Inside Social Media with Rick Mulready
From Rick Mulready’s Show Notes:
Have you heard of the Corcoran Group? If not, you’re going to love them after hearing this show. They’re the largest real estate firm in New York City and they were started by Barbara Corcoran who is on the TV show “Shark Tank” here in the US.
No, they don’t have the brand recognition as a Coca-Cola or JetBlue, but when I ask other heads of social media from the most successful brands in the world to name a great example of a brand using social media really smartly, the Corcoran Group inevitably comes up.
Get ready for this one, it’s so full of effective strategies that you can start using right away.
(Heads-up, I really geek out with Matthew on this one since there’s so much great info!)
In my chat with him, we discuss the Corcoran Group’s social media and content marketing strategy and how you can model it in your business, including:
Corcoran’s approach to using social media to sell high-end property and why it’s so successful.
How they create so much valuable content, and a simple plan that any business can follow to do the same.
Matthew gives his genius strategy for how they use Foursquare and how they’ve strategically come up with thousands of pieces of helpful content (I LOVE this idea).
Matthew’s 3 tips that he’d give to a small business trying to grow their business using social media.
How Corcoran measures their social media efforts against selling high-end properties.
And, of course, we talk about a lot of other cool actionable things that you can take and immediately implement into your business.
Transcript:
Rick: All right folks we're here with Matthew Shadbolt who’s the director of internet marketing for the Corcoran Group. Corcoran is the largest real estate company in New York City. Matthew, welcome to The Inside Social Media Podcast. I'm psyched to have you on today.
Matthew Shadbolt: Hi Rick, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Rick: Absolutely. So, tell us a little bit about what you do there at the Corcoran Group and what your background is, what your role is there at the company and I'd also love to hear if you have a team there or is it just you and then if you do have a team, sort of what's the structure there
Matthew Shadbolt: Yeah, no problem. Well, my official title is the director of interactive products and marketing at the Corcoran Group and essentially I'm responsible for anything digital that touches the customer. That’s my main role at Corcoran.
Rick: Okay.
Matthew Shadbolt: So that encompasses our website, anything we do with video, anything we do with mobile, things like listing syndication so working with advertising partners to make sure that the properties we represent get distributed in the right places across the web, so that could involve somebody like Zillow or Trulia or New York Times locally here. So distribution still falls under me and also social is a very very large part of that and that’s we do a number of varied things that I'm sure we're going to talk about to do with that as well as agent training, digital agent training. We have about 2,000 agents that work at Corcoran spread out across–
Rick: Two thousand?
Matthew Shadbolt: Two thousand, yeah.
Rick: Wow.
Matthew Shadbolt: And that’s spread out across Manhattan and Brooklyn primarily and we also have a fairly large presence in the east end of Long Island, the Hamptons region there and down in Palm Beach in Florida. So, we're responsible for sort of digital training, marketing materials and one on one sessions and sort of getting our folks to adopt to a more sort of digital way of working and working with customers and then the last thing that I'm really responsible for is anything sort of – any sort of experimental platform, so the future proofing Corcoran out for the next 5 to 10 years. And that’s a really interesting space to work in because the real estate industry is undergoing seismic changes as a result of digital and you know having to keep our eye on perhaps what our customers are going to be doing when they look for real estate in the next 5 to 10 years time and having a presence there or the ability to connect with them in different places. That’s something that I work on a lot at Corcoran as well.
Rick: So please tell me you have a team after listening everything that you're responsible for. Please tell me it's not just you.
Matthew Shadbolt: Yeah, yeah. I actually have a fairly small team. There's two people that report in to me and then we three are part of a larger marketing team that consists of like graphic designers and administrative assistants and the print side of the business and things like that. So, there's a larger marketing team that we are sort of subset of, but everything digital is handled primarily by three people, so there’s myself that sort of coordinates everything and sets the strategy and I do a lot of the sort of hands on work as well and then I have what we call as a specialist role which works a lot more with the agents and does a lot of the sort of distribution and work with the ad partner stuff and then we actually have an analyst role as well. The third position is an analyst role and that person is essentially responsible for understanding what is currently going on.
So, we're a very data driven group of three people here. We don’t make decisions without data essentially. And that person’s main role is to help us understand the effectiveness of what we're building, to understand how we're spending our money and essentially to answer the questions that we didn’t even really know we needed to ask, so it's actually a very very critical role. So that’s sort of how it works within the larger sort of corporate environment if you like.
