Allow me to start by acknowledging that the goals of Franchise organizations are not necessarily the goals of their individual franchisees.

The primary job of the Franchisor is to sell franchises, though supplying tools and systems to their franchisees is also an important goal. The primary goals of the franchisees  differ since they are all centered around their own  specific operations and the things that provide the greatest benefits to their businesses and their owners.

I saw a tweet by Chris Kieff that the Social Media Manager at Coldwell banker had responded to his Post “Oops!You Wanted a Full Answer to That Question?”, and being the Realogy franchisee that I am (in my role as CEO of CENTURY 21 Advantage Gold), my curiosity was piqued, so I headed over to check out the post and the response.

It seems that Chris Brogan had tweeted something about the new Coldwell Banker website, and Chris (Kieff)  had visited it , only to find that CB corporate’s national website only includes listings from Coldwell Banker franchisees. Kieff makes the point that this might disappoint consumers who visit the site, making them less than well disposed to the franchise. There is a whole argument here about the whether the Franchisor should be competing with their local franchisees for the limited number of eyes looking for real property, but that’s another post, so I will digress no further.

The post speaks for itself – Chris Kieff is an articulate guy who can (and does) make his own argument. And in response to the argument, something entirely new popped up for me.

The Social Media Manager for Coldwell banker, a guy named David Marine, responded to the post  in part, by saying;

We do allow consumers to see all the IDX listings in the area they search by promoting an IDX link on our results page, but this takes them to a local site of one of our Coldwell Banker affiliates and abides by the MLS display rules for that area. You’ll notice that these sites don’t have a number of the features that our site offers like video, social sharing, ability to save properties using our Home File product, etc.

Excuse me? Did he really just say :

You’ll notice that these sites don’t have a number of the features that our site offers like video, social sharing, ability to save properties using our Home File product, etc

Sort of like saying -

You’ll notice that our broker’s sites are really second rate propositions that don’t have the features  our corporate site has so we think consumers will be OK with our limited property data set etc.

I understand the need to respond to the post which placed the Coldwell Banker Corporate site in a critical light. And I think  the point they made about the various IDX feeds around the country was  important in helping people to understand their strategy, though other national franchises felt differently and have met the challenge of providing more information to  the consumer.

But where the David makes a huge faux pass is when he denigrates the sites of the brokers that make up the Coldwell Banker system. In its core, the value proposition of any franchise must include a commitment to the reputations of the participants in their system – and that is the big #Fail in this interaction. In fact, the question to me becomes “If Coldwell Banker thinks such features are valuable to their consumers (and therefore their franchisees), why have they not equipped their brokers with those systems?”

I don’t know David Marine, and I have no feelings about him pro or con, nor do I have any negative feelings towards the Coldwell Banker Brand. You probably know that I am the CEO of CENTURY 21 Advantage Gold, and therefore have my own franchisor/franchisee stories. In fact, Mr. Marine  and Coldwell Banker get points in my humble opinion for reputation monitoring, and attempting reputation management by engaging with a blogger who wrote about their brand. However I think there may be a cautionary tale here for all franchises in responding to mentions in the web 2.0 world. You can’t be sure who is reading your response and how it may affect the reader. Therefore  greater thought needs to be given to the content of the response,  and additional emphasis on protecting the reputation of the franchisee and the value of the franchise tools provided to them while defending the corporate decision.

In other words guys – Don’t throw your brokers under the bus to make the brand strategy look better – in fact, don’t even look like you might be throwing them under the bus – its not going to be good for franchise sales.

Just had the pleasure of teaching the Social Media Marketing Institute (SMMI) CSM course in Portland Maine, with the wonderful Amy Chorew,

The first day of the class was held at the Portland Board of REALTORS, a lovely facility close to the Portland International Jetport, and the room was packed with  REALTORS anxious to learn about social media.

Last nigth Amy and I had dinner at Fore Street , before going for a quick walk down to the waterfront to enjoy Portland’s Old Town at night. The food was wonderful, and the class recommendation of the restaurant was totally validated.

Today the class moved to the Art Gary School of Real Estate in Westbrook Maine, a short distance away, and the class is being shown the tools of bloggin with Wordpress.

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I travel more than most people, but I am always in touch with my office, working on property assignments and valuations, communicating with my offices, and generally needing to access files from multiple computers. It becomes even more complicated because I work on both PC and Mac platforms.

Even if you don’t travel as much as I do, or work with multiple platforms, you probably still need to access photos or flyers, or other files from remote locations. Perhaps you started work on a document in the office on a desktop, and now need to complete it or send it from your home computer. Or perhaps you use  a desktop at work, a desktop at home, and a laptop when you’re at Starbuck’s having that well deserved latte late in the day.  Or maybe you just got a new Ipad and need to access documents or presentations or photos you store on other devices. What ever the case is, it seems with the proliferation of  different devices in our lives, the need for remote solutions or “cloud based” solutions seems greater and greater.

