Dara at RealtySupport.ca pointed out a new site they just launched for Toronto Realtor Stephen Levy. Its a great use of custom CSS to give Stephen the look he wanted, plus includes complete MLS listings from the Greater Toronto area. Take a moment to check out his new website.
Ubertor client Claude Choiselat does some interesting work with video on his site. Here is one of the videos below but take a moment to check out his site for a bunch more.
Next week I will be in New York speaking on a panel at the Inman News Connect Conference. The topic is “Build a World Class Agent Web Site“. It is going to be a great discussion with some great people. Our panel is moderated by Bernice Ross, who has over 250 articles to her credit, is one of real estate’s leading female speakers and writers. As CEO of RealEstateCoach.com, Bernice currently heads up the company’s coaching team and has assisted in creating training programs for Coldwell Banker, Keller Williams, Prudential Jon Douglas, and HomeGain. I was chatting with Bernice today about the upcoming panel and it sounds like it is going to be a lot of fun and full of great information.
The panel consists of:
* Brad Carroll, Founder & CEO, Dakno Real Estate Marketing
* Dan Green, Loan Officer, Mobium Mortgage
* Stephen Jagger, Co-Founder, Ubertor
* Daniel Rothamel, Realtor & Community Manager, Inman News
Are you going to Inman in New York? Come find me for a special promo code that you can use to start an Ubertor website.
CityTV has shut down RealtyTV as of January 2009. The shows producer Marni Wedin posted on the web about the cancellation the other day. My segment on social media will be re-aired as one of the last shows. It will be interesting to see if something gets created to fill the void.
Here is my segment on social media:
Normally I don’t write about competitors, but this is not a normal day. Here at Ubertor we push hard to be in the front of our competitors to ensure that we have the best product available to real estate agents. We work hard to source new technology, integrate it with our system and educate our clients on how to use it to grow their business.
One of our competitors, MyRealPage, has been emailing our clients with an offer to try and get our clients to move from our system to their system with the enticement of no contract and no setup fee – something we have never done; as we believe we must earn our clients business each month. This email has been forwarded to me by many of our clients. Normally, we just ignore these things and continue growing our business but in this case, our clients responded for us, so I thought I would post their responses here:
Thanks to Tim Ayres of Sooke and Ian Watt of Vancouver for their videos.
If any clients ever have any questions please feel free to contact us or myself directly as we would be pleased to help.
Today I had the pleasure of joining some of my friends on Twitter to a trip to the downtown eastside of Vancouver to give out coats and jackets to some of Vancouver’s homeless. My wife and I picked up Gillian Shaw of the Vancouver Sun and her daughter to meet with Janice Laing and Yam De La Pena – the organizers of the event. It was great to see about 12 people had gathered to make great use of a snowy Sunday. Here is Gillian Shaw’s recap of the event in the Vancouver Sun, plus some video and pictures from the day. It was a great day and a great idea. Thanks to everyone for coming out and thanks to Janice and Yam for thinking of it. (pictures from the event at the bottom)
From Gillian Shaw at the Vancouver Sun:
VANCOUVER – It started as a two-line message on the Internet and ended up mobilizing a small crowd that roamed Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in the snow Sunday handing out warm clothing to the homeless who live there.
In a snow-covered demonstration of the power of social media, users of the online micro-blogging site Twitter — some who didn’t know each other in real life — searched in closets for clothes to hand out in the freezing streets.
Yam De La Pena, known on Twitter as @tyamdm, said the idea grew from a tweet — a Twitter update that is limited to 140 characters — Saturday night.
He and Janice Laing, a Vancouver executive recruiter tweeting as @JaniceLaing started talking about having a tweetup, a real life meeting of people who Twitter.
“It started snowing so we decided to stay in and then there was the suggestion we should do a tweetup with a cause,†said De La Pena. “Janice came up with the name Vancouver TweetupHeatup and within five minutes all sorts of people started getting involved.â€
A few people promised to dig out a couple of warm sweaters and meet downtown at Cambie and East Pender but by mid-afternoon Sunday, people were hauling in garbage bags full of warm clothes.
“Everyone was going to bring a sweater or two and then they came with a lot of clothes,†said De La Pena. “It was awesome.
“We didn’t expect this turnout at all. The power of Twitter and social media is so impressive — you can reach out to people you don’t even know and do amazing things.â€
De La Pena said he expected maybe four or five people would brave the snow-covered streets to come out, bringing a handful of clothes. Instead there three times that many arrived with bags full of everything from winter coats to brand new socks and hats. Kye Grace, also one of the early organizers (@KyeGrace on Twitter) brought granola bars and chocolate to hand out.
