9 Ways to Enhance Your Listings for Maximum Exposure

One of the biggest challenges that real estate agents face is marketing their listings to a wide audience. Some agents try their darndest to spread the word about new listings, price reductions, and featured properties, but no one responds. Nothing. Crickets. They don’t seem to take notice, or worse: they ignore an agent’s promotions altogether. In fact, the whole process can feel a little one-sided.

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A Case Study in Video Marketing: St. Michael’s College

I recently participated as a judge in a video contest for students at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. The rules for the contest, sponsored by the Admissions office, were straightforward: Create a 2-4 minute video that includes three or more reasons why you love St. Mike’s (at least one had to relate to academics), and post it on YouTube. You can imagine the array of reasons that resulted!

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Union Street Media Client Testimonial Video

One of the most rewarding aspects of working at Union Street Media is the clients’ appreciation of the work we do. When a client’s website performance increases, it is equally as rewarding to us as it is to them.

Recently we’ve compiled a video that highlights a few good words that some of our clients had to say about their experience with Union Street Media.

Client Testimonials for Union Street Media produced by Union Street Media

WellcomeMat is an excellent networking tool for realtors to share their listings, land, and other virtual tours. Video is an excellent way to engage customers and really showcase what you have available. If you’re a realtor, or simply a web surfer who likes awesome videos, you should check out WellcomeMat and sign up. This way you can browse and rate all of your favorite videos.

After you’ve signed up, check out all of Union Street Media’s videos and rate your favorites!

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Video is the New Photo – WellcomeMat Video App

Wellcomemat real estate video appI’ve been a fan of WellcomeMat for a while now for it’s effortless ease of use, attractive interface and the fact it’s a dedicated real estate platform for video. The latest offering from them is an iPhone app that allows you to post  geo-coded real estate videos to WellcomeMat, Twitter, Facebook, Posterous and YouTube for FREE.

The news was rolled out by their founder here and you can learn more about what WellcomeMat does here and even see a few of our in house offerings on our Union Street Media channel.

We would be interested to hear from anyone that has used this application and their thoughts on its effectiveness, however  the app is currently usable only on the iPhone 3G.

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Changing Media Landscape

I had an interesting phone call from a longtime client yesterday who decided to stop advertising in his local print real estate monthly for the next four months and will instead be engaging our report, recommend, revise process.  “RRR” helps our clients improve the search engine placement of their web site and generate more leads from the web.  This client understands the shifting media landscape and I was pleased to see him make his marketing investments accordingly.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8[/youtube]

The upcoming Media Convergence Conference in New York City, put on by The Economist, launched a video called Shift Happens, that helps put these changes in context.  They posted a fascinating video about the event here:

My favorite statistic: The average American teen sends 2272 text messages a month.

With numbers like that, and the often quoted 2008 NAR study that shows 87% of home buyers use the internet when making a purchase, I wonder how much longer people will continue to disproportionately spend money offline?

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Real Estate Videos Work for Brian Boardman, Burlington Vermont

Union Street Media presented at the Coldwell Banker Agent Real Estate Trends & Social Media Seminar on the 16th at the Ethan Allen Club in Burlington, Vermont. Our presentation focused on utilizing real estate videos.

The presentation went very well. We received a great deal of positive feedback from participants from all over the region. Our friend and client Brian Boardman, a REALTOR® here in Burlington, Vermont chimed in to talk  about how a particular listing video help him get one of his high-end properties under contract.  It was a fun, engaging conversation!

Please contact us if you attended the session and would like a copy of our notes (or if you couldn’t make it, and would like a copy of our notes).

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Adopting video at the right time

technology adoption lifecycle

Getting into the ‘early majority’ phase

In 1957 at Iowa State College Joe M. Bohlen and George M. Beal developed a simple analogy called the technology adoption lifecycle, which examined a way to look at when people adopt a new technology.

A more in depth explanation of this curve can be found here, but this is basically how it breaks down:

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The Value of Real Estate Video-Bios and Testimonials

_DSC00924Image by gamerscoreblog via Flickr

In a new era of ‘social’ media and more direct communication with buyers, it’s important to remember to be sociable without the appearances of a hard sell. Realtors are very much used to the meet-and-greet with prospective clients so a natural extension of this is to display these skills on the web.

When we here at Union Street Media talk to our Real Estate clients, we frequently hear that before the dominance of real estate websites they received many more direct calls from perspective clients. These days, they say, there are so many more barriers before that initial phone call happens. Many potential clients want to avoid the pressure of a face to face meeting and are more inclined to make contact via email and contact forms. In this sterile online environment, the opportunity for the broker to display his or her knowledge and personality is limited, thus reducing their direct impact on the buyer. In effect, there is so much more run-around before the broker and buyer actually meet and make a personal connection. This is where the video-bio comes in. If used correctly, the video bio can break down these communication barriers to get across the knowledge and personality that you just can’t achieve through email.

We are proud to present our own video bio for Brian Boardman here, which we produced in-house. Clearly comfortable in front of a camera, you get to see a more personable view of him and not just a slick advertisement.

What are the advantages to video bios?

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