Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’
Are Real Estate Agents Obsolete?
I’ve met with a number of Real Estate Agents and Broker’s the past few months and I’m not surprised they view Social Media as a waste of time. Don’t get me wrong, I have found a few that get it, they have taken the risk and setup virtual offices and even opened accounts with FaceBook & Twitter. Some use these Social networks well and some just say they use them effectively, my research here in Canada reveals that most aren’t practicing what they preach.
I’ve made recommendations and suggested radical approaches to how an agent prospects and wastes a huge amount of time with tire kickers at open house events. They look at me with those puppy eyes and say I couldn’t do that, I don’t know how, that sounds like too much work. I think it’s harder the way they do things now, but they’re stuck! If you’re an agent or a broker that’s been in the industry longer than 10 years, you may have a tougher time making the paradigm shift. I’m not saying you can’t or don’t have the ability, but I am saying if you don’t, life is going to get very interesting when the new tech savvy up and comers produce at a high level with a very different kind of effort. How will you compete and survive?
Let me give you an example of one thing you could do and have fun doing it. I’ll look at the old school traditional agent first, then the new tech savvy agent.
Old School Agent
The old school agent would sit on the phone rounding up prospects for hours on end, then would set up 4 or 5 walk abouts and even a few open house events two weekends in a row. A lot of time and effort goes into this type of selling, hard work is important but with today’s technology why would you do this? Organizing and worrying about how may or may not show up, worse yet, having to go and pick them to ensure you do have a prospect. Getting flier’s out and setting up sign’s, the list goes on. The advertising costs can be staggering too, time spent networking, convincing people they should come and see this house and so on.
The New Tech Savvy Agent
The new tech savvy agent sits at the desk and decides which homes to work on this week, then prepares how they would sell the dream of the home on video. This agent goes out and buys a Flip MinoHD Camcorder 2nd Generation
This new agent let’s the prospect qualify themselves and let’s them contact him or her when they’re ready, this agent is thinking about the prospect not themselves.
As you can see the new tech savvy agent takes a different risk, invests their time giving what prospects want and then makes it ridiculously easy for them. The prospect that calls the new tech savvy agent back just qualified themselves, less work than the old school way of handling the same task. This is just one opportunity to start making the shift to Real Estate Selling with Social Media, if you don’t take baby steps now and don’t learn how to do some of these techie things. I have to wonder if Real Estate Brokers won’t become obsolete, Broker / Owners at some point will figure out they can handle inventory in a less complicated way. By the way, people complicate things not flip cams and iPhones.
Are Real Estate Agents Obsolete? Maybe not yet, and maybe not all, but more than you think.
I.T. Strategic Planning – ANALYSIS: S.W.O.T.
S.W.O.T.
This section may answer some question but will also bring out more, consider it an opportunity to think tank with your team. The S.W.O.T (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) gives a quick reference to things that may or may not be real, but are possibilities. The accumulation of all these steps builds a road map, an understanding, and makes it possible to explain or describe where you are going in a short concise way, and makes it obvious what you are planning to do in the coming month’s and or years.
Keep in mind there is no wrong or right answer here, you are merely compiling and observing your organizations current status. This is just one step on the journey, one step in building a business case, and one more step in assessing what services and changes are needed to support your organizations business requirements. The basics rarely change, only the technology does, and of course there is always a list of nice to haves, documenting everything helps you filter what’s important and what is not.
Again, this list will be different…it should be as technology and business needs change. Here is an example:
Strengths
1. Minimal Core Infrastructure (name your application here)
2. New, enthusiastic team
3. Knowledge
4. Relationships
5. History
Weaknesses
1. 85% of staff are new to the organization
2. Unable to meet the expectations (Can’t move fast enough to please everyone)
3. Network instability
4. Lack of integration of core applications
Opportunities
1. Social Media Networks
2. Open Source
3. Standardization
4. Partnering
5. Virtualization
Threats
1. Inability to compete for qualified skilled people
2. Security – hacking, spam etc.
3. Inadequate budget
4. Little control over vendor products or direction
5. Little control over technologies
This is just an example of what your S.W.O.T. might look like, pull your team together and ask all the tough questions, make an exhaustive list and then pick the top 5 from each of the 4 areas in your SWOT.
This is the prime definition taken from the Wikipedia site on SWOT Analysis:
SWOT Analysis is a strategic planning method used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or in a business venture. It involves specifying the objective of the business venture or project and identifying the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving that objective. The technique is credited to Albert Humphrey, who led a convention at Stanford University in the 1960s and 1970s using data from Fortune 500 companies.
Until next time
Social Media Random Acts of Kindness
You frequently hear of people doing the most generous things in your community, and you can’t help wondering why it doesn’t happen more often. I think it does but we don’t hear about most of them, we hear about the high profile stuff, the things that glorify individuals or an organization. In general people think you have to be a Christian or a Missionary to do acts of kindness, you couldn’t be more wrong! I can say this because I am a Christian, but I wasn’t one for 34 years and I can tell you I have seen many great people and not so great people do things that wow you.
