By Sherry Heyl, CEO
James Lee is a residential and commercial builder in South Florida -
He is also my big brother...
As we have all been hearing on the news, the real estate market is not what it used to be. People are not knocking doors down looking for someone to build them a new house. The market still exist, but now more than ever it is important that the right builders get in front of the right people at the right time. Good thing James has a sister that knows a thing or two about social networking.
This weekend we began a social media strategy for James A Lee Builders.
Goals -
1. Learn about market trends - What is important to people? Green, Sustainability, Climate, Weather, Job Market...
2. Networking - Who are the motivated buyers or investors? Which ones are interested in South Florida, and why? It is important to realize that the people that James needs to meet are most likely not in his neighborhood going to networking lunches. They are in Canada, Europe, Kansas...
3. Make yourself known - James is very knowledgeable. Perhaps the smartest person I know. He is also very passionate about what he does. He has been building things since the beginning of time. In fact he built my first car for me. He is also a pretty nice guy who is easy to work with. These are things his current website does not let people know.
Current Marketing Efforts -
As I mentioned James has a website. However besides not telling his story, it is not optimized at all. He was recently approached by someone who offered to optimize the site for a bit of money.
James has a Realtor who is also a friend of his. She is working to sell his houses, but she also has other listings she needs to focus on.
James is listed on a few directories such as Realtor.com - along with everyone else trying to sell or build a house.
So with so many houses on the market and so many builders looking for attention, how can James stand out above the rest?
Social Media Solutions -
Blog
This weekend I worked with James on setting up a blog which will tell his story, highlight his expertise, reveal the passion in what he is building, and be optimized naturally.
James will write about how he grew up in FL and all the reasons he has stayed in FL all these years. I told him it should be simple to come up with content, because he is always trying to convince me to move back home.
He will write about why he is a builder and his passion around building. He started working with a friend building houses when he was a teenager.
I told him it was important that he shows people that he is also a husband, father, son, retired police officer and veteran. People want to do business with real people.
Tags
Since James was literally thrown in to the world of social media in less than two days, it was important that we developed a tagging strategy to start with. Tags are ways to categorize content. Almost all social media platforms have ways to tag content and typically it is up to the user to make up whatever tags they feel are appropriate. I learned from my own experiences the importance of creating a master list to start with and then you can expand your list of tags from there.
His master list is:
Commercial
For Sale
Housing Market
Pt St Lucie
Remodeled
Remodeling
Under Construction
West Palm Beach
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is my favorite way to surf the Internet to find information. Why? Because the surfing is done automatically and the results are delivered in the inbox.
We set up the following alerts to find information about the market as well as to find online networks that James needs to be a part of.
Home builders
Housing Market
Port Saint Lucie Homes
Real estate
Real estate investing
Shopping for homes
West palm beach acreage
Bloglines
When James finds a blog or a community or even a publication that he wants to follow on a consistent basis, all he needs to do is subscribe to the feed and have it delivered to his bloglines account. He does not have to visit the site to see if it has been updated - the updates are delivered to him.
Del.icio.us
Once I set up James' Del.icio.us account I searched for content related to home builders. I populated his account with information that was of value. From there we can follow the links and check into other's accounts to see what home builders are paying attention to and in what online communities they are hanging out in.
Eventually, as James begins to build his own del.icio.us network, he will create a loyal following by sharing relevant and important information to that network.
Flickr
It is a known fact that people make buying decisions for emotional reasons more than logical reasons. Floor plans are logical, pictures are emotional. Especially pictures with stories. Flickr is a social network based around sharing pictures and the stories behind those pictures.
Not only can we store and sort the pictures of the houses that James is building or remodeling in his Flickr account, he can tell a bit of the story behind that picture as well as connect with relevant groups that share his passion.
Social Networks
Over the next few weeks James and I will be exploring niche social networks. However, to get him started we created profiles in some of the main sites.
James has a LinkedIn profile. This has already allowed him to find people that he wants to connect with. Once he encourages his network to join and they encourage their network, he will have a visual path to ways to get to know the people he wants to know.
I also set James up on MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog is a way to see who is paying attention to your site and to let others know you are paying attention to them. It is a big giant networking event that is ever so subtle. I have received more hits to my site from MyBlogLog than any other community I am involved with.
Finally I set James up on Twitter. He is ALWAYS on the move, and he is always connecting with various people working on various projects. Why not put that "out there" for others to get an inside look at what it takes to build their home. It is a way to take the conversations that are happening anyway and turn them in to a type of marketing communications.
I gave James a lot to digest in a short amount of time and I am sure it will take us some time to build up his network and content. However, after one twitter message from me where I let my network know I was working on his social media strategy his site received 20 hits in the first hour. Everyone reading this post now knows James, and by the end of the week he will most likely have more than doubled his network connections and therefore his opportunities to do more good business.
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