Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

You can’t be successful anywhere unless you feel at ease where you are and doing what you do. It is all right stepping out of the comfort zone in order to achieve some change or some important progress in your life, but you should still be able to find a new comfort zone after the change is accomplished otherwise the results won’t be stable.

This at least has been my experience and also what I have observed of several people around me. When you feel uncomfortable in a particular location or place, you will not accomplish much and you will definitely not build for the future. Everything will have the tendency to be makeshift or temporary and even the people you’ll meet or that you will partner with will not stick with you.
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You will attract the things and people that best suite your attitude, so this will further develop your feeling of not belonging in that place. But there are a few tools that I found helped me a lot in feeling at home even when I arrived here in the US, a totally new place for me. I used the Web to keep in contact with people that still live in my own town and country of origin, while developing local contacts as well and crossing them together. So my US friend have known my Italian friends and viceveras, both online and in person and therefore there a new wider community at play.

Facebook is a great tool for this and you can bring a nice portion of “your world” with you, wherever you go, your personal world. Skype is another perfect tool that I found extremely effective to keep business contacts all over the world. The team we have created with my business associate Daniele has people in Italy, US, Brazil, Philippines and Hungary, and more countries will soon be added.

We are developing business activities that put together people from several different places so that we all feel part of a team even though we are not close together. In this fashion I could be working in Florida, Alaska or China for that matter, and the team would still be the same and I would feel at home anyhow.

I am also using the web to show and explain what I am doing to people that are far away so that they are informed and attracted to the point that they are willing to spend their time and money to come and visit me and therefore share even further. Tighter relationships are created in this way that merge online and offline.

The meeting person to person are short and very intense, since we know that we don’t have too much time to spend before they go back, and then we deepen and strengthen the relationship by communicating online.

This wasn’t possible before Web 2.0 and I am amazed to find out that now my friends and associates in Italy know much more about what I am doing in the US then when I was in Italy much closer to them. The necessity of using Web 2.0 as the key medium is paying back by giving an incredible amplification to my “voice”.

In this adventure, I have been very fortunate to my family with me. My wife Maria and my twin kids Alex and Stefano have shared every minute of these first 15 months in the US and have been very supportive. We have built a little portion of Italy in hour new house in Florida, while striving to understand more of the surrounding culture and mixing with it.

And we have realized that, despite some apparent similarities, the European culture is widely different from the North American one. One is easily mislead by the fact that we do shopping in a similar way and we watch the same type of movies, but that is about it. The way we conduct our families, our relationships and our business are very, very different. There is much to learn on both sides and we fully enjoy the chance of being the “melting pot”.

Roberto Mazzoni