Ed Kohler from Technology Evangelist at our Friday Skype in

Mark Eibner: Hi I'm Mark Eibner and welcome to Broker IPTV and we are once again with Ed Kohler from Technology Evangelist at our Friday Skype-in and Ed welcome to the show.

Ed Kohler: Hi Mark how are you doing today?

Mark Eibner: Just doing fine, key subject matter today, we are going to talking about fostering leads online and I think more specifically as we have been talking about in the past, registration, to register or to not register?

Ed Kohler: Yeah.

Mark Eibner: So what's your initial input on that Ed?

Ed Kohler: Mark I think this is something that is part art and part science and people spend a lot of time debating, what the best strategy is for this, but clearly anyone working in real estate one of the, you know the goals of their website is to generate leads and one of the tactics people often use is in order to generate more leads they try to force their visitors to register in order to access information.

Mark Eibner: Right.

Ed Kohler: So you know is that a good thing or a bad thing? There is really no right or wrong answer necessarily, and everyone has opinions and some very strong on that issue, but generally I think as people are more qualified as they are further into the buying process when they contact you with, they are going to be a better lead, so there is a quantity and a quality side to this.

Mark Eibner: Certainly I think perhaps one of the things that we can even talk about is that eventually consumers are going to pre-qual. themselves, I have got some of these calls I put up on the screen here like any time you receive a phone call with the words "I have been reading your blog", "Wow you really post a lot of photos on your listings" or "I really love that video you took of the new bakery down on Pearl Street", you pretty much know you've probably got yourself a great lead.

Ed Kohler: Yeah I would say so that the person who is calling who is giving you that kind of information, they are obviously showing that they've spent some time on your website and your website helped convince them that you are credible and worth contacting. So you are not just a, not a pretty face any more, you actually have demonstrated your expertise in the area or in aspects of real estate or you know in your quality of the listings you do or things like that.

Mark Eibner: Yeah let's talk about some suggestions here and I think the one thing I want to bring out and maybe you can support me on this is for the most parts static old world websites just aren't cutting the mustard any more?

Ed Kohler: Yeah I think its, it helps to have a little bit more there to show that you are currently in business and doing business and to show that you are just current on what's going down in your community, this thing is this its not exactly difficult to do today because blog software for example makes it very easy to publish content to the web and you know it costs nearly nothing, so that's a great way to go right there and it shows that you are in fact alive you know if it only representation of yourself online is a picture from ten years ago, there is really not much there for people to connect with.

Mark Eibner: Right yeah I think it gets back to that key word "transparency". I think there is a lot of the new social media where all the webs 2.0 web 3.0 world shows that brokers that are either not up to speed on technology and/or lazy or not actually working will be self evident out on the Internet?

Ed Kohler: Yeah and I think that the Internet also allows people to find out more about some one's expertise then say like a couple of letters after their name does, like certifications for example, outside the industry a lot of the different acronyms are not really well known.

Mark Eibner: Right.

Ed Kohler: So you know given a choice of going and taking another course you know there could be a lot of educational value in doing that, but if you had a choice of where to spend your time maybe you are better off spending your time just talking to people about what you know and just demonstrating it.

Mark Eibner: Yeah which really leads us back into the new issues today are social media being involved in online forums, perhaps industry specific blogs like ActiveRain and really the connectivity of your traditional website with all these different types of new, I guess how would, you even class a social media, these new ways of interacting with consumers.

Ed Kohler: Yeah there is just so many places where people are communicating online and if you can join in and you know be a part of a conversation that's going to help you build additional business for sure and when someone is ready to really do business, if they have known you for a while, then they are going to be more comfortable with you when it comes time to actually do some business. So if the only time you are interacting with someone on the Internet is in the buying cycle, you are missing out on the opportunity of just getting to know people and have people comfortable with you but you know other people I know and I am in Minneapolis and there are real estate agents I know who are very active online right now, I am not currently in you know a buying cycle, but I still know who you know active real estate agents are because they are you know prominent.

Mark Eibner: What have you seen out there on the registrations sites versus non registration as far as what seems to be more successful?

Ed Kohler: I have seen a lot of people trying to do first registration where it hasn't been very successful forum because it's, they end up getting a lot of junk data, so they end up chasing leads that are still very, very cold or the information is just complete garbage that people put into the system. I would try to steer people instead towards what can you do with your website that will help so that when people contact you, they are completely qualified, where they know who you are and they know you do a great job with your business and you understand the industry where when someone calls you up and says I was just reading your blog, if you can do more to get that type of person to call you, that's where you are going to turn more of those leads into closed sales.

Mark Eibner: Great once again this has been another session of Friday Skype-in with Ed Kohler, you can read him at technologyevangelist.com and Ed we really appreciate you being on the show.

Ed Kohler: Thank you Mark.

Mark Eibner: Till next Friday we will see at another Friday Skype-in.