanos when those first came out with this.

Andrew Peek  39:11  

They’re so tiny. Oh, man, this just feel like the first commercials with like the white. You know, that is such an eye Apple brand thing. The white headphones. Yeah. And there. I think they were like the silhouette of the people dancing. And they had the white headphones. I think I must remember that. And then things change. Things change. Don’t on anything. Least the music.

Kevin Oakley  39:33  

So but just world’s continued to change, unravel.

All right, we’re going to take a quick break and we come back we’re going to be joined by Dennis O’Neil who attended Facebook’s developer conference. He actually got to see Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sweat in person around issues of privacy and more. So we’re going to check in and see where things are headed. What he saw while he was there and its impact for homebuilders. We’ll be right back.

Welcome back to this week’s 360 topic of the week of Facebook fear factor with a someone who is very not scary. Mr. Dennis O’Neil, founder of Neil interactive. Dennis, thanks for joining us.

Dennis O’Neil  40:31  

Thanks for having me. On the show, longtime listener first time caller

first time caller, what a fun name fear factor. Whoo.

Kevin Oakley  40:42  

Yeah. Right. And we love superhero analogies, because I couldn’t figure out how to make Star Wars analogies work. But so tell us briefly your origin story because you were a builder or worked for a builder,

Dennis O’Neil  40:57  

right? Yeah, originally, and this is sort of my first entrance into the industry. I started as a, I guess, really a new home sales trainee. feels like forever ago way back in January of 2000. I started working for Ryland homes, which has now been absorbed twice. And it’s now part of webinar. But I worked for Ryland homes in the Baltimore market was a training for a couple months, obviously, and then end up being a salesperson for about four years or so. And then I spent another four years with Ryland in some sort of variation of sales and marketing management position.

Kevin Oakley  41:31  

Did you ever get a chance to meet Jim Ryan?

Dennis O’Neil  41:34  

So just somebody just asked me that question too. And I did get to meet Jim Ryan. But not actually until about two years after I left the company. Yeah, really interesting guy he was he was brought in to our local to Maryland does an annual trade show much, much smaller, of course and do it at the fairgrounds. But local pa brought him in to speak to all the members and really interesting guy and over the years had already by that point, I had met his to two of his sons. I’d met Pete and Jim Jr. Because they’re both builders. So just sort of done a little bit of work over the years for them here and there. But it was really interesting to to finally meet the guy that started a company that really got me got me started in the industry.

Kevin Oakley  42:18  

Yeah, this is nothing about anything but it’s Ryan Ryan family name. Of course, there’s different Ryan’s everywhere, but that’s kind of known as the first family and homebuilding kind of like the Bush family or the Kennedys. Right. It’s just this dynasty. And Ed Ryan started Ryan homes. His brother Jim then started Ryland and I believe I don’t just made up there’s no fact checkers out there. But I’m pretty sure Jim Ryan was started one of the first masterplan communities that was kind of he split off from Ryan proper and was like, I’m going to go down south and start my own.

Dennis O’Neil  42:56  

Yeah. Columbia, Maryland. Yeah. This is one of the first huge communities..

Kevin Oakley  43:01  

was in Columbia. Okay.

Dennis O’Neil  43:02  

Yeah. Yeah. Columbia, right. Well, I mean, I guess at the time they were hit like Pittsburgh, right. Like, isn’t that sort of where the company’s headquarters? Yeah, so the so yeah, so we headed south to Columbia, Maryland. And that community. So Ryland was still building Columbia when I started. I mean, it’s tremendous. It’s, it’s basically it is the county seat in that area. And it’s, I want to say the had finished the last of the seven villages in Columbia. So they finished the last home in the last village while I was an employee at Ryland. And Rylan started in 67. So 14 years probably that they were building Columbia, never ending community. No. Well, the redevelopment was starting by the time I was leaving, right. So they were already picking some of the early projects and starting over again.

Kevin Oakley  43:47  

So so I I got to meet Ed Ryan before he died two or three times. And one time, this old man with a cane just like walks into my office, I’m doing. I’m a marketing VP at the time at Heartland and this guy walks in, he’s like, Where’s Marty? Who was the company president at Heartland Marty’s offices right next to mine, but he’s not here. Lot of times he wasn’t there. Because he was out looking at land. And he’s like, Can I help you? Well, I’m Jim Ryan. I was like, Oh my gosh, like, start shaking. And it’s like, I’m looking for Marty because he should start a board and I want to be on it. And he walked out. I was pretty much all my interaction with

Dennis O’Neil  44:27  

funny.

He was an interesting guy. There really was

Kevin Oakley  44:31  

so much money and you’re like, shouldn’t you have someone like walking for you? How did you get here with things? Right? Yeah,

Dennis O’Neil  44:38  

she can somebody else have walked into the office to tell Marty that he should start a board?