Rick: Okay. And we're going to talk – we're going to, you know, as we get into the conversation here, we're certainly going to talk about how you guys measure your social media because I love the fact that you just said that everything that you do is data-driven and I think that that’s – I don’t think I know that’s a big challenge for most anybody using social media because it comes up as sort of the million dollar question here in almost every conversation I have here on the podcast.
So, let’s start with social media there and I think it's interesting that you – the way you talk about is social media does not sit in a silo to what you guys are doing there from a marketing perspective and I kind of think – and correct me if I'm wrong, but for the real estate industry it tends to be sort of caught in the old ways if you will, a little bit archaic in how they do things but you guys are on the cutting edge.
Matthew Shadbolt: Thank you.
Rick: And I don’t know if you know this but you guys, one of the questions I tend to ask my guest here on the show is what's one example of a really really good use of social media and I'm going to ask you the same thing towards the end here, but you know what's one good example of social media and maybe how small businesses can model it and you guys come up as one of those – you guys have come up in more than one conversation in these. I'm talking to some of the biggest brands in the world so–
Matthew Shadbolt: Oh, amazing to hear.
Rick: Yeah, I don’t know if you know but you do now, you do now. So, how do you guys use social media to sell, so the properties that you're representing are high end properties, so how does the Corcoran Group use social media to sell those properties and then how might small businesses be able to apply some of those principles that you guys are using to their own business often when they have very minimal budgets to work with?
Matthew Shadbolt: Sure, yeah, no problem. I mean there's two types of customers that we have. We have buyers that we're trying to attract and then we actually have sellers whose properties we represent. So, there's two different sort of strands of the business if you like, but essentially real estate is primarily a – it's an offline referral driven business. It's primarily analog in terms of the actual business that happens.
But one of the things that’s so important to understand in terms of the shift over the last maybe seven or eight years at real estate is – especially if the market is especially if the market is slow, the amount of research that people do online prior to reaching out to an agent, that time period – and this is data from like the National Association of Realtors, that data at that time period can be about 18 months to about two years of people doing research online where they consider themselves to be in the market and places like Google and Zillow and Trulia and the big syndication portals, they become very very important part of that process, but also people aren't necessarily looking for those specific type of searches until they're very deep into the process. A lot of what they do before that is things like researching neighborhoods and understanding where exactly they want to live, whether it has the amenities nearby that they would like or that it offers the kind of things that they’d be interested or if it’s near the bars that they enjoy, things like that. So, what happens is we are very very focused with social on where people are spending time online.
It's not necessarily about the direct connection with the customer in terms of direct lead generation. The path of the customer is sort of inherently – it's not a straight line, let me put it like that. The path of the customer is sort of all over the place when it comes to real estate. They look at one thing and then they look at a completely different thing and then they begin to narrow their choices. And what happens is the more we can have – the more time we can generate with our content even if it's recreational so much the better and it allows that – that approach allows us to connect with customers who are not yet in the market but eventually become customers.
So, the greater the level of connection, what actually happens is that the more aggressive we've become in social media and the greater connection we've made with a greater amount of people, what happens is that when people actually come to do those searches inside a Google or a Zillow or a Trulia or somebody like that, we actually – our results that have the little Corcoran logo next to them in the thumbnail picture, they start to resonate more with the customer because the customer understands that it's a brand that they recognize.
So essentially the social media thing is a search plate for us and what happens is the more aggressive we've been in social over the last sort of three or four years, there's a direct connection to an aggressive list in organic search results either back into our own site or just people that work with Corcoran listings on other sites and with Corcoran listings on other sites is still valuable time with us even if they bypass our website and connect with an agent without even coming to our own site.
The main goal of this is to connect customers with the agents as you would imagine so social plays key role in making all of that happen.
Rick: Yeah. So, I have tons of questions that, I mean that’s such great information and my mind is just going a million miles a minute right now. So, my first question there is can you give us an example of a type of content that you guys are providing because your sales cycle if you will is so long as you said and it's that, you know, that lead time, that long lead time that goes into it, so when people are researching neighborhoods and schools and so forth, what type of content are you putting out there from a social perspective?
Matthew Shadbolt: Yeah. A great example of what you're talking about is what we do with Foursquare. We have an approach of using Foursquare and it's incredibly popular here in New York, Foursquare. Obviously, those guys are from New York and what we've done, what we've built over the past three or four years with Foursquare is an enormous inventory of localized tips that are generated from our agents.
So, we'll interview an agent for 15 minutes or something like that and we extract sort of what's inside their head. So, an agent that’s been working a particular neighborhood for 15 or 20 years, they know the secret spots, how to cut the line, where the deals are, all this stuff that only a real local would know. And agents are really really good at that stuff and what we do is we've created a database of almost 3,000 localized pieces of information that now live as our presence within Foursquare.
