This past Monday was National Breast Cancer Awareness Day, part of the larger Breast Cancer Awareness month. Breast cancer affects many women and their families; a woman has a 1 in 8 risk of developing breast cancer during her lifetime. And that’s exactly why Trulians are doing our part to raise breast cancer awareness and to support Susan G Komen for the Cure.
For every Trulia Pro premium marketing subscription purchased through the end of the month, Trulia will donate the first month’s fee to Susan G Komen for the Cure. Just use code PINK at billing to make sure your money is donated to this fantastic organization. In addition, Trulia has donated on-site ad space to the cause and has launched an employee donation program.
Other ways you can do your part to support breast cancer awareness and help find a cure:
Donate to a national cancer non-profit or to a local cancer treatment center
Encourage women to check with their doctors about when to begin regular mammograms - then to have them!
Write your member of Congress to say that early detection and treatment programs be included in any national health care legislation.
I’m happy to say that my mom is a breast cancer survivor. Let’s all do our part to make sure more women are survivors, too.
Last week I had the pleasure of catching up with my friend Tisza Major-Posner, who is a real estate agent at I.V.P.G. Realty and blogger at Route66Living, at the 2009 CAR - California Association of Realtors Expo in San Jose California. She shared a wonderful story with me about a client she met on Trulia Voices. She also shared some of her pet peeves regarding what is an appropriate and inappropriate way of engaging consumers on Trulia Voices. Bottom line - answer the consumers question directly and don’t try to over sell yourself.
Today, Trulia helped start a Twitition to help extend the $8,000 1st Time Home Buyer tax credit. We're trying to get the attention of congress and need everyone's support to help spread the word.
If you think extending the 1st time home buyer tax credit is a good idea, then please vote.
All you need is a Twitter account. Then, please click this link and RT - Re-tweet the Vote.
Trulia launched a new initiative today for our growing Trulia Voices real estate community with close to 400,000 real estate professionals –The Trulia Mayor program. The idea is to identify and highlight a local trust worthy community advocate for each state who has served as a local role model and who has led by example within the Trulia Voices community. The program is launching with 5 mayors from 5 states.
Each Trulia Mayor will receive special Trulia Mayor benefits as well as gaining some new community responsibilities. We believe the Trulia Mayors can help bring the community closer together while increasing the quality of the contributions within Voices. All in all, a win-win for everyone involved.
Some of the benefits or super powers as we like to call them include frequent roundtable meetings with Trulia team members, insider access to our roadmap, sneak peeks on projects and the have ability to provide feedback for key strategic initiatives. Additionally, each mayor will have a Mayor designation badge by the middle of next week, will be promoted through out the community and will be sources for Trulia PR and media opportunities and more. As every great superhero can attest to, with great power comes great responsibility. That being said, we do look at our mayors as superheros because they have each done something remarkable on Voices – they have gained the trust of the community by providing quality real estate insight and knowledge to consumers and fellow real estate agents alike.
Moving forward, we would like the mayors to continue being active within the community by answering questions, blogging and helping others. We hope to see the mayors expand their sphere of influence outside of the Voices community as well, both online and offline via their social networks. To help this outreach effort, we will help each mayor co-host local Trulia sponsored networking parties, webinars and educational events in their area and more.
Without further adieu, the new Trulia Mayors are:
Josh Boggs (San Antonio, TX) – Owner of Exposed Homes – Trulia Pro Josh moved to San Antonio in 2000 and has flourished in his new found home. Having a strong background in financial management, consulting and multi-family property management, residential real estate consulting was inevitably waiting for him right around the corner. Believing wholeheartedly about reviving what is now considered a long lost art in today’s business world, Josh has brought his passion for helping people, valuable experience, sense of humor and enjoyment into his real estate career to hopefully remind his clients and potential clients that customer service is still alive and kicking in his domain. He now owns and controls the marketing company eXposed Homes located at Keller Williams and are barreling through their 3rd year of operation.