Kevin Oakley  44:44  

Yeah, yeah. obviously didn’t have a cell phone. I don’t think on him either. Anyway, back to that. So you started with Ryland work there until what year? 08. Yeah, perfect time to start your own company. Sounds like

Dennis O’Neil  44:57  

yeah, you know, we were in such a great spot in the industry in 08 right. Then I just figured, hey, it’s just got to be the right time. Right. Yeah, it was a definitely a rough spot. But you know, it’s it’s sort of worked out. Well got to be a time in the industry. You know, where I just started seeing more opportunities outside. I loved my time at Ryland. You know, it was enjoyed a lot of years made a lot of lifelong friends there. And, but it just seemed like the right time, you know, I was ready for sort of a next challenge. And, you know, the good news is, is we sort of figured out how to grow and how to thrive in a tough market, which is really sort of set us up for better success as the markets improved.

Kevin Oakley  45:35  

So and ONeil interactive does what briefly, in totality quite a bit, right?

Dennis O’Neil  45:40  

quite a bit. Yeah, we’re web design and digital marketing is what we’re known most for. No doubt

Kevin Oakley  45:47  

And home builder real estate specific or

Dennis O’Neil  45:49  

Yes, great, should have clarified that 100%. We work with the homebuilding industry, there is the occasional exception where I have some clients that do sort of apart and management, real estate, because real estate related Yeah, but primarily we’re interested in you know, we working with builders, like we don’t work with general brokerage companies, that kind of thing. That’s a whole different animal.

Kevin Oakley  46:12  

I teasingly say you’re a real company. We were talking about this offline before I started because you have an office where there is free coffee. We’re like, Do You Convert? We’re all remote all over the country. I think everyone is in a different state, even all in different locations. That’s amazing

Dennis O’Neil  46:30  

that none of you guys are in the same state.

Kevin Oakley  46:31  

It’s amazing that you have free coffee. I do miss that.

Andrew Peek  46:34  

We’re all I think we’re all one time zone. Except for Mike, too. Right? We’re all Eastern.

Kevin Oakley  46:39  

That Mike is one hour. So that means the next two people we hire have to be in Mountain Time.

Dennis O’Neil  46:46  

Pick some new time zones for sure.

Yeah, Hawaii. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s a good I guess at least I still get to pick my own coffee like you guys do. Right. I still get the coffee that we have.

Kevin Oakley  46:57  

Right? That’s true. Right on. Alright. Andrew, I’ll let you transition over to F8. Right. was the name of the conference? Yes.

Andrew Peek  47:04  

Okay. Dennis, I was on the Instagram. I do follow you, which I definitely recommend others do. And I saw you at F8. And I was a little a little jealous. Which is that’s Facebook’s huge nerd conference. Just do a quick intro on and I’ve never been Yeah, I definitely want to go. Hopefully, sometime. If it makes sense.

Dennis O’Neil  47:23  

It’s a it was it was great. I can so annual conference or almost annual. And there have been years actually where they haven’t done an f8 they call it f8. Because I wasn’t sure about this. They call it f8. Because Facebook hackathons are notoriously eight hours long. So they started doing it as sort of like a invite, you know, when they were much smaller, you know, inviting people in for what they call an f8. And they would invite other developers to participate in the Facebook hackathons.

Andrew Peek  47:51  

Gotcha. And they would try to find leaks and their security and probably some type of reward or something.

Dennis O’Neil  47:57  

Yeah. Or they probably found something. Find the good developers and try to hire them. Basically, it’s I’m sure it’s probably really where they were. Yeah, yeah. So they do it almost every year, think almost always it’s going to be held somewhere out towards Silicon Valley. You know, as some San Jose this year, sir. I’ve watched the keynotes and the recorded sessions for years online. You know, it’s it’s an application system, right? So you’ve got a, you’ve got to fill out a form and say, Hey, I’d like to go and then they ask you a bunch of questions. And then you cross your fingers. And every other year, I’ve gotten an email that said, Hey, thanks for playing. Here’s the link to watch the live stream. Thanks. I appreciate it. I was gonna watch the live stream anyway. But oh, well, this year, I got accepted. So it was very cool. It was just me. So I didn’t have unfortunately, an opportunity to get any other sort of tag along tickets for any mountain, the members of the team, but it was just me San Jose was a two day, two full days. Yeah. And he used the Convention Center in San Jose, and it is a day starts the keynotes in the morning. And then they’ve got education sessions today. And they’ve got, you know, just a crazy number of people there that you get to talk to I got to talk to some of the reps that I’ve talked about Facebook on several occasions, and finally got to meet them face to face. So it’s very,

Kevin Oakley  49:11  

it’s all coming back to me, because it’s been a little while since the conference now about four weeks or so. Right? But yeah, so you were there when Zuckerberg said, so we don’t have the best track record on privacy expecting a joke. Did anyone around like laugh? Or like what happened when you were if you were actually there? I want to know, yeah,

Dennis O’Neil  49:32  

I was sitting in the chairs during that keynote. Yeah, it was some like, like, sort of like soft grumbles, he has difficulty pulling off jokes. You know, I think no matter what, you know, no matter what he means to do. And you can tell there’s a lot of people that get up on stage there that that represent Facebook, and I’m sure they have coaches, you know, helping people present. Because there’s some of them that you can tell that listen very well to their coaches. And I’m not exactly sure he doesn’t listen, or if he just he just can’t get coaches

Kevin Oakley  50:03  

Coaches don’t apply to the big boys.

