Via Bob Stewart - ActiveRain (ActiveRain):

ActiveRain will be bringing our third RainCamp™ to the Big Apple on Tuesday, January 12th. We have teamed up with the folks at Inman to kick off Real Estate Connect New York City 2010.

 


Take advantage of the unique opportunity to not only attend RainCamp™ and learn how to implement proven internet marketing strategies, but also to attend Real Estate Connect where the leaders in real estate and real estate technology come together to map out the future of our industry. Get special group pricing through ActiveRain for a chance to attend both events, RainCamp™ and Real Estate Connect.


"What's RainCamp™ All About?"

Hyper Local Blogging: How focusing on things within your city can get you a better client than focusing on your city

Search Engine Optimization: What are the best practices to get your website (yep, your website can still rank well) to rank well in the search engines. And also what tools can you use to get better results out of your site(s).

Converting Leads into Closings: Ben Kinney, one of our speakers and a Mega producing agent with Keller Williams, will share with you the secrets of how his team converts their internet leads into closings. This presentation is worth the price of admission alone as Ben demonstrates the method his team uses to take full advantage of every lead they generate.

Facebook and Twitter: How can you leverage social networks to expand your sphere of influence. The business applications of these two particular networks are exploding at the same time it's a fine balancing act to mine them in a manner that doesn't alienate your followers. We'll help you understand the nuances.

Social Media Success Stories: We'll have agents from around the country explain how they are using their online presence to impact their bottom line. Does this stuff really work? Yes it does and you'll have access to people that are making it work for them.

30 Technologies You Don't Know about but Should: Our resident techno-geek Brad Andersohn will share with you 30 technologies that you can start using the next day that can help organize and bring efficiency to your online life.

Register for Raincamp NYC


"What's the Big Deal?"

Our first RainCamp™ in Seattle was an amazing success and the 250 people in attendance walked away with practical applications they could put to use the next day in their businesses. Knowing that the internet is here to stay and has a profound impact on how you conduct business, making sure that you have concrete means to take advantage of it's power is paramount to staying ahead of your competition. Raincamp™ is eight hours (we give you a lunch break if you want it) chalk full of education intended to help you take full advantage of the powers of the net. Your understanding of the different facets of internet lead generation, lead management, and lead conversion and how they fit into your business plan will ensure that you have a successful 2010 and beyond.


"Could Real Estate Connect Be As Cool?"

It sure is!! ActiveRain has been able to negotiate a fantastic group rate for our members for the Real Estate Connect Conference at the Marriot Marquis in Time Square as well. Real Estate Connect, for those of you that have never attended (since I don't have to tell those of you that have), is the source to keep you in tune with a rapidly evolving real estate industry. No one knows exactly what direction the market will take in 2010, but if there is one constant in this market, that constant is change. Real Estate Connect brings together over 1300 of your peers to help you assess that change and how it will affect your bottom line. The best and brightest minds in the industry make this annual trek to New York City and converge with one goal in mind, determining how to stay ahead of their competition.

Many ActiveRain members will be sharing as in years past.

Linda Davis (Carnac to her fans)
Spencer Rascoff (Zillow)
Matt Goyer (Redfin)
Paul Chaney (Bizzuka)
Mitch Ribak (the eHomes Realty Network)
Tom Ferry (Super Coach extrodinaire)

and a few more before it's all said and done.

The lineup of presenters and speakers is a cross section of the thought leaders from every facet of the real estate industry. Amazing people with amazing talent and ground breaking ideas. If you've never been to a real estate connect, I implore you to work it into your schedule. You will not be disappointed.

Register for Inman Connect NYC


"Bob, Shut your mouth.....It can't get BETTER, can it?"

Yes, it can get better and it does. How many of you would love a custom video for your website, blog, or the signature line of your email, or for just about anywhere you can stick a video? We mean a HIGH quality video done by a professional videographer with TurnHere. The videos can focus on a Local neighborhood or community, you as a Realtor®, or even if you're not a Realtor® there is some cool stuff they can do for you too. The Inman team will be giving one of these videos (a $500 value) to the first 50 people that sign up for Real Estate Connect through ActiveRain.

(this is where the guy on the pharmaceutical commercial comes in and rattles on like an auctioneer so fast you can barely understand what he's saying. Luckily we are in print so they call this the 'fine print': Must register for Real Estate Connect before November 30th 2009 and must shoot the video before December 31st, 2009 in order to be eligible for the free custom video)


"This Must Cost One Million Dollars, Right?"

