The Social Media Handyman

Up until this week, I looked at the real estate industry from the outside in. This week, however, I got an inside view that has given me an even greater appreciation for the role Realtors play. 

You see, this week my wife Amie and I signed a contract on a townhouse and I would not/could not have done it without the capable leadership and assistance provided by our agent, Conni Smith.

This experience has also given me is a better understanding as to why Realtors should blog, and the role blogging can play as a marketing tool. 

 Step 1: Focusing on Listings
We started our home search the same way over 80% of prospective homebuyers do according to NAR, on the Internet. We didn't begin by looking for an agent to work with though. Instead, we began by looking at listings. That may not be typical, but I suspect it is.

Step 2: Focusing on the Agent
Once we found some homes we wanted to take a closer look at, Amie and I contacted the listing agent. It was at that point that the relationship with the agent began. Once we found a place we really liked, that suited our tastes, needs and lifestyle, then we REALLY began a relationship with the agent.

I had questions. Does this Realtor know her stuff? As the listing agent representing the seller, would she also represent our best interests? Can we trust her? Of course, all of those questions were answered overwhelmingly in the affirmative, but we didn't really have a way of knowing that except by virtue of walking through the experience with her. I read her bio page on the broker's website, but that only gave me minimal information...length of time as a real estate agent, credentials, some brief customer testimonials, etc. 

If, however, Conni had had a blog, I could have gained much more understanding of her expertise, experience, her track record in sales, knowledge of the local real estate market, the community, and, yes, her personality. I wanted to know who this person was before I entrusted her with what, to date, is the largest buying decision I've ever had to make.

Knowledge That Leads to Trust
I've always held the opinion that people don't want to do business with businesses, but with people, and in particular, people they know. Knowledge leads to trust, and a blog would have given me more of both where Conni was concerned. Without sounding too melodramatic, a big chunk of our future was held in this lady's hands, and I wanted to know she could deliver the goods! 

Our interactions with Conni proved to be very positive. (BTW, she gave me permission to use her name.) She was personable, professional, and extremely capable. You bet I will use her again. She was even familiar with blogging, as her son had blogged for his college, something to do with recruiting. Still, I needed some assurance before entering into the transaction and negotiations, the kind of assurance a blog could have given me.

Had I been an experienced home buyer, perhaps I would have taken more for granted, but this is the first home I've purchased in 10 years. I'm a real estate neophyte where buying a home is concerned.

I'll tell you something I did do in advance of our meetings with Conni. I contacted an agent I knew I could trust, Ines. She answered my questions and, at my request, shared insights into the kinds of things I should look for.  I didn't merely trust Ines' advice because she is my apprentice, but because reading her blog let me know she had expertise and experience which could be trusted.

It all comes down to a matter of trust. I needed to know I could trust the agent I was working with. A blog could have helped foster that relationship. Some of us just need all the help we can get!

I'm not crying sour grapes by posting this, but I wanted you to see what amounts to the first negative review of our book, Realty Blogging. It's written by Joe Zekas, the guy who runs an incredible site called YoChicago. Everyone has a right to their opinion and here's his...

I delayed buying this book, hoping that it wouldn't be as bad as it proved to be.

It's a muddled brain dump of both good and bad advice about blogging, but with a focus on all the wrong things.

The single biggest problem is that it panders to the standard real estate agent thinking that there's a magic bullet out there that will give the agent an edge over his or her competitors. The current magic bullet is blogging.

Left out of the books is any serious discussion of what should have been the starting point: a blog can't attract an audience without a focus on delivering something of value to a targeted audience.

The authors pay modest homage to this concept, but virtually everything they write undermines it. They encourage agents to write about anything and everything, and tell them what they want to hear: you can be an expert simply by claiming to be one and having a blog.

Agents should spend the time learning something substantive that consumers want to know instead of reading this book.

