Marshal McLuhan is often attributed with the phrase “Perception is Reality”. Never have truer words been spoken, particularly in today’s web driven world. McLuhan is also credited with this, an excerpt from “The Gutenberg Galaxy”, written in 1962:
The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.
Obviously, McLuhan had a pretty good handle on the future of media and information in digital form; his prediction was 30 years ahead of it’s time. Social media is nothing more than the latest frontier, led by the exploratory flagship Facebook.
There’s a mistake that’s being made by practitioners such as you and I, and that mistake is assuming the direct connection between client and service provider is really a 2-way street. Agents who figure this out before their competition are going to find themselves as the top agents in their local markets, while others grumble about how it’s being done.
Why It Won’t Be Truly Social
Let’s look at the social media campaigns of other businesses. Ford Motor Company now spends 25% of it’s advertising budget on social media. At no point is a tweet to @ford going to Alan Mulally, nor is the consumer expecting such. Twitter and Facebook fan pages are a communication platform between client and company rep, but at it’s core it’s no different than the old chat boxes on a company website. The same holds true for real estate.
If you can grow your business through social media (and you should), that’s great. Bear in mind, however that social media should be treated no differently than the old direct mailers and flier boxes on properties. As an agent’s business grows, they hire someone else to worry about that sort of thing.
Hiring Makes Sense
Look at the business models of top producing agents. For an agent that sells 100+ homes per year, they require supplemental staff in order to make that sort of business volume sustainable. Additional agents to show properties, administrative staff to process contracts, etc. They’ve developed a highly refined method of sales, and it involves human capitol in order to make it all run smoothly. For agents running that sort of business, it’s only logical for them to hire an additional position to develop and manage a social media campaign, allowing someone to dedicate themselves to developing blogs, fan pages, videos, twitter feeds, etc.
Perception is Reality
At the end of the day it doesn’t matter if you are the one directly engaging with the client through the web. What matters is the perception of personal service. People don’t want to talk to robots, unless they’re cool ones, like C-3PO. Odds are that he’s out of the budget, so real people are the next best thing.
The point here is that you DON’T need to create it all, or even run it all, but you do need SOMEBODY who can do it for you. I don’t hold out much hope for companies that offer to write your status updates instead of you, but the cost of a web savvy college student or intern is an attractive proposition. Best of all, if they work out, you should be able to eventually hire them on full time. As long as there is a real person on your side of the media platform, directly communicating on your behalf, you can effectively execute a robust social media campaign.
Why Solo Agents Find This So Hard
For a solo agent, there are only so many hours in a day, and the learning curve for social media can be steep. There’s also a deep sense of self-satisfaction involved, along with a common assumption that if you don’t do it yourself, it’s not really social. The challenge for these agents is to understand that there is no shame (or glory) in having someone else run a campaign. It’s no different than paying a company for property flyer designs, website layouts, or business card templates.
It can be hard to make the decision to let someone else handle your campaign, I completely understand that. That being said, if you’re finding success through social media, you MUST remember that our business is selling homes, not chatting online. We (should be) using these fan pages, feeds, and videos to generate business, but don’t get wrapped up spending all of your time on marketing rather than selling. Social media is not a sacred cow, just a golden goose. Be prepared to hire a caretaker as your business expands, or you’re going to quickly find yourself once again spinning your wheels with not enough time in the day to keep up.
(photo courtesy of intersectionconsulting via flickr cc)
