Another Great Tool For Agents!

Since 1981, Fidelity-Arizona has helped close more sales and generate more money for clients in Metropolitan Phoenix with innovative marketing tools, industry experts and effective partner programs.  Our Tools are a "GPS" for your business - helping you define your course with strategic movements that get you to your end goal in the most direct route possible. 

One of these tools is VisualShows, your one click marketing solution for syndicating all your listings to over 300 sites, all social media platforms, first page Google results, single property websites, mobile text messaging, flyers branding and more!  There is no other platform as robust as VisualShows and the best part is that for those who are Fidelity partners, it's FREE… saving you hundreds of dollars and hours of time working with multiple services and platforms. Just some of the many great features of VisualShows:

• Go mobile - Get your own personal SMARTPHONE App and take your business to the next level. Your app includes a custom keyword, call capture and texting capability!
• Text messaging with call capture for your listings - Provide property information to potential buyers 24/7! In addition, we offer text capture and notify you with all the information needed to follow up!
• Syndication feeds with SEO - Your property information will feed directly into any email reader or send your feed link to your prospects for easy updating.
• Custom QR code - Get a custom QR code for all your listings and market them from your mobile phone.
• Marketing links for MLS - Links of your shows emailed to you instantly, both branded and unbranded, for MLS compliancy!
• Satellite views - Every property includes a satellite view which provides a unique way to research a home’s area and surrounding attractions!
• Video uploads - Include a marketing video on every Show and highlight an area or property features!
• Property widgets - Advertise your properties on any blog or website. Our marketing widgets will highlight one property or auto scroll through them all!
• Create online commercials - Advertise a listing, promote yourself, highlight a neighborhood, share special events!
• Realtor.com auto posting - Automatically upload your listing to Realtor.com with our easy once click posting option!
• ActiveRain auto posting - Post your listings on ActiveRain and generate unlimited exposure for your properties!
• Classified sites postings – Craigslist, Ebay, Trulia, Zillow, LiveDeal, Oodle and more

Contact your Fidelity sales executive today for more information! Twitter 

How To Make People Fall In Love With Your Website

In the court of online real estate, your customers are judge and jury, but the testimony that you hear will take place out of earshot. The rules are unwritten but they are set in stone. Give your customers a really good reason to trust you, like you and feel like you can serve their needs and they will toss aside their inhibitions, along with their reluctance to part with their business. That’s because they want you, the right website and the right business, the right broker to make their decisions easy. Not guilty by irrational reasoning. (i.e. crazy in like) Your customers hear every message you send – intentional or not. Your attitude is nearly everything. Customers want you to show a certain degree of eagerness, but not desperation. They want you to believe in yourself and demonstrate why they should believe in you too. They want you to be fun but also someone they can lean on for help. They want to trust you.

The web version of chocolate and roses in the world of online real estate is:

-Build your site to answer your customer’s questions.

-Know your niche and be the customer’s expert on it.

-Get to know your customers and what their pain points are.

-Make searching on your site an intuitive engaging experience.

-Translate what you offer into solving customer pain.

-Build your site from the users perspective.

-Make it easy to gather and share what they came for.

-Use photo and video visuals liberally.

-Create interesting non-pitchy content and give it away.

-Always deliver on what you’ve promised.

-Provide absolutely impeccable service always.

-Optimize for SEO, rinse and repeat.

At the end of the day, what we’re working to cultivate is trust in an environment lacking human interaction. These are a just few of the ways that you can cultivate that trust, forge new relationships and enhance existing ones. Falling in love is just the first step; you have to deliver even after the bloom is off the rose.

Source: Seth Price, GeekEstate

Pinterest Best Practices

What is all the buzz about Pinterest??

We’ve heard it countless times, folks that have created a Pinterest account, dabbled a bit by pinning a few items and then forgot about it… until the recent tsunami of interest flared up. Now it’s become almost impossible to escape tweets and status updates that mention Pinterest. There’s quite a frenzy around this new player on the social media scene. And the number of people who openly claim to be addicted to pinning is rising at alarming numbers.

Pinterest is growing rapidly from unexpected demographics and changing the rules of social media engagement. It’s a new way of interacting, the interest-graph, and is not prominent on Facebook and LinkedIn. It provides a new opportunity for public companies with strong brands and highly visual products to reach a captive audience that is more than willing to advocate on the company's behalf.

It is a virtual pinboard (or you can also look at it as a social bookmarking site) that focuses on images. It allows you to share images and videos you find anywhere on the web and link it back to the original content -so it’s great for generating links and SEO.

You can look around other people’s pinboards to discover things from people who might share common interests. You can organize your images by subject or however works for you by putting them in different boards. People can choose to follow all of your boards or any individual boards. As well, you’re able to like, repin and comment on other people’s content. Just like Twitter, Pinterest is an open network so anyone can follow you and you can follow anyone.