Maureen Francis (Birmingham, MI) – Associate Broker at SKBK Sotheby’s International Realty –Trulia Pro – 2008 Trulia MVP As a top producing Realtor in Birmingham, Michigan, she, and her husband, Dmitry Koublitsky, have been selling residential real estate in some of Metro Detroit's most affluent suburbs since 2001. The couple met in Ukraine, where Maureen worked as a consultant on projects for the US government, The World Bank and The United Nations, after serving in the first group of US Peace Corps volunteers in the former Soviet Union. Maureen and Dmitry have built much of their business through technology, by using the web to help them to unite buyers with sellers. Maureen was recently recognized by the Women's Council of Realtors for her use of technology, and she has received awards for blogging over the years. Maureen blogs at www.miOaklandCounty.com.
Alan May (Evanston, NJ) – Realtor at Coldwell Banker – 2008 Trulia MVP Alan brings a casual sense of humor to his postings (as you can tell from his ever-changing Elvis-inspired icons), here on Trulia and has has been a regular contributor to Trulia Voices since 2007 which lead to him becoming a Trulia MVP for 2008. Additionally, Alan has contributed to several other real estate related sites over the past few years. Alan has been a Realtor with one of the top Coldwell Banker offices in the Chicago area for almost 10 years, and has been consistently an award-winning agent, as well as one of the top producers in his area. He's a low-key agent, and views himself more as a consultant, than a salesman.
Carl Medford (Fremont, CA) – Agent at Windermere – Trulia Pro With the motto of, “Helping You Write The Next Chapter In Your Life,”™ Carl is one of the "next generation" of Web-based REALTORS. Carl typically transforms any local coffeehouse into an office; meeting with clients in any location and conducting business while enjoying the best coffee available! Instead of focusing on a specific neighborhood, Carl has earned the distinction of being a "Regional Expert," tracking trends and critical information in multiple markets, thus bringing the broadest possible expertise and service to his clients.
In addition to being a REALTOR, Carl is a licensed general contractor and also owns "The Next Stage," a fully professional and accredited home staging company. Lastly, Carl has developed “The Ultimate Home Buying Experience,™”. He is featured weekly in “Real Estate Reality” in the Real Estate section of the San Leandro Times and Castro Valley Forum newspapers."
We're very excited by this program and look forward to seeing how the community embraces it. As always, all feedback and observations will be considered for future growth and expansion of the Trulia Mayor program. If you want to be one of the next Trulia Mayors, share your thoughts on why in a blog post on Trulia, standout within the community and be remarkable – we’ll notice.
Real estate is a relationship business that is built on trust. Multiple parties rely on each other to reach a common goal. To reach this goal, teamwork and a steady line of communication is essential. Failure to communicate can lead to confusion, delays, errors or missed opportunities. So what does this have to do with Trulia, Twitter and Customer service?
At Trulia, we proactively participate in social media in a variety of ways and on various social networks. Each network is slightly different as is the manner in which the community chooses to engage. Regardless of the network, one thing is for certain, we’re there to be a part of the conversation. That being said, one of the most important things we do is listen. We listen to what consumers and agents have to say - the good, the bad and the ugly.
Twitter is a social network that has become an important communication channel for us - especially for customer service. On any given day, I’ll have a conversation with someone about something Trulia related. Questions like - How to submit a listing, What’s T.A.N, Can you fix my property address, How can I find an agent in my area, Can you help me sell our home faster, Is my MLS on Trulia to things like Can Trulia sponsor my REBARCAMP, Can you speak at our event and so forth. It’s a mixed bag really. All good stuff. In each instance, it brings us a little closer to our audience, customer and clients.
A couple of months ago, I met Erica Parpan - @realsupportva, a virtual assistant at RealSupport on Twitter. Initially, we exchanged a couple of casual hello tweets…sparked by my Trulia hat avatar of all things….
…and RT’s - re-tweets - which helped build up our rapport…
Then, Erica had some questions re: one of her clients listing syndication feeds….
140 characters was not enough room to have this type of conversation so I asked her to email me the details. At that point, a customer service conversation that started on Twitter moved to email where we could exchange more details. After receiving the info, I relied on our great back end Customer Service and Engineering team to assist in fixing her clients issue. Together, with teamwork and an open line of communication we were able to resolve the issue expeditiously.
