Social Media and Social Networking; they're done in many of the same places, but they're very different. To understand this difference in simple terms, don't concern yourself with the word "Social".
Media broadcasts messages and content. Networking involves interaction and relationship building.
Put the word 'social' back and there is a fundamental interdependency between them. Anyone serious about promoting their business online should work at both, but for the purposes of agents starting out or those who have met with limited success thus far, lets look at some basic ways of using Social Media. The Networking side of things takes time to develop and is much more in-depth than one blog post can cover.
Conventional advertising uses media with established audiences, whereas Social Media spreads messages and content by way of people responding to, sharing or expressing an
interest (a Like) for content with others they are connected with.
You can use Social Media to promote your services and your properties, but it is important to do this on people's own terms rather than yours. What I mean by this is you are unlikely to find legions of advocates happy to pass on messages about what a great estate agent you are or how wonderful your latest listings are blindly, yet this is the approach that many are taking. The key to using Social Media effectively is for the content to have relevancy to the person who encounters it.
Consider the ways in which a typical homebuyer may want to use a site like Facebook to share details of a property:
To encourage their partner to go and view the property
To seek advice and validation from parents or knowledgeable friends on what they think of a property and it's price
To tell friends how excited they are that they've found somewhere nice
To tell friends that they're selling their property
Your involvement can be relatively minor in all of this, but minor changes to your own website can encourage these sorts of interactions and help people to share your properties in whatever manner they feel is appropriate. This will become increasingly important as personal e-mail usage continues to decline and the use of social tools on mobiles increase in popularity. Understand that Social Media has a role in helping you to sell houses without you needing to be the one doing the selling part.
For your own services, Social Media is about providing compelling communications, ordinarily in the form of a blog. There is enormous apathy for self-interested, salesy content promoted on social networks and many companies are slowly embracing the idea that their Social Media efforts need to be less hand to mouth to be effective. Writing a blog and sharing it on Twitter may not result directly in a valuation appointment, but it might result in someone who follows your blog, shares your posts and, over time, grows to appreciate your company in ways that you have always struggled to convey in the "About Us" section of your website. The amount of web based research that home movers do has increased dramatically in recent years and although there is plenty of media coverage over the property market on a national or regional scale, there is less on a local basis. Think of your blog posts in much the same way as those articles you used to do for the front page of the local property supplement. Consider ways in which your posts will influence potential customers by making them:
Locally focussed
Insight driven
Current and objective
Entertaining if appropriate
If your content is relevant and engaging, then you will find it is shared, but Facebook posts and Tweets quickly fade into history. Therefore, don't look on Likes and Retweets as the only measure of success. Good advice to home movers can form part of the content on your website or blog for a long time and still be relevant to visitors.
Recommendations themselves are also an important thing to promote using Social Media and as I have written about previously, consider ways in which you can encourage positive reviews and comments to be published independently online.
Social Media is not a promotional panacea and don't get caught up in the hype. If you're going to do it properly, then it is not a task for the office junior just because he or she is a 'Digital Native'. Creating compelling communications requires professional involvement for any media, Social Media is no different in this respect and something that I'm working on for a number of agents. The quality of the content that you produce and the relevancy of that content to your audience is what will primarily dictate whether Social Media provides a return on investment for your business.
Google publicly told the industry that they had no plans to launch a property search in the UK just a few weeks ago. I was at Lettings Live on Tuesday with Zoopla (a launch partner for Google) and not a word about it was uttered. Then, BOOM! Wednesday morning and it's all over the press... Well, The Guardian and Estate Agent Today anyway. What were they up to? Was the secrecy a deliberate ploy to hide something amazing? A Rightmove Killer?
Well, on first impression, no...
Getting hands on with Google Maps UK Property Search is disappointingly crude. One of the first things that surprised me was that many of the results were branded with the software provider's names and websites rather than the agents'. The only distinctions in property type are "Detached", "Semi" or "Townhouse/Unit"; the last of which seems to cover off flats or 'apartments' to use the proper marketing term.
