The New "Broadcasting" Brokerage Website
Posted by Pat Kitano at 10/28/2008 8:16 PM 
Categories: social networking, New Business Models, Social Media, Blog networks, Blogging, Cool Web Tools, The Future
Categories: social networking, New Business Models, Social Media, Blog networks, Blogging, Cool Web Tools, The Future
Brokerages need to provide more information about the housing markets to attract a loyal following of local readers. Just providing the latest listings is old hat. Real estate blogging has proven effective, but very few agents do it due to the challenges of writing and maintaining a blog.
Simply put, brokerages can now leverage their agents into reporting on their markets in real time without blogging. The social media, particularly micro-blogging tools like Twitter and bookmarking applications like Delicious, have advanced to a tipping point where agents can "broadcast" updates in sound bite format. Brokerage sites then aggregate all their agent updates and comments into a stream of compelling news feeds - new listings, info on recent sales, multioffer stories (118 on a house in San Jose recently!) neighborhood changes, new deals - that is displayed on the home page. The analogy: Think of providing a housing update ticker tape, anybody interested in real estate is compelled to subscribe to it and watch it on a daily basis, just like CNBC.
Example: Chase International
Chase International has been a pioneer in providing the Web 2.0 interface between their agents and the consumer, starting with their social network Chase Nation. ChaseNation's expressed mission is to provide a wealth of commentary on the Northern Nevada and California High Sierra housing markets and create consumer loyalty, even inviting them into the Chase Nation social network. The key to ChaseNation's success in execution has been their agent involvement to provide that commentary. We've recently begun working with Chase agents through our Social Media Marketing Workshops on the mechanics of "broadcasting" that commentary across the web via a variety of social media applications. By doing so, agents directly benefit from positioning themselves as experts in their market. This translates into increased online exposure that generate leads without blogging.
Want to know more about the mechanics?
We invite broker/owners and agents to free webinars this week that will detail how to develop this new brokerage website that "broadcasts" real time information to your customers. Best of all - the system is also free to implement! We're scheduling the one hour webinars this Thursday from 10:30-11:30 and Friday from 10:30-11:30. Please click here to register.
Testimonials
You can find commentary and testimonials on our Social Media Marketing Workshops at this Twitter based group (called #smmw) where participating agents communicate during our webinar sessions. If you're an agent interested in learning more about our Social Media Marketing Workshops, we are starting a new 12-week session on Mondays from 10:30-11:30 Pacific time, starting November 10. You can register at this link.
Related articles:
The Social Broadcasting System
Slideshow: Website 2.0, Creating the Conversational Web
Pat, I am really looking forward to your series. Thanks so much for providing such great tips! These applications are PERFECT for what we are trying to do with our site.
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Pat,
In general, as an active agent who deals with the real pressures of blogging AND selling, I really like the idea of ticker-tape blogging.
Makes sense. I think my blog posts are kind of "old-fashioned."
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