Social media relationships are all about comfort level… after all you haven’t even met yet.

The new world of social media allows people to connect initially online, and then hopefully in real life at a conference, event or an arranged meeting. Simply put, the face to face meeting cements the relationship on a tangible emotional level. The operative word is emotion. The social media conversation that leads to a business relationship is conducted primarily through chat, email and a perusal through blogs, Facebook profiles and Tweets. Since there may be no tangible face to face feedback, the emotional criteria for gauging a virtual relationship based on a batch of text-based interchanges is not “what are they saying, what is the content?”, but “how do I feel about this virtual relationship?”. It’s about comfort level.

The art behind social media relationships is to make people feel happy.

If you’re providing valuable content, your readers thank you. If you’re a great joker, your readers laugh. It’s all about good will, and your online presence should mirror this message.

Most people on the social media don’t give a second thought about how they present themselves to the world, living by the “this is how I am, so take or leave it” credo. That’s ok. Just be considerate of the fact that comfort levels can deflate if you’re lauding Glenn Beck in San Francisco, or supporting socially liberal causes in Utah. Labeling is easy to do on the social media because it’s a text-based media; everybody has seen examples of rants that devolve into labeling and context twisting.

If you’re in the business to work with as many people as possible, it’s not hard to make good will a social media objective. Unless of course, you are inclined to work with people who also share your life philosophies… I have heard many stories by folks who have built businesses by being ardent and outspoken in their beliefs, and it seems to work for them.

Pat Kitano will be speaking at HomeGain Nation on Monday, March 1, 2010, about social networking trends and advice for real estate professionals.

This exclusive real estate video features Eric Blackwell, Director of Technology at RE/MAX who presented a special session at the August 2009 HomeGain Nation Live Real Estate Forum in San Francisco titled “SEO Is A Team Sport”.

Did you put SEO or getting better ranking as a priority for your business this year? What is SEO? Why do search engines put some REALTORS® at the top of search results over others?

SEO is the role that relationships play in helping you get to the top — being “search engine friendly”. Blackwell explains all this and more for what SEO means to REALTORS®, and provides the basic rules of effective SEO strategies.

Watch the SEO TRENDS session video: “SEO Is A Team Sport”

Check back next week to see one more video from this 2009 real estate event, which is the “Trends In Real Estate Marketing” with power presenters Robert Hahn, Patrick Kitano, Jay Thompson, Joseph Ferrara and Louis Cammarosano!

Watch more HomeGain Nation session videos

Also see more HomeGain Nation real estate videos on the HomeGain YouTube channel, on the HomeGain Nation Blog. and in the HomeGain Media Center.

When I was just a young pup in the real estate business, a mentor of mine spoke a few words that I’ve kept tucked away in the back of my head to pull out when I need to. 

He wisely spoke, “no matter how you attempt to generate business, it always gets down to going nose to nose and belly to belly with people.”

I can’t help but think about his words many years later as social media has taken a big bite out of my day. Five years ago neither blogging nor tweeting was in my vocabulary and posting photos on Facebook or Flickr wasn’t in the picture (excuse my pun). 

In the last two years, I’ve been to more than a few conferences and attended a whole bunch of technology panels. Heck, I’ve even been a panelist several times myself. What I found is that many of the “experts” may be whizzes at social media but they aren’t experts in real estate.

Don’t get me wrong, I learn a lot from these folks about technology. I take good notes and put what they have to say into practice. But it suddenly occurred to me that something is missing from the resume of many real estate social media speakers and panelists: real estate experience. (As in selling a whole bunch of houses kind of experience.) I worry that newcomers to the business think that social media is the magic bullet when it really should only be a part (maybe a small part) of their prospecting efforts.  Continue reading this post

At the end of March, I was fortunate to be asked to be a guest on a national radio show called The Takeaway. There is an accompanying blog post here and you can listen to the 8 minute radio interview from there. As fun as it might be to be a part of a radio show, I wouldn’t have done this if not for the basic premise that differed from much of what we hear from the media.

The premise here was that the market is shifting — for the better. The interview came because of another blog post I wrote that was picked up in the research of a national reporter showing something different than what we hear from most “media” sources. Basically, some professional insight backed up with statistics that shows something different than the gloom and doom we hear which is partially fueling the perception problems many of us are seeing in the market today.

What I’m really trying to say is that we are our local experts and when we take the time to articulate the information and experience that we have, we can make a difference and with the mindset of many buyers today, we need all the help we can give to each other! We are the professionals in our market and we need to actively participate in the dialogue lest we spend our time complaining rather than helping the cause.

There are lots of ways us Realtors can do this; Continue reading this post

HomeGain is delighted to announce that Sherry Chris, President and CEO of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, will be joining our already star studded cast of guest bloggers.

Sherry is a frequent speaker on major real estate industry panels, such as Inman Connect, Bloodhound Unchained, ReBlog Camps and REtechSouth to name just a few.

Sherry is an engaging personality and blogger as well as an adept user and evangelist of social media.

We should be receiving Sherry’s first post in a few days.

In the meantime you can follow Sherry on Twitter @BHGRE_Sherry

Louis Cammarosano

homegain.com

The problem with any product sold or given to real estate agents is, what I call THE MISSING MANUAL. Unlike the bikes I had to assemble at Christmas which had instructions – and still were tough to put together—the tools you get from vendors do not come with a manual of how to effectively use them. At best, you get the basics.

Let’s take blogging, for example. You can get a free blog from WordPress or Blogger and strike out on your own. Or you can pay for a blog at any number of real estate websites. But there are 2 major problems.

1. The blog providers give you virtually no instructions on how to:

• Set up the blog
• Post content
• Add images, video, slideshows, listings widgets, etc. -– Do you know how to use an HTML editor -– Or know what the heck HTML is?
• Tag your posts (and images) -– did you know that images are indexed by Google?
• Categorize your posts -– did you know that choosing too many categories actually hurts you?

You have to learn by trial and error. That’s how I learned. It sucked. It took a long time and I made many mistakes, some of which I did not correct until years later — that’s right, years.

2. It takes time for Google to index new blogs.

You can write for months and months before folks can find your posts on Google, i.e. on the first page of Google. Let’s face it, no matter how great your content is, if no one can find it on Google, no one will read it. So you end of toiling without seeing real success and it’s discouraging. You’re likely to quit.

If only someone showed you how to write blog posts to effectively take advantage of SEO (search engine optimization)…………….

Continue reading this post