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!

He is dead on, it is the 2 way communication that makes Social Media and Marketing so much different than the traditional uni-directional methods. At Learn About Web I talked about how the phonebook is becoming the dinosaur because of how little information you can learn about a business with a smiling picture and some words. Think about that, what do you actually learn from that? Only that company X either has more money or wagered more money that the phonebook could drive traffic to them.

I know, I was recently a gambler!

But a customer in the Web 2.0 world sees things differently. But what about those not familiar with it?

How do we get our customers involved in Social Media?

Now I know some of you people in larger towns may not see this as a relevant issue, but in small towns like ours.. it’s half the battle at least! I am telling Small Business they need to use Social Media, but how do you educate those customers or people in general who know little or nothing about it? The ones not interested in coming to see a Conference on their dime because they don’t understand its merit?

Challenging Question – perhaps it’s been answered, but here are some thoughts I have, and perhaps you can add something to this?

The most obvious – Word of Mouth – Tell them! Talk to them about the benefits you have gained from Social Media and the tools they can use to get involved. Point them to your blog.

Bring a friend/colleague/customer to the speaking portion of a conference, let them learn about about why they should be interested, and perhaps they will join in. Don’t try to take them to training session on their first trip out, the idea is to get them some exposure.

Write about them! Why not have a featured customer blog post and ask them to read it? They would likely share it with all of the people they know and so on!

A discount if they add themselves to one of your Social Media tools? Added value for you and your customer!

Using 2 way communication to gain the attention of people not involved in Social Media seems to be the smarter strategy, after all, we should practice what we preach right?

I’d love to hear if you have anything to add to this list or comments about the idea in general…