I am having the hardest time believing it. A real estate agent who got a whopping 10 REVIEWS —- all of them super-high —- in JUST ONE DAY (today) emailed us tonight to ask us to pull his page down and remove all those reviews.
Now, we’ve had some unhappy real estate agents ask us to pull their name off the site, and we’ve complied when they’ve had legimitate reasons to come down —- but we’ve told them that we can’t prevent people from adding them back in. (EARTH TO DISSENTERS: Start managing your online reputations. Pull your head out of the sand: your clients WILL talk about you. Why are you all sooooooo resistant????? What are you trying to hide?)
But we’ve never, ever, ever had a real estate agent with 10 REVIEWS ask to be removed from the site. It sounds like the real problem for this real estate agent was that he didn’t like not being looped in on the conversation early on; it’s an ego thing. He thought we were compiling reviews to solicit his business. Ha! Hardly. This is a customer-driven engine. I guess the joke’s on his poor clients who actually took the time to rate him. (BTW: Clients, we’ll still enter you in our Amazon gift card draw.)
DISSENTING AGENTS, HEAR THIS: We are not here just for you. This site is not built just for you. Keep your “business” all to yourself — we’re certainly not begging you to join our site. Only real estate agents who CARE about their customers need join.
If you have the marketing savvy to realize the potential to use What-Customers-Say.com to market your services to potential clients, then great —- we can totally help you there. But we WILL NOT:
- Make an effort of any kind to prevent your legitimate clients from leaving legitimate reviews
- Kiss up to you when you get pissy about your 2.45/5.0 review —- hello, serve your clients better and those bad reviews won’t happen!!!
- Stifle the voice of the customer at your command
We don’t actually work for real estate agents. We work for the CUSTOMER first and foremost. We looooove our great agents — the ones who actually care… the Bevs, Kevins, Jasons, Stevens, Alexises, Judys, Janelles, Charlenes, Barbaras — and we’ll bend over backwards to help them encourage their customers to talk about them and manage their online reputations. We absolutely feel a great sense of… closeness with those agents.
But for those who don’t respect their clients, we don’t need or want you, thanks. You’re not right for this site.
I can tell you this: If 10 of Jason Hafso’s clients left him reviews without his knowledge, he would NOT tell us he wanted to be pulled off the site. That’s probably why he has so many happy clients saying great things about him.
I just wish this agent would share the same respect for his clients’ time and voices. What a shame.
~jw
PS: It’s not an invasion of privacy for your name to be on our site. When you put your name online in any way, you make it available for public consumption. If you don’t want to be talked about, don’t make yourself public. End your web presence entirely —- but you can’t pick and choose. Not today. Welcome to the era of user-generated content.
Tags: Edmonton realtors, negative reviews, real estate marketing
November 12, 2008 at 8:04 pm |
This article gave me a good chuckle today. I gotta say, I can’t imagine any Realtor not wanting to get their face out there in the public, especially online.
If I Google the name of the Realtor you mentioned above, he shows up once or twice in amongst an author, a Toronto cop, a chef and a few others. If I Google my name, I’m mentioned in almost every line of the first 5 or 6 pages of results. I’m mentioned on websites I’ve never even heard of. I’m not saying that to brag, just to make a point.
In this day and age, especially with social networking sites like Facebook, people can and will talk about you. The public has so much more power than they did just a few years ago. In 10 seconds, they can say to 300 of their Facebook friends, “The barista at the local coffee shop was rude to me, so nobody go there again!” That kind of influence is HUGE!. It’s even easy for a person to throw up a review or create a whole website (see sites like http://FutureShopSucks.com , http://www.WeHateVonage.com or http://www.RuinediPhone.com ).
My point is, I couldn’t possibly police every comment made about me on every website, so why bother? Instead, I just try to make my clients so happy they would never think about writing anything bad about me.
By the way, on a side note, I walked in to my office this morning and was treated like a celebrity! Several people apparently saw me on the news last night, thanks to a story about your website. Unfortunately I missed it, but it seems like the word about your site is really getting around. Congrats!
November 12, 2008 at 8:54 pm |
That’s such good news that you were treated “like a celebrity” this morning, Jason! So happy to hear it. We were actually really surprised to learn that the site was on GlobalTV in Edmonton last night, but we quickly checked it out online (one of my grad school profs actually told me about the TV story, or I never would’ve known) —- and we immediately saw that you were one of the agents with profiles they showed. They actually focused on yours for a bit. Did you get a chance to see it? (Our latest blog post gives instructions to help people see it.)
As for Nim, I totally agree re: lack of awareness of Web/Real Estate 2.0. I had the hardest time finding him online, too —- even when I added keywords like “realtor” and “alberta” to his name. Oh, well. Some people just don’t get it.
But, for those of you who do get the web and the HUGE influence that the public has in spreading word of mouth online today, there’s plenty of success to be had, no?
~jw
November 19, 2008 at 1:00 am |
[...] was an absolutely crazy email thread with an agent we’ve already discussed here, and I’d love to include some snippets from that [...]
November 27, 2008 at 12:30 am |
[...] the people who pull themselves off our site. The one agent who we were actually very frustrated by (the subject of a post a few weeks ago) was so frustrating not because he doesn’t like the site but because he had 10 of his clients [...]