Here’s some quick advice for AgentView real estate agents to manage that new blog you may not know what to do with:

1. Blog articles are great but they do take time to write. Generally, the first ideas new bloggers have for topics - how-to’s, hyperlocal news - have been done before by other bloggers. It’s hard to differentiate yourself starting up a blog.
2. So do something different. Think like a journalist; watch out for real-time housing market news and be the first to report it.
3. Take notes at the tour marketing meetings, subscribe to the feeds of local online news and real estate publications.
4. Think in sound bites. Whenever you hear something interesting, write a sentence or two in the blog. Be efficient, don’t take more than 3 minutes per idea. Use a cellphone to write it if you’re in a tour meeting or open house.
5. When you see an interesting article online, cut and paste the article title and create a link to it.
6. If you write down several ideas per day, you soon accumulate a whole portfolio of ideas and facts that will be displayed on the blog. This content is just as revealing about how you develop business and help clients as blog articles.
7. You become a go-to source for your market. Prospects will come back again and again to see your new “sound bites”. After all, you’re the only one reporting on a daily basis… this is compelling to a committed home buyer or seller. Analogy - if I’m doing a stock purchase, I’d much rather analyze it in real time on Marketwatch.com than pick up the current Business Week magazine.
8. You’ll soon realize you can expand on the sound bites to construct more detailed blog articles. You’ll lose your writer’s block.
9. Finally, it’s easier to automate the whole process of “reporting” using a variety of micro-blogging and bookmarking applications like Twitter , Friendfeed, Tumblr, Delicious and Diigo. This is another story.

To learn more about HomeGain’s AgentView product, click here.

My business partner Pat Kitano and I have been thinking a lot lately about Twitter. What is it? How will it impact real estate marketing? In my first article, I acknowledged that at first glance, Twitter looks like an enormously fun waste of time. Far smarter minds than mine have made much the same point — twice!

We believe there is a business case for using Twitter effectively in real estate. I’d like to present several examples here of using Twitter as a communication tool, then follow up later with a more metaphysical discussion.

1. Conferences—Keeping track of the conversation, aka knowing where the cool kids are.

If you’re in real estate and have not been hiding under a stack of open escrows (not likely), you’ll know there were two big industry events last week: Inman Connect, and the REBarCamp pre-conference. Both conferences had an active “Twitterstream” conversation going on, (here for Inman, here for REBarCamp) not a simul-cast, but more of a “parallel-cast” to the actual sessions.

The image below is a sample of the conversation in the parallel-cast during a session on the MLS; note that slight edginess, bordering on rudeness, gets your message amplified: Continue reading this post

An interview with George F. Babbitt

I had the opportunity recently to conduct a phone interview with George F. Babbitt of Babbitt-Thompson Realty Co. to find out how the Zenith real estate market is doing. We were interrupted quite a few times as George tended to his incoming messages and alerts. I’ve published our interview in its entirety.

HomeGain: Hi George. How are things going?
George Babbitt:Could you hold a minute?
HG: Sure.
GB:I am in the middle of a Twitter, a useful tool by gosh, by jingo.
HG: I’ve heard.
GB: You bet, the sooner people realize that they aren’t going to be coddled, the sooner they’ll get on social networks and start producing. You have to tend to your business ALL THE TIME.
HG: I see. So how is the market in Zenith?
GB: I am working on a blog post on the topic.
HG: What will it say?
GB: Don’t know yet, but it will be on allZenithhomes.com, myzenithblog.com, Facebook, MySpace, friendfinder, ActiveRain, del.icio.us,stumble upon, Digg and the RSS feeds will be burning, old boy.
HG: Ok, you seem to be up on the latest social networking trends, tell me a bit about your social network?
GB: There’s some fine fellows in it. Its neither social nor a network but, by gee, you gotta be in it. It’s more like a water cooler.
HG: What’s that?
GB: That’s my other iPhone. Text message coming in. Like the sound?
HG: Yes, that’s a good one. So how is your brokerage holding up? Continue reading this post

Do We Really Need To Twitter?

A few years back I knew a guy who had one of the first blackberries. Armed with this new device, he would fire off incessant and inane emails while outside of the office, just because he could.

The emails often contained numerous typos, cryptic messages, stray useless thoughts and were sometimes sent to a few too many addressees, many of whom may have been the subject of ridicule in the emails. Continue reading this post