Why should you consider using Pinterest? With nearly five million users, and rapidly growing, nearly 1.5 million unique users visit Pinterest daily, spending an average of 15 minutes a day on the site. Think those inspiring vision boards don’t result in referral traffic to websites and blogs? Think again. In January 2012, Pinterest drove greater traffic to websites than LinkedIn, Google Plus, Reddit, and Youtube — combined.

While lots of folks are flapping their jaws about the impressive statistics of Pinterest, some companies are quietly using this fabulous new tool to pin their way to better customer engagement and a visually interesting, personally appealing brand. Some tips for beginners:

• Make sure you feature your business name on your profile for maximum exposure. Use your business name as your username, or change your profile name to your business name after your profile is set up.

• Add a paragraph about who you are and what you’re interested in to the “About” section on your Pinterest profile. It will show up right under your photo, and will be one way that users can find out more about you.

• Connect your account with your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Not only will it help you gain followers, but making this connection adds social media icons under your profile picture that link to your Facebook and Twitter profiles.

• Don’t forget to add your website URL in your profile, too!

• Pin lots of stuff. Pin content steadily, instead of in huge bursts, to maximize your exposure and engagement.

• Come up with creative and interesting board names. They get shared whenever you pin something, so make them enticing. But be creative — you need to keep your board names short. There isn’t a lot of room for long descriptive titles.

• Tag other Pinterest users in your pins by using “@username” in your descriptions. Network with other professionals and vendors in your field by using this feature. Not many people are doing this yet, so it’s a great way to build your following and stand out.

• Comment on other people’s pins. Just like with tagging, this feature hasn’t really caught on yet, so use it regularly to really engage with other users. Obviously, use the same good manners and common sense you would when commenting on a blog or other social media site.

• “Like” other people’s pins to give a thumbs-up when you want to recognize great content.

• Pin from lots of different sources, instead of just from one or two sites. Variety is important on Pinterest.

• Mix pinning your own unique finds with doing lots of “repinning,” which is repeating someone else’s pin to your followers (just like a Retweet on Twitter). The person whose image you repin gets notified via email, and they also get a credit on your pin, which increases their following.

• Feel free to pin your own blog posts, but don’t over-promote. Follow the usual etiquette rules of any other social media site, and don’t be the boorish one at the party who only talks about himself.

• Pin videos! Pinterest has a special section just for pinned videos, and there are far fewer videos than images on Pinterest at this point, so use them to distinguish yourself. Any YouTube video is easy to pin.

• When you pin an image, add a description under it. Be smart about these descriptions — a good description will stay with an image as it gets repinned all over the Pinterest world. If the image is something from your own site, definitely use your business name in the description.

• After you pin a new image using the very handy Pinterest browser bookmarklet (a great tool in its own right,) use its built-in social media prompts to re-share your pin on Twitter and Facebook, too.

• Use Pinterest’s embed option to publish pins as content in your blog posts and website pages. Note: As Pinterest is catching on, you may need to tell your users that they need to click on a Pinterest image to get to the original source. When I tried this last week, a reader wrote to me and asked, “Is there more to that Pin thing? Or is it just a pretty image?”

• Get the Pinterest iPhone app, so you can repin on the go, pin from your camera and add a location to your pins so others can find your images.

• Optimize your website content for Pinterest sharing (Part One): Use images in every single post you write, so your post can be shared on Pinterest. When you find yourself getting lazy about this, remember –- not using an image in your post means no one will pin it. And remember — the prettier the picture is, the more it will get pinned. The images that appeal to Pinterest members are powerful and emotive, so keep that in mind when choosing your pictures. That combination tends to work well for your blog readers, too.

• Optimize your website content for Pinterest sharing (Part Two): Consider watermarking your images, or adding text to them. If you’re using your own images on Pinterest, one of the best ways to help your image stand out is by adding a clear description to the image itself, or adding a watermark with your business name. Make sure it’s clear, but that it doesn’t block out the main subject of the photo.

• Create seasonal or holiday boards that relate to your brand. Example: New Year’s Resolutions, Fourth of July, etc. Users love these.

• Add a prominent Follow Me on Pinterest button to your website to advertise that you’re a pinner!

Source: Beth Hayden

Phoenix Wealth Builders Event

We are pleased to be hosting another great seminar by Phoenix Wealth Builders at our Hayden Ferry training room on April 25, 2012, 2:00 to 3:00PM.

Whether you are a first-time investor or a seasoned professional, Arizona real estate represents the best opportunity for appreciation and CASHFLOW. Why invest in Arizona real estate?

• With a diversified economy, an educated workforce, and one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation, Arizona is a magnet for corporations and workers alike.
• 2010 Census data reveals that Arizona’s population grew 24.6% from 2000 to 2010, and boasts a comfy population density of about 56 persons per square mile.
• There is a real estate investment opportunity just waiting to be snatched – vacant land, foreclosed homes, short-sales, discounted condos and flips are just a few prospects.