So what happens is when people are checking in and especially when they use the Explore feature of Foursquare, Corcoran has a very very localized context specific presence when people are exploring neighborhoods or deciding where to go to eat tonight or thinking about what to do with their weekend and things like that and that’s a really good example of how we've been able to generate enormous brand awareness locally and also outside of our market.
When people come to visit New York, they understand that Corcoran understands what life in Manhattan and Brooklyn is like more than anybody else and that’s a very big brand goal for us is you know owning local expertise and we do that you know by using sort of local social noble platforms like and Foursquare is a good example of that.
Rick: Can you give us a specific example of how that might work?
Matthew Shadbolt: Of a particular tip?
Rick: Yeah. I mean it doesn’t have to be the specific business but just like what's an example of the type of tip that you might give.
Matthew Shadbolt: Yeah. I mean I'll just share our most popular one. We have a place in New York with the Shake Shack and it's notorious for its long line. It's a burger joint exactly in Madison Square Park and in the summer the lines can be up to an hour or even 90 minutes for the burger and their ice cream which sounds–
Rick: Got to be a good burger.
Matthew Shadbolt: Believe me that is one of the burgers you'll ever have and it's very famous for its long line.
Rick: Okay.
Matthew Shadbolt: And our tip at the Shake Shack is a tip about how to cut the line, which essentially says you know, if you're here just for ice cream, look for the sign that say you know the B line instead of the A line and you can cut straight through and you can be out of there in about 5 or 10 minutes. It's a very very popular tip, but it's something that only real local would know because most people, you know, the line is 100 people long and it's 90 minutes.
So, if you're just there for a certain type of thing, this is how it works and it's a very very popular tip like hundreds of people have saved it and used it and added it to lists and shared it and things like that–
Rick: So, someone checks in to the Shake Shack and they get your tip.
Matthew Shadbolt: Yeah. I mean that’s – they don’t even need to check in. I mean if they check in, it’ll pop up on their phone, but even when they're using Explore, even if they're not followers of Corcoran, they still see the popular tips at those venues which is then great for us.
Rick: Okay. So, is that a paid strategy or is that something, you know, I'm just trying to sort of narrow that down to see what type of – you know is that can be modeled by a small business maybe who doesn’t really have any budget to do that, but it's a brilliant idea because the important thing to pull out of there too is that you're not advertising if you will a property. I mean you're just adding value to people within the city.
Matthew Shadbolt: Right. I mean one of the things we talk about a lot at Corcoran is the product, very often the product that we have is the service that our agents provide. Homes is sort of – you know selling a home and an apartment, that’s actually the result for the customer, but the service and the value that we provide is helping people through the process of moving within New York.
That’s actually what we do and a lot of what we took about brand level and every time we do customer surveys and things like that, our customers always tell us the same thing, which is that when they look for an apartment in New York, what is around the building is just as much as important to the process as what's inside the apartment and it's something we sort of characterize it as going beyond the four walls.
That’s what we call it internally and this strategy of populating localized knowledge around the city in a very sort of aggressive way, that’s a very key part of helping people understand that if you had a question about life in the city, we are an available and hopefully helpful and insightful resource for that because nobody really does it better than an agent that’s been working in a particular neighborhood for a long period of time.
Rick: Sure, sure. So, was that for – sorry, go ahead.
Matthew Shadbolt: To answer your question, it's not paid.
Rick: Oh okay.
Matthew Shadbolt: It's really an investment of time which of course is not free, but there's no monetary investment into what we're doing that. It's simply you know us adding maybe 8 to 10 different tips a week, but we've been doing it for three plus years. So over time, you end up with this enormously powerful inventory of localized information. Essentially we went out and built our own Zagat survey. That’s essentially what we did.
And you know a lot of the work was essentially making sure that those tips surface in the right place at the right time for the right person and as Foursquare has evolved, what they're actually starting to work on is different types of tests surfacing based on things like the weather or the time of day and things like that. So, we're very sort of focused on that thing now, so you know Times Square for example is very different place in the morning than it is in the evening.
So the nature of the local advice that you would give needs to sort of be flexible with that as well. Your tip is going to be different in the morning than it is perhaps at lunchtime or when it rains or when it snows. So what you can end up with is a strategy that actually needs to multiply around localized advice and that’s something that we're working on right now is how we surface the right thing at right time because we have this enormous inventory, but very often you know what we were finding is that we’d get the amazing rooftop bar suggestion surfacing in December and that kind of thing is like well, that doesn’t feel right.
