Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

The holiday season is upon us and the mind goes to this incredible year and the incredible challenges and opportunities that came with it. And I have a confession to make: once upon a time I was a well paid technical journalist, people would depend on my articles to know what was hot and what was not in the computer field. I even became editor in chief of a very successful monthly magazine, with testing labs, full time staff and all that.

And boy did that feel great. Readers would wait for the next issue to come out and they would write e-mail or letters inquiring about some subject and we would pick just the most “significant” and publish them with our answer (usually 1 out of 20 because of the limited space on the magazine). We also gave some e-mail answers but the magazine remained the center point of gravitation for the whole system.

And then the Internet came about and all of us journalists, along with the publishers and the advertising people, started reasoning how this would have changed our way of working. We figured out that people would come to our site in addition to our magazine and everything seemed familiar again. We were in control of the news and the publishing tools. We had control of the advertising so, we were still ruling. It was very expensive at that time (year 2000) to have a software to publish your articles on a site.

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I am almost 50 years old and I know very well how it feels when you have built a career leveraging a whole lifetime of work and connections: it feels comfortable and it feels like that’s he only way it cam be. I have been fortunate or unfortunate enough to have built my whole previous career on the computer industry and I have seen a whole market be born, grow exponentially and then fade away in little more than a decade. Some of you might know PC Magazine: it has been the reference reading for all computer professionals in the 90ties and I have launched its Italian edition back in 1991 bringing it to 110,000 paid readers and to 700 pages: the most successful international edition of PC Magazine the world over.

So I have had my heydays in publishing, but since the arrival of the Web I knew it was over and that the people were going to drop specialized magazines and go online: and so happened. Two years ago I was directing my last magazine. I had a biog office, a staff working with me and a nice paycheck paid by one of the top publishers in Italy.

Yet I knew it wasn’t going to be long before my comfortable position was going to be challenged by the death of the computer advertising market, that had been decreasing world wide. I couldn’t see myself doing anything else than directing computer magazines, but it looked like there weren’t going to be too many in the future and I was also a bit tired of it. My wife Maria started therefore a “campaign” to convince me that I was really an entrepreneur and that I was simply wasting my time. She did her best to convince me that I would have been at whatever I was going to do and I could trust her judgment: she has reached the highest levels in network marketing in Europe, developing a downline of over 10,000 people. So she knows people and how to motivate them.

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