I have many other stories like this but just wanted to highlight how a company like Trulia can use a non-real estate specific social network like Twitter for Customer Service. Are you using Twitter for customer service?
Brett Favre just signed a contract to be the new quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings. As one of the NFL’’s most dominant quarterbacks over the years, I guess he still has one or more years left in him. As a Jets fan, we were happy to have him last year in New York. Ok, so he’s un-retired once again. Does he have it in him to make another run? Who knows. But one things for sure, he has to live somewhere this season, right?
Here’s some homes that Brett might want to consider buying:
“On Monday, Vikings QB Tarvaris Jackson, who was the team’s primary starter last season, was asked what he thought of the reports.
“I didn’t hear it, somebody told me about it,” Jackson said of Glazer’s article. “I didn’t watch it on TV or anything like that. I think guys are just doing their job. Just trying to get people to watch their station, you all try to sell papers, that’s how it is.”
“Favre landed at a small airport in St. Paul, Minn. at midday and was greeted by Childress. The timing for Favre’s arrival is ideal for him. Although he has missed most of Vikings training camp, he could be ready to start Friday’s preseason game.
Favre joined practice just two hours after landing, dropping back and throwing passes in individual drills.At an small opening in a chain link fence surrounding the practice field, fans gathered to sneak a peak of Favre, including some trying to peer under the fence. WhenFavre walked on the field, the fans cheered.”
“I don’t have a reaction,” said Aaron Rodgers. “It doesn’t pertain to me. It has absolutely nothing to do with me. It doesn’t change anything. It has nothing to do with the Green Bay Packers.”
“I ain’t worrying about it to be honest,” said receiver Donald Driver.
Charles Woodson was asked if he thought Favre can still play at 40 (his birthday is on October): “I don’t know, I think you’d have to ask Brett that. That don’t really concern me. That’s Minnesota’s deal.”
“After all those years of not being able to hit him, do I want to hit him? Of course I want to hit him,” said Nick Barnett. “He’s an awesome guy. I wish him the best.”
Note: If you have already received your Raining Points t-shirt, please take a picture of yourself wearing it or holding it, blog it on Active Rain and send me the link - rudy at trulia dot com
Update: Thanks to the sugegstion of Lisa Hill and other AR members, here is some more detail of some of the benefits of being a Trulia Pro:
As a Trulia Pro, if you have listings, we will feature all of them [unlimited featured listings] in the search results on Trulia. This will give you approximately 4 times the amount of traffic to your listings [great selling point in a listing presentation]. You get to create a custom spotlight Ad [like a billboard ad on a highway] and place it in 20 locations based on the specific geography you choose like city and state, zip code or neighborhood. Then you get a stats package that will track the impressions you get for your ad in each of the locations. You can get as creative as you like with the ad - showcase your listing, yourself [great for buyers agents to stand out in the search results pages], your business, your neighborhood etc.....Each Trulia Pro can send their clients a peronalized listing report for their listing showing how many clicks and views it has had on Trulia during the week and overall [another great tool to use during a listing presentation]. Finally, as a Trulia Pro, if you have listings on Trulia, now you can select the destination URL of where we point consumers to - e.g. your listing on your broker site, your blog site, your personal website etc.... So if we receive your listing from multiple sources, now you choose and have control where the consumer will be directed.
Two weeks ago, I reported we were waiting for the MLS in my area called TREND, to approve my Growth Leader Web Site. Shortly there after, they replied with a five page letter of compliance that needed to be met.
Time is passing by, and I now have 12 leads, and my web site advertising is still not turned on. My Market Leader contact has been unexpectedly out of the office, and not much has been happening, I am told by the gentleman at customer service in Washington State. I should call back Monday, when he returns, to see what the update is....
So, Here I am, anxious to begin, with a web site that is on line, and we have yet to begin.
I have followed on the 12 leads I have received so far. I have actually generated four of them myself. I participate in Trulia Voices, and have been adding my Market Leader web site to the Trulia Voices answers I have been giving.
I see in Market leader that four of my leads came as a result of people jumping from my entry into Trulia Voices, to my Market Leader Web Site. This is cool.
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.
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