Unknown Speaker  50:05  

Maybe not. Maybe not. But yeah, he has some trouble sort of communicating, I think on stage. So.

Andrew Peek  50:13  

So it was a wide range of topics, but it’d be like just a couple that you attended. Like the the name of the set the sessions.

Oh, wow. So you can hit me with the name of the session. So let’s say so I was not the exact name but you know, like,

it’s something where it’s like, oh, that’s like really cool that the range of things that they they talked about,

Dennis O’Neil  50:30  

they do talk about a huge number, I can tell you that to that each day. There’s a keynote, obviously, the day one is where Zuckerberg starts off on stage, I guess probably big themes that I sort of followed, and then sort of followed up with later on sessions was, you know, his statement, Zuckerberg made the statement, the future is private. And so that I think is probably got one big thing where he’s clearly trying to address the whole privacy thing, interesting bed and making jokes, the rest of his presentation wasn’t too bad. So that was a big one, I would say that I was really blown away by some of the stuff that they’re doing around messenger. And so I hit a lot of sessions on just sort of what the opportunities are for integration. So I give you one stat that stands out that each month right now, consumers and businesses send between themselves 20 billion Facebook messages each month. Right. So that is customers talking to businesses, and some of it could be businesses, new customers who have opted in to get like their receipts, and things like that via messenger, I’m sure. So there’s some transactional things in there. But 20 billion, I knew it was going to be a lot, but I really just didn’t sort of that one I wasn’t expecting for.

Kevin Oakley  51:43  

And the initial question, obviously, that comes to mind is and how many are completely ignored by those businesses? Never

Andrew Peek  51:51  

chatbot percent if they look kind of the goal and be like, can you differentiate?

Sort of?

Dennis O’Neil  51:56  

Yeah, that’s a good point. I know, a lot. They might. So that’s interesting. I wonder if I didn’t ask anybody that question. But they might actually be able to differentiate between bots and people, but they probably wouldn’t publish that number. Yeah, wouldn’t be quite as impressive. Exactly. Exactly. Right. Yeah, I will say that one of the things that they mentioned as well, that is very specific to, to the building industry is that the it had been in closed beta for probably a year, but they’ve been pushing chatbots for, I’d say about three years. So one other event I was able to I went to about three years ago was the Facebook marketing partners conference that was in San Francisco, I want to say was maybe maybe was two and a half years ago. So there was one, the first of first Facebook event that I was there, where they were really, really driving chatbots. And sort of describing them as the future. This was a few years ago. And obviously, of course, we’ve seen a pretty good solid explosion of effective and non effective chatbots. But for the last year, they’ve been piloting appointment booking messenger. So like being able to say, picking a time and choosing a date, and then having a messenger bot actually, like create the event and send it to the calendar and then connect to the CRM for the business. And yeah, very cool. Very cool. And they have now opened it up for use for everybody. So I’m sort of thinking, you know, I’m always trying to think about what are we going to try to play with next. And I feel like there’s definitely opportunity there to make it easy for, you know, all the SES out there that are trying to set appointments, if they can set appointments and have that kind of thing sort of automatically happen through messenger seems like a pretty cool opportunity.

Kevin Oakley  53:36  

Well, it reduces the friction on the front end, I think if Mike or Jen were on the line, right? Now, they would be quick to jump in and say that the automatic appointment that gets set from that still requires a human being to follow up, confirm slash scrub that because you know, someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing actually pushes the button or thinks that you rent homes and sell them, right, you still have all these other things that you don’t want them to just necessarily show up. But that is a anything you can do to reduce the friction to the customer is is a good thing. And so at least as an initial, grab them, get them in and then you know, you’re following up as a kind of a warm transfer to the online salesperson from that chat messenger scheduling interface. That’s, that’s awesome.

Dennis O’Neil  54:21  

Yeah, I definitely am going to also agree about the need to, you know, nothing should be able to replace human sort of interaction, right, that sort of consciousness of like, well, let’s make sure that they’re actually trying to do what it is that we want to have a salesperson come into the office to meet with them for so yeah, completely agree. Completely. Yeah.

Kevin Oakley  54:41  

When Zuckerberg says that the future is private, what does that mean for an advertiser’s? homebuilder? Do you think it’s still have we figured that out?

