Casting a Wider Net(work)

Editor's Notes

• #2: Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today for our Real Estate Operations Masters Series. Today’s topic is an exciting one – social media in real estate.  My name is Sarah Fisher, Marketing Communications Director at Building Engines, and we are sponsoring today’s presentation. This Webinar is part of our ongoing Real Estate Operations Masters Series, where we present expert content from industry leaders on a variety of important building and facilities operations topics, at no charge to you.  In addition to today’s webinar, we have prepared other content on this topic including video vignettes, checklists and articles that we will be sharing with you over the coming days and weeks, so please look for those as follow-up to the webinar. [Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{F7BBF06A-C4C5-4489-B069-A62A10F1CE6B}}
• #3: Our featured speaker today is back by popular demand – his name is Patrick Braswell, and he is part owner of a real estate brokerage firm based in Atlanta called Scotland Wright Associates.Patrick did a webinar earlier in our series around tenant management, and we received so many questions from the audience around his participation in social media and what they could learn from Patrick around social media, that we decided to bring him back for a webinar dedicated to the topic. So first off, Patrick welcome. PATRICK: Glad to be here.[Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{0E310D6F-528F-45F4-9DDF-C8E4FABD8DA9}}
• #4:  And with that, let’s get back to today’s topic of social media. As we prepared the agenda today, we thought some of the questions you may have for Patrick including: How did Patrick get started in social media? What are some of the key social media tools and sites and how does Patrick recommend to use them? For the novices – how should we get started in social media? And for the more advanced users – what are some new sites or tools we should look into?[Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{7761EF32-DADC-4C61-A445-5380FE21582C}}
• #5: Ok Patrick, let’s get started. When did you get started using social media? PATRICK: I probably started using social media, I’d say, two years ago and it came with the idea that I really needed to start doing something different. My industry, like most industries, is very, very competitive, and we’re all, in my opinion, starting to sound the same, look the same, and I just wanted to do something that would help me stand out from the sameness that was going on. So I started doing a blog about office space here in Atlanta, and because of the blog, it led me into other social media avenues like Linkedin and Twitter. So the blog was the catalyst, and with it, at the same time of myself doing the blog, I started to utilize Twitter and Linkedin at a very high level.[Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{D89507D5-B331-41DD-8933-3C5384F48CD7}}
• #6: SARAH: So let’s start with your blog. Tell us about blogging – why do you do it and how does it benefit you? PATRICK: The blog is called “mosatlanta.com,” and that’s m-o-s-atlanta.com, and what it has done for me is kind of created this perceived expert in my field of Atlanta office space. I probably get a thousand to fifteen hundred hits a month on my website, mostly because of the blog. At one point I was blogging every day, which I would tell you is not sustainable. It was a lot of fun, it got my creative juices flowing, it made myself a better broker, but it was not a sustainable pace. Now I’m probably doing a blog every other week or once a month, and that’s kind of more of a sustainable pace for me, just because I’m so busy running a company, trying to represent my clients and everything that kind of goes with that. What I tell most people about a blog is this: Some people will say, “I think it’s a waste of time. Who’s going to read it? I don’t have time to do it.” If you do it and you put the effort into it, it will make you a better whatever-the-case-may-be, whatever you are. If you are a property manager, it’s going to make you a better property manager, because you have to sit down and think about your craft. What I want to say about my craft, what is it that is a pain that I’m feeling, what is it that is a pain that I’m seeing within my own industry, and then you start writing about it. And through that repetition, I promise you, it makes you a better broker, or it makes you a better property manager, or it makes you a better whatever-the-case-may-be, whatever industry you’re in.  For myself, it really made me start thinking about some of the kind of issues that tenants run into when they’re negotiating a lease or when they’re looking for office space, or when they’ve already signed a lease and they’re in there for five years, some of the issues they run into with property management. I mean, I had to sit down and think about it so it was top of mind and fresh so when I was out and meeting with people and they would ask me a question, I already knew the answer immediately, because I probably blogged about it two or three days ago, or whatever the case may be. It truly is a way for you to hone your craft. But then, on top of that, people do read this stuff. It is amazing how much people do read this stuff, and if you can coincide your blog with the Twitter feed and Linkedin feed and a Facebook feed, that in itself will start getting the word out. And it is a great way to distinguish yourself, and to differentiate yourself amongst your competitors, as an expert. blogging is still relatively new for the property management industry. So if you’re willing to take the risk to get yourself out there and to do it, people will read it, people will start perceiving you as an expert, and over time, you will become an expert because you are doing this over and over again.[Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{4620872F-640C-4747-981B-3D04CCC9BAF5}}