Unless there are actually a number of 3
bedroom semi's now available in the North Sea, there also seems to be a
problem navigating back from another website to the map results. Each
time I did this (in two different browsers) the map would reset to the
UK whilst the results remained peppered over the page...
Furthermore, I also found that a number of search terms including Pimlico and Putney, sent me off to their American namesakes rather than the London locations I was expecting.
Quantity over Quality
Any given search produces a map with tons of results, but I found
numerous listings that were incomplete or inaccurate. It's the same old headaches that the major portals have
worked long and hard to eradicate; properties being listed that are no
longer on the market, missing photos and descriptions, duplicated
listings, etc, etc.
The first result for the search pictured above has no image and is
actually under offer despite only having been uploaded to Google Maps on
11th June. And it's from an agent who I know to be very professional
and particular about property presentation.
Google's laissez-faire attitude to letting anyone and everyone put
content into their platforms has always made it too easy for erroneous or even malicious content to sneak into the results. With normal search, Google's algorithms learn over time to prioritise those results that are
actually delivering the right content. The dodgy ones will still be in
there, but they will be buried on page 10,000 of the 1 million results
for that search term. But, when each result is a little red dot on the map,
it's not so easy to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Get it right or get it off
Erroneous listing information is not really Google's fault. If the information that has been posted to Google Base (the long running platform which drives property results on Google Maps) is wrong or incomplete, it's down to the source which in many cases at present seems to be the software providers. If you haven't done so already, check to see how your properties are appearing on Google Maps.
A tip for doing this quickly: set map search to properties and then search for your brand name and area, e.g: "Bristol, CJ Hole"
If your software supplier or another portal is putting them on there and they are not appearing properly, then get them to sort them out or take them off Google Maps. There is bound to be an initial surge in traffic to this new property search as people try it out, so don't let customers get the wrong impression about you from poorly presented properties.
A threat to agents?
My criticisms are over teething
problems, but Google has got into a bit of a habit of releasing things
that don't
really have the impact that everyone anticipated (Wave and Buzz spring
to mind in particular). Just because it's from Google, doesn't mean it
will automatically and conclusively undermine everything else: iPhone vs
Android, Twitter vs Buzz, dare I say Microsoft Office vs Google Docs? Even with the creases ironed out, I don't believe that Google represents a threat to the portals and is just as likely to drive more traffic to them than take it away from them.
The threat to agents centres on whether self-sale develops an
interdependency with Google. They need Google to feed them a mainstream
audience, Google needs them to ensure that it offers something over and
above the established portals; 100% of what's on the market; self-sale
and agent listings combined. Although Rightmove has innovated on an unprecedented scale over the last couple of years, they enjoyed a long tenure in top spot without really doing much to develop the site or it's functionality. This was primarily because they remained the place where you could see the most available properties. So this in turn would give credence to the view that Google can be popular without being perfect. My friend
and colleague; Ben Harris believes that Google
Property will change everything - I am a little more reserved about
the level of it's impact, but it could have an impact nonetheless. Tepilo begins uploading properties to Google from today. Just make sure they're not doing a better job of it than whoever is uploading yours.
Rightmove; there's an iPad app for that. Primelocation; there's an app for that too. I completely understand the practical benefits of the big portals developing apps, but have struggled to see the point in agents following suit unless they operate in a particular niche or are using it as an exercise to promote the brand. It's the same argument that exists for conventional websites; if it's just a property search tool, why would a consumer prefer something with a fraction of what's available over an app with everything like Rightmove's?
Is using and iPad in estate agency an expensive and unnecessary folly?
I decided to have a look at what agents could use the iPad for without
needing to spend a fortune on development or to copy everyone else with a property search App...
Some critics have dismissed the iPad as a poor substitute for either a phone or a laptop, but the clue is in the name. Apple are seeking for the iPad to replace the writing pad, not laptops or phones; their two most lucrative product lines! I've used the iPad in a couple of meetings to take notes. Rather than trying to decypher my own illegible scrawl afterwards, I can just file or e-mail my notes with the iPad. Some of the software systems, like LetMC will already run on an iPad because their software is web-based and conforms to the web-standards that Apple are so rigorously championing. Taking notes and accessing data; all very well from a day to day perspective, but let's face it, if you've got an iPad, you're going to want to show off with it? Where does an agent need to impress whilst taking notes and presenting information?