You’ve heard on the news of people saving lives, street people jumping into rivers to save people, those heroic people. What about, well, you and me? Just everyday folks who get up in the morning, go to work and then come home and rest up to do it all over again. These individuals are caring loving people to, they may show it in many various ways but it’s in each one of us.
Our church, or should I say some everyday people held an Oil Change for Single Mother’s behind the 7-11 store at our Church location and we had some wonderful stories come from that experience. You don’t need to be part of an organization to pull these things off, even our own neighborhood holds a BBQ in the cul-de-sac around the corner from my house each summer. We get together, get to know one another and help each other when in need.It’s about people, it’s about building relationships, it’s about making a difference in the lives around you. You’ve seen it here and you’ve seen me post in Twitter and other various Social Media Networks. How Many People Are Better Off Because You Lived?
There are many of us who are trying to translate our offline activities and bringing them here to Social Media circles, raising money for various events and organizations, building one another up and help each other. It appears it’s easier to do it online than in real life, why? Why don’t have to get up off the chair, it’s easier, less work and effort. Does that means it’s any less valuable? Less effective? Is it shallow? Does it say, I really don’t care enough to go be with you?
So I leave you with a question and I hope you will share your thoughts here with us and those who read this Blog.
Does doing Random Acts of Kindness hold the same weight and importance in Social Media Networks?
How I Monetize My Blog Part 1
Lately I have been getting asked (what feels like a million times), the question of how I make money with my blog. Or, can you (I) monetize my blog? Ironically, I attended a local Blogger’s Event this week and two questions were the focus, do you have a blog and do you monetize it? I’ll cover what I do on this Blog.
First a disclaimer….This post is NOT a get rich, a how to make a million in 30 days and it’s not the only way to make money with a blog. I am not claiming or promising you a thing! I am merely going to answer these questions by sharing with you how I generate revenue on this blog.
I’ve been blogging for a few years now, not many years, just a few. I started blogging on the topic of nanotechnology, I even wrote a short eBook on the topic. I also write about I.T. Strategic Planning, some personal thoughts and now I focus primarily on Social Media because that is what most of the readers here want from me. Then every now then, it comes in spurts, I get asked how I make money with my blog. OK, I get asked a lot 🙂 Keep in mind, I didn’t start blogging for the purposes of monetizing, I had a website long before I had a Blog, it’s easier to manage and it gives me a place to share my knowledge and help people.
I’ll bet the answer to this question is like finding the holy grail, I decided to do a little research and this is what I found out. I did a Google search for the phrase “Make Money With Blogs”, I noticed that there are 202,000,000 references to that phrase. Next I did a search for “How Bloggers Make Money From Blogging”, that showed a result of 136,000,000 references. Then I tried “How To Monetize My Blog” which brought a result of 522,000 references. I even setup a couple Google Alerts and monitored what was being posted for a few days, it’s a mess out there when it comes to this topic. As you can see this is a hot topic and considering the economic times we are in, I’m not surprised people are trying to find ways to make money. I actually hate the fact that we need money to survive but that’s another story.
Let’s move to what I do here on owengreaves.com, if you look around you’ll find I do very little, on the sidebar you will see a couple books I promote, they are affiliate links to Amazon.com. If you go to Amazon you can learn how to do the same thing, they cover the how to very well. I wrote a short eBook that I sell and that’s about it. The real dollars come from consulting on this topic, Social Media and I.T Strategic Planning. The truth be told, I just love to help people figure things out here on the Internet.
There are many ways to generate cash through your blog but you have to decide what your passion is and do people want what you have to sell. There is a process to follow, you don’t find a product first…you find a problem to solve before you start investing in a product.
Recently I Tweeted on Twitter a link to an article by Chris Brogan called, Make Some Money, and people thought I was spamming when I was merely promoting what Chris wrote. Money is a sensitive topic and anything that sniff’s of SPAM is an even touchier topic. Gary Vaynerchuck believes anyone can monetize whatever their passion might be, someone is going to buy what you’re doing, eventually. The trick is finding enough people to buy what you’re selling.
That’s it for now…stay tuned for more : )
Do You Attend Blog Events?
I attended a Blogger event here in my community at a pub / restaurant / night club called The Duke of Dublin, we tried to talk but the live entertainment meant we had to yell. It’s a nice facility but probably not the best place to sit and talk quietly, get to know each other and cover items like blogging. Having said that, it was still great fun to catch up with a few people I already new and of course its always fun to meet new faces to match the names on Twitter.
The two primary question’s were, do you have a Blog and do you monetize your blog? Interestingly enough everyone had a blog but not all have monetized their blog because that wasn’t the reason why they started the blog in the first place. My primary goal is to help businesses with I.T. Strategy and how to use Social Media and Social Media Networks in their businesses. I’ll admit I didn’t start out with the intent of monetizing but over time I have put up some low level ways of monetizing my blog.
Once there was a break in the music we were able to share some stories and swap business cards. If you haven’t attended a Tweet-up or a Blogging Event you should, you meet the coolest people. These aren’t the most flattering pictures but I’m posting them anyway, enjoy!
A Few of the Gang