An excellent case study by Mike Conner about how different Internet and social media marketing techniques can amplify your reach and take your listing beyond the MLS. His RealBird property website for the single family home for sale at 11 SE Rosewood Ct. Shelton, WA 98584 had over 200 hits in the first few days.
A few months ago I was fortunate enough to stumble onto a company called RealBird. As a real estate agent trying to embrace the vast new world of online marketing I was admittedly lost, not knowing where to begin. What RealBird did for me was provide a one-stop place for me to get my listings seen all over the web. I used the tools they provided, added a few ideas of my own, and took off running. The results were fairly immediate with new leads coming in from places I had never even imagined posting listing information. Since that time I have used those same tools to easily obtain new listings I was competing for as well as build an almost overnight huge web presence. I won't go into all the details and features of their system here (but please go check out their website and AR blog!!!) because what I really want to share with you is a real life example of the power their product provides....
This past week I went out on a listing appointment. I didn't know going in if I would be competing for the listing or if it was a slam dunk, so I came prepared. After about 30 minutes of touring the home and conversation I knew the listing was mine. I had barely explained the online marketing I was doing and how their home would have its own personalized website and next thing I knew we were signing listing paperwork.
What happened next is where the magic kicked in....
We weren't going to be officially listing it in the MLS for a few days so I asked their permission to go ahead with some online marketing to create some excitement about the home in hopes of producing a quick sale. I submitted the listing info and created a listing page on RealBird for the home. I followed my usual routine of posting the listing to craigslist, Facebook, my blog, etc. as well as all the sites RealBird automatically syndicates to.
The results were astounding! I had over 200 hits to the listing website within the first few days. Phone calls and emails began rolling in within hours. What topped it all off though, was when I got a phone call from a fellow local agent. This agent explained to me that her clients had found my listing online and were very excited but the agent couldn't seem to find it in the MLS. The implications of this hit me hard....in terms of reaching consumers online, the MLS is no longer the only game in town! Obviously the value of the MLS is still great, due to the data shared amongst brokers. However, the old model for real estate agents of simply having a website with an MLS search function may not be enough in the near future.
The need to spread your online presence to multiple outlets and link it all together is growing rapidly, and RealBird provides that service in a very user-friendly interface. Do yourself a favor and check them out if you haven't already. You can sign up for free on a trial basis and market up to 3 of your listings. Experience the results for yourself!
We started a sweepstakes a few month ago using our RealBird Facebook Page as the platform, and an iPod Touch as the prize. The rules are simple: to participate, just fan our Facebook Page and we'll randomly select one of our Fans as the winner, once we reach 500 total fans. No purchase of any kind is required. You can also help by inviting your real estate friends to fan the RealBird FB Page too. Your chance of winning will not change. Due to rules of the sweepstakes, it always stays 1 in 500, but with your invites, we may get there faster.
We are now in the final stage, with the current fan count at 411. There are only 89 more fans needed. You can participate by fanning our Page on the right sidebar of this blog or visit the RealBird Facebook Page and participate there. There is also a handy invitation tool built into the Facebook platform. Once you are a Fan, you can use the "Suggest to Friends" link on the left side, as shown below. Again, your chance of winning remain the same:
One of the issues we have been working on regarding RealBird's lead capturing functionality was making sure that prospective clients' inquiries actually reach you. Email inquiries and showing requests were sometimes lost in space. Either because of spam filter settings or simply because sometimes emails go unnoticed due to information overload.
In May, 2009 we introduced the Message Archive for RealBird members and started to store all of your prospects' and clients' inquires and even consumer-to-consumer forwards for the RealBird Listing Publisher and the RealBird Property Search services. However, that facility still required RealBird members to log in every now and then in order to see if there are new messages that need attention. While this feature was a big step, in practice, it was still not the perfect solution. One forgets to check the Message Archive or due to the log in requirements just delays it. And we all know that a week old lead is as almost as good as no lead at all.
We needed to do better than that. All the powerful features of RealBird is useless if the leads are missed or go cold for the reasons described above. With this new release, we believe we sold the problem. The RealBird Message Archive now has a handy RSS feed that you can subscribe to with your favorite feed reader. You can add it to your browser toolbar, to your iGoogle browser homepage, Google Reader and even access it from your mobile devices, you name it. Most phones - Blackberry, iPhone etc. - has some sort of RSS reader application so that you can be notified when a new inquiry is submitted through RealBird. There are even services that you can use to receive text messages when this RSS feed is updated.
You can get your own RSS feed in the RealBird Member area under the Message Archive section. See the screenshot below:
Compiled by Larry Cheng, a VC partner of the Boston and London based Fidelity Ventures, the "Global VC Blog Directory" is a quarterly updated list of top 100+ venture capitalists blogs based on their Google Reader subscriber count. To add some value to this post rather than just reposting the top 10 of his list, I included the Twitter account of these VCs. The first link below is a direct link to their blog, the one at the end of each line is their Twitter account.
John Slocum was kind to let us know a few weeks ago that he could successfully post his RealBird property ads on Backpage using the new, high-impact RealBird embed code. Not only BackPage takes the RealBird slideshow code with all its glory, but it also produces very nice search engine ranking for your listings.