Yes, you are correct. However, since you are an ActiveRain member you are going to receive a $999,331 discount. In fact, when you sign up for Real Estate Connect, you will get access to RainCamp™ as part of your Registration for the Real Estate Connect Conference all for $669.00. This offer will be good until December 15th. (Of course, you'd be crazy to wait that long because you want to be one of the first 50 to jump on this deal so you get the free custom video from TurnHere.)

If you can't make it for the Real Estate Connect Conference and would like to join us for RainCamp™ only, you can register here for $109.00


 

Do you care what I'm doing and thinking? (I can not for the life of me imagine why) If you do, you can find me on some of these places........but remember, if you are offended by anything you see or hear, I didn't force you to follow me!!:

 

Follow Me on Twitter   Follow Me on Facebook   Lets get Linkedin   My Outside Blog   Follow my Photo Stream on Flickr   Watch my Crazy Movies on YouTube

 

 

Following up on our slideshow about Real Estate Coach 2.0, we're introducing new ways for agents to continually learn the best of social media marketing. We believe training and learning should be long term, practical and affordable.

We developed a Social Media Training Center product that we offer to Associations of Realtors for their members. One example is at Oklahoma City Metro Association. We're rolling out Training Centers with Boards nationwide, with California Association of Mortgage Brokers and several in the SF Bay Area slated for early December. We're fulfilling a void by providing an agenda-free product that REALTORS are now demanding, even in Oklahoma!

As many Active Rainers know, we've been doing webinar training on social media marketing for 2 1/2 years. We know Active Rainers are on the leading edge of social media marketing and we want to open up this training to all of you as well. We've created a Training Center for Active Rain members and have added a detailed module for learning about how to use Active Rain by organizing the tutorials of our friend Brad Andersohn.

We hope you subscribe to the Social Media Training Center for Active Rain members at http://domusu.com/activerain.

* One more idea: as a subscriber, you can offer the Social Media Training Platform free to your Board or Chamber of Commerce. We do all the work in presenting the product and setting it up... and there's a revenue model for you behind it.

 

One year and a half ago, we opened up our webinar training as a scalable way to train real estate professionals on social media marketing. Here is the slideshow we presented in May 2008:

Real Estate Coach 2.0
View more presentations from Pat Kitano.
Very soon, we'll be unveiling the next iteration of how we're making real estate training powerful, continuously updated and affordable.

 

 

Here are two simple ways to engage your community.

 

Building a Twitter-based community news resource in one hour has the same strategic mission of building a Breaking News city site. You gain instant recognition within your city by providing a community service and you become a local media hub. This is good will branding of yourself and an easy way to develop a farm of community contacts.

We invite you to offer our free social media training platform to your local chamber of commerce. In the span of only three months, Ines Garcia in Weston, Florida engaged her Weston Chamber of Commerce through Breaking Weston News, presented a social media seminar in September and was invited onto their Board.

 

 

Active Rain adopted the trend of reposting other people's content with its Reblog feature. Reposting, reblogging, retweeting, rebroadcasting - the function of distributing information and date relevant to your message is a function of media. Blogging purists may criticize this trend claiming it detracts from the voice of the blogger, but the reality is most people aren't bloggers but do like sharing information.

 

Posterous is a blogging game changer. It elegantly automates the function of reposting so that anybody can build a decent looking "blog" without writing one. It also automates syndication across the social media landscape so it gets instant recognition from your networks as well as from Google. Here's the slideshow:



Posterous facilitates becoming a media resource. We see templates and themes built for Posterous that will have the look and feel of the New York Times. We've been asserting over the past year that becoming the media is the next marketing paradigm. This is the slideshow we're presenting at the California Association of Realtors next Tuesday at 2:00:


 
Screen shot 2009-09-04 at 12.34.28 AM

We're delighted that our Breaking News Network is one of the event sponsors of 140 | The Twitter Conference in Los Angeles on September 22-23. The Parnassus Group (we like this friendly group a lot) has lined up a Hollywood-inspired roster of speakers that should provide a lot of personality for a tech conference.

We enjoyed the first 140 in Mountain View last May, but thought the crowd was too social-media-centric. I noted that in a room of 300, only two of us represented real estate. We want to see all kinds of industry and small business participating at 140. Twitter and Twitter-based applications offer practical solutions to business development, and it's usually the people in business - real estate, publishing, retail, entertainment, hospitality, advertising to name a few - who figure this out.

As event sponsors, we're offering a discount code for registration at 140: type in 140LAPK.
 
Outsourcing the Social Media Marketing Curriculum

Brokerages now require social media marketing training to be relevant to the needs of their agents. However, it takes too much time and resources to hire somebody to compose social marketing tutorials, to constantly maintain ever-changing information, and to make them relevant specifically to the real estate agent.