Dennis O’Neil  54:50  

Yeah, I don’t know that we have got, you know, that’s cryptic. It really is. And it’s, it’s tough to know, you know, and I, you know, I swear, I got a really have to as much as we were sort of ragging on him a minute ago for, you know, not not listening to his presentation coach, I feel for the company. And, you know, like, just the scale at which the problems that they have to solve, you know, that they’re, you know, 1.8 billion users that an incredible that as a whole section of the days were on like the number. It’s, it’s some ridiculous number, like 600 languages, and one of the slides that you took a picture of was the AI making decisions, like, 4 trillion times, it doesn’t say are some free, I want to say it was 40 was It was huge, right? On incredible numbers, right? Like, they’re just even doing things like, you know, that, I’m sure that probably includes, like, you know, like suggesting the next word in your messenger conversation. Right? So that’s sort of just general predictive stuff. But

Kevin Oakley  55:52  

yeah, I mean, they went and at least 2 trillion of them are do you convert AI, Facebook, ads and Instagram? That’s right.

Dennis O’Neil  56:01  

Yeah, I mean, they, it’s just an incredible scale. I mean, like that they’re doing those kind of predictive things, you know, the number of users, it’s hundreds of languages, they support, like 60 different scripts. So not just like Latin characters, like we use in the US, but you know, all around the world, they use characters other than our alphabet. So I mean, for them to be able to not only support all of those things, but then be able to identify, like, against, you know, like conduct that is not part of their terms of service, right, like, their terms of use to be able to identify that in hundreds of languages and 80 different scripts? I mean, and then like, compare languages back and forth, it’s the size at which they have to solve problems is just sort of incredible to me. I mean, it’s and I don’t think I really grasped that until I was there.

Andrew Peek  56:47  

And then on top of that have this subjective viewpoint on censorship? Yes, depending on like, tying all that into that what so yeah, beyond Facebook, on top of making it an algorithm that scales to United States law. Yeah, you know, law in this country law on this. I’m like, Mark has a very difficult job really does.

Kevin Oakley  57:07  

I mean, how do you please, I don’t want to give any excuses for it, because it’s very clear that all waffle related content should simply be removed from the platform, as as offensive to

Andrew Peek  57:19  

algorithm find that in an image.

Kevin Oakley  57:21  

But I think it’s a circle back to privacy and what he’s talking about there, I still think, for sure, do I think if Facebook and Instagram could figure out a way to make money through transactions, you know, working on their own currency, if they can find other ways to make money, I think, if it was similarly profitable, they’d love to dump and just be like, Hey, you know, what? shop clothes, no more advertising based on consumer content, or or intent? Only what, you know, they’re willing they searching for within the app or whatever. I think they’d be happy to make that change if they could. But I think that’s a ways away. I would agree with that. Yeah. And in the interim, still go back to if you put something on Facebook, who are you expecting it to be private from? Private from Russia? Okay, I grant you that right and get hacked. And all the data is released. That’s that’s a different thing. But that’s not the type of people are saying privacy. I don’t I don’t even know that. It’s not just mark and us. You don’t know what he means by that? Yeah, they don’t know. It’s literally like everyone who’s having this conversation is Facebook has a privacy issue defined. That’s where they’re asked

Dennis O’Neil  58:25  

them to define what that means. Right. And it’s, it’s tough.

Kevin Oakley  58:28  

Well, I don’t want to see these political ads or these other Well, that’s not privacy. Yeah. That is you choosing who you were connected to, in the beginning, controlling, maybe that privacy, but I think it’s kind of shifts into the group push. So there’s privacy was one big push and talk. Another was more communication at the group level. And I’ll set the table and then I’ll let you kind of go from there. I think what’s interesting to think about is there certain types of things that I would want to be a group of market proof marketing Facebook group, for example, I would definitely love to, I would like to be part of the pancake group. I’d like to be part of groups that are long term interests of mine. I have very little interest. And this might be my age. But I have very little interest in joining a how to find the best deal on buying a mattress Facebook group, or agree. Yeah, looking for a home in Columbus, Ohio Facebook group. That’s where I don’t, I’m kind of wondering if anything they talked about or showed kind of translate that. As homebuilders? Is there a group that makes sense for us? Do you think that we’re missing or for builders to start their own? How to shop for a home? I just I’m just I’m totally brainstorming, thinking out loud rambling at this point. But anything, spark you there?

