Here’s where we’re at: We’re in the midst of planning our Canada-wide expansion, thanks to all the great activity that’s happened in Edmonton (yay for Edmonton real estate). But, as with all things that you think should be as simple as the flick of a switch (like getting your cable hooked up — why DOES it take so much work to get cable?! ), this expansion is going to take longer than expected.

BONUS NEWS
We’re thinking of going into the US. Yuppers. Why not, right? Canada’s one of the toughest places to get a site like this going… so, I mean, if we can do it here (at least in Edmonton), why not try the US, too?

Hope you’re surviving the changing times,
jw

How will realtors make an effort to refill the plates of homesellers this year?

Since the 80s, Canada has not seen a real estate crisis like the one we’re now in the midst (beginning, middle?) of. Working for our own often selfish interests has caused the problem, many are arguing — the buying up of multiple properties on a hairdresser’s salary in the hopes of capitalizing on great need and the great desperation (read: amount of money one’s willing to spend) to satisfy those needs. It’s been greed.

By charging $0 for our service on What-Customers-Say.com, we’re trying to be less greedy.

What are you going to do this year to focus less on yourself and more on greater needs? What are real estate agents going to do to help the people who are selling their homes at significant losses get through this hard time? Does anyone know of any agents who are lowering their commissions to help clients out today?

~jw

Hopefully this will get your new year started on a positive note

The economy’s in the tank (no news there), and real estate sales are… well, at the bottom of that tank, with just 416 sales in Edmonton in December, so far. (The Edmonton Real Estate Blog is good for giving such sales updates.)

That’s why we at What-Customers-Say.com have decided not to charge for agent marketing profiles. Well, that’s not the only reason, but that’s a big & good one.

No charge for marketing profiles on What-Customers-Say.com
Yup, $0. Totally free. So whether you have a marketing profile or not (see an example of one here), there’s really no reason not to participate in What-Customers-Say.com — and let your clients help you with your marketing. …Not that we’re pressuring you to join! We’re just knocking down barriers for those agents who can benefit from our services but may not be doing well enough to provide anything in return right now.

What does a “free profile” mean? 
Y’know when you sign up for a free version of something, like, say, some software application, and you get this really watered down version where you have to pay to add on all the stuff you really need? Well, we’re not going to put you through that. You get all the bells & whistles that are available today, including:

• Your photo
• Your marketing messaging
• Your contact info
• A property listing
• Add-a-comment (testimonial) feature
• Email updates every time someone leaves you a review
• Details about activity on your account (on your sign-in page)

For free.

Well, how is What-Customers-Say.com going to make money?
Dunno. Got any ideas? We’ll see. But what matters right now and for as long as our little site is around is that Edmonton real estate agents, Sherwood Park real estate agents, St. Albert real estate agents… and every agent across Alberta & the country (as soon as we go national) will be able to get a free profile. And that profile — with all the wingdings listed above — will cost you a whopping nuthin’.

What do you think about that? Let us know!

~jw

Blogging to keep a record for my graduate school final project

WhatCustomersSay.com is not only a Web site but also a case study, which is part of my final project for my graduate program. (I’m very interested in social media and, in my day job, I drive the social media marketing team. My grad studies are helping me to fuel my passion from an academic perspective.) The topic of/thesis for my final project isn’t worked out perfectly, but it revolves around these questions:

• How can professionals & organizations market themselves online today when they do not necessarily control the messages about themselves &/or their companies?
• Can a self-serving organization truly release control of their messages to users/the public at large? How much does an organization need to control the messages about it?–to what lengths will they go to keep messages coralled?
• And, finally, what happens when you surrender total control and let people say what they will about you?–what kinds of professionals & organizations are doing this successfully… & unsuccessfully?

This blog has been not a way to voice my opinion — although it seems to have become that — but rather a journal of happenings that I will be able to use to compose the case study element of my final project. The majority of the entries in this blog are here simply as a record of happenings. An artifact.