The popularity of this book will do much to undermine any potential value that real estate blogging has to those agents who want to pursue it as a way of developing, honing and communicating real expertise. An army of idiot brokers will, on the advice of the authors, be babbling on with no focus and will discourage anyone from even looking at the occasional good real estate blog.

Real estate blogging, if the authors of this book find an audience that follows their advice, will be just as useless a field of garbage as real estate agent Web sites have become. 

It's a given that Amazon customer reviews help (or hurt in this case) book purchases on the site. I'd like to get your reaction and, if you feel so inclined, ask you to write a review, or at least leave a comment on his. Hey, maybe you feel Joe's sentiments are on-target. If so, say so.  On the other hand, if you feel the book has merit, say that as well.

My apprentice, Ines, and I have been hard at work practicing the seven blog posting formats. (Let me retract that statement and replace it with "My apprentice has been hard at work." I've been pretty much watching from the sidelines. :->)

While she's expressed not  having the same amount of affection for each, Ines has, nonetheless, tackled these assignments with enthusiasm and vivacity (Let me add tenacity as well). As her coach, I could not be more proud.

Here is a bullet-list her posts relative to each format:

• LINK-ONLY -  Historic Home Niche and Outside Active Rain drops 
• LINK-BLURB - Miami's Romero Britto 
• BRIEF-REMARK - Project Blogger in my wildest dreams
• SHORT ARTICLE - How to register your customers and show absolute insecurity
• LIST-FORMAT - 10 tips for writing good Real Estate descriptions and  Why isn't my house selling?
• LONG ARTICLE - Historic Preservation in Miami Shores - Mediterranean Revival architecture  
• SERIES POSTINGS - Blog formats - PART I

She is wrapping up the seven formats with her series posts, then we'll be kicking off the next section dealing with blog marketing, which I promised Ines will be more fun. 

That brings me to the title of this post. I live in south Louisiana near the city of Baton Rouge, home of the LSU Tigers. Their mascot is a Bengal Tiger by the name of Mike. The Cajuns down here cheer the team by yelling "Geaux Tigers!" Well, let me tell you, there is another tiger down in south Florida who goes by the name of Ines (sounds like "finesse" minus the "f") Hegedus-Garcia, and all I can say is "Geaux Ines!" 

My More on Comments post raised a question from a reader. He asks, in reference to the statistics Active Rain reports in the admin console, "What are Clicks?" Let me explain what I believe that metric to be and why it's useful. 

I've not spoken with Matt or Jonathan about this, but I suspect that "Clicks" represent the number of times a reader has clicked on a hyperlink contained in a blog post. That's an important metric, especially if you're using your blog for marketing purposes.

Allow me to go into greater detail using the More on Comments post as an example.

To date, I've received 511 views to the post, which has resulted in 106 clicks. If I do my math right (and, remember, math ain't my strong suit), that means, for every five views, I've received one click. That's a 20% click-thru rate. There are marketers out there who would salivate to get that level of conversion. Some would even offer up their firstborn to get it!

If your post is just informational, it may not be an important metric to track. However, if you're writing a post that has a marketing agenda and, say for example, you include a link to a listing or to your company website or some other lead generation site, it's very important.

Let's suppose my More on Comments post was actually one written with a marketing focus...maybe I'm trying to get you to download our Blogging for Realtors whitepaper (PDF). (You can do that if you'd like. It makes for great bathroom reading. Ha, ha)

Let's suppose that from the post we determine three leads were generated. (There are ways to do that.) I divide the number of leads (3) by the number of clicks (106) and find that I have a 3% conversion rate. Over time, I can watch those numbers and extrapolate that, for example, for every 500 views I can expect to receive 100 clicks which converts to three leads being generated.

What's my goal then? To write posts that are compelling enough to generate 500 (or more) views for one. That's one reason all that talk about blog copywriting is so important. It also has bearing on posting frequency. If I can get to where I'm averaging 500 views per post, then the onus is on me to retain that audience and increase it. Frequent posting is one way to do that, along with writing editorial content worth reading of course.

