Last week’s trip to Atlanta was a whirlwind of Realtors, Batchbook customers and monkeys (more on that later!). Pamela and I were there to attend the 4th annual ReTech South conference, where Pamela was presenting on panel with some other Small Business Web friends.
The thing that struck me the most about the conference was the great enthusiasm and energy from both attendees and presenters. Pamela and I attended a different real estate conference a few years ago, and I was amazed at how far the industry has come in terms of its adoption of technology in general and social media specifically. Most of the sessions were standing-room only, as panelists discussed ways to use blogs to attract leads, using Facebook to build network and of course, how web applications can help grow their businesses. Plus, you will not meet a nicer, more network group of people than Realtors. These guys are definitely in our wheelhouse!
Here’s some thoughts on the conference from Realtor Jim Duncan, who made a short video while driving home from the conference. Please note: we do not condone videotaping and driving!
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Tags: batchblue, mailchimp, small business
BatchBlue is on the road again, this time heading to Atlanta to attend the Real Estate & Technology Conference & Expo (RETech South). Pamela will be speaking on a panel about The Small Business Web and using cloud services with MailChimp, Expensify and IfByPhone. I’ll be there, too, armed with lots of stickers, shirts and stories and talking to folks about how they’re using Batchbook to manage their real estate contacts. If there was ever a well-connected group of folks, it’s Realtors! And judging from photos of past conferences, they’re fun, too. We like that.
We can’t wait to meet some Realtors doing cool things with technology in the real estate industry. We’ve even re-vamped our Batchbook for Real Estate page and added a new case study so folks can see how one tech-savvy Realtor is using a variety of web-based services to run his real estate agency.
As always, we’re interested in meeting our friends and customers, so if you are going to be there please let us know! We may put together a hosted Drink-up Thursday night – follow us on Twitter (twitter.com/batchblue) for details as they shape up.
Tags: batchblue, batchbook, Community, mailchimp, real estate, realtors
We’re back from the Massachusetts Association of Realtors Conference, held in Worcester, MA this year. We met a lot of great people, got some excellent feedback from real-live Realtors about what they were looking for in a contact management system, and is usually the case when we’re out meeting customers and potential customers, had a lot of fun.
We were also able to share our Social Marketing for Real Estate Blue Paper with a number of folks — in fact, we ran out of printed copies the second morning of the event (good thing it’s available online!). We learned that Realtors really want to use social media to help market their services! In fact, we met some real estate industry professionals already quite active in this area, including John Adler, Director of Sales from Union Street Media, the founders of the real estate media network Zipvo and self-proclaimed “Realty Man” Gerry Bourgeois.
The above-mentioned folks plus a few more were kind enough to share their thoughts on how best to use social media and social marketing in this little video clip we shot at the conference. I just had to use the “Home Sweet Home” song in it even though my husband said it was kind of cheesy. For those of you at the conference, the song will be eerily familiar since it played many times at the show. I think it works well in the video 
Pam and I stayed until the close of the second day and we’re glad we did, since we met a couple of interesting folks in the last hour or so of the event. This little video I shot as the conference was winding down demonstrates just how committed we were to being there. As they say in show business, it ain’t over until the Blue Ladies sing!
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Tags: "social marketing", real estate, realtors, Social Media