The Phoenix Wealth Builders team, Eddie Rosefield and Justin Colby will present their services:

• Full service, one stop shop, solution to your cash flow property buyers
• We take your investor and find them a property, rehab the property, fill it with a well qualified tenant, and place our property management company on top
• We effectively handle EVERY aspect of the ENTIRE process from start to finish.
• Investor sits back and collects a monthly check
• Through our resources of non-profits, asset managers, and other investors & wholesalers in town, we have the inventory that you may not have access to
• And YOU still make your 3% Commission!!!

This is an Invitation only event. Contact your Fidelity representative should you wish to attend.

Source: Phoenix Wealth Builders

Ready for National Open House Weekend? We Can Help!

Have you started preparing for the National Association of REALTORS® 2012 Nationwide Open House Weekend, April 28 and 29? State and local REALTOR® associations across the nation join NAR in hosting the nation’s largest open house campaign.

Open houses open doors to buying opportunities! So what could be better than a weekend full of open houses, encouraging people to tour homes? This coast to coast event brings value to both buyers and seller offering buyers a stress-free way to tour homes. For sellers, the weekend provides a high-visibility effort to promote traffic and drive home sales. It provides real estate agents a tremendous opportunity to promote the benefits of home ownership and have open dialogue with consumers about housing issues that matter most to them.

As your partner in your success, Fidelity has promotional materials and resources available to ensure your open house stands out.

Our Realtor Advantage Package for $69.00 maximizes your value by reducing costs and time with an all-in-one listing package that includes:

50 Full color flyers on your new listing

HighRes Media or AZ Imaging HD VIRTUAL TOUR- Tours are posted to Realtor. com, Homes.com, Google & Yahoo.com included

“Custom listing website” to showcase your new listing. Advertise on 9 Different Sites!

Online Print Ship Login-Quick, Easy and Affordable Printing with 24/7 Access!

Our Luxury Package:

The best rates for your luxury virtual tours and flyers. A savings of $300 exclusively through Fidelity National Title

HighRes Media Virtual Tour - daylight or twilight package available daylight package :$249 (regularly $539.45)

Twilight package: up to 5,000 sf $390 (reg $724) over 5,000 sf $490 (reg $825)

Tours posted to Realtor.com, MSN, Google, Trulia, Zillow, Yahoo, Top Producer, Frontdoor, VisualTour, UniqueGlobalEstates.com, craigslist.org, Vast, Overstock, oodle, The Real Estate Book, &LuxuryHomeVideosOnline.com.

50 Premium Flyers 8.5 x 11 (2-sided, Full-bleed Color, UV Coated Front/Back, 111# Gloss Cover Stock)

100 Jumbo Postcards 8.5 x 5.5 mailed to 100 properties surrounding the properties. (2-sided, Full Color, UV Coated Front, 16pt Cover Stock) MAILED FOR YOU!

30% discount on full page advertising with Luxury Home Magazine

Ala carte pricing: Daylight Tour Only: $150
Twilight Tour Only (under 5000sf): $250
Twilight Tour Only (over 5000sf): $350

A host of other open house tools are also available, including Fidelity Data Shop and Premiere Leads. Contact your Sales Representative today to make sure YOUR open house shines!

5 Email Designs Must Haves

Even with the mad rush to embrace all the growing social media platforms into one’s marketing, there remains value in a good old email marketing campaign… if done correctly. The average email subscriber faces an inbox filled with clutter. Once they sort through a variety of personal, professional and marketing messages, they won't look kindly on messy or incoherent email offers. "Without a well-crafted, clear and consistent design for your brand, your email is going nowhere in a hurry," says John Murphy in an article at MarketingProfs. Here's how to avoid such a pitfall: Use a good balance of text and images. Many spam filters consider an email's text-to-image ratio when deciding if it will reach a recipient's inbox. If there's too much text or too many images, it risks banishment to the spam folder. Assume that images will be blocked. There's a good chance your subscribers will only see embedded images if they actively click on a link to display them. Because of this, the text in your message has to make sense even if its images don't show up. Provide a back-up option for image-rich backgrounds.A number of clients—Gmail and Microsoft Outlook, for example—don't support background images. But there's a workaround. HTML allows both an image and a color to be coded in the same tag, which means that if a mail client supports background images, the images will be displayed; if it doesn't, then the chosen color will appear as the email background instead. Include a table of contents for lengthier messages.When an email has several sections, ease its navigation with a simple table of contents that links within the message to the topics a subscriber wants to read. Remember a call to action. You've sent the message because you want your recipient to do something—so make sure they can. How it works matters as much as how it reads. Don't sabotage your strong content with weak email design. Source: MarketingProfs

Apps That Give Buyers A Vision of Their Home

Continuing our series on mobile apps that can help real estate agents out in the trenches, here are a couple that are especially helpful when working with buyers.