• #7:  SARAH: You mentioned LinkedIn, can you take through how you use it and what you recommend?PATRICK: in my opinion, and again, this is my humble opinion, so take it for what it’s worth, Linkedin for business people, business associates, is the best social media site out there. Period. And again, this is just my opinion, but it is the site that I use on a daily basis. I use Linkedin more than I do Twitter. I’m not on Facebook. Youtube, Google Plus, whatever the case may be, Linkedin is by far the best tool. So I started using it two years ago. I started blogging and started asking people about good social media sites for people. And a friend of mine just said, “Hey, man, you need to check out Linkedin. It’s really a great site.” So I checked it out, signed up, did my whole profile thing, got it out there, got it going, and then immediately started getting people that wanted to connect with me. One of the mistakes that I made early, and that I hope that you don’t make, is that I started connecting with just anybody and everybody that wanted to connect to me. So I’ve got probably close to 800 connections now, of which I’d say 150 people I have no idea who they are, and it kind of clouds what I use Linkedin for, and I’ll get into that a little bit later. So my first advice on that is don’t connect with anyone just to connect with people. Connect with only people you know or want to connect with. The second thing that I did, which was a mistake, is I had my I.T. guy, and you can do this, but I had him download every single contact I had in my database, which was over, at the time, probably 1,000 people in my database contact. He immediately sent out an e-mail to every single one of those thousand people, of which I probably only knew 150 well, which those 150 people they connected with me. That was good. What was bad was, again, it probably added another 75-80 people that I didn’t know that just connected with me because they connected with me. So, again, it kind of clouded my Linkedin experience at the beginning. But another thing that it did, and it’s funny, because I use Linkedin a lot. I actually give presentations to prospects on how to use Linkedin, and I’m actually on what’s probably a blacklist on Linkedin, because if you send out to people you don’t know, and if those people ignore you, that’s fine. But if those people say, “I don’t know you,” which is one of the options you get when someone tries to connect in on Linkedin to you, if you get enough of “I don’t know you,” then Linkedin will red flag your account, and so every time you want to connect with someone from here on out, you actually have to have the person’s e-mail address. Whereas if you were just connecting with people you know, all you got to do is just say, “I want to connect with them.” Linkedin sends that person an e-mail, and then you connect with them. So that’s kind of the pitfall number two. Now what I use Linkedin for personally, and again, it’s going to be different for different people, the vast majority of individuals use Linkedin as a way to find jobs, and a way to post jobs, and it is an incredible tool for that. But I use Linkedin as a prospecting tool. Personally, for me, I have increased my number of face-to-face meetings by about 150 percent, and what I do is I do searches on companies that I want to get in front of. So if there’s a company that I know of that I’d like to get in front of, I then go to Linkedin, and there’s a way to change the people search to company search. Search the company, and then it will show you how you’re connected to that company, whether you have a first-degree connection to that company, meaning I actually know somebody in that company, or whether you have a second-degree connection into the company meaning somebody that I’m connected to is connected to a person in that company. So that’s usually the case, and so I will take my second-degree connection and send that person an e-mail or give that person a phone call and say, “Hey, I see you’re connected to so-and-so within XYZ company, do you mind introducing me or letting them know that I’ll be calling them?” And just by doing that simple step, my meetings have shot up, again, by 150 percent of what I was doing before as far as number of face-to-face meetings. [Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{92FC4448-44E3-44E6-9984-ABB731EEA807}}