So why don’t I keep my journal/blog private?
I like the input. Rather, I need the input. Am I seeing things the right way? Am I wrong about something? I need readers to tell me. And controlling my own messages isn’t exactly acting with integrity or transparency, given my topic, is it? How can I expect others to open themselves up to the public if I won’t do it myself?

Why didn’t I write about this sooner?
One of my profs asked the same question — it’s a great question. And the answer is simply this: I haven’t wanted to alter or influence the way people respond to me. If you knew all along that this was a study in control issues that marketers have, would you want to come off as controlling?–or would you be overly controlling to prove a point?

I’m writing about this now because I think it’s time. Plain and simple. I wish I had more complex answers than I do… but “get to the point” is kinda my motto, so………

~jw

Are you putting user-contribution systems to use for you?

I’m researching a contact management tool to use for What-Customers-Say.com — to help us manage our incoming emails from agents + reviewers and to assign/complete tasks accordingly — and I’ve just come across BatchBook, an online CRM for small business owners.

Anyway, their tool is also designed for real estate agents, and they’ve written a useful whitepaper (html) for agents that you can find here

Are you using these social networking tools today, agents? Is Real Estate 2.0 growing in Canada… or are Americans the early adopters, with Canadians following their lead?

~jw

The front of the postcard

If you’re a real estate agent with a profile on our site, then you can look forward to receiving in the mail (if you haven’t already) a package of postcards.

What are these postcards for?
Well, if you have a profile on our site, then you already know that we strongly encourage you “manage your reputation before it manages you.” These postcards wil help with that.

The idea is that you can take the postcards, hand them out to your clients when you close on a deal with them (or run into them in Starbucks) and simply ask them to review you on the site —- the postcard is their reminder to do so.

What’s on the postcard?
The front is the bright card you see here. The back is a message that:

• Thanks the client for choosing to work with you
• Tells them about What-Customers-Say.com
• Invites them to rate you to tell you what you did right and if you need a little improvement in an area
• Lists out the steps to take to rate you

There’s also space at the bottom of the card where you can sign your name or place your business stamp.

Hope these cards help! We know it can be challenging to work up the nerve to ask for a review/recommendation from a client, so hopefully these cards will help make it a little easier. (Handing over something may help? At least it keeps your hands busy and gives them something to look at instead of just staring blankly at you. )

~jw

Kudos to those agents who have the courage to be early adopters of our real estate agent rating site

In the last few days — or since EREB sent out its email about What-Customers-Say.com — we’ve been having some good talks around here about the agents who will use our site and those who will not. We’ve also talked about the agents who’ve already asked to be removed from the site. (BTW, we’ll only remove until the point that you get a review; after that time, your name has effectively been “added” by a [legitimate only] reviewer.)

But what about those agents who already are using the site? Or what about those who, in the heat of everything, are actually creating profiles on What-Customers-Say.com?

It takes a lot of courage to step away from the [small] mob with its pitchforks and flaming torches and say, “Yes, I believe in my customer’s voice, and I’m going to support it. Even if it stresses me out every time I get a new review.”

So to everyone who continues to go out on a limb — in spite of pressure from the ill-informed not to be associated with us — and trust not only in their customers but also in the idea that What-Customers-Say.com actually is helping the best agents rise to the top, thank you. And kudos to you. As you certainly know, it’s the leaders, not the followers, who actually make real change happen.

~jw

PS: Lance Jones (a partner at What-Customers-Say.com) wrote this today, and I love how clear it is, so I want to post it:

Only 27 of ~290 reviews on our site are negative — so are dissenting agents sure that our site is about making realtors look bad?

Things are loooooking up!

Because I was curious, I looked up some stats on What-Customers-Say.com. As of about 7:30MST today:

• We have 112 agents reviewed
• There are over 280 reviews on our site (not including the illegitimate ones we’ve pulled down)

One-third of the agents rated on What-Customers-Say.com are rated between 4.5 to 4.99 stars out of a possible 5 stars. And our top 3 most reviewed agents are rated between 4.25-4.49 stars out of 5 —- which is probably not where they’d be if they only had one glowing review, but you can imagine the positive effects of rating at the top of the page when someone sorts results by number of reviews (which is how the site is built to default).  