Dennis O’Neil  59:48  

you know, in terms of a good group, I don’t think so at least nothing is come to mind for me either. Because just like you say, this is not a, you know, purchasing a home is not something that the average person does on a regular basis, right, you’re normally and these are long term decisions. And these are sort of instantly as you know, as Zuckerberg led off with his whole statement about the future being private, you know, he immediately jumped into, you know, driving more people into groups, and then driving more people into messages, rights or private conversations. And that’s when he talked about things like end to end encryption, and reduce permanence, right. So those are the ephemeral ads, and the ones that are sorting the content that you share that disappears for everyone, like Instagram stories and Facebook stories that only last for a period of time. And then of course, obviously driving into groups. And his comment was as well the groups are have also been transitioned to end to end encryption, which means no one, unless you’re an approved member of that group can can even see the content even if they managed to hack, right. So there’s, there’s sort of that end to end piece where even if you got into Facebook servers, you couldn’t actually understand what was being shared in there. So I’m thinking immediately, like, Well, okay, now there going to have billions of conversations that, you know, you have to get sort of contextual information from right.

Kevin Oakley  1:01:06  

So spoiler spoiler 20 minutes in but this is going to be a definitely a more technology focused episode,  than others.

Dennis O’Neil  1:01:15  

And so you invite a nerd on the program that’s what you get.

Kevin Oakley  1:01:19  

the the ephemeral nature of Instagram stories, though, if that content wasn’t still there, like, my wife would be much less likely to use Instagram stories, if she couldn’t still go back in her own accounts, and pull those back in and view them, organize them into categories or groupings for her profile page. So while they’re temporary, for the public to see, they still pose a huge privacy issue of that’s all still held. And so I think there’s just there’s a lot of messiness still in what they’re talking about back to groups, I have a theory, you tell me what you think, I think they’re going to create more dynamically, like I’m going to join groups, I don’t even know that that I’m a part of, it might start to say, you know what, we’ve just noticed that you have a lot of family members. And we’re just we’ve created, we have an Oakley family, Facebook group, private, where we bring someone goes on vacation, we don’t want to throw it to the world to see, but everyone in our family wants to see me throw it there. I wonder if there will be more dynamically created groups that still have that type of encryption, but it is now here’s my family, here’s the people in a region that I tend to interact with. And there will be less of a feed, and more of a hopping in and out of both truly static, I chose to go to that group. And just, I want to go to this part of town. that Facebook is organized for me.

Andrew Peek  1:02:42  

I think it’s genius they should do and it feels almost like if you think back to like message message boards, like the Bolton phpBB. Like before, Facebook was the thing to do get hop from message board, message board, depending on your, your interest, and those of kind of faded away because Facebook, they’re still there, obviously. But yeah,

Kevin Oakley  1:03:00  

yeah, much more on social now. It’s all out there.

Dennis O’Neil  1:03:03  

And I wonder, though, like, I feel like the way most users sort of interact with social is well, so it’s sort of, you know, could be sort of correlated towards sort of the Google Facebook sort of differentiation, right? Certainly very intent based and what we think about when we think of Google users, I’m going to look for mattresses, like your example. I think a lot of people like social because it lets them like, like almost like lean back and just like enjoy the show, you know, I mean, like I like it, they’re trusting whatever channel they’re using to sort of drive the entertainment, that and maybe that is exactly what you mentioned, is the group’s them just sort of auto adding you to groups that they think you’re going to be interested in. And then I don’t even call them groups, it’s just, we’ve just noticed that you tend to interact with these people who work for homebuilders. So we’re just creating this place you go, or no group by name, where you talk to other homebuilders.

Kevin Oakley  1:03:57  

I don’t know how that works. The only thing from a market? How do I hack that is those groups are creating relationships. Where then if someone in that group is buying a home, or thinking of selling, may go off topic within that group, and just say, Hey, I’m thinking about moving? Hmm. Does anyone have a builder that they would trust in this part of town? Or, you know, have you home communities here? Maybe that’s all we have. And we just need a plan.

Dennis O’Neil  1:04:25  

And each one of the groups, right, that’s bought

Kevin Oakley  1:04:30  

by this Undercover Boss,

Dennis O’Neil  1:04:32  

you know, so I can share one other thing that comes to mind when we think about like, how do we? How is Facebook going to be able to monetize, you know, more and more private conversations? One, I think that, you know, just like you mentioned, with the currency, and I think they’re going to be looking for other ways to other ways to make money than than just their current advertising channels is probably still advertising, but other ways to make money too. But one of the things that they announced was, with the goal, my note was sketchy, so I don’t have the, I’m pretty sure they call it shopping for creators. So I’m sure you’ve seen like, you go through Instagram, and you’ll see, you know, like a shirt or shoes or something like that. And you’ve got like a shop now button on it. Right? What they’ve enabled influencers to do, I think the brands still have to approve it. But you could have, like, you know, a fashion model, I guess, would be the right word I was about to use icon, but I think there’s something seems a little overkill, right, but there’s like a fashion model whose Instagram account as well followed, and they can be wearing shoes, clothes, whatever. And then they can actually link to those brands pages for people to be able to purchase it now this isn’t an ad, right? So it’s not like there was you know, some Burberry add this trying to sell you a coat. But instead it’s just a it’s a random fashion, you know, influencer that somebody follows and they should wearing a Burberry coat and you click on it, and then you can go to the Burberry site and buy it. And then those Instagram creators receive a commission. So that like, that’s a way that they’re enabling people that you’re connected to, to actually advertise to you’re not brands, right. So these are like, it’s not like Burberry is buying the ad, right? Because that that would be a privacy issue. If this is a person that you’ve already chosen to follow, it’s it’s not they’re not selling your information to advertisers at this point. You say I like this person, I’m friends with them, I follow them. likelihood is that you might like what they were if they’re a fashion person, so they can be able to now and they got a way to reach you with advertising. That’s not selling your information to somebody else. So I think I think well, maybe we can see something like that for homes maybe.