Rick: Right, right.
Matthew Shadbolt: So making sure that we edit and sort of curate our own database based around those environmental factors and that’s been a lot of fun to work on.
Rick: So I think the key there Matthew is that it's not – you guys have been working on this for a few years now and it's not something like you know you’ve just put together 3,000 of them right now. You’ve taken you know this is a collaboration over a period of time and you’ve just done a little bit each week and built up this database and it's not something that has cost you money. It's cost you in the way of time.
So this is something that any small business can do and you're adding value to people. I think it’s a very key thing that we're talking about here is you're not going for this sale. It would be very difficult too because the market that you're in with a high end real estate, but you're not going for the sale right away. You're adding value to people and branding yourselves that way, so you know we've talked about–
Matthew Shadbolt: Yeah, that’s very important.
Rick: Yeah, yeah. We've talked about Foursquare, so you know one of the biggest challenges I hear from readers and listeners is they're overwhelmed with all the social media options out there and they think they need to be on every platform chasing the latest shiny social tool and ultimately it causes their social media efforts to be wasted because they really – you know, they haven’t really gone deep on one or two platforms so you guys are on several platforms.
You’ve mentioned Foursquare, you know, you're on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and Pinterest, how did you guys figure out which platforms to be on especially because your audience is very diverse. You have many different types of people, so how did you guys figured that out and then how did you recommend that small businesses go about finding where their customers are in social media and then likewise how might they decide, whether they should use any new tools as they come out?
Matthew Shadbolt: Yeah. Let me take each one of those in turn. In terms of how we choose what to do, we're ruthless editors when it comes to platform adoption and also how we use those things, essentially how we would create content for them and we started – we actually started our first ever social platform was Twitter and the way that we think about this stuff is we only really adopt the platform if it solves the business question for us and one of the things that we had initially started to talk about was that it was very difficult for us to talk to people online. It's very difficult.
For example, it's very thorny to add comments to property pages for example because of the relationship with the seller and things like that. So commenting isn't something that we can do on our website necessarily. So, one of the things that we said was yeah, we're sort of living and breathing this localized insight, brand and things like that, but we weren't really living that stuff online. So, we said well we need some kind of menu to be able to talk to the people that we want to connect with which is either potential customers, other New Yorkers or even other people within the real estate industry because essentially you know like I said before, we're a referral based organization and connecting with other members of the real estate industry is very important.
So, that’s why we started with Twitter because it essentially became an open door to ask Corcoran anything and you know essentially when you think of a luxury high end brand, it isn't necessarily known any type of brand like that. It's isn't known for openness and transparency of information. Usually it's a pretty sort of closed door type thing, so it's a really big step for Corcoran to take that and it's been incredibly powerful for us.
I still think Twitter is one of the most powerful things that we do online because it allows people to ask us anything and it allows us to participate in conversations. It allows us to do things like thought leadership. It allows us to share really what's going on and what we're building and what our agents are doing and the kind of things that were interested in.
And then you know, we started to sort of curate a little bit more content. We actually have – very often we have the content curation, versus creation kind of conversation with people. We actually had a very – we usually have the opposite problem from most folks because we have too much information very often in New York, so there's so much going on here that it becomes more of an issue of curation of what we're going to share in finding the best stuff rather than we're making it post today.
So, as we started to curate and share more visual things and videos and things like that, we actually found that Facebook offered sort of a good solution for sharing more visual things in a way that Twitter was conversational, we found that photos would be a little bit more appropriate for something like news feed and I think that Facebook has evolved, we definitely have seen that really take hold I think, but we sort of almost exclusively post photos only there because they perform the best. They have the highest engagement; you know, things, more sharing, things like that.
So, Facebook was a natural evolution of what we were really doing on Twitter in terms of sharing things to do in New York and things like that and then as we started to get more and more people connect with us, we were starting to be asked lots of different questions like where to get the best cupcake or who has the best pizza in Manhattan or Brooklyn or what's the difference between a condo and a co-op, things like that whether it has to do about life in New York or something to do with the industry or any kind of knowledge about the market that we work in.
And what was happening was we are answering those things on a fairly regular basis, but there was no real way to archive them. There was no real way to say here's a vast bank of answers that we have about what we do and that we said well, we want to sort of humanize that a little bit instead of it just being like an archive that you would type something in and search.
