“Is your employee Internet use policy out of date?” asks a spam message advertising a pricey audio conference. “E-mail, Facebook, blogs and Twitter have become the biggest workplace distraction. Should you limit employee access?”
The strangely archaic warning is at odds with the way people actually use the Internet today: for personal and professional reasons, often at the same time. Consider the realm of residential real estate.
Realtor Pat Wattam has a lot of Web sites. She maintains several blogs, a personal site, a business site, a Facebook fan page, a podcast page and a weekly market analysis sign-up.
She is active on LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, although her video channel gets more attention for snippets that Wattam shot of Baton Rouge’s December snow or her physical therapy for a broken elbow. Those personal subjects drew comments from as far away as New York and Singapore and more than 1,000 views each.
“Then I post a nice real estate tip and get 50 hits,” she says.
As social networking has swept through everyday Internet life, it blurs the line between work and play yet also enables cheap, instant and organic-seeming ways to promote all sorts of business.
“Social networking is just like networking in person,” says Wattam, who works for RE/MAX First. “Going to a party, you don’t just say, ‘Oh, I do real estate, here’s a house for sale.’ It’s really about creating relationships with people, and then what you do comes up. It’s not the hard sell the whole time.”
She moderated a panel over the summer at a “Star Power” conference in Denver on using online networks to build an audience of prospective buyers, share listings with other agents, optimize Web sites for search engine hits and personalize the business. She was as busy taking notes as she was running the panel.
“It’s the viral marketing we’re trying to tap into,” she says. “In social networking, they want to know who you are.”
That means Wattam, a tennis player, doesn’t just toss jibes back and forth with her opponents online. She also talks real estate, encouraging people to check out her listings and sometimes getting spontaneous sales queries from Web acquaintances or friends of friends.
Real estate investor Richard McCray launched a Meetup.com group last year called the Baton Rouge Real Estate Investor Network Group. He says involvement hit a plateau with the market’s troubles in the past year, but interest looks to be on the rise again with several new signups.
The RING lets its 70 or so members network online and coordinates in-person gatherings about once a month where agents, investors and neophytes share ideas and even put deals together.
McCray says at one meeting, a member brought a guest who had a pending foreclosure to resolve in Baton Rouge and needed help. Another member took interest in the property, and the group worked out a short-sell deal where the bank would get part of the loan back, the homeowner avoided foreclosure and a new owner got a now-rehabbed home at a discount.
“We put together a chain reaction of people,” McCray says. “We all made a profit on that.”
He says he got the idea for his group from a colleague who assembled a similar Meetup in Arlington, Texas. Later, McCray joined such a group in Houston that had about 800 members. When he didn’t find a local version, though, he started his own.
“It’s a good way to network and let people know what you do. I keep the message out there,” he says. “Real estate just went through a really hard year. A lot of people were discouraged. Now that the economy is showing some signs of recovery … the momentum will grow quicker.”
Matt Noel, a Realtor with Coldwell Banker One who originally is from Donaldsonville, says he loves integrating his personal life and his business pursuits online, particularly through Facebook.
“It’s allowed me just to connect with people I probably wouldn’t have talked to for the rest of my life, old friends, students and so on,” he says. “It’s also just an efficient way to remind people what I do. I put my listings up there, and instantly it’s on the Facebook home page of everybody I’m connected with, which is close to a thousand people in the various circles of my life.”
He says whereas people once looked to paper listings for homes, now they almost exclusively look online for properties. Because advertising by social networking costs nothing, the economics are a no-brainer for both parties.
A few times, he says prospective buyers have contacted him about a property that in the end didn’t suit their needs—but Noel represented them on a later sale.
He also trades listings with other brokers, enabling them to split the commission but broadening their client reach and offerings geographically. While the Multiple Listing Service offers the same concept within membership groups, casual Web networking that fuses social and commercial life can offer an exponentially vaster universe of prospects.
“When I post a listing, it goes into the Facebook Marketplace, to people outside my network,” Noel says. “This is just so easy.”
Wattam says one of her lesser-known Web resources is EyeJot.com, a kind of video e-mail that lets her post personal greetings to clients and prospects on an electric-Mardi Gras-colored page.
Another is AnnounceMyMove.com, which lets agents contact their clients’ friends and associates and to hunt for sales prospects without looking like spammers.
“It’s like the world’s become smaller,” Wattam says. “The younger people aren’t e-mailing us, they’re Facebooking us; normally I would send a private message. It’s all out there in the open.”
