Are You Trustworthy?

To paraphrase Lt. Saavik in Star Trek II - The Wrath of Khan: "Trust. It is a difficult concept. It is not logical."

Many people look at social media with disdain, others see it as a panacea. Wherever you are on that continuum, you need to be yourself and you need to be trustworthy, lest others view you with wariness.

Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and other social media channels, it’s nearly impossible to pretend to be someone you’re not. It’s also a lot tougher to win people’s trust, according to Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, coauthors of the new book Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust. According to the authors, the qualities that make Web 2.0 attractive to “digital natives” — instant access to wide-ranging research, open invitations to join conversations, universal transparency, etc. — also make it difficult to reach out and do business with strangers.

So how can you get through to customers who no longer respond to typical advertisements, or win over clients who tend to be suspicious of expert claims? As Brogan and Smith have discovered, the Web’s best business communicators are people with a knack for building relationships. They offer these niche marketing tips for earning trust online:

• Crash the gate. Before you can make your own splash, you need to understand who “owns” your target market. These people and companies are the “gatekeepers.” Make a list of all the gatekeepers you can think of. Then, make a list of the upstarts, the “gatejumpers.” (For example, in the auction business, Sotheby’s was the gatekeeper and eBay is the gatejumper.) Identify the qualities that define each list. The exercise will help you determine who your gatekeepers are. Then, decide which rule you can break to make yourself a gatejumper.

• Be human. Before you can become “one of us” in the consumer’s mind, you need to be liked and accepted. Start by sharing a bit of yourself. Use your picture, not your logo, as your avatar on social sites. Promote others 12 times as often as you promote yourself. And always remember to ask about other people first. How are they doing? What are they doing?

• Understand the difference between a friend and prospect. Becoming “friends” on Facebook is liking saying hi at a party to someone you don’t exactly know. It’s a good start. Unless your connection is really a friend, consider being accepted as “friends” to mean that you can pay attention to what your network connection is doing and try to find a conversational entry point. Marketing to a new friend will almost always result in being “unfriended” — and possibly an angry blog post.

• Choose one thing you’d like your community to do. Try running a cause-related event. Simplify the act as much as possible (make the link to it on your site obvious, blog about it on the day of the event, etc.). If the cause stands behind something the community cares about, it will be more successful. Reach cause-related influencers and help them spread the word. Finally, create incentives for participating. Any event is bound to be more successful, more fun, and more meaningful if there’s a benefit for all involved.

Lt. Saavik could learn a little about trust from Brogan and Smith. Building trust is not based on the logical tasks that can be checked off your "to do" list. Rather, it is the consistent outreach and honest human concern for each other that builds the connection and eventually trust.

Where are you in that continuum?

Best to you,

Jim Herrera


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Concepts of How To Use Some Major Social Networks

Hey there!

In this post, I'm going to link to several posts that describe how to use some of the major social network sites. The are good overall starter points and you can really benefit from taking a brief look.

eHow - How to use facebook

bNet - How to get started using LinkedIn

The following link is a little different. It shows how one journalist uses twitter for his profession.

twitter - How it's used for journalists

As you might guess when you read and review these websites, there are many ways to use social networking. How can one figure it all out?!



I am distilling these different general purpose uses and refining them for the real estate professional. We'll be conducting training classes, but more importantly, coaching solutions to help you implement social networking and get a positive return on your investment (ROI) of time, effort and money. For more information, drop me an email at jim@perceptiveinsights.com.

Also, take the opportunity to join the Real Estate Insights Social Network. There, you can post questions, create forums for areas of interest that are important to you. Right now, it's an experiment. I'd like any and all comments or suggestions on how to make the network something that real estate professionals, real estate consumers and real estate activists can use.


Best,

Jim Herrera
______________________________

Subscribe to my blog and podcast at:
http://www.perceptiveinsights.com

And follow me at the following networks:
http://profile.to/jimherrera
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jbherrera
http://jbherrera.myplaxo.com
http://twitter.com/jbherrera

How to Manage Your Social Profiles and Create Virtual Business Cards

Just a really quick post about managing your social profiles. In my class, "Let's Get Social", I mention some tools that will help people manage their social networks. Here's an article in Mashable that has links to those sites as well as some more information that would be useful.



Of course, if you have any questions, please drop me an email.

Best,

Jim Herrera

______________________________

Subscribe to my blog and podcast at:
 http://www.perceptiveinsights.com

And follow me at the following networks:
 http://profile.to/jimherrera
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jbherrera
 http://jbherrera.myplaxo.com
 http://twitter.com/jbherrera

Social Networking with twitter

For those of you who aren't familiar with twitter. Let me briefly explain what it is and how it might be useful for you.

