Hi, I'm Marissa Myers. I help small teams leverage social media to tell their stories and expand their reach without breaking the bank. Click to learn more about me.
The industry is moving away from 500-page, brokerage sites, filled with unnecessary agent bios, busy graphics, and messy navigation. Eventually, the brokerage will need only a “landing page” with simple mapping, easy navigation to blogs/social networks and the access to mobile applications. The consumer wants hand-held property search and neighborhood info. And what the consumer wants……..
I would much rather have my clients able to drive around town with all of the information on an app on their phone. Likewise, I myself would love to be able to pull out my iPhone and answer questions using the latest information available. I should be able to get a lead off of my website while out of town, and from my phone send them a message and setup the listings via email subscription for them.
Portland Real Estate ‘s blog comment
“potential buyers need, deserve and demand more than just 12 Kodak pics. Video, professional photography, property websites, floor plans, etc. Yes, all these extras to help expose the home should be mobile friendly, and believe me, they will be VERY soon. Virtual tour/media companies will adapt to the small screen. We already have a mobile iPhone version of our interactive floor plan viewer. It kicks ass and I guarantee many virtual media companies will follow suit, if not already in development.
blog comment by Kori Covrigaru
“Texting a short code to get info on one home is so 2005. People want pictures, virtual tours, all the info they can find from their home computer, but they want it while sitting outside the home. “Is it worth going into?” “should we call the agent”? Now they can check. Mobile also offers agents that don’t necessarily have a big listing presence to gain market share. By offering a branded application that buyers can use their potential clients can find any home for sale even if they are sitting in front of a competing brokers listing. The brokers that have the “wow” products will be the winners in the future.” [Note: author sells mobile solutions]
I am a big fan of text messaging services as a modern replacement of the flyers and brochures. It’s a good informational service… but it’s not that interactive.
For a more interactive service, a couple of agent & broker sites I’ve worked and I think have done it well are http://www.mcmoniglegroup.com and http://www.winkrealty.com. Both have automatically detectable mobile internet sites that allow users to see their featured listings on-the-go and search additional listings in the area. The sites are optimized for different handsets giving users a “customized experience” based on their phone (e.g. iPhone is more graphics intensive).
In my opinion, this is very useful when a user is driving by a listing and sees the name of the realtor but doesn’t have time to write down the text ID & shortcode. All the user has to do is load up the realtors URL on their phone (or do a google search on their name) and instantly they have access to all the listings. They can search by home address, street name, or city.
It’s a fun time in the mobile market right now!
“Because I value money so highly, the long-term earning potential of experience far outweighs immediate salary. Already, I’ve seen my low-paying, high-learning internships pay off in really neat opportunities.” - Jeff Widman”
How do I identify what to learn that will be of value in ten years? (today’s pop marketing focuses on social media, etc) How do I know what’s fundamental and what’s just noise?
Last internship: After three weeks, completely outsourced his job to a team of people in India & Bulgaria (via About | Jeff Widman (.com)
I like this approach. could be done with a partner for the examen. Agree that the emotional connection of a phone call is important for accountability. Like 5 minute max.
@Charlie I’m so glad you wrote this timely post. You’ve probably seen those recent ‘exposes’ on how a masters degree can be a major financial and career blunder (NYTimes), and yet stats show that young people are flocking back to school more than ever. It makes me really, really POed that, instead of thinking for themselves or buckling down and doing the hard work (eg. of starting a blog that might actually suck, or trying to edit a video and then failing), people think they can just throw money at the gaping holes in their lives. The biggest irony is that these same people – who in one instance are willing to toss $100,000 at that gaping hole – are the ones who complain about ‘free work.’ ‘Free work’ = valuable, relationship-building apprenticeships in fields that YOU target, doing a job that YOU engineer. Somehow, it’s a bad deal to put in a few month’s work of free work (a few thousand $$’s worth of earnings) in exchange for experience and connections that can totally change your career, but it’s a good idea to write a $100,000 check to a film school in exchange for a piece of paper and a few years of your life where you don’t have to think about the hard stuff? So foolish, and sad, and lemming-esque (or whatever is a good word for ‘opposite of entrepreneurial’). -Susan
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Susan Su’s comment on Charlie’s post, “Fail Cheap”
I agree!
How To Talk To Engineers: Lessons From A Silicon Valley Fuzzy Techie
I love engineers. But, I’m not one. I’m a Murakami-devouring, French-speaking, fuzzy techie. That is, I took a total of two non-humanities courses at Stanford: Intro to Statistics, whose only textbook was “Cartoon Statistics,” and Search For Life in the Solar System, a freshman course about alien life between the Sun and Neptune. How then, did I end up as a web product manager at an engineering-driven tech start-up? I learned, after a few early failures, how to talk to engineers.
Here are the THREE things to remember when talking to engineers:
1. Bring value to the table. The simplest way to gain anybody’s respect, especially members of the ‘ruling’ class of your company or organization, whether they’re engineers in a tech start-up or male analysts at Goldman, is to know something that they don’t know but might like to know.
The HR Director at my old company was a smart young woman who could easily have been pigeonholed into being another one of those “HR girls.” She never let this happen because she had lots of valuable workplace and HR information that EVERYONE – even engineers – needed to know. And, she wasn’t afraid to make it clear in her (highly articulate) conversations with developers.
[Personal expectations, desires] + [cultural myths] + [sense of entitlement] + [practical limitations] = :(
Charlie on hacking the mind — figure out how someone thinks. To do it, find a smart person who uses delicious bookmarking a lot.
See post here.
