What’s the point, after the novelty wears off, that makes social networking a viable channel to create new business? Just what is the outcome to be achieved with social networking for real estate professionals?
Facebook’s face lift confusion provides businesses a good lesson in how not to confuse your customers while building your brand.
Are social network games just for fun – or powerful sales tools. Matthew Ferrara explores the Gen X / Gen Y sales potential of Farmville and other social media fun.
For many real estate brokers and agents, the hot technology today is social networking. Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter are the “new new thing” for making friends and influencing business. There’s probably no better tools for directly prospecting your marketplace – and maintaining your referral and repeat business base. But let’s not lose sight of the [...]
Blogging is both art and tax. Good blogging means turning a steady flow of useful ideas into interesting content. Bloggers must be good writers. And developing a readership takes a lot of time each day and week. So it’s not unusual for busy salespeople to worry that they’ll never really leverage the medium, [...]
For some time now, I’ve been asking myself if I’d missed the point about Twitter. Give it some time, I told myself. Sometimes these new technologies just need to shake themselves out. Originally, Motorola shelved the mouse as an input device, only to have someone dust it off years later and make it [...]
Readers of our column know that we called the beginning of the end of search engines some time ago, when we noted that Facebook and MySpace had already started to generate more ad views and targeted traffic than Yahoo and Google. Unfortunately, Microsoft didn’t seem to have read our post, and went ahead [...]
Ten Questions with Real Estate Expert Matthew Ferrara
By Dianna Kawell
Reposted with permission from WCR’s site.Real estate is becoming an increasingly technology-driven industry. Every day, a typical REALTOR® depends heavily on her laptop, GPS and digital camera to get the job done. For what was long believed to be a face-to-face business, 88 percent of REALTORS® [...]
In one of the cruel ironies of the housing market today, the total number of units sold this year isn’t that far from historically normal volume. According to the National Association of REALTORS, the seasonally adjusted annual rate for sales in May is around 4.77 million – generally trending the pre-bubble long-term volume for a [...]
The social networking abuse by REALTORS reached a tipping point yesterday: It seems some virtual tour vendor has made it “quick and easy” to mass-post your tours across multiple networks at once. Oh, goody: REALTORS are about to have no more friends.
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Matthew Ferrara spent the morning with Michael Saunders and Company recently, helping this market-leading firm leverage the latest sales, marketing and technology tools to reach for [...]
Months ago, we reported to you that internet marketing was dead. That was August 2008, when MySpace overtook Yahoo in display ads totals for the month. Our argument then was that people prefer to interact with other people, even online, and that the original internet age of “blindly searching” the portals was dead. They just [...]
Months ago, we wrote that traditional internet marketing was dead. In August, 2008, MySpace outranked Yahoo for the top spot in ad displays. More people saw more pages – and advertising – on a social network than searching the “trusty” search engine. Did REALTORS take notice? Apparently not, since we’re still getting emails from agents [...]
While the vast majority of REALTORS still don’t know that social networking exists, there’s definitely a trend growing amongst “early adopters” to drive a stake in the heart of Web 2.0 world. Being first often creates a competitive advantage – such as being first to respond to a buyer’s inquiry on a property. On the [...]
Here’s an idea (or five) whose time has come: Real estate professionals can’t wait around any longer to have “someone else” fix the market. Whether it’s government money or buyers coming off the sidelines, if we’re waiting for other people to turn around our business, we’re going to find that time is against us. No [...]