According to wikipedia:

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Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, or through applications.

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Rather than a full-blown blog, like this one, twitter enables you to send important business information to your clients or business contacts on a consistent and steady basis.

To start, you and your contacts need to set up a twitter account. Don't worry, it's not that difficult and it's free. Simply go to twitter.com and sign up. Once that's done, you ask your business contacts to do the same.

After you and your contact have done so, you can "follow" each other. Then, depending how you've set up your account, you and your clients will be able to automatically get each others' microblogs - "tweets".

It takes a little practice and patience, but twitter is a great way to stay in touch. I use this to stay in touch with MLSListings clients as well as people interested in how to use social networking for real estate.

If you're interested in obtaining a larger following there's a new service I'm trying. It's called tweetgetter. I just started using it myself and its starting to work already.

If you'd like more information on how to use twitter for real estate connect with me at any of the social networks below.

Happy tweeting!

Best,

Jim Herrera

______________________________

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And follow me at the following networks:











Be Your Own CEO: Online Marketing

In my first podcast, titled "Change is Here" I spoke about several ideas that real estate professionals should consider as 2009 begins. One of the fundamental principles is to "Be Your Own CEO". As part of that principle, I'd like to focus today on: "Online Marketing"

Being in the real estate market has changed over time. There was a time when residents of the country stayed in the same area and lived in the same houses for decades at a time. In those times, being a real estate professional was ALL about local knowledge.

But I believe those times have changed.

We live in a transient society. Where the average work tenure at a particular company has dropped from 20 years to 5 years; where people live in one community, go to school in a different community (or state) and live in multiple cities over their lifetime.

Local knowledge is still very, very important. But it will take more than that to thrive in the "new reality" that is 2009. This requires the real estate professional to change his/her way of marketing themselves and their local knowledge expertise. But ... how?

Essentially, real estate professionals must use "Web 2.0" applications and tools. "Well, what are these," you might ask. Let me try and give you a brief overview.

Essentially, Web 2.0 encompasses the set of tools that allow people to build social and business connections, share information and collaborate on projects online. That includes blogs, wikis, social-networking sites and other online communities, and virtual worlds.

Millions of people have become familiar with these tools through sites like Facebook, Wikipedia and Second Life, or by writing their own blogs. And a growing number of marketers are using Web 2.0 tools to collaborate with consumers on product development, service enhancement and promotion. But most people still don't appear to be well versed in this area.

The real power of these tools is not just to write about your own subjects, rather it is to get people consumers involved, inviting them to participate in marketing-related activities from product development to feedback to customer service.

How can you do that?

The Upside
One leading greeting-card and gift company has set up an online community -- a site where it can talk to consumers and the consumers can talk to each other. The company solicits opinions on various aspects of greeting-card design and on ideas for gifts and their pricing. It also asks the consumers to talk about their lifestyles and even upload photos of themselves, so that it can better understand its market.

The Danger
But with this great connection comes a potential problem. Consumers are grabbing power from companies - this means you! I would bet that most of your sales training is about "controlling the client": about the type of information they should get about a transaction to the amount of contact with the opposing agents' client.

Let's face it. Companies are used to being in control. They typically design products, services and marketing messages based on their own particular view of what people want. Keeping up with customers has meant conducting research on their needs and test marketing new products and services. Because the balance of power has favored large corporations with a lock on manufacturing, advertising, distribution and other operations, the term “customercentric” was mostly just a buzzword.

Now, though, many customers are no longer cooperating. Empowered by online social technologies such as blogs, social networking sites like MySpace, user-generated content sites like YouTube and countless communities across the Web, customers are now connecting with and drawing power from one other. They’re defining their own perspective on companies and brands, a view that’s often at odds with the image a company wants to project. This groundswell of people using technologies to get the things they need from one another, rather than from companies, is now tilting the balance of power from company to customer.

That's what's going on with Trulia and Zillow and other real estate data aggregation sites. They've recognized this groundswell of customer power and have filled the gap that traditional real estate professionals have not.

Folks, you've got to get in the game! No matter how much local knowledge you have, if you don't understand the new marketing and information sharing rules of this consumer-focused reality, you'll have a very disappointing 2009 and short career as well.

With the help of some of my colleagues at MLSListings, some experts in social media, online marketing, and successful brokers and agents around the country, we hope to provide you some clarity in this new reality. Stay tuned to this blog for updates and our podcast for brief technology concepts and techniques.

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In the meantime, here are some brief videos that will open your door to the new reality.

What is Social Networking?



"What is a Blog?"



"How To Use Facebook"

Learn More About Facebook Through its Site tour -- powered by ExpertVillage.com

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Until next time, if you have any questions, please dont hesitate to get in touch.