Most of you know the value of posting your RealBird single property websites to Craigslist, but I thought it is good to emphasize the importance of posting to Backpage.com as well. With our new RealBird Quick Share tool, it now takes only a minute or so per listings to do so. One of the great features of BackPage is that they then distribute your ads to local newspapers.
The combination of the new high-impact RealBird embed code, Backpage search engine ranking, their distribution to local online newspapers and the new RealBird Quick Share tool looks like a winning combo. It's quick and powerful way of sharing your listing info to even more places.
I am researching the exact list of newspapers that BackPage distributes advertisements to, but the post on Galttech.com says, that BackPage supported newspapers are huge in Dallas, Pittsburgh, LA, Kansas City, Houston, St Louis, and Miami. I'll contact them for a full list and let you know what I found out.
See a few ReaBird ads on Backpage below - active ads at the time of posting this article:
To get started, just enter your listings in RealBird as usual and from the listing management page or via the Quick Share page, post it to Backpage.com with a few clicks. Simple, fast, great-looking and powerful distribution.
Another week, another linkroll. This time it is a list of 5 blogs I am reading on a regular basis for design ideas, trends and insipration. These blogs focus mostly on graphic design, web design and usability/user experience.
As promised, we continue to roll out productivity upgrades to the RealBird Listing Publisher. Here is the second feature which should reduce the time it requires to perform important repetitive tasks such as reposting your RealBird property websites to Craigslist and to social media. The more clicks we save for, the more likely you will actually use the features. So our theory goes ...
Last week, we made a downloadable PDF file available that should help you keep track of repetitive tasks with a simple checklist. The #2 productivity feature we have just released is a Quick Share page that shows your top 100 most recently added or editied RealBird listings on one page with one-click access to the most important sharing codes. Until now, when you wanted to re-post your listings to classified sites that do not allow automatic syndication, you had to log into RealBird, navigate to your listing management page and share the listings from there. The new Quick Share page does NOT require login (there is no private information on the page) hence you can bookmark it with your browser and jump back directly to the sharing page with only one click.
There is a new link called "Quick Share" above your listings - highlighted above on the screen shot.
When you arrive to the Quick Share page, bookmark it with your browser
On subsequent visits, go directly to your bookmarked Quck Share page, no need to go through the first 3 steps again. You will be able to re-post your listings to Craigslist and other destinations with only a few clicks. The page is also optimized to load fast (showing only minimum information) and does not require paging through sets of listings.
ActiveRain Exclusive - this invite won't be shared on other platforms.
I finally received the Google Wave access and I have 6 invites remaining.
The first 6 commenters will be invited. For free of course.
Just say: "I Love RealBird" in the comment - is that too much to ask ? :)
And do not be mad at us and at the 6 fast-handed cowboys and cowgirls who might have got in at the top 6 positions. Once they are in (in the Wave that is) they might just invite you, if you ask.
Please find below a downloadable, printable PDFlisting marketing action item sheet: a basic, but powerful checklist and progress tracker for your RealBird listing marketing activity. It's low-tech, because it is designed to be printed and to be pinned on your office wall or filed in your listing folder. It's also low-tech, because you can mark the completed action items with your favorite red marker, no need to use your wireless bluetooth, fingerprint scanning, music playing mighty mouse. But than it's cutting-edge again because it encourages you to take advantage of RealBird's online marketing toolset and hopefully helps you in utilizing it at its best.
We all probably agree on how much peak traffic Craigslist can bring to a property ad shortly after posting it there. But it only happens during the intial hours or during the first day. Your ad will then be pushed lower and lower on the list and less and less traffic will be directed to you and eventually your ad will be purged by Craigslist. Most of us know the value of reposting to Craigslist every now and then, but most of us also skip these tasks for a simple reason: It is just too much of an effort to keep track of all these small repetitive tasks.
The most time consuming part of these repetitive tasks is to actually remember what to do next, rather than actually doing it. That's why most people drop repetative tasks no matter how much value they associate with it. We all do. Whether it is blogging or other online activities, some tasks are skipped eventually, because of the lack of prepared and simple action item plan.
So here we go: Download the RealBird Listing Marketing Checklist as a PDF file (235 KB). Print one for each of your listing and track the progress for two month for each listing. We designed the form to focus only on the most important repetitive tasks in order to keep it as simple as possible. Try it and see for yourself how much a simple low-tech form like this can help.
We noticed a few Internet Explorer 4.0 users on the www.realbird.com domain and also on the RealBird single property websites. According to Wikipedia IE 4 was released 12 years ago in '97 superseeded by IE 5 in 1999. I wonder who on Earth still uses IE 4?
Good news: As you can see it in the trends below, in most browser categories, usage of the latest versions grew significantly.
The only category where I would like to see some changes is the upgrade from IE 7 to IE 8 (and forgetting about IE 6 altogether). Firefox 3 and 3.5 are both solid (though 3.5 is much faster) but IE 8 is a big improvement over IE 7. IE 6 is just simply terrible.
Upgrading to the latest browser will benefit you (latest versions are much faster) and benefit us, developers, because we do not have to spend time on developing and testing for old versions and therefore we can roll out new features and products faster. It's a win-win.
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
-- Zoltan 
-- Zoltan 
;)
;)
