Real Estate Pod Casting Technology

Everyone is Pod casting these days, uploading audio/video to websites that can be downloaded and replayed on your iPod.

I found an article yesterday touting to be one of the first Pod Casting sites specifically designed for the real estate industry. For those of you that are iPod users, you'll know what all of this means. For non-iPod users, well in short...you can now buy an iPod and go to some of these sites to download tips, tricks, training and general chatter about how to better manage your Real Estate business.

http://www.podcastingnews.com/archives/2006/07/new_real_estate.html

Here are some things to remember when Pod Casting, or downloading Pod Casting files:
1) Most of these are amateur recordings and may or may not have accurate data
2) Because most of this is amateur, just remember opinion is NOT fact. A lot of people will share their success tips which may or may not work for your area.
3) Only download from reputable sites, remember there are still a lot of virus and spyware sites out there. Never download stuff from sites that look less than professional or give you errors when you start downloading.
4) If you are recording a pod cast, be clear, concise and site your statistics. Making up data or sharing your internal data doesn't support your idea unless it can be proven in general or over a larger test group.
5) Be careful of liability - don't say things that may put you in the sights of lawyers; avoid using competitor names, brands or other products, especially if you are not providing favorable information. Even favorable reports may require approval from the companies, it never hurts to ask before you publish your pod cast. If you can, issue a release of liability for the pod cast (especially if it's on your site, let people know that this is Opinion or Recommendation and that some markets may require different strategies/methods). Just be careful.

Finally - before you publish online, load the files to a test site and have a few of your internal employees test them to make sure they sound OK, download correctly and are a reasonable length.

If you are managing a larger group of agents or brokers, you should really consider pod casting or media file downloads within your internal corporate network to provide your employees with valuable training and educational material. I've known a couple of CEO's that have developed weekly messages that they record for their staff (and an additional message for their customers/potential customers) to help motivate and educate their staff from an executive level. In fact this can be very effective for marketing. I’ll use an example; my company, myAgentPHONE has a relationship with Hobbs Herder Advertising. We supply them with a telephony product known as VoiceCast, (which I’ll write about in a future post,) to communicate their message to their clients. For instance, Don Hobbs uses VoiceCast to record holiday greetings or reminders of upcoming seminars that he sends out to his clients routinely. . He recommends Realtors to use it to stay in contact with their farms. The main difference here is that VoiceCast sends the messages to phone lines whereas pod casts can be sent and or downloaded. So all though it’s not the same technology as pod casting, it allows for the same ease of delivery of a consistent message. Subscribe to my RSS feed to stay tuned for more info on VoiceCast.

Okay so for those of you not really interested in the iPod generation or Pod Casting...remember myAgentPHONE gives you the ability to play a pod cast
message directly through an 800 number that people can call at any time for free. The quality can usually be better and give people the ability to connect with someone by phone or cell right after the broadcast...a much more effective way of converting this type of marketing tool directly into a lead.

Yep, if you're in the Real Estate & Mortgage business, myAgentPHONE really is that important...it can take the place of several "hot technologies" or just be a more powerful full-service offering for you to leverage to sell more real estate.

SSend me an email about your thoughts on this subject. And if you have the time, let me know if you've heard of other similar technologies being used to pod cast.

Until next time,

Damien Zamora
dzamora@myagentphone.com