“I got more out of today than a whole year’s worth of ‘classes’ at my brokerage.”

These are the two most memorable quotes I heard from a couple attendees of our first Real Estate Marketing Lab event that took place today.

The event, held at RefugePDX, was a combination conference and “hands on” workshop where attendees gained a real working knowledge of the HOW and WHY of Activity Based Marketing along with the supporting platforms of WordPress, Facebook, and YouTube.

This workshop style event is something a little different than what most Real Estate conferences offer.  It was a hybrid conference/conversation/Q+A session all at once and more than anything, it gave other local agents a glimpse of what we do at M Realty on a daily basis and how they might implement the same strategies in their practices.

We started the day with a discussion around Garron’s “Do-Document-Share-Convert” strategy.  He then showed several examples of this in action, and prepped the group for our mid-day activity of heading out into the real world to put this strategy into action.  We then broke the group up into smaller groups of 4-5 agents, gave them some basic instructions, and sent them on their way.

The groups were instructed to think of something they could go out and “do”, pick a way to “document” this activity, grab some lunch, and then return back to the lab so we could proceed with the “share” portion of the day.

Each group did a great job of picking a task or topic, documenting it with pictures and video, and making their way back within the allotted time.  From there, we worked with the groups on getting the images and videos ready to be used in WordPress.  We showed an easy way to crop, resize and upload the images along with getting the videos setup into a YouTube account.  Once that was all done, we dove into the WordPress section on our practice site The University of M. Check out the “student posts” section to see the results!

Overall, we were pretty impressed with the group and their progress.  We covered A LOT of info today, and everyone was able to keep up and participate in the activity.  In the end, several of the agents expressed comments similar to those in the beginning of the post, which to me means the event was a success.

We plan on doing more of these events, hopefully on a monthly basis, so if you’re interested shoot me an email and I’ll make sure you get the invite for the next one.

Ken Robinson - Creativity and educating towards our new world

Dan Pink – What motivates us.

Steve Jobs – Spend your life on project you love!

Yesterday in one of the classes we usually hold on Thursday’s at M Realty, we had a group of agents that were interested in learning a little more about how to create content from your daily activity.  Garron explains:

Garron’s point is that these are the activities that you should already be out doing, as a Real Estate agent.  Then you can leverage those activities to create interesting content that you can show the world, reiterating what you actually do for a living, which is sell Real Estate.

In the end, you become a better agent, plus you have the ability to show this to the world vs. the old way of just telling everyone that you’re a great agent.

What kind of content are your activities creating?

Since I started at M Realty late last year, we’ve been focusing pretty much all of our efforts on this type of marketing both as a brokerage and in working with all our agents on their individual marketing efforts. We’ve been using a combination of blogging (with custom designed WordPress blogs), Facebook and Twitter to spread our message out into the world.

The activity set for M Realty as a brokerage is based around technology and innovative marketing ideas that help our agents in their Real Estate practices. We use a combination of photos and videos in our blogs, Twitter and Facebook posts to show the world what we’re up to on a daily basis. Apparently it’s been working. Garron, our Founder, has been asked to speak at numerous National Real Estate conferences and we were recently nominated for the Inman News “Innovator Award” for most innovative brokerage in the country.

The activity set for M Realty agents is totally dependent on the individual agent. Some agents are already very active out in the community, and finding things they find interesting that they can use as “content” to promote themselves is relatively easy. For others, we have to work on creating a plan and layout the steps that they can follow to get to that level. But, we’re good at it, and the agents are able to pick up the concept fairly quickly. Once they do, they’re off and running, doing things they actually like to do and using those activities to cultivate new business relationships.

It really is a beautiful thing.  If you’d like to talk more about how this can work for you, get in touch.