We all have our strengths and weaknesses… and not all buyers have the ability to see past rooms of a home as they exist, to what they have the potential to actually BE. The iLiving app can help your clients visualize a space in a different light. It allows you to take a photo of a room and place furniture into the room to see what the space looks like with new furniture and layouts. It’s currently available for iPhone^®, though rumor has it an Anroid^® version is in the works.

Or if you’ve ever struggled with helping your buyer get past a horrible paint color, the ColorSmart by BEHR^® app will be your new favorite tool. Simply take a photo of a room and the app will virtually paint the walls for you. No more trying to imagine; this app will allow your buyers to see a room in colors THEY love, providing you the capability to decorate a room image digitally with touch-and-tap technology and preview color on walls, trim and accents.

The ColorSmart by BEHR Mobile application is available as a free download in both the Android Market and Apple iTunes^® App Store.

Both apps can help you overcome buyers reluctance about a potentially great home for them, by providing them a glimpse of it as “their” home.

Apps That Help Your Business

There are so many apps out there, it's hard to know what is beneficial to your business and what is a waste of time. So we've done some of the work for you! We are kicking off a blog series on apps that help you in your real estate practice. Keep checking back, we'll be posting info on a regular basis regarding apps we think will help bolster your business.

Are you posting video to YouTube, to your own website, as another tool in your real estate tool belt? With real estate professionals using video more and more, a great video production app can help today’s mobile agent get the job done.

For you iPhone 4/3GS and iPod Touch running iOS 4.2 and higher users, one app you may want to check out is Splice. The Splice app will allow you to create and even edit videos from your smart phone without ever having to use a computer or laptop.

Video editing can be a really frustrating experience, especially if you’re trying to do it with only a few inches of screen real estate. Splice removes the pain, allowing you to put together HD photos and videos in an amazingly simple way with a raft of powerful but super easy-to-use tools. You’ll be able to create videos using your videos, photos, and even music from your iTunes library. Add sound effects, transitions, borders, special effects, trim video and audio, narrate with your own voice, and much more.

If you’re an Android user looking for video editing capabilities, than Clesh Video Editor is a great option. Clesh is a cloud based video editor that provides an assortment of editing capabilities and features, and even allows you to publish your videos directly to Facebook and YouTube with no advertisements.

Leading Your Business Through Today's Market

You won't want to miss this Chader Event - Leading Your Business Through Today's Market

Just 'Glympse Me'

Imagine, you’re at the NAR® convention, among 1000’s of people, and an associate is trying to find you…

Or you’re at a listing, about to show it to potential buyers, but they’re new to the area and lost.

Just Glympse™ them! Huh??!

Glympse™ is a brilliantly conceived mobile application that lets you share your real-time location via SMS, email, Twitter, or Facebook. It's a useful, easy-to-use tool that doesn't require you to sign up, create any profiles, or invite contacts. Your location is only shared for the duration you specify and then stops.

With Glympse, you don’t send the address; you merely send a Glympse of your current location, and with a tap on the recipient’s screen, they navigate their way there. Or if you're not yet at the location, you might send them a Glympse showing it on a map, as well as your real-time location as you make your way there. There are so many possibilities with such a powerful, location-aware application.

The Glympse app is clean and refreshingly simple to use. To get started, launch the app, hit Menu, then Send a Glympse. Next, input a phone number or e-mail, or choose to share a Glympse with Facebook or Twitter. Set the duration (anywhere from 10 minutes to 4 hours), and that's it. For the allotted time frame, your contact(s) will be able to view your real-time location on a map, from a mobile device or desktop browser. If you're on the move, you can also input your destination, so your contact can see where you're headed.

For those who routinely use Glympse to transmit a location (e.g., children with eagle-eyed parents), the app includes a nice Favorite feature, which saves the recipient(s) of your Glympse, duration, and destination, all for easy sending later. The app also comes with an optional home-screen widget, which puts Favorites, Glympse History, and Send Glympse functionality right on your home screen.

Glympse is an incredibly useful app that has the potential to become incorporated into many of our daily routines. Try it out for yourself, and see if you and your friends start saying, "just Glympse me."
It’s available for Android, iPhone, WinPhone7, and Blackberry. http://glympse.com/get_glympse
Sources: CNET, Glympse

Using Google Analytics In Social Media

In a recent interview Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner did with Avinash Kaushik, the digital marketing evangelist for Google and author of Web Analytics 2.0., Avinash shared how the free enterprise-class tools available through Google Analytics affects businesses today. He explained how your social media activity influences the behavior of your business audience to help you improve your results.

Think about 3 buckets:

Acquisition – It provides details about where people are coming to your site from. Was it from SEO you’ve implemented, from your Twitter, etc.

Behavior on your site - Bounce rate, the percentage of people who somehow landed on your site, but went (clicked) no further. It’s pretty valuable information, as it can help you identify weaknesses at the floor level of your site. From seeing what pages they’re landing on and immediately leaving, it may suggest broken links or landing pages, or campaigns/content that may not be enticing enough to make them WANT to go further.

