I had an opportunity to speak to a crowd of about 250 at the Graduate Center for the City University of NY yesterday morning for the Business Development Institute\'s conference on Social Media and the Enterprise. Specifically, how CENTURY 21 is adopting social media as a core marketing strategy.
1. Century 21 Real Estate LLCSocial Convergence & The Enterprise July 21, 2010
2. @mattgentile– CENTURY 21® Matt Gentile directs public relations and social media content strategy for CENTURY 21®Real Estate, the world’s largest residential real estate sales organization. In this role, he promotes approximately 7,700 independently owned and operated franchised brokerage offices and 117,000 sales associates in 68 countries and territories worldwide.
3. Today’s Agenda Why SM is Important Audience Content Integration Measurement Takeaways
5. Why SM is Important: 10 Stages of SM Business Integration* Good things take time *Brian Solis - http://mashable.com/2010/01/11/social-media-integration/
8. 8 Audience: Getting to Know You Audiences don’t want interruption—they want conversation What’s the target’s online behavior? What activities do they most enjoy? What media do they consume? Where do they like to “hang out?” What communities do they prefer? How do they go about finding information? Who do they trust for guidance, advice, and support? What has proven successful? Identify with your target’s pre-existing online habits Integrate paid media and PR tactics into the brand’s social strategy
12. Integration: Speaking Multiple SM Languages Conversation content strategy matters most Create a mix of content informative, interesting, & entertaining content Develop a calendar Share content from press, influencers, bloggers, researchers Leverage across all properties Solicit feedback from the community Shameless Plug: Like Us Today - http://www.facebook.com/century21
15. Integration: YouTube Regularly update with content and publicity Integrate into other platforms: Blog, Facebook, Twitter Curate and favorite fan and media videos and leave comments that link back to your content Interact: be proactive in cultivating subscribers
16. Integration: Twitter Twitter can promote a brand’s other social properties via cross-linking Design conversation strategy One or more feeds? Customer service? Engage consumers directly and re-tweet influencers Follow along with the #’s and streams
As you can see from this slide, chances are that even if Facebook and Twitter are not the right social platforms for your business. There is a community that can help you drive your business objectives.Choosing the Right Platform This is not a one size fits all medium. In social media, you must recognize that everyone has different preferences and tastes. We noticed that every time we posted about a celebrities home, we received additional activity. When we identify behaviors, we establish the policy / strategy that we are moving forward with. Connect the dots…think of a wheel with a hub and spoke approach where you have a centralized content center that branches out with a customized voice for each message platform to maximize the reach of your message. Multipliers – Trying to extend your message outward to maximize impact. Selecting the right content, pushing to key influencers who may repurpose and repackage that content to drive your message. A content catalyst. You may have a great deal to say, but if noone is interacting with you, what is the point. The object of a Web site was to push content, the object of social media is to enable an environment where content is shared.
Observe and Report (Listen and Learn)Setting the Stage and Dress Rehearsal (Creating multiple presences on various platforms)Socializing Media (Joining the Conversation) This may take the form of engaging with consumers about likes and dislikes or addressing concerns and issues.Finding a voice and a sense of purpose. You don’t have to be everywhere in order to create presence, just in the places where you would be missed. Understanding that the social web is far more extensive than Twitter, blogs, and Facebook, brand managers search across the entire web to locate where influential dialogue transpires. Relevance: “Chatter” or aimless broadcasting is not as effective as strategic communications and engagement. Turning Words into Actons:The shift from simple response to purposeful, strategic communication will be mutually beneficial. It is in this stage that we can truly produce captivating content and messages. In order to hold it, we have to give the audience something to believe in — something that moves them.
Develop a Social Media StrategyAs the world’s largest real estate franchise sales organization, we have over 7,700 offices and approximately 117,000 sales professionals around the world. So, the challenges and opportunities are great for our brand. 6. Humanizing the Brand – The one thing that I’ve learned over the past five years is that my efforts are much more effective if I can generate a conversation between one of our sales professionals and a consumer than it is if I push a message.Community – I’ve been with CENTURY 21 now for nearly 2 years and since that time, we have come a long way in defining what it means to establish a community. At first it was about trying to take advantage of the size of our System by developing uniform standards and corporate programs, but as CENTURY 21 works its way through these stages, we have come to realize that the community is really about connecting with you and enabling an environment where our agents can connect with you the consumer more directly.8Social Darwinism - In order to truly compete for the future, artful listening, community building, and advocacy must align with an organization’s ability to adapt and improve its products, services, and policies9. The Socialization of Business Processes - the assembly or adaptation of infrastructure is required to streamline and manage social workflow.10.Business Performance Metrics – Understanding how our efforts impact ROI and constantly refining processes.
Forrester developed the “Social Technographics Ladder” which segments the types of social media users. It is important to decide who you are targeting. From Century 21’s persective, we are looking to attract Spectators, Joiners and Critics. Long term, our goal is to work with some collectors and creators. Ultimately, our brand as the most well recognized real estate brand, produces a significant amount of content…
Conversation StrategyCreative ExecutionFacebook TabContextbit.ly (c21.in) drives SEO (Social GPS)Allows agents to spread links to properties easily (and track them)
The rise of Facebook has been extraordinary over the past two years. In March Facebook become the most popular website in the United States for the first time. The demographic targeting capabilities of Facebook have enabled us to grow our target audience and move “find our voice” if you will among the consumer.When we started to develop our strategy, we didn’t immediately see Facebook becoming a centerpiece for Century 21 social media content the way it has, but I’m sure glad we took the steps that we did at the time. In addition to including tabs for Twitter, YouTube and soon to be “Careers” which is really an interface for our recruiting presence on Linkedin, we have also developed a Buyer / Seller Tab that enables consumers to interact with functionality that exists on our .com directly through our Facebook buyer and seller tab.Facebook enables account administrators to view impression counts so from a corporate perspective, I now have what I refer to as an impressions engine that I can track and report. In addition to automated tools to count impressions for Twitter, I am starting to develop a more robust reporting capability now that provides clearly defined metrics. You know the goal at the beginning of the year for me for social media was to be able to impact not only brand preference goals, but also to directly impact business goals by developing a system that could track leads via our social media efforts. I’m proud to report that Facebook just hit the top 10 referring sites into Century21.com, something I’m very proud of.