The Valuation
How many of your listers still have a faithful old folder crammed full of comparable properties, marketing examples and other paraphernalia to support their pitch? You tried to give them laptops with very detailed Powerpoint presentations a few years ago, but these presentations were very generic and didn't provide them with the flexibility to refine their presentation depending on the listing. It was also rather awkward to find somewhere to perch the laptop that meant you could control it, see it and still pay full attention to the vendor. So, you soon found that the laptop was staying in the car and the folder was once again the preferred choice.
I've been helping people avoid death by Powerpoint for years by using Apple's own presentation software: Keynote. If you've been to any of our seminars or watched many Academy videos, you will probably have seen all sorts of whizzy graphics, these are usually done in Keynote. The simplest way for me to describe it to the uninitiated is that it is Powerpoint on steroids. So, when I saw that Keynote was available for the iPad, I put my design team at Phoenix to task and we've now got a demo of a listing presentation designed specifically for the iPad...
The idea behind this is to provide a lister with something that will help them impress a vendor without getting lost in a pile of supporting materials on paper or spending half an hour trying to login to your laptop. Simple, clear presentation of information which supports your pitch. What's more, updating and adapting it is pretty straightforward, so you could create a bespoke presentation for each listing appointment with relative ease. This is great for making things like comparable sales and market data customer specific.
In addition to a slick presentation, the iPad would enable you to show potential clients your website, Rightmove and other sources of property data while you sit and explain things to them. The best presentations are those that engage and inform and I think the iPad has a lot of potential to help agents raise their game in this arena.
I will be armed with the iPad at Lettings Live on Tuesday, so if you're coming, then make sure you pop by The Academy stand and I can show you more.
I read, with mild amusement yesterday, that the Decentralisation and
Local Government Bill announced as part of The Queen's Speech will bring
about the "Outright abolition of Home Improvement Packs": Even in their
final hour, HIPs continue to cause confusion at the highest level. But
as the rumbles of discontent at the decision to get shot of them quickly
subside, there is already talk of what, if anything, should replace
them.
Peter Bolton-King confessed at The Property Professional Show that he
had spoken to many others about what
to do in (or at) the wake of HIPs and the consensus is that
the issues with the home buying process that HIPs so spectacularly
failed to deal with, still need to be dealt with somehow, by someone at
some point. No
doubt this will be a topic for further rampant debate, but I think it is
important that it is a) a debate for the industry, not for Government
and b) it is just a debate at this stage, our current efforts need to
focus on recovery rather than reform.
Fast forward a bit to a point in the hopefully not too distant future
when mortgage availability has dramatically improved and Bill Oddie has
been brought in to save the endangered species of the First Time Buyer
and we can once again pull in for a pit-stop and take a good look under
the hood. If we can then come up with a HIP replacement, we should consider much more carefully how
we present it to the public. Perhaps there are some
lessons from other industries about how this should be approached.
As a young father, I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that my
next choice of car will need to be influenced more by boot capacity than
cubic capacity. High on the list of requirements will also be safety. I really don't know what the difference would be if I crashed a
car with a EuroNCAP safety rating of 5 as opposed to 3. Perhaps it's the
difference between a bruise or a break, perhaps it's the difference
between life and death. All I really know is that safer is better and
therefore I should have a preference towards the highest possible NCAP rating. I
would probably not regard a Car Information Pack that explained the
technical details of airbag deployment or crumple zone performance to be
much use in making that decision. Ultimately, I just want an expert to
tell me it's safe, I don't necessarily need to know how or why.
There are plenty of other examples of industries getting behind a
badge that acts as reassuring hallmark for consumers. The vast majority
of us would not dare to book a holiday that was not
ATOL protected and yet who outside the travel industry can explain in
detail what protection ATOL actually gives you. It's changed to Gas Safe now, but CORGI registration for
gas engineers is also a name that consumers have come to trust without
understanding why.