Conversion or outcome for you – This is where Google Analytics goes deeper. Did they land, click on an e-report to be sent to them, and thus become a lead? Did they leave a comment on your blog thus adding value to your site as well as to SEO and the conversation? You can measure the number of people who follow you on Twitter, who sign up for your RSS feed, who come back repeatedly, etc.

Google Analytics can also help you understand your social media results, particularly when used in your business branding and marketing. Not only do you want to know when your Tweets or Facebook posts, etc. cause activity and engagement, but most important, what was the value of that activity? Did that activity drive more website visitors, more website engagement, more prospects? Knowing these things, by Google Analytics measurement, quantifies your social media efforts. This enables you to compare the value of your social media efforts against that of other avenues, i.e. display ads, SEO, etc.

One of the things you can easily do in Google Analytics is to create and track what they refer to as advanced segments. This could be your Twitter segment, another for Facebook, another for YouTube, etc. It takes you literally about 3 seconds to create a segment, then once created, all the same stats and details you can find out with Google Analytics, are than drilled down to specific segments. You can than compare the value you’re getting from one segment to another, and make adjustments of time invested based on that. If you’re getting say 23% more comments on your Tweets than your are on your Facebook posts, might knowing that direct where you apply the larger percentage of your social media effort and time? Super valuable information!

In terms of which metrics of social media provide the greatest value to you, while it’s great to know how many Facebook followers you have, how many Tweets you’ve been mentioned in, etc, it’s of more value to you to move beyond those basic numbers. For example, with your Twitter segment, look at the number of re-Tweets. Think about it like this, each of your Tweets is like a drop in a lake. What matters more than the number of Tweets you’ve made, is the wave caused by that drop; is it a big wave or a small wave? If your Tweets provide value to your followers, they validate that by re-Tweeting, and now that value goes out to others who aren’t perhaps already following you or even know who you are. You’ve just been introduced to perhaps countless other prospects!

The follower re-Tweet percentage is also important to measure and look at. Is it just your Mom and Dad re-Tweeting your brilliance, or is it a growing number of followers that you have? If you analyze these metrics, it enables you better know who the people are who follow your Twitter account, what are their needs, what do they respond to?

Another important metric to look at is conversation rate; on Twitter this would specifically be the number of replies you sent each day, and the number of replies received each day. Basically, it’s measuring more one-on-one or one-on-few conversations. Social media is not a medium where simply shouting creates value. The real value comes when that “connection” is made by people with your brand. THAT is the real gift of social media.

To learn more about Google Analytics in social media, you can follow Avinash on Twitter, @avinash, or go to http://www.google.com/analytics.

Facebook Best Practices

Welcome to our series on Facebook Best Practices. Today we share a little information about Facebook with you along with the first 5 of the 20 best practices we will share with you throughout this series - so be sure to check back!

If you build it, they will come? Perhaps in baseball, but not necessarily when it comes to people (i.e. potential customers) finding your Facebook page. Those potential consumers ARE using social media…. but it’s up to YOU to make sure they can find you. Your fan page can be one of your organization’s richest sources of interaction, R&D and lead generation…. as long as you’ve done a good job of making people aware of it!

First, go to facebook.com/username and secure a custom URL for your Facebook page. Then, put that URL everywhere it’s appropriate: your website; TV, radio and print ads; signs, banners, table tents and window clings, door flyers – all marketing pieces; and your email signature.

Don’t just tell people “Find us on Facebook!” If they conduct a search for your business on Facebook, they may find many similar pages that are not yours. Make it easy for people – direct them to your URL.

The numbers associated with expertise in integrating social media into your business marketing can be mind-blowing! And with social media continuing to grow, the numbers can only get better, as businesses better understand how to effectively engage people.

A report from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate reveal people feel more inclined to purchase from the brands they are fans of on Facebook. 51% of Facebook fans said they are more likely to purchase from at least a few brands they are fans of on Facebook. 60% said that being a Facebook fan of a brand would cause them to be more likely to recommend that brand to a friend.

Unless you have a built-in audience like the huge brands (think Nike, Coca-Cola), you’ll need to help drive traffic to your fan base. There are myriad creative ways to promote your Facebook page, one of the most complete lists below, put together by Justin Wise on Social Media Examiner:

#1: Put your fan page URL in your email signature: How many emails do you send per day? Now imagine each email you send is a chance for someone new to find out about your awesome fan page! This URL goes out on every email I send! Talk about free publicity!

#2: Write a blog post about your new fan page: Give your readers five compelling reasons why they should join your fan page. Don’t beg; just give reasons they’ll benefit.

#3: Tag other, well-trafficked fan pages in your updates: Their fans might see your page and you may get some cross-traffic.

#4: Ask your Twitter followers to join your fan page: Give some compelling reasons why your Twitter base should join your Facebook community. If Twitter is the new water cooler, think of your fan page as an invite to come in and chat. For example, tweet something like, “Wanting more conversation than 140 characters will allow? Join us on Facebook at http://fb.me/awesomefanpage.” A nice and simple ask that will get results.