We want to humanize that process a little bit and that actually became what we do on YouTube. We still do like the property videos and the tours and the walk-throughs and that kind of stuff, but it really isn't a focus of ours on YouTube. Primarily what we do is people that work at Corcoran whether they're agents or members of the staff or something answering questions and sharing insight personally about Manhattan and Brooklyn so–
Rick: So, you guys took all this information, this vast amount of information and like you said you're humanizing it and you're just having people answer it in a real short video.
Matthew Shadbolt: And we filmed it, yeah.
Rick: Yeah, I love it.
Matthew Shadbolt: And a lot of that, a lot of that process of you know having an agent say what's the best thing to do in New York when it rains and answering that in like a 60 seconds or 1 minute kind of clip, that allows us to start answering the things that we were beginning to see in Foursquare, so when it begins to rain in Manhattan that’s just been doing today, that video surfaces more aggressively and you start to see it more inside of Twitter or you'll see it in what we do in Tumblr or that kind of stuff.
And most importantly was about the same time, we were starting to work a lot more with mobile apps and location targeting and things like that. So, what happens is we're able to create our own app for searching Corcoran properties, so when somebody is searching for an apartment in Soho for example whether they're physically in Soho or whether they're just looking for Soho listings and they're somewhere else, what happens is there's a small module that appears at the bottom of the screen of a Corcoran person talking to you about something to do with Soho whether that’s, you know, where to get the best dinner or how the market is or anything in between, but it's a person talking to you on the phone and mobile video views have been something that we've seen a lot of engagement and use of.
Most of our video views come in some form in a mobile way. So the videos that we did in YouTube were always really geared towards being used either in social or in mobile. We don’t really think about channel as a destination. Our channel is more of – just a place to kind of store all that stuff. You can browse it. We have playlists and you can browse that stuff if you want, but that isn't really where the viewership is. So, that’s sort of how like the conversational aspects of Twitter, the visual creation of Facebook and the mobile video humanized answers of YouTube all kind of fit together.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Shadbolt: Does that make sense?
Rick: Yeah, absolutely. I think the key there is that you didn’t just jump in to every single platform and start–
Matthew Shadbolt: Oh no.
Rick: – using it. You strategically looked at it and said okay, this is what we need to accomplish, which platform does that and then, you know–
Matthew Shadbolt: Yeah.
Rick: – you figure that out in that platform and then went on to the next one. So, this is my problem here, now which platform fixes that or not fixes it but–
Matthew Shadbolt: Right.
Rick: – achieves that.
Matthew Shadbolt: Right. And there's a lot that we say no to. You know we don’t have a blog and there's a lot of platforms that we don’t – you know, we might sort of sit back and say well, let's see what happens with this. This might be interesting to us. You know very often we've been – recently we've been asked what is Corcoran going to do Vine for example and we say well, right now we're not doing anything with Vine.
We're sort of happy to listen and watch and we're very interested in sort of non-real estate brands as well and sort of looking at what perhaps like Coca Cola might do with Vine or the great example that I saw it too was MLB are doing great stuff with Vine. They're doing sort of like almost like virtual baseball cards inside.
Rick: That’s really cool.
Matthew Shadbolt: Yes, super cool. And we're looking at that kind of thing, but there's a lot that we say no to, but a lot of what we are able to do quite easily is apply an existing approach to a new platform. So, for example, what we were doing on Facebook in terms of sharing amazing photos of New York or amazing pictures of our properties or things like that, that’s actually quite easy to scale into something like Pinterest for example.
Rick: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Matthew Shadbolt: So we just say oh here's a huge group of amazing kitchens or here's a huge group of things on that Upper West Side and it just allows us to do sort of an expanded version of what we've been doing on Facebook anyway.
Rick: Sure, sure.
Matthew Shadbolt: In terms of Pinterest specifically, we're actually more interested in what's being pinned for in terms of Corcoran content elsewhere on the web. We're very interested in seeing what other people are sharing and that in many ways sort of guides what we do. We're actually guided by how and what people are sharing of ours elsewhere online and we were able to go in and see that in Pinterest which is very very helpful.
Rick: Sure. So, you're listening. You're using these platforms to listen to what people are saying, what people are seeing, what people are doing and then reacting accordingly and I think another key thing there Matthew is that the content that you guys are creating is it doesn’t – I mean of course, a lot of it is high end, but it doesn’t have to be. I mean you can just take your – you know, any small business can take their smartphone with a video camera on it and shoot a high quality video especially with the quality of the smartphones these days.
Matthew Shadbolt: I mean one thing that we know New Yorkers are very very passionate about is food, you know, where to eat and what to order and what the specials are and things like that. New Yorkers are incredibly passionate about that stuff, so pictures of amazing food do very very well for us and they really help, they help to visualize and explain a piece of localized information.
