5 Ways Real Estate Agents Fail At Social Media

Using Social Media Properly

The way we communicate on a daily basis has changed radically over the last ten years. In our ever changing world of communication, social media is what’s in vogue. Everywhere you turn you can’t escape it whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linkedin or one of the many others that are cropping up daily. Social media is a way of keeping in touch with the world around us just like reading the daily newspaper used to be. How many people actually sit down and read a newspaper cover to cover anymore? Probably not nearly as many as there were going back even five years ago. How we deliver news is no longer the same.

With new forms of communication, come new rules of the game. While social media is an information delivery mechanism, it is also a way of socializing as well. Those that are really good at social media will tell you being “social” is what matters most. Building relationships is a big part of what social media is about. 

9 Communication Skills for Salespeople

Knowing how to communicate well is a minimum requirement in sales. If you can't talk with people and get them to open up and share information with you, you're going to struggle to sell anything. Assess your communication skills in the following areas to see where you're excelling and where you need a bit more work.

Can you give a prepared speech?
Delivering a pre-written presentation effectively is a necessary part of the sales process. Can you give a prepared presentation without sounding stilted and unnatural? Can you handle questions without losing the flow? Can you incorporate factors that are important to a specific prospect? 

Visual Communication Solutions for 2013

For every business, the end of the year is a time to evaluate the past year’s strategies, assess prospects for the coming year and build a strategy for a more successful 2013.

In particular, your business may need to update its marketing strategy to include new and different forms of visual communication.

Remember, your competitors are taking advantage of the latest technologies and techniques to bring in more sales leads; you need to evolve to stay competitive. Consider the changes you’ll need to make to stay relevant. 

Communicating your Brand’s Story through Marketing Automation

You can use the fanciest of tools marketing automation has to offer (and most of you do), but if your brand isn’t being showcased as a part of your messaging, you’re missing the mark. The question then becomes, how do you tell a story that speaks to buyers but also conveys what your brand’s personality really is? Look around at some of the companies who are marketing to you.  Likely there are some you identify with that have a strong sense of who they are, while others, not so much.  Recently we saw an interesting battle of brands – Apple vs. Samsung.  Now that battle had nothing to do with public opinion, but as the two squared off you could certainly see the contrast between the two organizations.  Apple markets its products under the umbrella of its brands perception – and wins because of it.  Samsung, well, I simply don’t know what that perception is as they haven’t communicated their brand story quite as well.  How buyers see your organization matters, and for that reason we still have to consider brand – even in modern day conversational marketing.

Marketing Communication - How Much is Too Much?

Can we over communicate with clients and customers?

My short answer is yes. We used to have to worry about the number of emails that we sent out to ensure that didn't bombard those interested in our products or services to the point that they would unsubscribe. We tried to measure how much is too much and how often did our subscribers want to hear from us. Now, while this is still something we all must be concerned with when it comes to marketing over communication has become even more of an issue. Technology has made us more efficent with our marketing, but perhaps it's time to consider that maybe it's made us less effective.

Grow your social community through constant measurement

The best branded social communities will never be of the “set it and forget it” type. A community on a brand site is a living thing – requiring ongoing measurement and refinement to grow and remain successful.

Align social goals to existing business goals

Business goals for social communities should always match the existing goals for the site. Conversation for conversation’s sake is not a goal. Forget meaningless vanity metrics like fan and follower count. Instead, determine what you’d most like visitors to do, then measure your community’s impact on those metrics.

How To Improve Visibility, Communication & Accountability of Social Media Within Your Company

Do you want to improve visibility, communication and accountability of social media within your company? It’s as simple as sending a project dashboard on a regular basis to a broader team.

Really. That’s the magic pill.

It seems so simple yet not enough of us do it. Instead, we complain that there are silos or that people don’t understand that corporate social media is more than just tweeting and status updates. While there are many other ways that you can take your internal critics and turn them into your biggest fans, sending a project dashboard on a regular basis can be one of the simpler ways to increase visibility, communication and accountability for you and your team.

Brainstorming Tactics: How to Get Unstuck

We've all been there. Your boss walks up to your desk and has a great vision for what the team needs to accomplish, and it’s up to you to make it happen, and you don’t know where to start. Maybe it’s not your boss, maybe it’s a client, or maybe it’s your idea, but you just don’t know how to bring this vision into reality. The challenge is so big or you’ve gotten so lost on the road you don’t know how to solve it.

You're stuck. So what to do?

Increase Your Communication Effectiveness 93%

When you get an email from a prospect with one of the following requests, what do you do?

• Send me a quote for…
• Provide us with more information about…
• We’d like a proposal…
• Forward us a brochure on…

If you thought, “reply by email,” you just put your prospect firmly in control of the sales process.

How?