#5: Invest in Facebook ads: They’re easier than you think and you can spend as little (or as much) as you’d like.

Source: Social Media Examiner, Justin Wise

Leveraging Foursquare For Your Real Estate Practice

In mid-June of this year, the location-based social network, Foursquare announced they had reached a major milestone: 10 million users! This is particularly amazing in that they’re pretty new in the social media realm, having started in March 2009.

Of those current 10 million users, about 3 million check-in somewhere each day, and about 400,000 businesses use Foursquare as a marketing tool.

Checking in is becoming more and more popular. The latest ComScore report released in May 2011 revealed that nearly 1 in 5 smartphone owners access check-in services via their mobile device. Foursquare had 381,576,305 check-ins in 2010 alone.

So how exactly does this affect real estate? We are starting to see brokerages adopting creative social media strategies, like the ‘Race for the Home’ event that Prudential Georgia Realty did. Based in metro Atlanta, they teamed up with property search site HomeFinder.com and mobile gaming platform SCVNGR to offer some 500 prospective homebuyers the chance to compete for a $15,000 down payment on a home purchase. We’ve also seen The Corcoran Group, a New York brokerage, embrace Foursquare and is now a major brand on Foursquare. Foursquare fits beautifully into Corcoran’s core brand ideas in that the process of searching for a home is just as much about what’s outside of the 4 walls than it is inside.

What are some of the ways you can start leveraging Foursquare in your own business?

Add your own business location to Foursquare - Provide clients who check-in to your location regularly with loyalty rewards. Offer incentives for people to write tips that mention you by name e.g. “Go to Jones Realty and ask for Sally Jones. She knows Jonesville like the back of her hand.” It’s a great way to generate word-of-mouth referrals.

Check-in when you’re doing an open house - If you are a Realtor sitting at an open house, do you have a Foursquare special set up? Think of it as just one more way to market to the people who are in the immediate area and just may be looking at open houses on your block. Remember, EVERYONE who checks in somewhere nearby (the local coffee shop, hardware store, etc.) sees not just the place they’re checking into but other places nearby; including your open house IF it’s there to be found! Your Foursquare check-in provides a map to your location. Conversely, it also works the opposite way. If someone comes to your open house by way of seeing it in an ad, but are unfamiliar with the area, they can use the ‘Explore’ tab on Foursquare to check out nearby places friends have visited or are popular with locals. It’s a fantastic way to go somewhere new and try something different. You can even filter it by the type of venue you’d like to visit – the type of food you like for example. Their vast inventory of user-generated tips is the content that ultimately describes what those experiences are going to be like prior to actually going there. If you’ve never tried it, it’s a powerful form of suggestion-based marketing that often leads to some amazing recommendations. Most importantly, it keeps people engaged with you and your content in a meaningful way. The unexpected search result or experience in a sea of noise, that creates real value related to what the user was originally looking for, can be a very powerful place to position your services.

Advertise that the property is open for review on Foursquare - Mention in your web advertising that you’ve added the property location to Foursquare. Invite home open visitors to write a review. Their review will be available to other Foursquare users.

Ask your colleagues to check-in when they show the property - Get them to add a brief review while they’re at the property on an agent caravan or when showing buyers. And reciprocate by doing the same for them.



Sources: Mashable, Tech Savvy Agent

Five Email Design Must-Haves

Even with the mad rush to embrace all the growing social media platforms into one’s marketing, there remains value in a good old email marketing campaign… if done correctly. The average email subscriber faces an inbox filled with clutter. Once they sort through a variety of personal, professional and marketing messages, they won't look kindly on messy or incoherent email offers. "Without a well-crafted, clear and consistent design for your brand, your email is going nowhere in a hurry," says John Murphy in an article at MarketingProfs.

Here's how to avoid such a pitfall:

Use a good balance of text and images. Many spam filters consider an email's text-to-image ratio when deciding if it will reach a recipient's inbox. If there's too much text or too many images, it risks banishment to the spam folder.

Assume that images will be blocked. There's a good chance your subscribers will only see embedded images if they actively click on a link to display them. Because of this, the text in your message has to make sense even if its images don't show up.

Provide a back-up option for image-rich backgrounds. A number of clients—Gmail and Microsoft Outlook, for example—don't support background images. But there's a workaround. HTML allows both an image and a color to be coded in the same tag, which means that if a mail client supports background images, the images will be displayed; if it doesn't, then the chosen color will appear as the email background instead.

Include a table of contents for lengthier messages. When an email has several sections, ease its navigation with a simple table of contents that links within the message to the topics a subscriber wants to read.

Remember a call to action. You've sent the message because you want your recipient to do something—so make sure they can.

How it works matters as much as how it reads. Don't sabotage your strong content with weak email design.