You know it's one thing for us to say, you know, the Shake Shack has an amazing burger, but it's something else to say and here's what it looks like, you know. It makes it feel like we actually did it and it sort of makes it a little bit more realistic and of course, when you see something like that in a news feed, there's a big difference between something that has a picture and something that doesn’t.
Rick: Sure, sure. So Matthew let's do a little fill in the blank here, so two words.
Matthew Shadbolt: Sure.
Rick: Social media is more about blank than about blank.
Matthew Shadbolt: Oh boy, I saw this in your notes before the podcast. This is a real tough one. I mean very often I’ve heard that listening is more important than publishing for example. I've heard that a lot, but one of the things I think is very often missed with these things is that social media, it's about the long burn more than the quick hit I think.
And that’s sort of how we feel about it is that we think that, you know, while it's wonderful that people connect with us and they say oh, you know, I love what Corcoran is doing. It's been a five-year process for us to get to the point where we feel like we are sort of connecting on a way that we're sort of comfortable with.
It's a very long burn at social media and we did almost everything wrong along the way. All the bad advice we could – you know, we did it all bad, but eventually there's enough good things and how to connect with people and things that do work over time that you actually start to be able scale the thing effectively and grow into new platforms and things like that.
So, I think very often people miss the fact that this is a cumulative process. It's that 8 to 10 tips a week, but it's doing – it's having the discipline to do it every single week. And that’s a real challenge for some organization I thinks, is just the discipline to keep going with it because they say, you know, this isn't working or I tried Tumblr and it didn’t work for me.
Well, you know, Tumblr for us for example is our largest social platform and for the first I would say three years of what we were doing on Tumblr, we had very very low engagement levels and then all of a sudden it took off and now we have, you know, more than 100,000 subscribers on Tumblr, but it was because we stuck at it and we believed in what we were doing and it fitted with everything else that we were thinking about.
Rick: Yeah, that was my question there. So, it did fit with what you were doing, so is that why you kept at it because you know within the first three years if you do have low engagement, you know, it's like you said many businesses both small and large would probably look at that and say okay, you know we try it for a couple of years, the engagement isn't quite there so we're going to abandon that and try something else. So, what was the reason that you guys kept at it?
Matthew Shadbolt: Well, we're big believers in the platform.
Rick: Okay.
Matthew Shadbolt: And it's been an interesting couple of weeks in terms of Tumblr’s acquisition by Yahoo, in terms of people asking us about how Tumblr works. Tumblr is sort of the – it's a little bit of a blind spot within the real estate industry. There aren't really many real estate organizations that use it. We are very very big supporters of that kind of organization within New York.
So, Tumblr are actually from New York, Foursquare from New York. People like Foodspotting had a base in New York, you know, things like that and we're really interested in connecting with those kinds of startups essentially and so we tried that relationship with Tumblr for some time now and you know we started to think well, what would we – would we do Wordpress, would we do some kind of like expanded form of what we're doing on Facebook and Tumblr was like – it was just a really neat fit for doing something that we really wanted to do which was a property of the day.
We wanted to create something where we would be able to showcase one amazing thing every single day and the reason that we chose Tumblr was because it allows us a very, it's very nimble. It's mobile optimized and it has enormous, local audience in New York, but behind all of that stuff was a plan to create that as an iPad app.
We wanted to create something a little bit different that wasn’t perhaps like search-centric and create this amazing sort of magazine-like property of the day product for a tablet and the iPad was very very new and we said well, let's use Tumblr to experiment with what types of properties, perhaps the order of the images, what other information we might put associated with each less thing, whether we perhaps incorporate the Foursquare stuff with it then we want to put in the deal next to it and explain, that kind of stuff.
So Tumblr was just a huge testing ground that allowed us to understand what types of visual content and visual curation would really resonate with people prior to using that kind of insight elsewhere and it ended up as a tablet app for us.
Rick: Okay, okay.
Matthew Shadbolt: So, that’s how we think about those things. So Tumblr is huge sandpit that we kind of play in. It just happened to coincide with enormous growth of Tumblr itself and we were picked up as like a featured Tumblr and over time we've managed to grow an enormous discussion base there.
Rick: Got you, got you. So Matthew we're coming up on time here, but there's a couple of questions that I’ve got to ask you because – I mean I could talk to you for hours here and we sure we can go on for the rest of the afternoon but–
Matthew Shadbolt: No problem.