The TweetupHeatup met at Cambie and Pender and headed east, stopped every few feet by people looking for warm clothes. Along the way Grace and another Twitter user David Watts (@davidnotary) ran into the Army & Navy store to buy more socks, gloves and hats to meet the demand.
“Here’s a coat,†said Steve Jagger, a Vancouver tech entrepreneur on Twitter as @sjagger, rooting around in the bottom of a bag to come up with something for a homeless man looking to warm up. “No, take this one instead, it’s a better fit and it’s cool.â€
De La Pena said he has already heard from people on Twitter who want to follow up with other Tweetups with a cause.
“We hope to be able to give out food next,†he said.
De La Pena said he also hopes the name VancouverTweetupHeatup on Twitter will inspire people in other cities to follow Vancouver’s lead in getting together to help the homeless.
Here are some of Gillian Shaw’s photos from the Vancouver Sun:
A resident of the Downtown Eastside tries on clothes donated by the TweetupHeatup.
Photograph by: Gillian Shaw/Vancouver Sun
Steve Jagger (right) chats with Downtown Dave.
Photograph by: Gillian Shaw/Vancouver Sun
Janice Laing (left) and Yam De La Pena helped out people in the Downtown Eastside by handing out clothes.
Photograph by: Gillian Shaw/Vancouver Sun
Sarah and Steve Jagger took part in the TweetupHeatup to hand out clothes to residents on the Downtown Eastside.
Photograph by: Gillian Shaw/Vancouver Sun
More of Gillian’s photos here
Are you thinking of designing your real estate website for 2009? Here are 2 websites that are still under construction but will be ready for 2009. Check out what these designers have done to the Ubertor real estate website software product.
I had the pleasure of joining Tom Everett on his famous internet show this morning to chat about 2008/2009 real estate markets. It was fun hanging out in the Garagio with ThinkTom.com himself.
Attn Realtors: What are you doing that is different? Where is your online tv show? What are you doing to gain the attention of potential clients? Now is the time to think outside the box and look to other tools to market your business. From blogging to Twitter to online video, there are lots of options. Feel free to email me directly if you want to chat about your plans for 2009 – sjagger at ubertor.com
I had the honor of being the feature of a Vancouver Courier story on the use of Twitter in the business world. Michael McCarthy wrote a great article about myself and 2 other Vancouver Twitter users. Here is the article that ran this weekend.
Twitter heads
If you aren’t twittering online, you’re falling behind, say perpetually connected people like Steve Jagger. Social media tools are radically changing the way we communicate.Michael Mccarthy,
Special to Vancouver Courier
Published: Friday, December 12, 2008Steve Jagger takes his usual seat by the window at the Raging Bean Café in Yaletown, turns off his iPhone and plugs in his Mac Powerbook to check his “tweets.”
The Bean is his home away from home; actually, anyplace with wireless Internet is his office. Jagger, like the room full of other people tweeting here at the Bean, is moving too fast for things like offices, meetings, employing staff or even email. Welcome to Twitter and the future of instant communication. If you think email is fast, dude, like you are sooo way behind. Real-time messaging is upon us in a big way, and the world will never be the same.
“The best way to explain Twitter is simply to show you,” says Jagger, typing a few words into his laptop. “I’ll tell people I am at the Bean talking to the Courier about a story on social networking and then watch what happens next.”
Bingo, within 15 seconds a series of replies–tweets–pop up on his screen. Some tweeters say hello, others suggest possible story angles. Reporter Gillian Shaw from the Vancouver Sun weighs in with a comment. A tweeter named Fuzzy Dave asks for a quick review of the café for his restaurant website, and Jagger replies with a few lines.
Within a minute the twittering is over, although if Jagger had asked a serious question requiring debate the conversation might roll on for days with dozens of people involved.
“I’ve got 228 people whose conversations I am following right now on Twitter,” says Jagger, checking his iPhone for instant messages and typing in a brief response, “and 427 people following my conversations. On a slow day I’ll post seven or eight tweets a day, and I may receive dozens. The other day I asked where I could get a fast haircut, and I got eight replies in eight minutes, from real people with real answers in real time.”
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (tweets), which are text-based posts up to 140 characters in length, or about one sentence long. Updates are displayed on the user’s Twitter profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends, or share with the public. Users can receive updates and responses via the Twitter website, RRS feeds, email or through an application such as Twitterfon or even on Facebook.
Founded in 2006 by a small podcasting company in San Francisco, Twitter began as an internal communication device for the company’s own employees, but rapidly spread and gained immense acceptance in the high tech community everywhere. Thanks to its repeated mentions on CNN during last month’s U.S. federal election, Twitter stands poised to become just as well-known and popular in the general public. According to the Financial Times, a few weeks ago social networking giant Facebook held acquisition talks with Twitter, with a buying price rumoured to start at $500 million. Twitter executives turned the deal down flat; it appears that a lot of people consider Twitter to be one of the most efficient communications tools ever created, and half a billion bucks isn’t enough to buy the model.
