Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

I have just returned from an amazing evening presentation by Chris Krimitsos the founder of  The Wealth Building Annex in Tampa and a leading expert in how to train business men to use Internet Marketing without becoming Internet Marketers full time.

The Wealth Building Annex meeting on social media strategy.

It was a private session for just a limited number of people and I have come back with the feeling that something has changed in my whole perspective of how the Web will play a key role in the future evolution of business. First I will quote a statement that was emphasized during the event: “70% of business comes from referral”, which means it comes from word of mouth by your existing or previous customers.

Social media makes it easier for the word of mouth to spread, but the real connection happens between real people who have been involved in real business. Gone is the time (or soon gone) where you just use some technology trick or technique to gather always new potential customers and then leaving them behind to find some more (high churn based on ample availability of leads with little competition).

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Time for another story and I will borrow the words taken from “The Art of Money Getting” by P.T. Barnum where he teaches that the 16^th golden rule on how to make a fortune is to create a message that stands out, that surprises and entices people, and maybe orders them to do the opposite of what you want them to do. In this particular instance, the sentence: “Don’t read the other side” was written on a swing sign attracting people to a store.

But the real story is about “Genin, the hatter” a character who bought at an auction the first ticket to the play of a famous opera singer and paid a ridiculous amount of money for it. The news of the outrageous bid traveled throughout the nation transforming “Genin, the hatter” in a star overnight and people would turn their hat to check if it had been manufactured by him and his brand became renown by just this trick, increasing tremendously his sales.

This story fits perfectly with the experience I had today in participating to an afternoon seminar on balancing online and offline marketing held by The Wealth Building Annex in Tampa and leading business consultant Mark Katz.

Some of the key concepts I brought home from this intensive experience have been: you need to market to a need by ensuring an attractive market position for yourself, and there must be a specific emotion, event or need that is a catalyst for your business. In the example of “Genin, the hatter”, he definitely marketed to a need: people used hats extensively at those times, and he has secured for himself an attractive position by leveraging the desire of people of being appreciated or noticed, to win over the establishment. He had in fact won the bid against thousands of people from the Fifth avenue who knew nothing about him.

He had become a star overnight and a some of the emotion connected to this event could transfer to those who had bought his hat. And since he had a good quality product he kept selling from there on out. He had “sold” himself and his company first to the “influencers”, namely the press and the high society, and then these influencers promoted him to his real clients, completing the circle.

Today the cycle is the same, but most of the influencers are now on social media and the Web would be a good channel for standing out.

Roberto Mazzoni

Yesterday I have started a new mastermind group that is an evolution of the mastermind activity already conducted by The Wealth Building Annex in Tampa. What is a mastermind first of all? Well, it is a place where you go and meet people who are trying to achieve something different in their working life and share their experiences and necessities with others so to obtain and give help under a facilitator that makes sure that no time is wasted and that every meeting has a productive outcome.

Well maybe some of you already belong to one so “what is the big deal” here? The deal here is to create a whole new model of high end mastermind that will then be used elsewhere. Having this purpose alone will make it so much more powerful.

The official objective anyway is to iron out business strategies and to enable a faster growth leveraging to experince of Mark Katz, the facilitator who has a substantial background in business development in the US. Joining this smaller elite mastermind inside TWBA has also changed my status in the organization, bringing me to “governor” level which means I will now be able to have a deeper insight into the evolution strategy of what I consider the most advanced mastermind organization in the whole nation.
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