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Ben Chimes

I first talked to Paul when I was looking for a fresh look for my website. After just a few minutes of speaking with him, I knew he was the right man for the job. Paul has the rare ability to combine technical expertise with strong communication skills... this made it easy to transition from my rough vision of what I wanted my web presence to entail to into the reality of a site that I am extremely happy with. In addition to responding to my desires, Paul was able to add his own creative flair to the website in a manner that I was very impressed with. I truly can't say enough good things about the work Paul has done and recommend him to anyone who asks.

Ben Chimes
RE/MAX Crest West Side

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Let’s Turn Real Estate on its Head

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Real Estate by Paul McEwan on February 1, 2012 | 1 Comment

Teri Conrad had an epiphany and wrote a real estate oriented post called Who’s Brand Is It Anyway? I like the post. The epiphany she had about why brokerages protect their brand in today’s real estate market is spot on. It’s been my thinking for a long time that the brand of the brokerage does little for the sales ability of an agent with the tools they so freely have at their disposal.

More and more the real estate brokerage’s brand is sinking into the background. Proctor and Gamble or Milton Bradley seem to do it right. They supply just the right amount of name recognition while spectacularly backing and advertising the brand of the individual products first. After all, it’s their *product* that sells, not the Big Daddy brand in the back ground. I certainly can’t tell by watching an agent on Youtube or reading their feed on Twitter what brokerage they are from. Like the big Daddy Brands of old, brokerages should be following suit along with their fee structure. That right there is the key. Let’s get back to that later.

The basic problem is brokerages aren’t selling homes. They are recruiting agents. The only way they can promote themselves is through the agent. Some brokerages have even gone so far as to provide “free” marketing for their agents. (You know who I’m speaking about?). There is nothing free about that. They are simply paying for advertising of themselves at the expense of the agent having no personal brand at all. It seems like a neat and tidy package that some agents just love. Nothing wrong with it just as long as we’re all clear and on the same page.

Back to the key point: Real estate agents get nickel and dimed at every turn. Some fees and insurances are real. Some are because they have to. The brokerage for the most part is a have to.

Here’s the part about turning it on it’s head. Many often suggest that the brokerage had better start providing more or they are going to be left in the dirt. But my thinking is why don’t they simply provide less in exchange for micofees? This is the model the music business was forced to take. It works very well. You and I, we start an online virtual brokerage that simply provides the must have legal parts and charge fees in relationship to the service it provides. The brand is way in the background like Proctor and Gamble and we let the agent brand and sell the way they want to.

What do you say? Who’s in?

Leilani from BetterLiving Group on TV

Posted in: Blog, Clients, Company News, Real Estate by Paul McEwan on January 12, 2012 | No Comments

Whenever I see one of our clients providing their expert opinions as sound bites for television reporting I get all verklempt as if it’s one of my own kids on the TV. *sigh*. I can not help myself. I have to tell you all about it. Below is a video from Global Television News that starts with our client Leilani Fong of the BetterLiving Group. The BetterLiving Group is an online real estate focused neighbourhood information provider.

Let me know if you have a TV spot you want blogged about here. Contact us.

Pride for our Tribe

Posted in: Blog, Clients, Real Estate, Upcoming Events by Paul McEwan on November 21, 2011 | No Comments

REALTORS Care® Blanket Drive 2011 featuring our client Jan Rankin. We’re looking forward to seeing more of Jan in the public eye. Her blog, Twitter feed and Facebook page are all very active. Follow her on Twitter, Like her Facebook Page and read her blog. Comment and become part of her tribe.

3 Ways Video Tours Kill Business

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Real Estate, Technology, Web Design by Paul McEwan on August 14, 2011 | No Comments

real estate videos Video has become popular in marketing real estate and so has the confusion around all the different offerings popping up all over the place.

I have a number of Youtube channels and a Vimeo Channel so I get your real estate home tour video updates as they are uploaded, if they are uploaded. So I go to your website to see how that same latest video is posted there. I click on the Video Tour Tab and notice that only an external link is offered to the video!!! Holey lost traffic Marketing Man! This blows me away!