“If I update Twitter, it updates Facebook and my blog, and suddenly I have spoken to thousands of people,” says Jagger, reaching for his coffee. “I don’t use email much anymore and I think social media will largely replace email soon. Twitter is only 140 characters so you have to be short and succinct, and you can hold many more conversations. And it’s really fast.”
Twitter has enjoyed a 600 per cent increase in just 12 months, with more than six million users as of this month and millions more joining every week. Celebrities such as John Cleese, British actor Stephen Fry, tennis player Andy Murray and pop star Britney Spears are singing its praises.
Twitter was used extensively by Barack Obama throughout his presidential campaign to keep young, tech-savvy supporters fully appraised of rallies, debates, key policy discussions and ways in which they could get the vote out. It probably won’t be long before Twitter surpasses Facebook, last year’s social media phenomenon, which now boasts a global audience of more than 120 million users.
Aside from finding out where you can get a haircut in a hurry, what else can you chat about on Twitter? Jagger, 31, says the uses are endless for business, politics, the non-profit and fundraising worlds–and the general public of course. Formerly in advertising, he has built two businesses, a real estate company named Ubertor and a marketing company called Reachd.com, which teaches social media by using social media tools like Twitter. He now has thousands of real estate agents paying attention to his blog, business is up “a lot,” and Jagger has stopped using all other forms of marketing. His speaking engagements to various groups explaining how social media works have resulted in “about a 25 per cent increase in new business.”
His marketing strategies at Reachd–taught weekly at a local Irish pub in Yaletown–are “packed” with company executives trying to learn about social media tools as fast as possible.
Aside from twittering, Jagger films himself on other social media tools such as his Pure Digital Flip Video camera ($150, but free with his seminars) giving updates and reviews. He then posts those short video clips on his blog, then alerts followers to these video updates using Twitter. His entire office is comprised of his iPhone, Flip camera and laptop, which means he has few staff or expenses or meetings to slow him down. He’s too busy making money to hold meetings.
It’s the staff meetings and actual (versus virtual) offices–and the old school model of big business where events move so ponderously–that Jagger warns will leave many behind when real time communication takes over. For instance, he’s just back from a training session with reporters in the newsroom of the Vancouver Sun, and shakes his head at the negative reaction he received from older reporters who think that desktop computers, cubicles with filing cabinets, meeting rooms, the Internet, voice mail and a nice desk with a view of the waterfront comprise the state of the art in modern media.
“Big business is having a hard time getting a handle on this new media,” says Jagger, checking his iPhone that keeps beeping. “Meetings are such a waste of time. Reporters ought to be out on the street, staying on top of events, shooting and posting their own instant video and photos, filing copy from their iPhones. Why does the Vancouver Sun need a big fancy expensive office right on the waterfront?”
“Why can’t the public act as reporters and submit their own photos to the newsroom? Because union rules forbid it?” says Jagger. “Well, an awful lot of these reporters and photographers are going to find themselves laid off as soon as their business model expires.”
At a recent Board of Trade event last month titled Tough Talk for Tender Causes: The Case for New Communications Tools, Jagger and three other local experts on social media spoke to a packed room full of executives from Vancouver non-profit agencies. The speakers talked about the future of communication using blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools, especially as they pertain to organizations that need publicity and to fundraise. In a world where nobody knows where the economy is heading next, you could have heard a pin drop. Jagger, however, while extolling the virtues of instant messaging to build social networks, also mentioned the other side of the coin. In a world where people hold real time conversations in cyberspace, a lot of people are listening and nothing you say or do is private.
“The fact is, using new media, you can’t stop people from talking about you,” says Jagger. “The best that you can do is control the conversation. If someone does business with you and has a negative reaction, their comment can and will be posted publicly and people will respond to it. You don’t control your brand any more, the community will control the brand. Everything you do in the future will be in the public domain. If you smoke at parties, your photo may end up on Facebook. If you are caught drinking and driving, expect everybody to know about it immediately. If you lie, exaggerate or dissemble, in the future it is going to catch up to you. Honesty and integrity will be vital in all your real time communications.”
Does Jagger twitter endlessly like a Blackberry addict, at parties and dinner and during meetings? “No, I don’t check messages when I am out. If you want to talk to me, you have to call me on my cellphone, if I have it on. I only check my messages a few times a day. I’m too busy working.”
Mortgage Broker Maury Lum has launched a new Ubertor website. The design of the website was completed by Split Mango, a new Ubertor Approved Vendor. Take a moment to check out the site. If your interested in having some custom design work done to your website feel free to contact us or any of our Ubertor Approved Vendors.
