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:
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.
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.
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.
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)
Everybody has been asking us - why is the Breaking News Network innovative?
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
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.
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.
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.
The social media is in full bloom now that every real estate agent seems to own a Facebook account. After a few months experience being "social" on the social media, most real estate agents eventually wonder how the social activity translates into new business. Business in practice demands efficient messaging that brings in clients. Chatting on Facebook seems too indirect an approach for many agents.
We're now seeing a palpable shift towards using the social media as an advertising platform solely used for branding and messaging. The key idea behind this movement is to set up two types of social networking accounts - one personal and one strictly business on Twitter and Facebook. The personal account, based on your name, is used for personal branding, as you've been doing up to now.
For real estate, the business account is used strictly for discussing real estate - market trends, breaking news in the neighborhood, etc. Chats and other personal broadcasts should be limited so the content remains relevant to the opt-in subscriber / "friend". These Twitter feeds also become positioned as a proxy blog themselves and can be re-broadcast on other sites. For example, on the Breaking News sites like http://breakingsfnews.com/real-estate, we add those undiluted Twitter feeds within the Real Estate section.
@CindeeLean provides good examples on how to use multiple Twitter accounts for business:
A series of basic tutorials introducing how to use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media applications.
A series of advanced tutorials on how to build Breaking News for your city.
A series of advanced tutorials on how to market Breaking News and implement revenue generating business models.
Over 36 hours of our best recorded webinars detailing our social media marketing system and Breaking News
A series of 90 tutorials detailing on how to blog effectively
Domus Live Webinar series
All new enrollees and past clients who have gone through our complete 101 series have free access to live webinars held every Friday between 9:00-9:45 PDT / 12:00-12:45 EDT between June 19 - October 1. These webinars will not be basic training; we’ll be discussing the latest developments in social media, real estate marketing and our Breaking News Network. They will be recorded.
Our Breaking News City sites instantly position you as the hub of your community. Even better, we have built several revenue generating business models with Breaking News City sites that are simple to implement and provide recurring income. You are the owner of your City site and participate as part of the larger Breaking News Network. Here is the list of Breaking News city sites developed by our network since May 1:
All enrollees will have the opportunity to build one Breaking News city site if the city is available. This is the final call for any real estate professional interested in developing a Breaking News City site.
The total price for the Social Media Marketing 201 and Breaking News course is $299. Register here. Also register for our introductory session free this Wednesday at 10:30am PDT / 1:30pm EDT at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/350300010
Here are ten steps to create an enthusiastic community network with a Breaking News City site:
By launching a Breaking News City site, you are providing a service to your community.
First, find the best local Twitterers in your city (this takes about 2 hours, and is kind of fun).
When you add a Twitter feed to Breaking News, you are helping that Twitterer get more exposure. They thank you for adding them. Add 50 feeds, gain 50 new friends.
You develop working relationships with the media because you're adding their Twitter feeds. The media follow you because your Breaking News site is, well, a media property.
Local merchants will appreciate, even love having a forum to tweet their daily deals. They will instantly become a part of your network.
Introduce Breaking News as a free advertising / marketing medium to the Chamber of Commerce, and request their participation.
Participate or even start a Tweetup in your city to meet f2f all the Twitterers participating in Breaking News
Offer barter opportunities with Breaking News. Want a hotel to sponsor a Tweetup? Ask them and acknowledge their generosity with a sponsorship badge on Breaking News.
Once you've developed new friends on Twitter, invite them to network on Facebook or LinkedIn and solidify your network.
Consumers will be attracted to Breaking News like a local newspaper, and will see you as a hub for their community.
We've created a simple tutorial to get a Breaking News City site up and running, and I'll be going through this in a special webinar this Thursday at 9:00am PDT. Register through this link:https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/219107691.
Breaking News City sites are developed by real estate brokers and agents who understand the importance of online community networking. By providing the community with a way to communicate together, you become the hub of this activity while you build your local network.
We're registering for our next Social Media Marketing workshops starting Friday, May 8 at 10:30pdt / 1:30edt. During these sessions, we help build Breaking News City sites for our clients. Register at http://DomusConsultingGroup.com/101h.
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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