Here are a tip borrowed from email marketing best practices. It's always good to put a link (again, we're thinking of using the blog for marketing purposes) early in the copy, then again later. Having said that, you don't want to input so many links to the same URL that Google thinks your link stuffing. (SEO experts out there...is that something Google would penalize you for? Methinks it is.) Plus, unless I'm mistaken, AR doesn't report clicks per individual link, but presents a cumulative number for all links. 

That's part of the fine art of blogging. How many times can you use a certain set of keywords and/or links to one particular site without it coming back to haunt you from a search engine perspective. 

The bottom line here is, if you're using your blog as a marketing tool, every metric is important. The number of page views, unique visits, click-thrus... the whole nine yards. The beauty of the Internet is, everything can be tracked. You can quite literally know exactly what transpired all along the pipeline, from writing the post to generating the lead. 

I would love to hear feedback from you on what your experience has been, If you fancy yourself as someone knowledgeable about SEO, please feel free to debunk my assertions. I know some things, but don't pretend to be an SEO expert whatsoever.

In my post about Active Rain being a "nursery" for preparing you to enter so-called "real world" blogging, I failed to mention something relative to the statistics I used in the first paragraph. I indicated receiving 17,317 views and 248 comments. Doing a bit more ciphering I determined that comments equated to only 1.5 percent of the total views. 1.5 percent, and that's in Active Rain! (Keep in mind, math is not my strong suit!)

I share that, not as a source of discouragement, but as a way to suggest that those leaving comments only comprise a small percentage of your readership and should not necessarily be a barometer of your overall traffic. Just because you may not get a lot of comments doesn't equate to you not getting significant traffic. The two don't always go hand-in-hand.

Still, the question must be asked, why don't more readers leave comments? Let me proffer a few ideas:

People aren't trained to interact
Even though, thanks to blogs, wikis, forums, social networks, etc, the Internet has morphed into a participatory environment doesn't mean Internet users have altogether. Plus, and this is my conjecture, we have been trained to be passive consumers of information, not active producers. Think about it, in terms of how we interact with media, we watch television, listen to radio, and read the newspaper. Until recent years, the web was also a consumption-oriented environment, not a participatory one. 

If that's the case, we have to "train" our readers to leave comments. We can do that by encouraging them to engage in that practice, and by writing posts that leave questions unanswered or that ask for feedback. Not only that, we can write posts that touch on hotbed issues. Those almost always engender response. In any case, we have to presume that most people are not reading our post with a view toward participation, but consumption. The burden is on us to change that mindset.

People are afraid to leave comments
You've heard the old expression, "Keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, open it and remove all doubt." I think fear plays a role in why people don't comment. They fear their viewpoint might be ridiculed, or that they don't have something substantive to say. 

I've read a number of blog posts where I desperately wanted to share a comment, but held back because, in reading comments left by others, I feared mine would appear...well, let me just say it...dumb! 

The blogger doesn't write conversationally
One of my biggest pet peeves is bloggers who write a post like its an article or essay. If you want to write an essay or something more formal in tone, do it elsewhere, and link to it from your blog. Your blog post (and you'll excuse me if I misspell something here. My cat is leaning his head on the keyboard. His name is "Smokey" by the way, and this is how he lets me know he wants attention.)...what was I saying? Oh yea, your blog post should be written conversationally and even anecdotally.

Blogs are all about engendering conversation...about creating dialogue. In the case of a business blog, it's about creating conversations that lead to clients. So, write this sucker as if you're talking to your best friend. (Close acquaintance anyway.)

One other thought...

We get all worked up about getting a large readership. But, let me tell you, blogging is not about how many sets of eyeballs you can get reading your blog, but who those eyeballs belong to! Blogging is "influencers influencing other influencers." Even if you don't have a large readership, you may already have the right readership...that target audience that you truly need to reach, and that's what you should focus on. Blogging is a self-filtering, niche marketing approach, not mass media.

OK, nuff said...now, let me go play with my cat!