12 Ways to Improve Focus

We’re all incredibly busy these days trying to balance an endless list of demands on our time. Every day it seems as though we’re saying “yes” to another personal or professional project while jotting down another idea that we hope to pursue someday. Add that to the never ending abundance of information from blog posts to tweets to status updates to magazines, books and other forms of media and you can quickly start to feel like we’re drowning. In order to accomplish everything that we have on our plates and keep the balls in the air takes a lot but you’ll never get through it all without focus. To maintain laser focus takes effort and is something that we have to continually work on individually.

5 Hidden Skills for Big Data Scientists

1. Be Clear:  Is Your Problem Really A Big Data Problem?

There are many big data problems out there requiring huge compute scale, innovations in computation paradigms, vast storage space and so on. But just because your data takes up lots of disc space does not mean that you have a big data problem. Firstly, your data may be encoded in an inefficient format. XML, for example, can be incredible verbose (all those close tags and human readable text). Secondly, if your data changes over time it may change very slowly indicating that monitoring the difference between data sets is more important that importing complete data sets. Thirdly, you may be processing your information on a legacy architecture designed for low power CPUs or cores. Architecture should be data driven, meaning that you need to deeply understand the informational aspects of your data and not just the size of the data as it comes to you on disc.

Ambient video and the changing face of communication

This past week I wrote about Skype competitor OoVoo, which launched a new Facebook 12-way video chat app along with updateds to many of its other apps. While the Facebook app was the headline, what really stood out to me was my conversation with OoVoo chairman Robert Jackman. Jackman told me that OoVoo’s mostly young users — 60 percent of its 46 million users are under 25 — don’t use OoVoo like other people use Facetime or Skype: to make the equivalent of a phone call over video.

Many simply come home and leave OoVoo on in the background as they do homework or watch TV, sort of like an instant messager app. Friends jump on or jump off, checking in with each other and seeing what’s going on. The person who starts the video chats isn’t obligated to stay on. This is not appointment video: it’s ambient video, running in the background.

Think like a Marketer, Operate as a Consumer

Big corporations, small businesses, non-profits, and even politicians are seeing the value in social media, which means that the surge in social media marketing and advertisements will only continue to increase.

According to a report from the Royal Bank of Scotland 9 out of 10 medium to large-sized businesses in the UK will maintain or spend more on their social media budget for 2012. Borrell Associates stated that the total local online social spend in the US will grow from an estimated $1.1 billion in 2011 to $7.8 billion in 2016.

Choosing the Right Medium for the Message

Email is a magnificent communication tool—but not in all circumstances. Many conversations call for different—and better—communication choices.
When Is Email the Right Medium?

Email is the right communication medium for matters of relatively low importance. It’s great for sharing information. It’s awful for important conversations.

What’s your problem?

All great marketing solutions start with a well and accurately defined problem and a correct diagnosis of the course of action that needs to be followed. So I thought I’d talk a little about this to kick the new year off in a back to basics style.
There is a very basic diagnostic tool I want to share with you that works a treat at the very start of a project and ensures that you are directing your efforts in the right and most profitable direction.

It involves asking whether you think the real problem that needs to be solved, the blockage that needs to be opened up, is a product, brand or communications problem.

And the starting point is to scrutinise the product, service or occasionally business – to ask whether the problem lies at the product level.

Call Center Coaching: 5 More Tips to Ensure Your Success

We’re pleased to present the next 5 essen­tial skills that will help improve your coach­ing ability.

1. Spend some time each day prais­ing your agents. Tak­ing time to give feed­back is an essen­tial skill of man­ag­ing. Offer­ing praise and con­struc­tive feedback—and know­ing when and how—will help your agents improve—often dramatically.

When you praise your employ­ees, gen­uinely and on a reg­u­lar basis, you help val­i­date their work and demon­strate your sup­port. Call cen­ter envi­ron­ments can be harsh—especially if you have an abun­dance of upset or dif­fi­cult cus­tomers—so it’s your job as a call cen­ter coach to ensure your agents feel supported.

The Thought-Patterns of Success

Your passion for your career can sabotage your attempts to succeed.

When you go from feeling energized, excited and in control of your work to feeling an overwhelming compulsion to achieve and produce, you've tipped from helpful harmonious passion into harmful obsessive passion.
But when you've grown accustomed to operating from a state of obsessive passion, you may want to act differently, but you just don't know how. Your deeply ingrained mental and behavioral patterns naturally lead you toward seemingly uncontrollable compulsion to work. Paradoxically, these natural reflexes inhibit the quality of your professional output. And when you do make small attempts to change, like leaving the office on time, you experience withdrawal symptoms, which send you scurrying back to your familiar habit patterns.

Communication Strategies for Open Innovation

Strong communication programs are important at any time within an organization, but never more so than when open innovation is your goal. Without a good communication strategy, your odds for success do not look good. To move forward, people need to know where to go and how to get there. Here are three reasons why communication is a critical element if you want to succeed with open innovation.