Source: MarketingProfs

Is Your Website Mobile? Part 2

People are so entrenched in the information they can gather from their mobile devices these days that they expect to be able to get what they are looking for on a mobile device… exactly when they want it. This is the case even though most real estate websites are not formatted for use on the mobile device. People have turned to apps from companies like Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com. There’s nothing wrong with this… in fact they have great apps, however, it presents an opportunity for you as the agent to take back this consumer.

There is a good chance that the real estate consumer who texts-in for information was not aware of you or your firm prior to that text message. Now you have just provided them the exact information they wanted at the precise time they wanted it by incorporating a text message solution on your listings. In addition, if you had a mobile website, where they were able to not only get information on the property that they were looking at, but search the entire MLS, use GPS to see the 10 closest listings to the one they just looked at and get all your contact information as the agent who has provided them this information, they would be thoroughly impressed. I would go so far as to say that if you were able to provide this experience to a potential real estate consumer, the chances you could convert them to a buyer or seller have just increased dramatically.

However, if standard practices are not adhered to, potential pitfalls can occur. A poor mobile website portrays a bad impression of you and your business, potentially turning away customers. You must recognize that the needs of mobile browsers are different from PC Internet users. Based on knowledge of your customers, you should focus your message, so that it is contextual to the mobile arena and targets your mobile browsers’ needs. This must be achieved while also keeping your brand identity and marketing message consistent with your other communication media. A poorly designed mobile website will not be credible. As with the PC Internet, it is vital that mobile websites are easily accessible and are optimized for search and discovery tools.

Due to issues such as small screen sizes, slower download speeds and device incompatibility, industry standards around the Mobile Web are imperative. With the rush to create mobile websites we are seeing a wide variance in the quality of the websites created - from the captivating to the single static page.

Guidelines for mobile website development have been released by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community where member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop web standards. dotMobi engaged with the W3C Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) to help formulate the MWI Best Practices for mobile content. The practices outline a number of ways to achieve good user experiences on mobile Web-enabled devices, and recognized several methods of implementing these practices. These are intended to communicate to website developers how to improve the user experience, thus ensuring that the Mobile Web is more reliable and accessible.

The unique challenges inherent to Mobile Web include:
• Size of screen on most mobile devices.
• Scrolling on a mobile phone.
• Typing on a mobile phone.

In addition, there are wide variations in the capabilities of mobile devices; from the smallest mobile phone, to PDA handsets, to laptops with mouse and QWERTY capabilities.

The W3C and dotMobi guidelines include catering for these challenges as well as a renewed focus on website efficiency. These key elements are:
• Minimizing the number of clicks. An additional click may be a minor irritation on a PC, but on a mobile phone it is a bigger issue, information is expected quickly.
• Reducing the number of kilobytes in each downloaded page.
• Delivering specific information. Mobile devices are currently less likely to be used for general browsing but more for retrieving specific information.
There are many mobile services that provide mobile web technology that complies with the “W3C Mobile Web Best Practices”. Some optimize an existing non-mobile website for mobile use, and recognize when someone has come to the website from a mobile browser and redirects them to the mobile version. There are stand alone mobile sites. Determine which works best for you and GO MOBILE! Real estate agents with standards-compliant search-optimized mobile websites will clearly have a competitive advantage. You can become the destination for real estate information mobile devices of consumers in your local market if you format your listing information for mobile.

Sources: Sybase, a SAP mobile intelligence company; Google Insights; Nubiq; REALTOR.com®; RISMedia

Is Your Website Mobile? Part 1

According to comScore, 36% of Americans browsed the mobile web in December 2010, and this is particularly important in real estate, where mobile buyers are looking for quick access to the best property listings available. Demand for these types of sites has grown substantially and if you would like to see your real estate business stay above the curve, you need to understand the importance of using simple mobile websites for it. You must be able to anticipate what your customers needs are and then meet them.

Bottom line though, you’re a real estate agent, you aren’t, nor should you be, a technology guru. Technology tools are to help you be a better real estate agent; because if you don’t do transactions, you don’t make money. But no matter how much technology one embraces, real estate will always be a people business. Mobile web is simply about finding them differently, communicating with them differently, and leveraging consumer-demanded technology to generate leads differently.

Consider these statistics:

• Over 70% of the world population now has a mobile phone, that’s over 5 billion mobile subscribers, and in places like the US, it’s 9 in 10 people. Apple has sold almost 60 million iPhones world wide, while Google’s Android OS is growing at 886% year on year and now activating over 160,000 devices a day, across 60 devices in over 40 countries.
• In 2014, mobile internet usage will overtake desktop internet usage and already in 2011, more than 50% of all “local” searches are done from a mobile device. Mobile search has grown 400% in the past year.
• 85% of mobile devices will be web-enabled by 2012.
• There are almost 5 times more mobile devices than there are computers. Text messages have a 95% read-rate, and are read in an average of 4 minutes.
As Realtors use social media more and more in their marketing, the following stats become even more important to pay attention to:
• Over 1/3rd of Facebook’s 600 million+ user base uses Facebook Mobile.
• 50% of Twitter’s 165 million users use Twitter Mobile.
• 200 million+ YouTube views occur on mobile devices per day.

