I have Googled, I will Google, I must Google, I will Google in future.  Google is the "it" verb of this decade.  If you want to find something, you Google it.  I Google to find the phone number for a cab to the airport.  If I own a phone book, I honestly don't know where it is.

So I always ask Long & Foster agents if they've Googled their own name.  A few hands go up, sometimes more than few.  But for the most part they look at me.  So I ask them how they think the consumer would go about looking for them.  It's interesting how we all have different ideas about how consumers will do a search for real estate - whether it's for property, for an agent, for a specific town, neighborhood or county.  We really can't second guess what goes on in the mind of the consumer, but agents really only have control over their own name and their own domain names.  What the brokerage does is not within agent control, so whether your company is first, last or in the middle of search results, you can only work on making sure the consumer can find YOU.

Inman News ran an article on Oct. 29th by Glenn Roberts, Jr. entitled "Survey: Agents Still Clinging to Print Ads."  There were some amazing statistics in there, including the fact that "about 58 percent stated that the investment they made at their Web site or sites 'doesn't bring the return I hope for,' while 31 percent said they do see the expected return."  So it's safe to say there are a number of agents spending a fair amount of money for websites, meta tags, and search engine optimization and they are disappointed in the results.  At the end of the article, Glenn states "Another significant change is the rise of blogs and online networks among real estate professionals -- 21 percent of respondents reported that they have their own blog and 25 percent said they participate in at least one social-networking site."  These things were not even present in the survey for 2006.

Then as part of my class, I Google Long & Foster agent Nancy Pav.  I do this because I know that Nancy will come up as almost the entire first page of the Google results.  And then I tell the class she didn't pay a penny for it - not for her website which is provided by Long & Foster and not for all the sites where she created a profile - including Active Rain.  While I believe in investing money in marketing and adverstising, the prize does not always go to the agent who has spent the most.  Leverage what is being provided for free.  Search for your name on Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com   If you aren't in the top 5 results, work on leveraging online resources to place your name and your website address where the search engines will pick them up.