It’s possible that you’ve been using Real Estate Shows for years, or maybe you’ve stumbled across this blog almost accidentally for the first time today. Either way, let’s pretend you’re new and just asked me about ways to use Real Estate Shows. I just don’t want you to miss anything good.

We start with a Show of 5, 9 or 15 photos. These photos become the base for advertising your listing. Begin by adjusting focal points, selecting music and adding data. From here you can increase value by adding up to 96 additional photos, property mapping, panoramas, print quality flyers and video conversion. If you put in the local school’s zip code, you’ll have local school information added, too.

We offer tracking reports so you can gauge the effectiveness of your marketing. (Clients love to receive these, too.) You can download your Show files and create CDs to give out. You can point to these CD files on your desktop to use in a PowerPoint listing presentation if you like.

Shows can be connected together if you’d like to spotlight the neighborhood or some special aspect of the home. We also have lots of ways to help people spread your Show around for you, such as social bookmarking tools. There’s a button to help buyers make an appointment with you to view the home.

Checking “Viewable in Other Shows” on your Manage page helps to build an inventory list of your Shows. Keep this list up to date and consider adding the URL of your Other Shows to your email signature.

If you prefer the look of an embedded Show on your website or blog we do offer that option as well. It brings more attention to the Show than a little link and it also keeps people from clicking away from your site. Use our listing widgets to display information on your current listings, community information and more.

The Flyers are a favorite feature of mine because they save so much time. You’ve already uploaded the pictures and written the property description, why start over again for a flyer? Just few clicks and you’re done, with a choice of many designs. They can be used online as a listing webpage or printed for use as traditional flyers.

We help you connect online to sites such as Realtor.com, your MLS, Trulia, Zillow, Facebook, Homes, Google base, Viewr, Vast, Geebo, Hotpads, Ebay, Craigslist and more!

We also offer a large selection of pre-made Instant Shows that you can customize or use as-is to keep in touch with your clients, family and friends, like an e-card that subtly advertises you as an agent. (They’re great in your blog or website, too!)

Video conversion is currently in beta testing. (Not available in trial accounts.) If you have an account with YouTube, we’ll upload directly to your account there, or you can download the video file and upload it to the video hosting site of your choice.

We also have a nice customer service staff who really want you to succeed and are always happy to discuss marketing ideas with you. I’ve thrown a lot of information at you and there is STILL more you can do with Real Estate Shows, so if you have questions or comments please feel free to ask here, email us at info@realestateshows.com or call us at 888.580.7627.

Since writing about the ability to have discussions in the Real Estate Shows LinkedIn Group, I’ve received numerous email from clients who wanted to know how to get the most from LinkedIn. I’m a big fan of the videos put together by Common Craft, so I thought this might be a good way to share the real power of LinkedIn in an easy to understand way.

What is LinkedIn? from LinkedIn Marketing on Vimeo.

I was forwarded the following question from our customer service department today:

I love this new flier feature. The only question I have ( don’t laugh) is when I publish it to whatever place…where does it actually go and who sees it??

We’re definitely not laughing.

Why? Because it’s a more common question than you might first imagine. Those of us who spend the bulk of our time online tend to think everyone is familiar with these new Web 2.0 distribution portals, but that’s just not true. The vast majority of real estate agents I meet in my travels have never heard of Edgeio, Vast, Propsmart or Oodle. More have heard of Trulia, but not many more and even though everyone has heard of Google, Google Base is not a known commodity. So here’s the short answer.

Each of these sites is a search engine.

Some are strictly real estate, but others cover the classified gamut. Consumers go to these sites to search for homes. And you want to be where the consumer is searching. That only make sense. So, we’ve simply made it easier for you to do so. Once you’ve created a flyer, you can choose which of the sites you want your information sent to and we send them a “feed” of the new information.

It usually takes 24 to 72 hours, depending on the site and the timing of the feed. Unfortunatly, none of that is under our control, but your listing will eventually show up on these other search engines. And the more places the consumer can find you, the better.

Take some time to search around on these sites so you can see what consumers are seeing. You may be surprised by what you find.

Less than an hour after we “soft launched” our new features, I got an email from one of our long time clients, Doug Scott. Doug is an avid supporter of RealEstateShows.com, but his email was less than flattering. He was unhappy. Specifically, he was unhappy with the social bookmarking links that now came up at the end of his Shows and was concerned about people leaving his site.

Doug was only one of two people that first day that had this reaction. Of those who took the time to comment, most were excited to see these options for social sharing presented in this way. Doug didn’t say the following, but what we heard in Doug’s comments was this…. “Don’t force things on me. You shouldn’t decide for me what new technologies I should buy into. That’s for me to decide.”

Of course, I made an effort to “educate” Doug on the potential value of these links. But ultimately, Doug knows his clients and his market better than I’m ever going to know them. And he should be the one to decide how he wants to work with them. Not us.