I’ve used both  GoToMyPC, and LogMeIn , and found them to be decent work arounds when I am not near the computer where my files were stored. However if there is a challenge with the speed of the internet connection at either locations, the experience can sometimes be more of an issue.

Using the internet for storage then seems to be a decent solution so you can work across platforms (PC or MAC) just through the expedient of storing the documents on  Google docs and then allowing collaboration or download to different devices as needed. I like Google docs (in fact the whole Google suite of products are great tools) but you can experience some formatting issues if you start a document in a program like word or power point and then try to work through it on Google docs.

Recently I started working with dropbox and so far I’m liking the experience.. When you open a dropbox account, a file is downloaded on to however many computers you use. You can drag and drop files to that folder and the folders on all of your computers are automatically synchronized. For MAC users, another program called Growler actually notifies you when files are added to your folder.

A free dropbox account allows you to store 2 Gigabytes of files and the upgrades seem pretty inexpensive (if the solution works for you) at $9.9.5 a month for 50 Gigabytes of remote storage (the ultimate dropbox.com account costs $19.95 a month and allows 100 Gigabytes of storage). For me the benefit is multiplied because I can share photo files not only from computer to computer (when I’m not using my eye-fi card to upload directly to flickr) but with my assistant who can then use them in our marketing without creating zip files and emailing from place to place. In addition, having a central repository for files avoids the “Where did I store that?” problem that so many of us face.

I just listened to my friends Marc Davison and Teresa Boardman talk with Maya Paveza, Michael McClure & Todd Waller on their #RTB Radio Show at Blogtalkradio. They are smart, articulate, people and the chat room was filled with other really smart people  so it was a fun way to spend an hour.

If you’re not in real estate or active on Twitter you might not know that #RTB stands for “Raise The Bar”, a movement of sorts (or at least a discussion) about how the real estate industry needs to achieve a higher level of professionalism.

The conversation is sometimes interesting, and the participants engage in the conversation with great passion, but parts of it seem to me to be more “Durm und Strang ” (storm and stress) than actual suggestions to improve the industry.

We have people trotting out business truisms without really knowing if they make sense. Today one of them was ” real estate businesses don’t make money, the money is made in the affiliate relationships” (I believe I am paraphrasing, but pretty accurately). That’s just not smart business. If you are a large enough real estate  concern to have title , escrow, insurance or mortgage companies as part of your operation, each one needs to be profitable, or you would be better served by operating an affiliate and letting someone else lose money on the real estate company. Of course, if you are a smaller real estate firm, you may not be able to operate affiliate firms, so that logic would leave you with the option of just operating your real estate company without making a profit – a lousy option at best.  The  person who made the statement is a friend of mine and a smart professional person- which doesn’t mean that they cannot fall in to the trap of relying on “common knowledge”.

Though I believe that the open exchange of ideas between professionals can lead us to some very interesting places -  we need to get there because we know what we’re talking about, or at least admit when we’re postulating or theorizing. In the #RTB conversation, many people talk about stuff they have no experience with, and therefore have limited understanding of – and that’s a problem.

An agent really can’t speak about running a real estate brokerage until they have opened one, run it, and know what makes it tick. To me its like coaches who talk about how to sell real estate even though they’ve never done it. And Brokers fall into similar traps when they talk about agents. To be accurate they need to put aside their business models and prejudices, not be self-serving, and remember what it was like to do that job.  In other words, if we’re going to have this conversation, let’s put aside “what we think” in favor of “what we know” and  develop opinions based on fact rather than pre-judgement?

The concept of  raising the bar in the real estate industry isn’t remotely new. The National Association of REALTORS was created for just that reason in 1908 and our code of ethics , adopted in 1913 pre-dates  all of the real estate licensing laws in the U.S. Now that’s an example of raising the bar in an industry.  But that was a long term commitment based upon a desire to improve with a willingness to be held accountable through this new organization. This conversation doesn’t rise to that level at all. Don’t get me wrong, there are some very smart, passionate, well intentioned  people talking about this, but in a very fragmented and disordered manner. As I read some tweets today about “thinning the herd” it struck me that the conversation was much more about “look what a poor job the other guy is doing” rather than  “how can I do my job better?”.

Look, I’m all in favor of raising the bar – but I think we have to start by raising our own bars, not talking about how others need to raise theirs.  Too often it seems we’re just talking about the agent or company that made us mad, or the broker that didn’t appreciate us or pay us enough. None of that is productive – whining never is. So if you’re a real estate agent,  recognize that your broker is not there just to facilitate increases in your income, they are running a business and entitled to try to be profitable. If you don’t like the way your broker runs the company, go and try to have a frank talk with them first, and if that fails go open your own company. If you’re a broker and you don’t think your agents appreciate your efforts or waste the resources you provide them with , or don’t  work hard enough, you have a few options. Change your company culture, hire new agents, or manage the agents you have in a more productive manner. But always remember that the relationship between broker and agent should be symbiotic not parasitic and that we each need to value our team mates and work had to be a valued member of their teams.