• #8: Now Patrick, how specifically should property managers or building owners use LinkedIn? PATRICK: Now as a property manager or other ways within the commercial real estate world to use it, if I were a building owner, I would set up individual groups within Linkedin, which is a tool you can do. You can set up your own group, and I would set up a group for my tenants to talk to one-another. It’s a way for you to monitor what they’re saying, as well. So I would go in there, I would connect to all the tenants that are within my building, or if I’m the property manager, I would connect on Linkedin with the people that are within my building, and then I would start a building group for those tenants and allow people to see what’s going on within the building. You can do announcements within that group that will send an e-mail out to everybody. You can open up forums of discussion. You could do things to where, “Hey tenants within this group, I’m going to be investing a million dollars within the building. Here are the three things that we’re thinking about investing in. What’s most important to you?” So it’s just a great way to allow your tenants to have a voice in a group that’s private to only those tenants, and have them really have a feel of, “Hey, these owners care what I’m saying, or these property managers care what I’m saying, and they’ve created this atmosphere, this intimate place for us to go in and communicate to one-another.” So I think for property managers and building owners that would be just an incredible tool that no one is utilizing right now on Linkedin. So, bottom line for me, I use Linkedin as a way to stay connected to my contacts, to get in front of new prospects through my contacts and through my network, and then I do myself participate in a lot of different commercial real estate representation groups. So it’s kind of a best practice groups and ways for me to interact with my peers.[Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{DBD8D516-1D31-4467-AFBC-F406E088A00A}}
• #9: SARAH: And how about Twitter? PATRICK: Twitter is, for me personally, it’s one of the more fun sites that I use personal and for business. It is an incredible tool to gather real-time information on news and updates and what’s going on. But if I were a property manager, what I’d use it for myself is I’d follow my own clients and my prospects that are on Twitter. And you will be amazed at how many people are actually on Twitter if you look. But for me myself, I follow my contacts and my prospects that are all on Twitter, and it is an incredible tool for me to understand what their likes and dislikes are, because people will tweet about, “Oh, my son’s got a ball game today.” So, therefore, I know this person has a kid and they like to play baseball with him. Or they’ll tweet about, “Hey, we’re out searching for office space.” So I know this person’s out searching for office space now. People will tweet about just about anything. The cool thing about Twitter is you can set up different groups to only follow people within your building, so if you know that I’ve got 15 tenants in this building, and all the CEOs of these tenants have a Twitter account, I’m going to put them in a special group within Twitter. You do that, and then you can follow what these 15 people are saying. You never know. These 15 people could probably go out on Twitter and have a complaint about a building. “Man, this building, I can’t believe they did such-and-such.” And if you were to respond to that, like a lot of big corporations are doing when a customer has a complaint and they complain about it on Twitter, they monitor that stuff, and they immediately respond to it. A customer satisfaction level, they shoot up when they see that you do care and that you see them on Twitter. They’re kind of pretty amazed by it. But for myself personally, I use it as a way to voice my opinion about things that are going on. People do follow it, and they do reply to it. But I also use it as a tool to follow my prospects and my clients, to know what they’re into, to know what they did the weekend before, to find common grounds to talk to them. You know, as a building owner or property manager, I think a cool thing to do is to be on Twitter yourself and to tweet about different things that are going on in the building, whether it’s a client appreciation day or, “Hey, XYZ is happening to the cooler systems today. It’s going to be down from Saturday to Sunday.” Those things, throw them out there on Twitter. It’s not much harder to add them and to do it, and people do follow that stuff, and they probably follow it more than they do e-mails. My own personal experience, I have been able to communicate with people on Twitter that I have probably sent them, I don’t know, 10-15 e-mails with no response. See if they’re on Twitter, follow them for a week or two on Twitter, and then reply to something that they have said on Twitter, and they immediately reply back, and then we start a dialogue. The next thing you know, I have a meeting and they’re a client. I think the same can be said for, if someone were willing to take the time as a building owner and a property manager, to set up groups within Twitter that is all your tenants, and you can follow those tenants and see what they’re saying, you would have an intimate knowledge of what’s going on and a way to communicate with them that you just can’t. [Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{9B2DBC06-F1DE-41E7-9724-FD7C149AF4D6}}
