Amy's Blog - The Digital REALTOR

How fun! Great promotion for all you Harry Potter fans out there. Even if your not a fan take the opporutunity to get yourself an amazing Kodak Printer. This is perfect for Real Estate Agents. I use all Kodak products and love them.

One common thread of questions I hear in all the seminars and courses I teach on marketing on line is summed up in these questions:

• What do I do first? I am overwhelmed, I barely enough have time to do my real estate business
• How do manage mytime - when trying to implement new marketing?
• I don't really care what someone ate for breakfast - how is this social media going to make me money?

First things first. Social Media is for making connections, it is for creating relationships, continuing your present relations . . . online. We will cover that in another blog post. But for now . . .

You need a database. When I mention marketing online and importing existing databases into programs like LinkedIn and Facebook I realize that many of us have been lax in keeping our databases up to date.

One of my coaching clients hired an intern from a local college and had them input into a simple excel spread sheet everyone they had not added. The intern then called each an every one person on the list and said: "Mary Ellen is updating her holiday mailing list and wanted to make sure she had the most up to date information. Can we have your email address also and have permission to email you information on the market once and awhile?"

What do you think happened? Lots of great leads were turned over to Mary Eleen. Once that database is together, we suggest you tag your core group, whether it is 50 or 250 and plan to touch base with them at least two times a year.

I personally use Outlook. Plain and Simple. I have my top 100 sphere tagged to contact 4 times. When I open Outlook I don't open my email until I have checked my tasks and figured out who I am going to call, email or touch base with on Facebook. If you go to email first, well, you know what happens . . . nothing.

Every time I meet someone new I automatically add them to Linked In. If I get to know them a little better, I ask to be their friend of Facebook.

Simple. I contact 5 people a day, and that gets me 1250 "touches" to my database a year . . . SWEET!

Becuase I sync my database with my smart phone I can do the calls when I am out and about.

First step - work with your warm marketing. Next? A web presence - stay tuned . . .

Recently I was asked to present at the Connecticut Association of REALTORS Politics Grassroots event.

I spoke on using Social Media to bring forward political issues in our state. I can now say I am hooked.

Have you ever seen TweetCongress? It is a place to find twitter feeds of all the politicians and follow them.

Shout out to Claire McDonough at Community and Policial Affairs for NAR. All her input made me look like a rock star.

Here is the slide presentation I used . . . enjoy

I just posted an article on how to use the product Topify.com to help manage who to follow on Twitter. Here is an example of an email you receive from Topify when someone follows you.They call them Power Twitter Email Notifications!

For the complete article click here!

I really enjoy the product. Do you use any Twitter products that make your life easier?

Join us for a Webinar on February 17 at 4 p.m. ET ONLINE with Brad Carroll from Dakno.com where we will discuss the 5 critical components that consumers want from your website!

Click here to register! Space is limited.

Reserve your Webinar Seat Now at: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/513374003

For more details go to my blog at www.amychorew.com

On the road again, still preaching reputation management. I just found a great Ebook that is authorized for sharing through Creative Commons. If you don't know what creative commons is check it out here.

In the mean time visit this link to download a 21 page ebook on how to use Google Alerts:

Click here for the link for the Google Alert Ebook

Google Alerts Power Primer: 50 Tips, Techniques & Workarounds.

About the Author Adam Green is the CEO of AlertRank.com, an online blog relationship management application. He blogs at AlertRank.com/MrGoogleAlerts. Please feel free to contact Adam with any questions or comments you might have about this eBook. His email address is Adam@AlertRank.com.

• Setting up Google Alerts
• Single Word Search
• Multiple Word Search
• Matching complete words in a URL
• Searching for inbound and outbound links
• Searching for URLS in Blogs

The list goes on . . . Enjoy!

With the holidays here, there are lots of gatherings. I am getting to see lots of friends, neighbors, family that I don't get to see throughout the year. Its fun. Lots of fun. And . . . fattening. I can't stop eating all the good food, and catching up, laughing and having a thoroughly good time. And the holidays haven't even begun.