Kevin Oakley  1:06:45  

So kind of what you’re describing is what house does if you You know, I’ve got pulled up in that Kraus a Lego single handle pull down faucet with a Chrome finish 149 95 that I can order Amazon from someone directly. But then in the corner kind of in reverse this would be in reverse of what you’re describing. There are rooms with the same or similar products of just kitchens have been uploaded by anyone. And whether through computer vision or tagging. Someone has said this is a crowd stilettos single pull faucet. And so what you’re going to say is the reverse it would be the kitchen photo. And then oh, by the way, there’s this faucet in there, or this dress that this person is wearing and it kind of becomes a store without making you go somewhere else or

Dennis O’Neil  1:07:29  

Yeah, yeah, it’s like your friend could post a photo of their newly remodeled kitchen. And you’d be like, Oh, that’s a cool faucet and you click on it, and it would take you to the Amazon where you can go buy it. I mean, that’s like, now we’re got like in a completely different level of product placement possibilities. Now,

Kevin Oakley  1:07:46  

other levels of nightmare were

a nightmare for a marketer in that my mind quickly went to Wouldn’t it be awesome if every Heartland homeowner who took a picture in their home was able to be identified as such, the advertiser could somehow have that hover over like this is a heartland home or some note to that, and then I could start exploring where heartland currently builds and what historical homes were Hartland.

Dennis O’Neil  1:08:15  

I mean, it could be sort of that opportunity for, you know, the average consumer to actually maybe even benefit from hands. You know, I mean, like, like, the different sort of version of the old Google AdSense, which I think might still be around where they used to let you know, anybody could just add ads to their websites and make a couple pennies every time somebody clicked. So it’s sort of like that. But now you’re just basically monetizing your own Facebook posts and Instagram stories for a couple pennies here there,

Kevin Oakley  1:08:45  

man. So turning everyone into an influencer? That’s right. Yeah, I’m not sure I’m ready for less influencers and less of these jokers around they’re trying to

Andrew Peek  1:08:54  

I could see that it could pay for Facebook kicked around the idea of a membership. My sec.

Kevin Oakley  1:09:00  

Well, they do they do in their quarterly reports, they talk about basically a revenue per user revenue per user. Exactly, which is what they would need to have charge per user to have the same equivalent income.

Andrew Peek  1:09:13  

And it’s not that happier. No, it’s actually not

Kevin Oakley  1:09:16  

that crazy at all, under $150, a year I think is or $50, a quarter maybe.

Andrew Peek  1:09:20  

And there’s your private ad free version. And then you could put ads on your own profile. And then you pay for your membership fee,

Dennis O’Neil  1:09:27  

you could sell your own ads, and then other people could pay for your quarterly subscription. Not enough users have clicked on your ads. So you owe us $50 in this quarter, your account will be determined falling short again. Yeah, it’s not a problem that’s going to go away. And I think the whole sort of definition of privacy is is where so much of it gets challenging when people say, Well, you know, I didn’t I shared this, but I didn’t know it was going to go there to you know, like, well, I only shared it with these people, but but they took a screenshot of it and shared it with somebody else, you know, they’re sort of these unrealistic expectations of privacy that like, that’s like saying, like, well, I just told my one friend, I didn’t tell them, they could tell everybody else. So whose fault is that? You know, I mean, but it happens. I mean, it’s like unless you unless you, there’s no way you can completely lock it down. So I think it’s we’ve got this unrealistic expectation that technology is actually supposed to be better than humans. And I don’t necessarily know that it is in terms of accountability. You know, it only does what people tell it to do.