• #10: SARAH: And how do you recommend for our audience that they go about setting up their personal or business Twitter accounts? PATRICK: I have a MOS Atlanta, which is my blog, Twitter page, and then I’ve got a personal Twitter page, which is Patrick Braswell. I have had so much more interaction and connection with my Patrick Braswell page than I could ever have on my MOS Atlanta page, and it’s part of the reason of people don’t want companies following them, they want individuals following them. So my Patrick Braswell profile tells you exactly what I do, and it is me, so people feel like, “Oh, I’m having a personal interaction with Patrick,” versus my MOS Atlanta Twitter account, I mean they think it’s some company, and they just don’t want to have that interaction with a company. They want to have an interaction with an individual, and I think that’s what Twitter and Facebook are there for. I mean, as an individual I want to get down to an individual connection with somebody. So quick advice on that: Don’t have a company page. Actually have an individual page, and it will increase your traffic, it will increase your connections, and increase the relationships you form on both Twitter and Facebook.  [Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{F7505A0F-E759-4FE4-A86F-F931D7460F61}}
• #11: SARAH: And does Twitter support groups like LinkedIn does? PATRICK: You can’t set up Twitter groups, but you can set up a group of people that you follow on Twitter. A great website to do that is called hootsuite.com. H-O-O-T-S-U-I-T-E. Hootsuite.com, and it allows you to select people and put them into different groups, and then you can follow those groups. It is an incredible tool. I wouldn’t monitor it 24/7, but look at it every other day, see what people are saying. Within hootsuite, you can also monitor different search terms. So if you were to, say, put in the name of your building on hootsuite, every time someone said the building’s address or the building’s name, you would see that tweet. So that is a good way for you to monitor what people are saying about your building on Twitter. That could be anything to say, “Hey, 1117, this building had a great client appreciation day. They served hot dogs.” And you would see that someone said that, and you could reply to it. Or, “Man, 1117, can’t believe that it’s 100 degrees in here. They really need to fix the HVAC.” Well then you know that people are complaining about the HVAC and you need to do something. And you can reply to them on Twitter. Again, it’s just an amazing tool that people really resonate with that, “This building cares about me.” Owners and investors, kind of the same thing, building operations, I’d say it’s kind of the same thing with each one of those social media tools. [Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{1423CE73-21EA-4576-8538-D70FD7CA09EE}}
• #12: SARAH: Let’s touch on some of the other large social networks, how about Facebook? PATRICK: I do not use Facebook. People probably think I’m nuts, but I just don’t trust Mark Zuckerberg. I don’t want him to own all my information. I don’t know, I don’t have a Facebook account, and it’s part of my distrust for the CEO of the company and what he’s trying to do with the company. But with that caveat said, I do believe Facebook is a very powerful tool. I know a lot of people who use it, and it can be used like Twitter and like Linkedin. It is a way to connect to your tenants, to connect to prospects on a level that is outside of business, and that is a more personal and interactive way to get in touch with them. For my personal experience on Facebook, and this will kind of relate back to Twitter, if you have a Facebook page and it’s for your company, for what we do, I don’t believe people follow it. If you’re going to have a Facebook page, have it be a personal page and connect to your clients and prospects that way, or the people within your buildings, whether it’s industrial or office. [Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{88E0EF8D-1C83-4371-8238-27944E9B96A3}}
• #13: SARAH: And how about YouTube? PATRICK: Love Youtube. Absolutely love Youtube. I will videotape some tours that I go on, I will take my little flip camera with me and do the outside and the inside of a building when I’m touring office space with a client. They love it, download all of it onto Youtube, which is free, and send it out there. People absolutely love the fact that they can see a video of the space they just toured. So if I were a building owner or property manager, I would be doing Youtube videos of my vacant space and getting it out there for everyone to see. I think it’s a very underutilized tool. I will also do some blogs from Youtube. I could be taping myself on my flip camera right now and put it out there. One unknown fact about Youtube, it is the second most searched website in the world. Google is first, Youtube is second, before Bing, before Yahoo!, before everything else. So people do more searches on Youtube than they do on the second tier search engines. So that’s just a little F.Y.I. So if you put in there “warehouse space at XYZ,” and someone’s searching for warehouse space, they actually will search for warehouse space on Youtube. So it’s a good way to market your property that is cheap. I mean, it’s cheap, it’s free. Just buy a flip camera for a hundred bucks, or do it with your iPhone or your iPad or whatever, and put those videos out there. It’s an underutilized tool. [Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{503E8FB8-6AB2-4E97-9ACB-43614D60890A}}