And here are the details on how the cards fall re: top-rated vs. … um… less-well rated agents:

• 5/5 stars: 6 agents
• 4.5-4.99/5 stars: 45 agents
• 4.25-4.49/5 stars: 15 agents
• 4-4.24/5 stars: 9 agents
• 3.75-3.99/5 stars: 11 agents
• 3-3.75/5 stars: 9 agents
• 0-2.99/5 stars: 17 agents

75 of our reviewed agents are rated at 4.0 or higher out of 5 stars. 20 are between 3 & 4 stars. And the other 17 are below 3 stars.

Finally, the majority of the <3 star-rated real estate agents have just 1 review. So the tides could easily change on the site for these folks.

So, the blog may not have a ton o’ fans , but the site seems to. And that’s what’s most important. ‘Cos a blog is just my voice… but What-Customers-Say.com is the open, vocal collaboration of great agents and their honest, generally happy clients.

~jw

Getting down to brass tacks

How does that Simon & Garfunkel song go?

I get slandered – libel
I hear words I never heard in the Bible
And I’m one step ahead of the shoe shine
Two steps away from the county line
Just tryin’ to keep the customers satisfied… satisfied!

Ah, keeping the customer satisfied. Our customer is the “real” customer. Who’s your customer?

With that in mind, What-Customers-Say.com was the subject of an e-newsletter sent out by the Edmonton Real Estate Board today. I’ll insert the article below.

Before I go too far, though, let’s clear some things up, shall we?

• Bashing: We have not “bashed” 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 take the time out of their days to rate him, and his response was —- in “shouting”, all-caps emails sent to us —- to pull his name off the site. Why? Because he didn’t like, basically, that we hadn’t asked his permission. Here are our problems with that:
  a) Your customers took the time to rate you, and they all gave you rave reviews, but you would rather pull those reviews down — effectively telling your clients that their time doesn’t matter to you — than let them speak openly.
  b) The customer voice does not ask your permission to speak. You can’t stifle what your clients think about you. In the past, you could —- but the Web is this tool that actually lets customers be heard. Try listening to them instead of shutting them up.
• Relationship with EREB: EREB contacted us to ask us to loop [name of EREB worker withheld] in. He wondered why we hadn’t contacted him earlier on. The pretense of his email to us was that he wanted to make it possible for us to work better together. He initiated contact. We did not. So for us later to suggest, in posts, that we would be working with EREB was 100% true —- but then we did meet with him, and he changed his tune.

As I mentioned in the past, you can focus on the negative all you want. That’s fine. Read only the blog posts that openly challenge the mindset of old-school agents who want to stifle the customer voice. Feel free to overlook all the great posts about how we’re helping this agent and that agent. About how we love our agents who’ve shown an interest in their customers’ voices.

At the end of this day, this site is here. And it’s a legitimate way for clients to find agents in the future. And, if you choose not to be involved, that’s cool. We’ve had several agents asked to be pulled off the site, and we’ve never said a single negative thing about them. We know it’s your right to use whatever media you want to for your business and reputation management.

There’s only one agent we haven’t reacted well to, for the “bashing” reason above. Just one. READ THAT AGAIN: There’s just one agent we’re not big fans of.

On slander
I’m going to do another post on the difference between slander and libel, too, since this EREB article gets it wrong. Slander is spoken; libel is print. And neither apply to what we’re doing here. We pull down all reviews that are defamatory —- and, sorry, but the truth is never about defamation of character. Nor can open sharing of the truth be an invasion of your privacy. That’s just not how it works.

Here’s the article:

What-customers-say ranks REALTORS®You can send a copy of the request to the Association at marketing@ereb.com as well.