Curiously, like a cat smelling it’s own up-chuck, I click the video link to see where it goes. As expected it opens a new window away from your website. I am now on some butt-ugly video company’s website looking at your listing! Why? What kind of nincompoopish reasoning is behind taking me away from your website? Did you know you can display a video right in the listing’s details without sending people away from your site?

Link to Butt-Ugly Video Tour Website

I know what’s happened. You were sold the full java script enabled video package complete with galleries and mortgage calculators and map views and more; You already have all that available at your own website! Why pay for it twice?

Look, all you need is to embed the video into your website. And here are 3 reasons why…

Water Down your SEO Juice:

If you link to another site with your listing then there are now two website domains with that listing dividing up the Search Engine Optimization. Your website and the Butt-Ugly Video Company’s website and I am sure Butt-Ugly Ltd is very happy about all that traffic. Without you, they would have no traffic. Don’t let them sell this the other way. I bet they said something like “we’ll link it to your website so you’ll get more traffic”. No, not the case. I have also seen these sites without a link back.

Allow Your Customers to Drift away:

Many times I notice that the Butt-Ugly Video Company’s website offers all the same tools that your website has. Let your buyers discover the tools on your site so they can keep searching there. Don’t let your website visitors think (even for an instant) that your site doesn’t offer these tools. It looks like they are selling the listing and you are their assistant contact person.

Let them Mess up Your Visual Branding:

Your visual branding is completely different on the Butt-Ugly Video company’s website that you just sent your buyers to. Oh sure they add your name and throw up (pun intended) your mugshot but it’s their brand they are wrapping you around and it never works.

A couple of other things to consider

When a customer comes to your website and clicks the video tour tab, they really expect to see the video. No really. They expect that because every site can have video – including yours. If Butt Ugly Videos Ltd tells you their video tours can not be embedded, end the conversation.

Using something like Youtube to serve your video from is terrific because it is a strong social sharing website that is linking into your website. The video can remain after the listing is gone. Also, savvy users and newbies alike expect to see your videos there. The ability for them to comment, “like” and subscribe is very powerful and goes a long way to creating a tribe of followers.

How to solve this

Some video companies have different packages and perhaps they have a cheaper price for not offering the separate Butt-Ugly website. I know that there are scripts needed to display some of these 360 degree tours that can not be embedded. My answer to that is don’t bother with it because nothing is going to replace seeing the home in person. All you need is a video so buyers will want to schedule a viewing in person and make an offer. I’m not seeing “Buy Now” buttons beside listings yet.

The best thing to do is save yourself some money and find a person who has a camera and some video editing skills. They make a video – you uploaded it to Youtube and simply embed the video into your website. Award winning music videos have been shot with less.

If you need help with any website administration please let me know. We do Web administration also becoming known as Virtual Website Assisting and used to be called Web Mastering.

Comments are appreciated!

Social Media Event

Posted in: Blog, Company News, Real Estate, Technology, Upcoming Events by Predrag on June 7, 2011 | No Comments

Master Template vs Index Page in myRealPage

Posted in: Blog, How to Video, myRealPage, Real Estate, Technology by Paul McEwan on January 15, 2011 | 1 Comment

TribalYell Integrated Branding shows you the basic differences between the Index page and the Master Template of a myRealPage Website. MyRealPage is a company that builds websites for real estate which is a highly developed CMS platform, listing engine and mobile search tool all wrapped up into one. Tribalyell helps people brand them, edit them and use them.

Social Media Links added to myRealPage’s Dynamic Contact Weblet

Posted in: Blog, Design, myRealPage, Real Estate, Technology by Paul McEwan on January 7, 2011 | No Comments

A new feature was added to myRealPage today that enables an average user to add their social media links with icons in their contact information. You can read about it on their website at Adding support for Social Media links to the websites.

How does it work?

There are two basic steps.

Add your links in the Site Settings of your website staging area and publish.
Add the Contact Info Weblet into a page of your website (Manage Content) making sure the Hide Social Media remains unchecked and publish

What does this mean to you?

This is basic administration. You don’t have to ask a designer to this for you and you don’t have to know any advanced administration to add links to your social media sites and profiles. This is basic and offers no styling from a basic administration level so you may still want help to swap out the icons or place them a certain way on your website.

What does this mean to us?

