Social Media – Training Feedback

I recently held a training class that’s purpose was to introduce some local Small Businesses into Social Media. Giving them a basic idea of what it is, community, and how to get to know others online, by letting people get to know the real you! We did discuss how some things can be accomplished with tools, but more importantly how use of the tools still boils down to being who you are, less about what you sell.

It went very well, mixed bag of people who knew some of this and some who never heard of it. So there was some great open communication from the group after the “lecture” just as I had hoped.

Then a local, well known I might add, Real Estate Agent asked this question as it pertains to her business:

“Craig, (insert Brokerage Firm name here) has decided to completely stop using the newspaper as a source of advertising and are moving solely to the web, but I do not know nor do I really have the time to get involved in Social Media, I have an assistant who is in charge of that for me. Also most of my clientele are over 50 and not the predominate demographic for using the web to find out about things like Open Houses, and the local newspaper will not even call me back to place ads with them at this point, what do I do?”

She also brought up about how she posts houses for sale in her blog.

This was an excellent question and immediately I started to think about the following:

Right or wrong, I tried to work through these issues with her one at a time.

I suggested to her that I felt it was an error on the Brokerage firms part to just stop using other traditional forms of marketing outright without at least pulling back slowly (the reason for the change was because of the dramatic increase in paper advertising costs) and using the opportunities to educate the customers about the transition to web. However we were told that the local newspaper will not post the Real Estate company’s URLs anymore (there are competing with there own home listings website, well maybe not competing so much if others can’t post there own stuff.)

So my thought was this, use direct mail postcards to those clients for those Open Houses and be sure to educate the people that the website would have more information, use the postcard as a lead in. Use sources such as salesgenie.com (If you have a better one, please post!) to find customers in your demographic for the mailing.

Now the assistant writing articles. I explained that I felt that she needed to be the one sharing the message, and the message needed to be more about her knowledge in her industry and her own thoughts about certain topics in general. I have seen other Tri-Cities, WA Real Estate Agents who attended classes start doing this as well. I feel that she could use the assistant as an editor, by providing some bullet points and then proofing before posting so the article is essentially hers and not her employees. She had a concern about time, and I mentioned how I use Dragon Naturally Speaking to dramatically cut down the time necessary to do this. All things she hadn’t thought of.

What I wanted to get across to her, was that people can learn ABOUT what she does and about who she is and that she already knows that relationships are what builds business opportunities in any service related business. People that get to know her will learn that she has a website dedicated to selling houses, her blog can demonstrate her personal expertise in the housing industry and how she thinks about business in general. No need to blog about a HOUSE.

I don’t know that I could cover everything in 2 hours, but did my best.

What do you think? Have some thoughts about this? Please post!

Tags: craig, Marketing, Social Media, sutton

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Business, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.