Rick: So, I do want to know, you know, everything you're talking about is creating great content and adding that value but in the end you guys are about selling properties, so how do you measure all of this? How does Corcoran measure all your social media efforts?
Matthew Shadbolt: Well, one of the things that we do is there is a follow up and after the sale about where the customer originated.
Rick: Oh, okay.
Matthew Shadbolt: That’s one way that we can track it. However, that process is a little, it's a little foggy in terms of how that works because it's like trying to remember the first time you had a Coke, right. Well, I know I'm a Coke person. I'm not a Pepsi person, but I don’t really remember seeing 20 different types of ads or seeing their Facebook page or you know I just remember the thing that got me to the agent. It's like that kind of stuff.
So very often, one of the things that we look at is volume of agent contact. How many people are directly reaching out to agents either on a daily basis or weekly or monthly basis and that’s really the search play that I talked about earlier. So the more of that we can generate and social directly fuels that, there's a direct connection between social and search for us and so that’s the key kind of criteria of which it leads kind of the work that we do and becomes about the connection between the agent and the customer.
So the more we generate through social and search and other sort of online venues and the more time people spend with our content, the greater the degree of actual agent outreach. Now, the other side of that is what we can offer to prospective sellers in terms of reach. Very often we'll work with an agent to say how can you help me promote this particular property in the widest possible, most competitive way online and we'll say well, we can offer you a YouTube video, a Pinterest board, a dedicated Pinterest board just for that property or we'll surface you in our mobile apps when people search within that particular neighborhood or we'll promote you as our featured property of the day in or proprietary iPad app or Facebook or Tumblr and the range of what we can offer to our sellers greatly greatly expands and it becomes very very attractive to people that want to do business with us.
Rick: Yeah, because it's a result of all your cumulative work and you know the breadth and scope of what you guys have built has become basically a positioning and a selling tool for people looking to list properties in New York and you guys can – that’s really cool, you can say look this is what we can offer you guys because we have the scope and reach of these properties.
Matthew Shadbolt: That’s very true. It becomes much more about what you can offer that’s different from the competition because every listing information in general is sort of have been commoditized already. You can really get all listings everywhere now. So, it becomes about additional things on top of that and there's a big difference between the agent that goes in to pitch a potential client.
One of them has a manila folder full of 50 sheets of paper and one of them goes in there and says I can put your property in front of thousands of people on our iPad everyday. There's a really big difference between those two things in the seller’s mind. Okay.
Rick: Sure, absolutely, especially when we're talking about the high end properties that you guys are representing.
Matthew Shadbolt: Yeah, absolutely. Well, all aspects of the market for sure, yeah.
Rick: Sure. So Matthew two questions here to wrap up and let's bullet it out here, so as we've talked about small businesses obviously don’t have the kind of marketing and social media budget that big brands do, so with that in mind and we've kind of talked about it a little bit, let's bullet it out here, what are top three tips that you would give to a small business trying to grow their business using social media?
Matthew Shadbolt: It's a really good question because it's very difficult to narrow it down to three, but I'll take my own advice and say the first one is you have to focus. You have to focus. You’ve got to start small and grow it and that it's a cumulative thing. So, focus is really really important. I also think that is number two I would say is yeah, absolutely critical to listen because a lot of people would make the mistake of jumping in and sort of doing the sort of doing spray and pray publishing approach especially on things like Twitter and Facebook where their content is dissolved into the news feed, but the ability to actually listen and understand the types of things that resonate with those types of users and how different the users are per platform like Pinterest people are completely different from Instagram people or and Twitter people, they comment in a completely different way than YouTube people, things like that.
So, focus and listening and number three, so I'll just reiterate one of the things that I said before is stick with it. It's a cumulative process of slowly building an enormous thing over time and that’s been an approach that’s been really beneficial to us and I think that’s applicable to any size of business is to start small and grow it. Make the mistakes along the way, but be nimble enough to be able to adjust and don’t sort of lock in to one particular approach.
The great thing about social is that it's so flexible and the platforms change so much throughout the year like Facebook is a completely different sort of beast than it was a year ago for example and there are so many sort of opportunities that gets thrown at you that if you don’t have that sort of focus and sort of dedication to what your particular sort of competitive strand is, you can really get kind of muddled and confused I think and just, you know, try to sort of understand what people that you would be interested in do, so for example like the kinds of brands that I would like.
You know, don’t try to sort of copy them, but I take things that I enjoy about all of these non-real estate brands and I try to apply it to what we do at Corcoran. Well, that was a lot of fun for me, how can I make that resonate for the hundreds of thousands of people that are connected to our brand?
