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The second season of #RTB on the Radio has now officially kicked off.

Our first guest of Season Two was Chris Smith – aka @TechSavvyAgent -  the driving force behind and creator of TechSavvyAgent.com, Inman News’ 2010 Real Estate Blog of the Year.

Chris dropped so much knowledge (listen to archived recording here) that he left me with no alternative but to write this blog post to share with you the best of the wisdom he shared with us.

I tried to make the size of this manageable, but this was the best I could do.

Most of this is verbatim, but I paraphrased in several places where I thought it made sense to do so. I hope you learn as much from Chris as we did…

The New Sales

• People buy from people they like and from people they think help their business, and that is the new sales: just caring, helping people and being willing to stay longer and go the extra mile.
• With real estate agents, it’s always been “all about them.” I don’t think that approach works any more. You have to become a resource. It’s NOT about the person; it’s about creating a resource that is valuable.
• You don’t want people going to a website looking for information or looking for homes, and front and center is a big headshot of a salesperson. I learned what to do by watching agents do it wrong.
• We can name everybody that’s doing Social Media right on a bad shop teacher’s hand,  and that is a good thing. That’s a good thing from the perspective of an agent that’s looking to learn. Instead of trying to figure out what 5,000 people are doing right, they just have to look and see what 10 or 15 people are doing correctly in the real estate space follow their lead and execute. People like Dale Chumbley (@DaleChumbley) and Krisstina Wise (@KrisstinaWise) and you guys (Professional One) are proving that.
• Agents don’t have to guess that Social Media might work. It WILL work, but it takes two elements. Hard work and loving the content you’re putting out, and probably also liking people. I heard this great quote (from Scott Stratten, aka @unmarketing) the other day:

“If you suck at liking people, you’re going to suck at Social Media.  if you like engaging people, you’re going to do pretty well at Social Media.”

Aggregate and Filter

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  It’s all about aggregating and filtering for your tribe.
• If you don’t want to do Social Media, then you’ll have to learn pay-per-click or a different technology. You can’t avoid technology AND Social Media.
• If you’re not engaging in Social Media, it’s almost like people think you’re hiding something.
• You’re absolutely correct in what you just said (“automating Social Media is like paying someone to take your wife to dinner”), Mike.  In terms of automation, you will lose every time if you syndicate the Facebook.

Social Media: It’s What’s for Dinner

• People are treating Social Media like salt-and-pepper, when they need to start treating it like it’s the main course.
• I’m all about creating relationships with people. So, is technology critical? I come from a sales background. Sales is about getting people to like and trust you, and it’s also about how many people you get an at-bat at. Where the technology is critical is that you might be a better Realtor than me, but if I’m generating 20 or 30 times the opportunities that you are (because of technology and or Social Media), I’m going to close more escrow.
• Can you sell more than 30 homes in a year without technology and or Social Media? I’m going to say absolutely not.
• There is a sucking sound that’s going on, and it’s the sound of agents who have done a really good job for a long period of time who are losing business and not keeping up with what’s happening on the web.

Web Leads? Not Just Buyers!

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  Twelve to 18 months ago, Krisstina Wise and the Goodlife Team were generating 90 to 95% buyer leads off of their website. Today, it’s 60/40 (meaning 40% of the leads are for listings, not buyers). Now people are determining who to list with based on web presence and based on Social Media presence.
• Agent follow up is poor. They send out sports calendars or recipes. People go out to their mailbox and they get something with an agent’s headshot and a recipe for how to cook a fajita better. Agents who don’t embrace the changes that are happening with the consumers are going to be out of business.  if you want to be in business five years from today, then you need to start taking all this stuff very seriously.

Find Another Broker

• Agents need to learn how to do this stuff (technology and Social Media). In my opinion, this  starts with the broker and trickles down;  it doesn’t start with the agent and trickle up.
• If I have helped your business (with technology and Social Media) more than your broker, find another broker.
• If Social Media and technology are the “main dish” of the future of real estate, why would you bring in outsiders to teach your agents how to do those things? It’s easier (for brokers) to bring in outsiders to teach it than to learn it yourself. If you (as a broker) aren’t doing these things yourself at the top of the food chain, it all trickles down, right?

Twitter vs. Facebook

• If you’re doing nothing (in Social Media), you need to start with Facebook, and here’s why:  Real estate is about numbers, and it’s about relationships.
• The perception about Twitter – which is a mis-perception that you (Mike) helped clear up for me – is that it’s a one-way communication device. Facebook is the place where everybody is communicating and commentating and engaging, and I disagree completely.
• When you’re in Facebook, it’s a group conversation. It’s like having a conversation in the hallway where everybody can listen to you.
• The engagement that’s happening in Twitter is very much peer-to-peer, person-to-person, it’s a 1-to-1 engagement taking place there.
• The “technology aspect” of learning Twitter is what keeps a lot of people from using it.

Want New Clients? ENGAGE!