It's time for your business to make its next Internet visibility and marketing investment in a mobile website. Your current website is probably available on a cell-phone, but is it readable? Is it user-friendly? Really?? Tiny print, tiny pictures, and impossible to click navigation will not cut it. The biggest user frustrations with the Mobile Web are:
• Site Load Time.
• Site Navigation.
• User Friendliness.
• Web Page Layout.

The stakes are higher in terms of providing a good user experience. If a user’s time is wasted on their mobile phone, they are less likely to be forgiving.

By establishing a good mobile web presence, you are opening up a new window of opportunity and are providing a richer user experience to your mobile customers.

Sources: Sybase, a SAP mobile intelligence company; Google Insights; Nubiq; REALTOR.com®; RISMedia

QR Codes for Real Estate - Part 4

Today is the last installment of our QR Codes for Real Estate Series. Earlier in the week we provided an overview of QR codes, and throughout the week we provided ways in which you can use QR codes in real estate. Today we share the final two ideas for using QR codes to bolster your real estate practice. If you put these ideas to paractice, we'd love to hear your feedback!


4. Property Flyers – Considering all of the information about the listing is on the flyer right there in front of them I think that this is another opportunity to leverage video. If you have a full video tour of the home on YouTube link to that. If not create an Animoto video or something slideshow esque, upload to YouTube and link to that. If you are uncomfortable with video then link to a Vyoo.it listing page where they can then see additional photos and information that would not fit into a single page flyer. I have walked past 1000′s of real estate offices and have seen none of them leveraging this idea which again seems to fall into the no brainer category.

5. Your Vehicle – Hear me out on this one. I polled our Facebook fans a while back to see how many of them were leveraging their contact info and domain name on their ride. Seemed to be the majority. That being said how many agents have taken it to the next level and actually placed a QR Code on their car? My guess is zero, but hey I could be wrong. The strategy with this QR Code should be similar to the business card. Again, address in the video that you link to that you appreciate them taking the time to scan the QR Code on your vehicle and that if they are looking for a tech savvy agent to help them with their buying or selling needs you are the one they should contact when they are ready. An additional bonus is that if it replaces the current headshot you have on the window of your Camry I have made the world a better place!

Source: Chris Smith, Tech Savvy Agent

QR Codes for Real Estate - Part 3

Welcome to our QR Codes for Real Estate Series. As QR codes gain in popularity and usage, we want to share some information about QR codes and ways they can be utilized in your real estate practice. Earlier in the week we provided an overview of QR codes and the first of 5 ways you can use QR codes in real estate. Today we share another idea on using QR codes to bolster your real estate practice. Stay tuned the rest of the week as each day we will post a new idea.



3. Direct Mail – Tracking ROI through the mail is now actually very easy using QR Codes. If you do just listed cards use Vyoo.it to send them to the mobile optimized site for that new listing. If you are looking to generate leads and new business you may also consider doing a video unique to the mail campaign similar to the above business card strategy. So for example you are mailing to Cypress Creek…start the video with “One of the things I love about working in the Cypress Creek area are the people…” Then obviously let them know that when the time comes to list they deserve to work with a Realtor who leverages the latest online and offline marketing. Even include images and video of the neighborhood to really give it that hyper local touch. Again offer up all of your contact info and social media URL’s in the video and on the mail itself.

Source: Chris Smith, Tech Savvy Agent

QR Codes for Real Estate - Part 2

Welcome to our QR Codes for Real Estate Series. As QR codes gain in popularity and usage, we want to share some information about QR codes and ways they can be utilized in your real estate practice. Yesterday's post was an overview of QR codes and the first of 5 ways you can use QR codes in real estate. Today we share another idea on using QR codes to bolster your real estate practice. Stay tuned the rest of the week as each day we will post a new idea.

2. Business Cards – Another no brainer in my opinion but I can envision agents screwing this up royally. If I had to guess most agents will put a QR Code on their business card that will lead to a website where the exact same information on the business card is then regurgitated. NO VALUE there beyond maybe the web visitor but again is your website even mobile friendly yet? So here is the strategy. Record a video that you upload to YouTube that is 100% specific to the fact that they got your business card and scanned it. Then use Goo.gl to generate the QR Code. So for example the beginning of the video should say “Thanks so much for taking the time to scan the QR Code on the back of my business card it was great meeting you in person…” I would also then offer them up any other resources like your Facebook Page, Blog or Twitter account letting them know that you want to connect where THEY want to connect. In the video be sure to layover text with all of the other URL’s that would be relevant and mention that when it gets closer to the time for them to buy or sell hopefully they will remember that you leverage the latest technology both off line and online!

Source: Chris Smith, Tech Savvy Agent