Kevin Oakley  1:10:30  

So the good thing is there is true, there’s so much of the marketing world right now that can feel stagnant. I’m not saying it is. But for those of us are those of you listening who might not be as involved in the day to day, you’re kinda like, yeah, thanks for kind of generally the same I mean, it might have smarter chat on our site, or, but generally, like Facebook, and Instagram, particularly are going to keep live our lives interesting for, for many, many more years to come. With lots of changes coming down the pike,

Dennis O’Neil  1:11:00  

I would agree, it’s impressive, really how much they constantly are changing. I mean, if you think about how often Facebook changes things, to the point where people don’t like it, but they do it because they’re trying not to be replaced by somebody who’s moving faster than they. And in the in the news

Kevin Oakley  1:11:15  

segment, we’ll talk briefly about the fact that a lot of these tech companies are potentially being looked at antitrust issues being broken up. And so like, game on, if Instagram suddenly becomes its own company a year from now, because they are, they do say look at that and say, Hey, you can’t have all these things connected. And that way, you just kill competition. Like if Instagram and Facebook both became competitors. That could be that could make life really interesting for marketers and open up a whole bunch of new opportunity as their, he’s gonna have to go on their own hunt for revenue,

Dennis O’Neil  1:11:48  

too. So one more tactical note to that, which would make that really interesting if that’s what the band and trust tries to do. One of the things that they announce f8 was that they are merging messaging between Facebook Messenger, Instagram, DMs and WhatsApp. So they’re all essentially you’re going to be able to like no matter what app you use, you’re going to be able to message other people, and you use the app of your choice, and then use the app of their choice. So they are deeply deeply deeply integrating. And I

Kevin Oakley  1:12:20  

think that’s a race to prevent the ability to break it up later. One, and to make sure that whoever gets left with whatever piece, if a breakup does happen, which I still don’t know that it will, but if it ever did, if you have all of the user data from all those essentially available to all others, everyone has a fair shot now. So it’s not like WhatsApp or, you know, just in terms of if I can communicate with an Instagram user, even if I don’t have an Instagram account. All those platforms have to have a total awareness of all users to so it’s not like people who killed their Facebook account and are now Instagram, Instagram would have an advantage potentially, in today’s world if it got spun out on its own, because of perception and actual usage, being what it is. Yeah. Whereas Anyway, let’s leave social media land and talk just for a few more minutes about data. And maybe even privacy from a different perspective. And that is websites you mentioned that ONeil is, is a web development company, as well as doing digital marketing, for homebuilders. Most people think that means we have to talk about design and UI and mobile and all the rest, I kind of wanted to pick your brain a little bit more on the data side. Obviously, there’s Google Analytics, that gives us a lot of good information. There’s there’s data and your CRM when people become a lead. But some of the interesting things that I’ve heard you talk about are kind of this is middle steps, or, or pieces that are, are not as easy to view or just kind of forgotten in terms of opportunity, potentially, for data on a on a builder’s site, what give us some examples of what you mean by that.

Dennis O’Neil  1:13:58  

Now happy to answer. A lot of this started. And just one step back and the you know, just like you guys were talking about, you know, the pages per visit and time on site, and you know, sort of traffic volume sessions versus new versus, you know, your sort of new versus repeat visitors. Right? So you’re talking about sort of these common metrics that Google Analytics brings to the top for everybody. And these are, these are good metrics, right? These are good ways to evaluate how things are going. But I will say that, you know, over many, many, many years of talking to builders, both internally and externally about these numbers. You know, it’s it’s a little bit harder for everyone, especially anybody that’s not a marketer, to connect these numbers to anything, right? Like they, they say, okay, that’s great. But what does that tell me? I still didn’t have enough people in my sales office last week, renderer, traffic is still down in there. So we’re trying to, over the years, think about, well, what what could we present Data Wise, that would be a bit more effective. And that’s, you know, sort of one of our internal sort of guiding principles, this is that we really are looking to try to help create Marketing Leaders within organizations, right, and we’re trying to help, who cares? Yeah, we’re really trying to help marketers become powerful, important and influential person in our organization, because we believe that they should be and a lot of them are and sometimes they just have trouble. Yeah, sort of representing their

Kevin Oakley  1:15:27  

talk. The very first online summit five or five years ago, I think, just talking with someone last week, and they’re like, you know, five years ago, I saw you talk for the first time, and I didn’t really know who you were, but your opening slide was a black and white photo of firefighters putting out a car fire. And you said, this is not a marketer’s job. And he’s like you had you had a firefighter like you’re not a firefighter. So yeah, that’s, that’s right. On the money.

Dennis O’Neil  1:15:56  

Yeah. It’s your angels holding so many are like, sort of trained to respond to what everybody else says, like, Oh, I don’t have enough. I didn’t get any traffic this weekend. So you’re, you know, not doing what you’re supposed to do. And then everybody sort of is reaction mode, instead of being proactive? So we really look at data and try to think, Okay, well, what kind of what, what can we arm, you know, our marketing leaders with that will help them not only do a better job proactively, but also help them communicate what they do to others in their organization. And most of the others in the organization, do not care that pages per visit are up 25% month over month, right like that, that does not make a difference to them in their daily lives. So we look at data and over time, and we’re always trying to build a sort of a more perfect version of our vision. But, you know, we like to take the data and the activity that we have from builders website, and be able to produce market related information. So being able to say over hair over the last seven days, out of all the listings on your website, you’ve got homes that range from, you know, 2100 square feet to 3700 square feet, and here in this spot is the hot spot of interest over the last seven days. And over the last seven days, you got prices from this point to this point. And then this is the hotspot of interest, this is your peak and reporting on more popular communities or plans, trying to give them information that helps them understand not how people are interacting with their website, but how people are interacting with their homes for sale. So to sort of help give them more market level information, as opposed to website level information. And it’s really taking the same kind of principles, but just sort of applying them directly to the products, you know, making sure that we’re tracking the attributes that we should be tracking instead of things just like time on site. And we have found that, you know, the the response has always been very positive in terms of how these things work, work together, to sort of bring opportunities and insights to the surface that otherwise just work. So I