It doesn’t take a thousand voices to deliver the truth. One will do.

So, we went back to the drawing board and rethought how this should work. What we came up with has already been implemented. Here’s how it works now: The “Get Link” and “Get HTML” icons, as well as the Social Bookmarking Icons will be OFF by default. They are now turned on at the Show level. This is done in the “Edit Buttons” area.

Here is a short video to show you how.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Doug, thank you for helping us make our product better for everyone.

What is an RSS Feed and why should I care if RealEstateShows.com now has them?

Since we announced that your public Shows would be available via RSS Feed, as a full list or by category, this has become a common question to our customer service department. Several clients called in wondering what they were and others wondered how they could be used. This is an attempt to answer that question, though I’m sure it may raise more questions in the process.

What is an RSS Feed?

Back in May I wrote a post called, Ever Wonder How Oprah Would Describe An RSS Feed. There I pointed to Stephanie Quilao, who I think explained RSS in the simplest way possible in her post, How To Explain RSS The Oprah Way. For a great understanding of how RSS Feeds work, go give her post a read. (Click Here) It will give you a good grasp of the technology and how to use it..

How would I use RSS Feeds on RealEstateShows.com?

In short, an RSS Feed allows you to push information out to the Internet in a way that others can get to it easily. It “syndicates” content so it can be shared easily. Your goal is to get information into the hands of the most people, in the simplest way possible. That’s what RSS will do.

The most common way to access RSS Feeds is via a Feed Reader. I like Google Reader, personally. Attach the link to your Shows feed to your email signature, so your clients can subscribe and be notified each time you make a Show public. Put a link to your Shows feed on your website and anyone interested will be updated as well.

We see the feeds as a way for you to get more bang out of your RealEstateShows.com subscription. Many of you are now using blogs to market to your area. We decided to distribute via RSS, rather than a closed widget system, so you could use any RSS widget you wish. Widgetbox is a great source. Pulling your Active Listing Shows or your Neighborhood Shows into the sidebar of your blog will give them more exposure. Plugins also exist to automatically write blog posts based on an RSS feed – like Wp-O-Matic. This is a plugin for self-hosted Wordpress blogs. So, that means each time you made a Show public, your blog could be updated and a post automatically written based on the content in your Show. Does this apply to all of our clients? Certainly not, but those who can use this will have a big advantage.

“Syndicate Your Real Estate Listings With RealEstateShows.com” – I Still Don’t Get It.

That’s understandable. Even though RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, it’s not all that simple to understand! Luckily, the RSS Feeds are also being used by our new Flyer distribution system coming on August 21. So you’ll still get the benefit of distributing your listings if you simply use that new feature for your listings. All you’ll really need to know how to do is click a few buttons and we’ll take care of the rest.

When we release the feature, we’ll be writing more specifically about how to use it and give you specific ideas and examples to learn from. There will also be how-to videos. Right now, we are feverishly working on making sure it does exactly what it is supposed to do. And we’re excited about the possibilities.

Costs associated with Realtor.com are set by Realtor.com. We simply manage the process for you. If you are a Showcase Listing Ehancement customer with Realtor.com, there is no charge to link to Realtor.com. If you are not, Realtor.com charges us to facilitate the link and we pass that cost on to you. This is true for ALL PicturePathâ„¢ Partners.
When you click the link to send to Realtor.com we send information from your property details to Realtor.com’s database. If they find a match and show that the real estate agent who owns the listing is a Showcase Listing Enhancement customer, then you get the submission screen with no fee.

If Realtor.com sends back a negative response you will get the screen to pay $25.

This can happen for 3 different reasons.

1. Realtor.com does not have your listing as a Showcase listing.
2. The MLS# is incorrect or has not posted on Realtor.com yet ( it is too new)
3. Either your street address, city, state and/or Zip code do not match exactly to what Realtor.com has.

Please use the MLS Number in a search on Realtor.com before you submit. Verify that your listing is active on Realtor.com, that it is a Showcase Listing (with the yellow border around it) and the that address is exactly how you have it in your Property details on your Real Estate Show. Two computers are talking to each other and they are NOT intuitive. They are looking at characters only and all the characters have to match. Extra characters will generate a negative response as well, like an extra space in a city name.

If you continue to have trouble please send us the Show #’s you are trying to link to Realtor.com and we will try to help you sort it out. All customer service emails should be sent to info@realestateshows.com.

In an effort to maintain our high level of service, this notification is to inform you of an upcoming maintenance window in the Data Center at RealEstateShows.com.

The window for this maintenance will be from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Pacific daylight time on Saturday, April 21, 2007.

No public Shows will be impacted. So any Show created before this time will be viewable at all times wherever they may be linked.