HIPs provided too many meaningless ticks in meaningless boxes. A
whole bunch of information that the average consumer found difficult to derive any actionable
insight from and hence hardly anyone ever asked to see one. Our industry is a
process driven one, but our customers are not familiar with the internal workings of
the property engine and do not want to become RICS
qualified to understand the intricacies of what surveys and
searches can reveal. The detail always has its uses for the professionals involved, but from a consumer
perspective, we need something that simply says "it's all fine, you have
no reason to pull out of the purchase."
This is not something that can or indeed should happen overnight, but if enough agents, enough solicitors, enough industry bodies, maybe even a Housing Minister or four could get behind a scheme and sell it to the consumer as a simple benefit, then we
might fare better than we have with HIPs.
Mobile internet usage is accelerating at a phenomenal rate and in Dec 2009 alone, some 16 million people in the UK accessed the internet from their mobile phones. Not only are the number of users growing, but their usage is too, with one in five mobile subscribers surfing using a smartphone.
The property portals have responded by launching mobile websites and iPhone apps for the increasingnumber of home hunters using mobile devices. However, with such a fast growing audience to please, mobile is one of the areas where we will see the most significant developments in the coming years and one of the major developments is Augmented Reality.
Augmented Reality applications combine virtual data into the physical ‘real world’ by utilizing the iPhone 3GSor an Android phones compass, the phones camera and it’s GPS system. The result is that you can see things such as the location of Cash machines, restaurants, coffee shops, bars, hospitals, hotels etc, even if they are miles away.
I would expect that as you read this you are already thinking about where I’m going with this in terms of property search. Using this same technology, house hunters walking down a street will/can point their phone camera ahead of them to identify which properties are currently available for sale or to let.
This technology already exists and there are currently two applications available that perform this type of property search. Using the ‘Layar Reality Browser’ application, users can access two further applications called ‘house detective’ and ‘Find a Property’ (not to be confused with TDPG’s findaproperty). Both apps have been built using the Nestoria search engine (more info on the open API here ) and are really good early examples of how this technology will work and no doubt be integrated by the main property portals.
There isn’t much difference between the two (the orange one or the blue one) so below are some screen shots from the orange one (Find a Property) to show you how it works.
When you go into the app it automatically opens in the camera view and will begin searching for properties in the direction you point the phone. A 3D mesh appears on the screen and the app loads property images onto the grid.
As you touch the properties on the screen, the orange bar at the bottom gives you the property address and its distance from your current location. In the top right corner you also have a 'radar' higlighting the density of other properties around you.
Touch the bar and it gives you some further basic information about the property and the options to return to the camera view (done), get Google map directions to the property (take me there) or view further details, which takes you through to the listing on the agents web site or portal.
If you prefer, the app can show the properties on a map or in a list and there is also the option to switch between lettings of for sale properties. One additonal feature in the house detective app is the ability to adjust the search range, and whilst there is currently no option to refine the search criteria, I’d imagine this is likely to come at some stage in the future when the property portals get in on the act.
For now, it is working on the basic rule of location, location, location.
I know of one portal that is already working in partnership with Nokia on this technology for the property world and would be very surprised if the others aren’t doing something similar.
So what should estate and letting agents be doing about this? Do they need to be investing in augmented reality and iPhone apps?
My recommendation to most agents would be to focus your initial mobile internet efforts on ensuring your main web site is optimised for mobile visitors. This will mean that it recognises visitors that are using mobile devises and provide them with a better experience on their mobile handsets small screen.
iPhone apps are probably the next port of call, but I’d suggest you research well before you spend. A poor app could do more damage than harm as the current users will be fairly switched on users. Unless you are confident of winning new listings on the back of it as one agent I know is (currently losing them to competitors who have them) then maybe leave this trick to the portals.
There is no question that the growth in mobile internet searching is something we as an industry need to take seriously if we are to keep up with developments and give mobile users what they want and expect.
is one of the areas where we will see the most significant developments in the coming years and one of the major developments is Augmented Reality.