My neighbors even have a small gathering Christmas day. I just moved into my neighborhood and am thrilled that I have five amazing neighbors who have brought us into their festivities. I am looking forward to that.

But . . . I realized an amazing thing. I miss my online friends. I can't wait to get on line and share what has been going on with them, through my blogs, facebook, twitter. My online relationships, friendships are just as amazing as with those people who have been in my life a long time.

If I have made your acquaintance this year on line I hope I have added something to your year. Thank you to all of you who have shared resources, experiences and in some very special cases, serious advice to help me advance my business and make some serious business decisions.

Thank you.

And when the holiday season winds down and we get busy again with the day to day, I will remember this time fondly.

One last time, the quote I have ended my classes with in 2009. Look for a new one in the new year!

Life is too short to wake up with regrets. So love the people who treat you right.

Forget about those who don't. Believe everything happens for a reason.

If you get a chance take it. If it changes your life, let it.

Nobody said life would be easy, they just said it would be worth it.                      Unknown

After a class that I taught at TriplePlay this December, a student camp up to me and said these words "All this tech stuff is easy for you, how can I figure out what works for me?

I started in on some suggestions . . .  then I stopped.

It has not been easy for me. I am baby boomer who worked on a computer the size of a high school gymnasium when I was in college in the 70s. I remember where I was during Woodstock. You get the picture.

How did I figure all this stuff out? In the late 1980s I ran the marketing division for my real estate firm and we bought our first computers in 1986. I had graphic designers, a staff of 5 who needed direction from me. We did all the marketing for a five office company and we had twleve subdivisions going on at the same time. (those were the days.)

It was my job to figure it all out. So I bought a spiral notebook. I hired a consultant. I paid this guy $45 an hour and I spend thousands of dollars of my own money to learn how to use those computers. I wrote it all down in my notebooks. What was frustrating was that every time I sat down at my computer I had to open the notebooks and follow my written instructions, word for word.

Six months later, one night  after working with real estate clients I sat down at my computer and started working. I realized that I didn't have a notebook open! What a great feeling.

I paid the price . . . will you?

(BTW if you are anywhere near Atlantic City in December, you should attend TriplePlay. National speakers, great trade show and a guaranteed REBarCamp in 2010!)

Right now I am writing an online course on Internet Risk. One of the topics focuses on how to monitor your online reputation. They are lots of tools out there, free and for a fee. Let's explore some of them.If you did nothing else with social media, monitoring what people are saying about you, your company, your brand, your neighborhood, and your industry is very important.

Sales associates who are in our monthly coaching program constantly speak about wanting to know what people in their community are thinking – they create polls, do interviews, study their website analytics, where all the time there are other simple tools to help them in this task.

Google or Yahoo Alerts are a great place to start. Set up alerts based on your companies name, principals names, community, town, etc. These alerts will send you an email every time one of your search words is found by the search engines.

http://www.google.com/alerts

http://alerts.yahoo.com/

The phenomen of Twitter allows us to search any topic and find out who is chatting about it. Open up a web browser and find Twitter Search at http://search.twitter.com. This is great place to find people to follow as well.

One of the keys to managing your reputation is to know where your name appears and what people are saying about you. Some great sites to help you monitor more of your social media reputation are:

SocialMention.com

Addictomatic.com

Spezify.com

Steprep.com

Also check out the Zoom Info site located at http://www.zoominfo.com. this is site that helps you find specific people in an organization a little easier than using LinkedIn or a Google Search. Search for yourself and make sure you set up a up to date profile.

Read a great post about the New Real Estate Consumer by Mathias Bergendahl, Director of Marketing & Communications at Pinellas Realtor Organization in Florida. His blog post says Consumers have changed. Gone are the days when they’d be content waiting for a reply to an email for 24 hours as the previously followed general rule of email etiquiette would stipulate. Gone are the days when consumers would wait for their Realtor® to handle their transaction independently without collaboration. Here is a link to the article The New Real Estate Consumer.