• Go to Facebook right now and look at real estate agents’ status updates. How many of their updates end in question marks, and how many are statements? Statements don’t lead to engagement, questions lead to engagement. And Social Media is all about engagement
• Agents are using Social Media to reconnect with somebody they already knew. They’re not engaging and leveraging and creating new relationships.
• New relationships are great. That’s what leads to new business.  But if you don’t engage and if you don’t comment and you don’t hit “like,” and if you don’t put those question marks out there, you’re not even giving yourself an at-bat.

@TechSavvyAgent’s Five Big Points

(In response to the question “What are the five big things you want to tell people they should be doing?”)

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  Stop Selling on Facebook:  Stop trying to sell your properties on Facebook. The first thing an agent thinks is, “If there are a lot of eyeballs in a place, that’s where I need to be marketing my properties.” Stop selling and start engaging.  If your goal is to make money using Social Media, you will fail. Your goal needs to be genuinely building and maintaining a community.
• Fix Your Website: Please look at your website and ask yourself, “Is this OK?”  Look at your website, and then look at a couple of other real estate websites. If you were browsing the web, and you wouldn’t choose you, fix that right now. That’s a big one.
• Build Your Facebook Tribe. Another thing that people are missing out on is having the ability to build a community on Facebook that is absolutely second to none. Facebook has collected all the same data that you would want to capture on a real estate website, it’s accurate, it’s readily available, and it is a marketer’s dream.  If you don’t leverage that data, you shouldn’t be a marketer.
• Stop Not Blogging. Darin Persinger (@darinpersinger) of ProductivityJunkies.com and I had a conversation where we came up with this analogy, which is to substitute the phrase “creating valuable content for my sphere” for the word “blog.” If you can say you don’t have time to create valuable content for your sphere, that’s just wrong and maybe that’s why you don’t have any listings. If you’ve drawn a line in the sand and said that you’re not going to blog, then you need to find something on your side of that line that you can do, which is likely to be even MORE complicated than blogging, like SEO or pay-per-click or SEM. it doesn’t get easier on the side of the fence either. There’s a social side of the web, and there is a technical side of the web. And if you can’t figure out the social side of the web, you’re never going to figure out the technical side of the web. And that’s why I pour my heart and soul into training agents, because, again, I don’t think agents are getting taught at the broker/office level, And if they’re not going to do it in their offices, which they are not, then I’m going to do it at a national level. And I can’t even imagine the feeling (of a broker) thinking, “I don’t even have as much influence over the people (in my company) as some kid in Brooklyn.”
• Deliverables: This is huge. You need to ask yourself, “What is your deliverable?”  What are you offering consumers in exchange for  their information? And if it’s “check out my listings and my information” and “contact me”? Forget about it.  A true story: I am following Chipolte on Twitter. Why? Because they gave me a free burrito. It doesn’t have to be a ton,  but it can’t be nothing. The deliverable on the web is so important and so underused. What can it be? It can be “Would you like to know what your neighbors homes sold for, and would you like to know what your home is worth in this scary market”? Heck yes I would. Or, “If you’ve never bought a home before, would you like to know how the home buying process works”? Heck yeah, right? You should have a deliverable on every page of your website that is not a salesperson looking to contact them.

The “Thank You” Economy

• This all goes back to Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) and his “thank you” economy:

If you don’t give people a reason to say thank you, then you’re not giving them a reason to hire you.

• When agents require an e-mail address to allow you to search for homes on their website,  they’re forgetting about this little thing called Google that allows you to find about 800 other websites that will allow people to search for homes without giving up an e-mail address.
• Another quote that has really stuck with me is from Chris Brogan (@ChrisBrogan). He said, “We need to get beyond “Golly we’ve got tools.””  In other words, we need to start using and leveraging these tools – Twitter, Facebook, LinkeIn, etc. – properly.  These things aren’t coming…they’re HERE.  Start building your brand and your voice using these tools.

Video: The Most Powerful Medium

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  The thing about video is that it’s not for everyone. But it IS the most powerful medium on the web. And the ability to build and grow your personal brand using video is insane.
• The video element humanizes us.  Statistics show the people got to a website 12 months before they engage.  That’s not the case with video.  People feel comfortable with video.
• And the web is adopting video at an insane rate.  Is the SEO aspect of video great? Yes. But where I really think it helps is that it makes you approachable and people feel like they know you before they meet you.
• And, again, that’s going to make them feel more comfortable starting a real-life relationship with you, which is then going to lead to listings and buyer transactions.
• There aren’t a lot of things that you can do that will put you in the “ 1% of what people are doing” category, and video is one of them.

Content Creation vs. Content Consumption

• What we need to deal with in this industry right now is this:  creating content versus consuming content. Agents are great at consuming content. They are scared of creating content. They’re afraid of what other people will think. I tell agents, “People will think you are cool if you create video.” The cost of entry to video is zero.
• Caller Jeremy Blanton (@jb140) recommended that listeners check out copyblogger’s (@copyblogger) AuthorityRules.com ebook. The idea: Show people you are the authority, and you won’t have to sell yourself to people. People will come to you.
• Inbound marketing works better than outbound, but you have to give people a reason to want to become an inbound lead.