Kevin Oakley  1:18:07  

got to come up with a better name, because I don’t like calling myself skeptical. But do you? Do you see kind of surprising things come out there? Or is it Hey, most of the people who come to my site want the cheapest thing I have is it is a kind of not always in that kind of lowest common denominator type of takeaway that you find any any ideas or examples of or just even generally speaking, yes, that is it is not always you would expect? That’s a

Dennis O’Neil  1:18:33  

great question. And you’re right, it is actually not always what you would expect, you know, we definitely see, I would say, on average, I’m just thinking of the last one that I looked at, you know, of a price graph from zero to one, the hotspot was at, like seven. So it wasn’t all the way down at the bottom, you know, it wasn’t always just all the traffic at the low end of the site. So it was definitely something there and I see them move, you know, sometimes it has to do with, you know, opening a new community or closing one, sometimes it has to do with a new product offering or potentially maybe where they drove spent money to drive traffic to a particular region. So all of those things sort of change this activity. But what I think is important is is that we’re thinking of analytics in the sense of, you know, homes for sale, and not analytics in the sense of just pitches. Yeah,

Kevin Oakley  1:19:21  

no, I think that’s I think that’s awesome. And you’re right there, there’s so many things that can go into how that’s viewed as is if you’re forcing traffic towards an area, that’s obviously going to show up. But it would be consistent then. And then you would be able to know the impact potentially the of what that advertising is doing. But also, if you’re the type of marketer who says I don’t like to show price points in my paid search or social ads, then I have a hunch that the your data would show more often that it goes towards that lower end of the price pool. Whereas if all the ads are showing are helping qualify those consumers by saying, Hey, we, we build homes from the 400. So the six hundreds, then I would be less surprised when you say like that the big red middle part or that the hot hot spot, so to speak, is in the 552 to 590 range, then I’m less surprised about that. But it does. There’s obviously a lot that goes into how that needs to be analyzed, calculated. But that’s, that’s awesome.

Dennis O’Neil  1:20:15  

Yeah, thank you, we’re really sort of excited about taking that some of that data, even to the next level where we’re working on making it easier to see sort of longer term historical changes, and sort of like being able to go back now and go, Okay, well, this was my last seven days, but what does it look like, every week for the last year and a half? You know, are we seeing any major swings in the consumers that are visiting our site, you know, we’re getting people that are looking for more homes in this particular region of our market, you know, as we might not feel it that way in the sales, but maybe the website activity is telling us that more people are interested in this region, then we’re in maybe we’re not looking at enough land in that region, really trying to make that kind of data help builders get some meeting insight into what’s happening in their market. And obviously, it’s going to be in the hands of those Marketing Leaders, within their organizations. They’re going to be able to the one, they’re going to be the ones they’re gonna be able to share the data,

Kevin Oakley  1:21:12  

get the data, tell a good story with it. That’s how you that’s how you get transformation and change to happen. For sure. We lost Andrew about three minutes ago because he had to hop on to a Facebook or call with our Facebook informants on the inside. Right, right across the hall from Zuckerberg. So he’s not here to say goodbye. But thanks so much for joining us next time. You will be a second time caller longtime listener.

Dennis O’Neil  1:21:36  

That’s right. That’s right. Thanks for having me. I know we’ve been talking about getting together for a while. I’m glad we finally got to, to get it on the calendar.

Kevin Oakley  1:21:43  

And we are excited to have you and the ONeil team. Join us at the online sales and marketing summit, in Chicago, which is sold out. I know broken hearts everywhere it is sold out. You can still join the waitlist and hope that other people end up not being able to make it but we will see you and the rest of the team there.

Dennis O’Neil  1:22:00  

Thanks again. Looking forward to Thank you.

Kevin Oakley  1:22:16  

All right, that’ll do it for this week for published articles, blog posts, videos and more, check out DoYouConvert.com and it’s also the best way to find out how to connect with all of the DoYouConvert team on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and the like. Have a great week. We’ll see you next time.

The post Ep 56: The Facebook Fear Factor with Dennis O’Neil [TRANSCRIPT] appeared first on Online Sales and Marketing for Home Builders - DYC.