A group of four young entrepreneurs have just launched a new web site which allows customers to rate their relationship with a REALTOR®. The service has been profiled by the Edmonton Journal and was promoted at the recent trade show. While this new “service” may have some positive benefits for REALTORS® it also has the potential for abuse and slander. You can review the site at www.what-customers-say.com.

While the name implies that a number of services may be ranked, the site is targeted directly at REALTORS® and is operational only in Edmonton at this time. The company has scraped the names and company affiliation of many of our members off the Internet and posted them on the site, in most cases without your knowledge or consent.

The site has a blog which has attacked some REALTORS® who have asked that their name be removed from the site.

The REALTORS® Association of Edmonton has met with a principal of the company and expressed concerns raised by some of our members. Despite the company claims, they do not have a relationship with the Association and will not be given access to MLS® data. In our opinion this is an advertising opportunity which some members may want to explore. However, customers may perceive a bias inherent in a service which rates the very people who are paying for it.

If you do not wish to be listed on the what-customers-say.com web site, you should contact the principals directly in writing to ask that your name be removed or to have a specific comment amended. You can write to them at wiebeDOTjoannaATgmailDOTcom, wcsATdavelerigerDOTcom or lancecjATgmailDOTcom

 

As always, feel free to discuss in comments. Remain anonymous — that’s fine. But if you have something to say, say it here. Make it public. And then we can actually find ways to work better together, given that one of our goals is to help the best agents rise to the top organically rather than by means of big marketing budgets.

~jw

Do you advocate on behalf of all customers... or just your clients?

It’s too bad that, prior to the advent of the Web — and, in particular, social media and elevating the customer voice — the only organizations that advocated on behalf of the customer were non-profit consumer advocacy groups. Because they weren’t bringing in any revenue, those groups weren’t really been able to finance marketing initiatives and other tactics to get the word out about defending customer rights and freedoms.

So, until the Web rolled around, no one really understood just how much power the customer ought to have. Even customers didn’t seem sure if they should question things or just accept the status quo.

But, now, if the consumer wants to find out information about his/her rights, about a product s/he is researching or, as it may be, about a real estate agent to whom a friend has referred him/her, they just do this:

• Visit Google (or Yahoo or MSN)
• Type in a keyword phrase that describes what they’re looking for, like “customer reviews Edmonton real estate agents”
• Get results! (Can you guess who’s at the top of that organic results list?)

Ta da! The consumer gets what s/he’s been looking for. Pretty sweet. Goooooo customers!

So, what is customer advocacy?
Chris Lawer, an expert on customer advocacy, defines it like this:

[Customer advocacy is] an advanced form of customer-orientation that responds to the new drivers of empowered customer choice, involvement and knowledge. Customer advocacy aims to build deeper customer relationships by earning new levels of trust and commitment and by developing mutual dialogue and partnership with customers. Put simply, customer advocacy is doing what is best for the customer, even if that entails recommending a competitor’s product (see paper by Urban in Winter 2004 MIT Sloan Management Review for more on this). The hope is that this will earn greater levels of loyalty and spread positive word-of-mouth.

And, yes, businesses —- real estate agents included —- it works for you. Read a few of the ways Lawer suggests you can use the power of your customer’s voices to build trust in your business and transparently represent your business to the whole world:

• How to build trust & relationships through customer advocacy
• How to build brand value? Become an advocate for your customers
• COVER STORY: How to harness the power of customer advocacy

Find all the info on Chris’s blog: http://chrislawer.blogs.com/chris_lawer/2005/02/developments_in.html

Are you ready to be a customer advocate?
It starts with accepting your role as a customer above all. We’re all customers. Even the billionaires are, when they’re out for dinner, just customers.

For a better consumer world for you and everyone you know, advocating on behalf of the customer is the only way to go. Which side do you want to be on? Now, which side do you think you’ll be on in two years’ time, when customers simply demand what they’re entitled to: free, newsworthy information to help them make better decisions when acquiring a product or hiring a service.

~jw