We now offer this new item under basic administration; yes, we can do this for you. We have been adding social media links to websites for a long time without using the Contact Info Weblet. Now that we can do this from the Contact Info Weblet means your information will be dynamic from the site settings. If you ever delete and change a Twitter account all you need to do is update the Site Settings in your myRealPage website and publish to make the change on all pages.

On a side note, many myRealPage designers have made the mistake of not using the dynamic weblets. Some websites get re-designed to a point of complete dependence on the designer that made those changes. For instance, when the Contact Info Weblet is not used then a simple phone number change or update to the photo is a call to your designer at a greater expense than a simple basic administration update to the Site Settings. Keep that in mind. Our designs try to maintain all the owner editing abilities that came with the off-the-shelf myRealPage product. From my point of view, being able to edit myRealPage easily and on your own is a huge selling feature.

Image courtesy of myRealPage

RISO Press best for production colour

Posted in: Blog, Printing, Real Estate, Technology by Paul McEwan on December 16, 2010 | No Comments

Here is a great little printer by RISO. I have used a number of these in my day and they keep making them better since my print house days. Because they use ink and not heat to fuse the image, they run 95% less energy and way faster than convention digital presses. Add to that the soy based inks and you have a pretty green machine. The video above shows the newest two colour machine. They have a full colour and single colour version as well.

Quality? this is not for high end printing but it’s not terrible either. The output quality on a RISO is stock dependent, meaning different grades of paper change the quality by miles. But I have seen prices for printing retailing full colour starting at 8 cents each for 1 to 10 pieces. That’s Cheap!

Pros: Very green, inexpensive to operate, extremely fast 1, 2 & 4-full colour output, easy to run, They are very capable of variable data printing.

Cons: Although best in it’s class ”Production Colour” means it’s a lower quality.

Summery: This is a great little machine for those things you would normally run in black and white or absolutely need to have run in full colour but don’t have the budget for it. Let’s face it, high end printing isn’t necessary all the time. This machine is perfect for those times so go and find a printer who owns one.

How we plan advertising.

Posted in: Advertising, Blog, Creative, Design, Real Estate by Paul McEwan on November 19, 2010 | No Comments

I think REALTORS® have some of the worst. advertising. ever. Just listed! Just Sold! Don’t do it! One reason I got involved offering services to real estate was to help rid the lower mainland of some of the crap. I literally thought to myself, ‘well there must be no one offering decent real estate advertising’ and ‘I can do that’. I set out to save us all from another IJS [I Just Sold].

I have since discovered the market is thick with creative graphic and design talent and the blame for the poor advertising is the REALTOR® themselves. They simply fall into a rut of doing what the last person did or because they got 3 calls from 20,000 mailed pieces means it must be working or they just don’t know anything about it and are busy doing real estate to think about it much. They send their next listing to their graphics person to create another mail piece.

TribalYell Integrated Branding will not take on new clients who want Just Listed and Just Sold marketing pieces. And unless you have some authentic engagement going on, we will not set up social media to auto populate this crap either. We will not add to the mess you’re all in. We won’t do it – no way.

There is another way. These questions need to be asked at the start of every advertising piece.

What are you giving?
What do you want in return?
What problem do you need a solution to?
What problem do they need a solution to?
How will it be communicated?

Notice the last question was not “How will it be written?” or “How will it be said?”. This is because communication takes place in every image, line, shape colour and yes: word. Let the creative take your communication miles and start standing out. If you do this, wear your boots because you will be standing with the crap around your ankles.

Fairview ad campaign

Online marketing, social media, display ads or mail out pieces all need to be good. Does this sound complicated? Then hand it over to us to look after. Let’s plan something for the entire upcoming year.

Featured by myRealPage

Posted in: Design, Real Estate, Technology, Templates, Web Design by Paul McEwan on May 25, 2010 | 1 Comment

When we toot our own horn it’s a week sound indeed. When someone else does it we can hear it for miles and we really appreciate the thought of someone doing so. myRealPage has done just that. Three times in fact. It about time we toot their horn. That is coming in a big way. myRealPage asks for no designer fees or designer sign up to build on their system. Take look at our featured websites on the myRealPage blog. Thanks myRealPage, always glad to help your clients get branded online.

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