So if you want to raise the bar for the industry, its easy. NAR and your state and local associations are working on that every day. Contact them and volunteer. You might be surprised to find out how many other people have been working on that bar while you were talking. But I have to admit, there is part of me that really enjoys the #RTB discussion, and perhaps you think the bar should be raised some other way. So tell me,  how you think the bar should be raised in the real estate industry?

Image by reeltor99 via Flickr

I wrote a post recently at AgentGenius about the need to write, even when you are afraid that you are not writing “War & Peace”. Today, in checking my recent posting history I recognized how much I’ve ignored this poor little blog.

Its actually pretty ironic since this is the place I wanted to write about the real estate industry and trends that affect it. Social media is obviously one of those trends. I thought perhaps, it might be time to write a little about what I’ve learned about social media and what social media has done to and for me.

And today I’m teaching a group of people at a CSM class in Cincinnati that they can fit blogging into their lives as easily as I finish this little post. Hope they actually try to do that when they’re ready.

Image by concrete_jungler101 via Flickr

I was recently reading an interesting article;

The New York Times City Room Blog reports that that Rafael Martínez Alequin, Ralph E. Smith and David Wallis filed a federal lawsuit when each of them were denied credentials, even though all of them had such credentials in the past.

In the face of the lawsuit, the NYPD changed their minds and issued the three their press cards, anyway. This move gives other bloggers across the country hope for legitimacy in the eyes of government officials.

“This step recognizes that bloggers are 21st-century journalists,” Mr. Siegel, a noted civil liberties lawyer who has announced plans to run for public advocate next year, said in a phone interview. “It’s an important first step, but only a first step, because we still need to address the constitutional problem of who gets press credentials in New York City. The Police Department should not be in the business of determining who’s a journalist.”

Image via Wikipedia

I found this fascinating quote today:

There are basically two types of bloggers in the world – reporters and experts – and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).John Chow, Reporter vs Expert – Why Most Bloggers Are Stuck Reporting, Jan 2009

Most bloggers report facts or quote others because its easier to do that than it is to provide important expert information. That requires  expertise that is gained from education and experience, hopefully combined with the wisdom to apply both properly.

In the real estate business, we have tremendous expertise to share, and our business shows us that building relationships is the most important piece of building a succesful career.

The article goes on to say;

Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc… experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.John Chow, Reporter vs Expert – Why Most Bloggers Are Stuck Reporting, Jan 2009

  So when you choose to blog, or twitter, or interact on Facebook, weigh the different paths you might choose. Do you want to be a commercial effort in the middle of a social enviroment? Or will you build more business opportunities by demonstrating to the world what an expert you are, so that they will be pre-disposed to do business with you?

I’ve made my choice – Good Luck with yours!

transformational technology Originally uploaded by Will Lion

When we get involved in social media to build our businesses, often there is that last Century thinking behind the 21st Century technology. We try to determine who we are in a vacuum rather then seeing the world through the eyes of our consumer.

Some of it is inevitable. The prejudgements we make because we know that we come from a good place in trying to help the consumer, without acknowledging the lack of trust the might have because we assume the trust rather then earning it.

The first job of any salesperson is to find out what they can do to satisfy the needs perceived by the customer or client rather than the needs as perceived by the salesperson. And we need to use our Social skills in a technological setting to help the consumer know us by satisfying their need for information and direction even before we meet – Not how to build our database (that’s so 1990s)

risky digital

Originally uploaded by Will Lion

In a world where companies and agents all “know” that they need to have a “brand” to help the consumer differentiate them from other providers of the same products or services, what are you willing to do to build your brand?

Do you establish yourself as a technology expert? Do you provide in depth information on housing statistics? Are you creating a community on line by exchanging links with other businesses in your area? Are you handing out flyers in front of the Piggly Wiggly every Saturday? Are you really doing something different or do you just crave differentiation without taking the steps to actually be different?

Its hard sometimes to recognize that an idea that might be new to us may just be someone else’s old idea wrapped up in a new ribbon, or facilitated by a new technology. We blog today, we used to send out newsletters. We send e-flyers to other agents where we used to put flyers in the MLS book each week. We create extensive static websites displaying out listings, where we used to display them in the windows of our offices, or in Homes Magazines – but are we doing anything really different?

I would love to know how you put yourself on the line – What do you do that is really different from the other professionals in your marketplace? What was your epiphany about how you practice your trade?

consumer constructed brands

Originally uploaded by Will Lion

Every real estate agent and broker (probably including myself) at some time in their careers become a legend in their own mind, having found the best company name, or logo, or slogan, or “brand” identity to use.

The truth is, as the statement above indicates that the consumer decides what the positioning of your brand is , no matter how much we believe we shape their perception.

We are long past the days of the Mad Men of Stirling Cooper (AMC’s Emmy nominated show about the salad days of Madison Avenue) where advertising executives felt that when they wanted to know what the public’s opinion was they would tell them. Today’s consumer’s are too savvy and have too much information to be so easily manipulated.

So remember that our job is to respond to the consumer’s needs and desires, and fulfill their expectations, if you want to really have any impact on the consumers you wish to reach.