Over the last three years, Domus Consulting Group has trained thousands of real estate agents on how to use social media effectively with our renowned series of Social Media Marketing webinar workshops (links to testimonials and awards here) that are running continuously every week. Kevin Boer has religiously chronicled the workshops into a portfolio of user-friendly tutorials. We offer this portfolio to your agents at a nominal cost, co-branded to your company... see the slideshow.

What's InsideFor more details

Contact us for a demo and a peek at the tutorials. An example of a tutorial we created for Chambers of Commerce can be downloaded at Local Business Owner's Guide to Twitter. We provide a very affordable solution that works in tandem with your training and marketing managers and frees them up to focus on building your team with the most updated and best-of-breed social media strategies.
 
In his updates from the CUNY New Business Models for News forum in Aspen, Jeff Jarvis discusses how a Salt Lake City newspaper acquired a real estate agency in order to sell houses as an alternative commercial venture.
Also here at Aspen, I was amazed and impressed to hear newspaper owner Dean Singleton tell some of us that his Salt Lake City paper has bought a realty agency and will list homes for a flat fee of a few thousand. Yes, the paper undercuts other agencies’ listings businesss. But, hey, the agencies have pretty much abandoned newspapers and newspapers still have readers and the ability to market homes in print and online. In Salt Lake’s case, the paper will send buyers – rather than sellers – to agencies that advertise. When I worked in the newspaper industry way back at the start of the consumer web, I tried to convince papers to just this: to get into the real estate business to get homes into the listings and to get access to listings data. I thought I was going to be killed. But I believe that this was an inevitability. Singleton’s move is the ecommerce strategy we presented in our models made substantial and real. We talked with the Telegraph’s Edward Roussel about their sales of wine, hangers, and hats. Selling homes is certainly bigger ticket. It monetizes the relationship papers have with readers in a new and smart way.
With the Breaking News Media Network, real estate brokerages and agents are using the same strategy, only opposite that of the media companies. They are building Breaking News city sites like Chico Breaking News in order to develop their community media presence as a branding vehicle. Note that the real estate participants in the Breaking News Network adhere to the idea that the sites are community services, so with a few exceptions, it's almost impossible to see that a real estate brokerage or agent is behind them. Yet, their presence is always there because they are communicating with the community through the site. This is the new wave of marketing that real estate is beginning to adopt to attract the community for business rather than spam them to death with drip marketing techniques. (tx h/t Tom Royce)
 

The Breaking News Network was awarded Most Innovative Media 2009 by Inman News last Friday.

inman_innovator_awards

Everybody has been asking us - why is the Breaking News Network innovative?

  1. Breaking News sites like Breaking San Francisco News aggregate the best Twitter feeds in a city. They filter the Twitter experience for the local consumer so they're not seeing the noise. These sites are powerful viral marketing vehicles - Twitter feeds @BreakingSFNews, @BreakingLANews and @BreakingNYCNews all have grown organically to over 2,200-2,500 followers in less than 3 months
  2. The Breaking News Network's grass roots application design makes it a unique media model. We give the template away to media/publishing companies and real estate brokerages and agents, who then build a Breaking News site in 3-5 hours. And they OWN the sites; it's on the Wordpress platform so it's easily accessible to non-programmers and customizable to the market.  Once up, that real estate brokerage/agent or media company provides a community service and instantly becomes the hub of their Twitter community in their city.
  3. In three months, the Breaking News Network already covers over 100 cities. As the Breaking News Network expands to cover every city in America (as well as overseas), the network begins to look like the Craigslist for Twitter feeds. We plan to overlay new business models across this network.

We're continuing to develop Breaking News sites and offer the opportunity to Active Rain members for your city. We're allocating only one per city, so if you're interested, please contact me on Active Rain. We select those who understand the power of virally connecting to their community for developing their business.

Related articles:

Mike Mueller's video with me talking about the Breaking News Network at Inman Connect August 7.

 

 

 

We at Domus Consulting Group have been working to develop new systems that leverage the social media to practical use.

Generally, we see real estate professionals who adopt social media marketing as being more in tune with their customer base than those who aren't participating in online conversations. Being on Twitter is not an indication of being a good real estate agent (says Rob Hahn), but it does become more obvious who knows their stuff by surveying any agents' online content on their blogs and networking accounts.

We're working with Neighbor City.com to develop social media channels that connect good real estate agents (as evidenced by their social media presence) with qualified Neighbor City prospects. The first one is called @leadbroadcaster; it's an opt-in application for real estate professionals. We'll also be testing the application for loan prequalification as well. Please check out the slideshow and let us know what you think.

 

 
 
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Patrick Kitano

San Francisco, CA

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Domus Consulting Group

Office Phone: (415) 320-2844

Cell Phone: (415) 320-2844

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