Conference Highlight: Building Community Relationships

November 3, 2011

Filed under: 2011 Active Enterprise Network Annual Conference,Conferences & Events,Ebby Halliday Real Estate, Inc.
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At our annual conference, Ebby Halliday’s VP and Director of Marketing, Randall Graham, presented Ebby’s strategy for community involvement. Ebby was founded in 1945 on three legs of service including service to the client, service to the industry and service to the community. For 65 years, Ebby has focused on the giving back to the communities they serve and getting involved in things that matter most to clients.

By doing this, they have seen substantial success when it comes to brand recognition. Ebby has maximized their community relationships through a variety of different events and marketing campaigns that reach their local audience. A few of these campaigns were discussed in length at this year’s event including Ebby’s charity powder-puff football game, their sponsorship of the 2010 Super Bowl and video contests.

Today, we’d like to focus on one important aspect of Ebby’s campaign efforts for the Blondes vs. Brunettes charity powder-puff game. In addition to print and online advertising, social media outreach and more, all advertisements were aimed to promote and attract customers to their website to continue their home search through the recently released proximity search.

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Conference Highlight: Search, Mobile and Social Trends

October 27, 2011

Filed under: 2011 Active Enterprise Network Annual Conference,Conferences & Events,Mobile,Real Estate Technology,Search Engine Optimization,Social Networking
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At this year’s Active Enterprise Network Annual Conference, Active Website’s Director of Deployment, Tyler Olmsted, and Director of Mobile Technology, Chris Chares, discussed the impact search, mobile and social networking can have to the online home searching process. 89% of home searching is done online and the process can often be a cold, impersonal experience. However, with the new advances in these areas we are able to bridge this gap and provide a robust experience to customers and give them search results that better match their needs.

Before people started home searching online, they would first go to their realtor to help them find homes based on criteria other than the number of beds and baths, price range, etc. Customers would discuss what was important to their lifestyle and the realtor would then be able to help them find homes that matched all of their needs.

However, since more and more buyers are starting their search online before talking to an agent, we need to provide better tools that mimic the experience they would have with an agent. Through search, mobile and social networking, we can achieve this goal. (more…)

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Conference Highlight: Your Brand is More Than Your Logo

October 26, 2011

Filed under: 2011 Active Enterprise Network Annual Conference,Conferences & Events,Residential Properties Ltd.,Usability
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At this year’s Active Enterprise Network Annual Conference, attendees had the opportunity to hear from Enterprise Network member, Tom Flanagan, on the importance of establishing your brand. Tom is the Technology Director at Residential Properties Ltd., a syndicated technology columnist for Inman News and has spoken numerous times at Enterprise Network events.

Because Tom is one of our most forward-thinking members, we invited Tom to present at the conference on ways to bridge the gap between your brokerage’s brand and your customers through a usable website and superior customer service. In order to do this, it is important to understand that your brand consists of more than just your logo; your brand is everything, including your strategy, communication tools, agents and staff, website and more.

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Conference Highlight:Collaboration Within a Network

October 21, 2011

Filed under: 2011 Active Enterprise Network Annual Conference,Active Enterprise Network,Collaboration,Conferences & Events,Real Estate Community
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At this year’s Active Enterprise Network Annual Conference, members had the opportunity to hear from Verizon’s Community Manager, Becky Carroll, on the power of collaboration. During her presentation, Becky focused on how a network can inspire ideas and create a sense of community with our customers. Taking this one step further, Becky helped set the stage for an in-depth discussion on how Enterprise Network members can build a stronger community not only with our customers, but with one another as well.

Following Becky’s presentation, members participated in an open forum discussing new ways to increase communication with other brokerages in The Network. Due to the market exclusivity among our members, the session allowed us to come together in a non-competitive environment to discuss ways to drive innovation forward through the sharing of technology, ideas, best practices and more.

The following video ended the conference and reinforced the power of The Active Enterprise Network. By encouraging innovation and giving each member the resources needed to do so, we can work together and still maintain our independence within a network – because together, we are stronger. Our buying power increases, our costs are reduced and our learning curve is exponential as we collaborate and evolve together. (more…)

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Conference Highlight: How Do You Feel About Syndication?

October 12, 2011

Filed under: 2011 Active Enterprise Network Annual Conference,Conferences & Events,Google,Syndication
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Our annual conference is over once again and as always, we had great participation from our members. One topic that always sparks a lot of conversation is syndication. We have been educating our members of the dangers of syndicating content to “black hat” outlets for more than a year now and have highlighted a couple of important points publicly from earlier this year that are worth reading. The first was when Google opted out of the real estate search market, and the second when Zillow and Yahoo announced  a new partnership.

Since then, while preparing for our conference, we reviewed the situation and found that our predictions are quickly becoming fact. While our 2010 conference focused on educating members on syndication issues, this is the year for taking action.

For those of you who don’t know me, let me start by explaining that I don’t believe there is a need, nor a place, for these syndication outlets in our market. A typical user starts their search on Google. Luckily Google no longer provides direct real estate searches. So the best thing that could happen to your brokerage is to have users searching for real estate in your market area find you at the top of Google, and become loyal visitors of your site as a result.

The reality, however, is quite different for most of us. Somehow, we have been convinced that we need extra exposure from these giant syndication sites. We give them our content, they take SEO authority over it by placing “no follow” links from that content to our sites, and they work on amassing more inbound links than us. The result? They end up ranking higher than us for our own content in Google. So now, rather than have traffic go straight from Google to us, we allow customers to familiarize themselves with another brand and real estate search system, hoping that maybe through these 3rd party sites we might get some of our customers back. Crazy right?

When looking into the data, we find more horrors. (more…)

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