• #14: SARAH: Are there any other sites that we have not discussed that you want to mention to the audience?  PATRICK: there’s two social websites that I will bring up. One of them is Google Plus. I do like Google Plus. I know it’s a lot like Facebook, but it has a lot more privacy set up to where I can distinguish whether or not you’re a friend, someone I do business with, so you’d be in another circle, or someone that I barely know but I do want to keep tabs on, so they would be in another circle. Meaning you can separate people out in different circles, and each circle is a different level of privacy or what someone can see on your Google Plus account. So I am on Google Plus. I know it’s a lot like Facebook, but Google’s a big corporation, to me they’re a public corporation, I probably have a little bit more trust in them than I do Facebook, which is naïve. [Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{B84D378F-531B-478E-93DA-2670A0EEABDE}}
• #15: SARAH: And you mentioned you have one more site? PATRICK: the final site I will talk about is a site called Gist, and it’s G-I-S-T .com. Again, G-I-S-T.com. I’m just now starting to get into it, but it is a great way for you to correlate all of your contacts and see what those contacts are doing on their social media sites. It also keeps record of all the e-mails that you’ve sent that contact, as well. So it’s a pretty cool tool. I haven’t gotten that much into it, but from what I’ve seen of it, it’s awesome to be able to look up a prospect or client on Gist, and to see all the social media stuff, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, what have you, blogs that they’ve done that’s out there in cyberspace, so to speak. It kind of brings all that stuff into one place for you to look at, and then over on the far right column it will have every e-mail that they’ve sent you or that you’ve sent them. [Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{02521DA7-C58F-41D6-81A3-D73609D59825}}
• #16: SARAH: And are there any other online resources, besides social media, that you want to mention? PATRICK: LoopNet’s iPad app is really cool. I’ve used it before. It’s very well done. CoStar just came out with their app, which I’m having a CoStar representative come out to our company, to give us the presentation on it. From what I hear from people that have seen the presentation on the CoStar app, it’s far superior to LoopNet’s app. It allows you to do searches, to evaluate deal structure, to look up public companies’ leases, to see stacking plans. I’m real excited to see it, because I hear it is absolutely phenomenal. Those are the two resources that I use that are industry-related. Again, I use CoStar every day on my computer, but as far as mobile applications, kind of more of a social media-type feel to it, LoopNet’s app is awesome, and CoStar’s app is awesome. actually, there is one other pretty cool application that’s out there that no one really knows about: It’s called Blend Rate, B-L-E-N-Drate.com, and you can download their app, and it is a way to evaluate deals that will give you the net effect of, and it’s probably the most simple tool that I have seen out there as far as rating deals or proposals that you get from building owners and from landlord reps.[Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{AE4D883B-C4F6-40DF-B1C3-85B54E12A214}}
• #17: SARAH: We’re going to open it up for a Q&A in a minute – so audience this is the right time to be submitting any questions for Patrick. Patrick, before we do that, do you wan to recap for the audience any final tips or suggestions for getting started? PATRICK: Yeah, just real quick: If you’re listening to this and you’re wanting to get started, my very quick simple advice to you is just to keep it small at first and keep it fun. As you keep it small and keep it fun, it will grow upon itself. For those who have been doing it for a while and they’re like, “Oh, I’ve heard all this other stuff,” I challenge you just to get onto Gist. It’s a new site. Again, it’s G-I-S-T.com, and it’s really, really cool. I’ve been doing this very actively for two years now, and I’ve never heard of it, and somebody told me about it, and it was a lot of fun.  SARAH: Outstanding Patrick, thank you.  R: No problem. It was a lot of fun, and if anyone has any questions, I’m here and would love to answer them. No question is too small or too big for me to answer, so I appreciate everything. Thank you for your time. [Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom]Avitage Item ID: {{4977C746-500C-4EC2-B67C-D2D1BD766DE1}}
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