We will be performing upgrades and maintenance on the Core routing infrastructure in the data center. Due to this maintenance, there may be several brief interruptions of service while traffic switches over from one device to another. So, to prevent any possible mishaps, you will be unable to log into your account and you will be unable to create Shows during this time frame.

Again, no public Shows will be impacted. You clients will not be impacted by this maintenance.

We get this question via email a few times a week, so we felt it might be a good topic to cover here.

Our main Shows are either 30 seconds or 60 seconds. This will always be the case. We allow up to 96 photos in the secondary slide show that is accessed by the “more photos” link. They do not appear in the main Show.

We’ve done significant research and experimentation concerning the optimum length of Shows. Let me share with you our findings, our experience and our conclusions.

Our objective is to help you be more effective and to help build your business.

Our shows work as 30 or 60 second commercials. We developed our technology and crafted our presentations with that in mind. The feedback we’ve received from real estate agents and from the general public (your client base) overwhelmingly says that when people view our Shows they feel as if they are watching an effective, evocative commercial.

The key in having our commercials be effective is attention span.

We all know that television commercials are 30 or 60-second spots. The reason is attention span. It’s not money, or technology limitations. We could create Shows of any length. Our research supports attention span maximums of 60 seconds. In addition, during an earlier stage in our product development, we did some custom Shows (at a much higher price) for a select group of real estate agents selling multi-million dollar homes. The Shows ran 90 and 120 seconds. There was no increase in viewer or client appeal. Some viewers asked the real estate agents why the Shows were so long. Cognitive science prevailed. Presentations have no more than 60 seconds in which to make an emotional first impression on a viewer.

The goal of our commercials is to have viewers say, “I want to see that home and I want to meet that Realtor.” That is best achieved in 60 seconds.

Here’s why our Shows are effective.

In the first 30 or 60 seconds, we capture the emotional interest of the viewer. That is essential if we want the viewer to act (contact the Realtor and go see the home). Once we capture their interest and the viewer wants more information, we provide that information in the form of additional photos – as many as the Realtor chooses to put up, up to 96. Bear in mind that the viewer always becomes unconsciously hooked in the first 30 to 60 seconds. Everything beyond that is research is wanting more information. Making the shows themselves longer runs the risk of having the viewer lose interest by having to continue to watch a commercial after they’ve decided they like the product. That’s talking past the close.

We’ve created our commercials for homes at all price points – from under $100,000 to in excess of $12,000,000. The same format has produced outstanding results across all price points because all of our unconscious minds want the same thing.

The keys to optimizing the impact of your Shows are:

• take good photos
• arrange them in an inviting order
• adjust camera movement for maximum dramatic effect
• write evocative titles for your scenes
• and tell an interesting story about the home in the Property Information section of the show.

Maximum emotional impact is best achieved by paying attention to all those elements.

We truly believe that the combination of all of the above is the key to having the absolute best, most effective Internet presentations in existence.

[tags]attention span, tour, real estate, realtor, realestateshows.com[/tags]

We get a version of this question almost every day: “Why isn’t my branding showing up on my MLS?” or “Why are my titles missing on my Real Estate Show on my MLS?”

There are over 800 MLS systems in the United States and virtually every one of them forbid you to have your personal branding on the tours you attach to listings on their search engines. Some MLS systems are more strict than others. These “strict” MLS systems require that any information that can be input by the Realtor be removed. This includes tiltes, links to outside websites, property details. They remove any possibility that you could slip in your name and telephone number.

Strict Sample

Other MLS systems simply require that the branding be removed and they trust that you will do the right thing and NOT insert personal information in the titles, headlines, and property details. We call this our “basic” MLS player. Most MLS systems accept this kind of link.

Basic Sample

Both of these links are sent to you in your linking email that is sent as confirmation the moment you create a new Real Estate Show. Each Show you create has both the basic and strict link available for use. To keep yourself from being fined, make sure you use the right one for your MLS.

[tags]MLS, marketing, realestate, virtual tour[/tags]

I’m A Showcase Listing Enhancements Customer of REALTOR.COM, why am I being asked to pay the $25 Fee?

There is a simple, but frustrating, answer to that question. The reason is that the information in the Property Details of your Show do not match EXACTLY what Realtor.com has in their system. Extra characters, # signs or the wrong city or zip are typically the reason for this. If the information does not match exactly, Realtor.com will tell us you are not a Showcase Listing Enhancement Customer. Remember, this is two computers talking to one another, they have to be perfectly aligned in order to make the right assessment. So, check the information on Realtor.com and make certain the property detail in your Real Estate Show matches EXACTLY with what is shown on the Realtor.com listing – then submit again.

If they match, the system will now know you are a Showcase Listing Enhancement Customer and you will NOT be charged.

[tags]real estate, realtor.com, virtual tours, featured tours[/tags]