Rick: Sure. That’s a key point there, that you don’t have to necessarily look at and model other companies or brands within your specific industry, you can see what other brands are doing and–
Matthew Shadbolt: Yeah. We actually rarely do that. We're much more interested in what, you know, Ford might be doing or ESPN or whatever other brand – we're just really interested in like interesting work that’s being done at being social and that’s not confined to the real estate vertical at all I think.
Rick: Sure. Well, you have to listen to episode number 1 with Scott Monty from Ford. He was my first guest here on the show.
Matthew Shadbolt: Oh, yeah. He is really great. He’s really really great.
Rick: He’s awesome.
Matthew Shadbolt: Yeah. He’s doing great stuff over there.
Rick: Yeah. He really is. So Matthew let's finish up here with last question. So you mentioned at the very beginning that part of your responsibility there at Corcoran is to look at what's trending, where are things heading. So, what do you think the trends are in social media that you're seeing over the next year or so and then how do you see these trends affecting small business?
Matthew Shadbolt: Well, one of the things that we're very focused on right now which we think is actually going to be more and more important as more content gets published to these platforms, the amount of sharing – what do they call it? Like Zuckerberg’s law, the amount of sharing that’s going on is doubling every year and as more content gets published in these platforms I think it's going to be much – it's going to be very critical to understand four things, the right content in the right place at the right time for the right person and if you can surface what you're doing in a way that hits those four particular things then I think you resonate more with the potential customer.
Rick: Sure, sure.
Matthew Shadbolt: So, you know, I mentioned an approach where we're surfacing things at Foursquare, but one of the things that we're actively working on with Twitter is to use a service called If This Then That.
Rick: I've heard about that just recently.
Matthew Shadbolt: Yeah. It's a really really great service that allows you to, it's what they call a trigger-based service that says when I upload a picture to Instagram, I want to push it to Facebook for example or when somebody sends me a text message, send it to my email and there's a bunch of services that work with this, but one of them is the weather and you can say when it begins to snow in Manhattan, send a tweet that says here is Corcoran’s favorite hot chocolate in the city. And we're starting to connect those two things where it isn't us physically tweeting it, but the tweet is triggered by something that’s actually happening environmentally.
Rick: I love that.
Matthew Shadbolt: So, it might be that it's weather. It might be the time of day, so it might be say 6:00 o'clock for example and we'll say okay, it's 6:00 o'clock and you're making dinner, why not dream bigger with our Pinterest kitchen boards. It's like that kind of – it's that kind of thing where we start to connect the dots between the context of what somebody might be doing with content that we already have at the right time.
And we're starting to use a video like that as well, so we – you know, when it rains in Manhattan, here's an agent talking about her favorite movie theaters and museums to go to on a rainy day, like things like that. And so I think, you know, surfacing appropriate context is going to be very very important and a lot of people like on Facebook for example, I think there's a huge opportunity in things like Twitter and Facebook to use that kind of stuff more effectively.
I mean we've seen incredible levels of engagement where we've actually created something in Facebook that’s been timely and I think the recent example of all this is obviously what Oreo did in the Super Bowl where it was so timely and they were so nimble that they had this enormous response to something that was incredibly appropriate to post.
So, we're all sort of working with that kind of idea and it's not an easy thing to build essentially because you have to have the nimbleness to be able to do that, yet you also is dependent on having the available inventory for things you ought to use and the means to actually implement it in a way that reacts to something. So, I think those kind of things are going to be what we see brands do a lot more over the next year to 18 months I think.
Rick: So cool. I mean I love that stuff and I geek out about it so–
Matthew Shadbolt: You can have a lot of fun with it because you know we're starting to say well, you know, it's 1:00 o'clock in the morning, here's our favorite pizza places. We start to kind of talk to the customer in a way that they might – this stuff is going to surface at the right time but in a fun way.
Rick: Yeah. It's the crown jewel of marketing.
Matthew Shadbolt: Right.
Rick: It's awesome. That’s awesome. Matthew, man I seriously could talk to you for hours here, but where could people connect with you and with the Corcoran Group online?
Matthew Shadbolt: Well we're at Corcoran.com. That’s our website and if you want to stop by and say hi, I'd love to speak to anyone– I'm always happy to chat on Twitter. I'm @corcoran_group on Twitter and that’s a great place to just say hello.
Rick: Okay. I will be sure and link those links up in the show notes for today’s show and Matthew, man so thankful that you could join us on the show today. It's such good information, really appreciate it. Thank you again.
Matthew Shadbolt: Thank you so much for having me today Rick.
Rick: Absolutely.
