Last week was an adventure—a new and fun experience. I was asked by the North Carolina AEs to be a featured speaker at a ‘Fireside Chat’: the AEs submitted questions and I (retired and “experienced”) responded with shoot-from-the-hip answers.
I hope the AEs found it useful—it was certainly helpful to me as a review of past issues and still-meaningful concerns in association management. “What was the most successful thing I ever did? What was my worst experience? What should I do about an absentee president? How to I convince the Directors to spend down some of the reserves instead of making drastic cuts?” Tough questions.
One particular question has been on my mind a lot since I returned home. It was, “How do I convince our Board of Directors that our association should support the MLS Domains initiative?” Now most of you know that I’ve been supportive of, and involved in, the ‘Dot MLS’ project from the outset. I believe in it because I think organized real estate has an unprecedented opportunity to establish and solidify an important branding position in the next two years. We’re lucky to have this chance to rectify our past oversights with the term ‘MLS’, and we can’t afford to let it slip through our fingers again.
But it is a hard sell to members. First, it presupposes a shared belief in the importance of the internet as a marketing tool—and there are still too many real estate practitioners who are convinced that the internet is a fad, a passing fancy, and that the salesperson will remain useful only if the consumer is kept in the dark and important information is held hostage. Secondly, many brokers are not very knowledgeable about the sophisticated world of internet marketing: what is search engine optimization? How do consumers behave on the internet? What attracts them to a web site? How does the broker monitor her website and leverage the visit of the consumer?
Many brokers feel that if they’ve thrown up a company website and maybe included an IDX feed, they’ve ‘marketed’ their company. It’s the same attitude that prevailed about print advertising: if I put a big display ad in the newspaper, I’ve advertised your listing—no matter that a large portion of potential buyers are from out of town and never see the publication, or simply are reluctant to call a real estate office to get more information.
Tracking results from a broker’s investment of advertising dollars often was, at best, primitive. The salesperson On the Floor might—or might not—check the box that asks if the caller referred to a newspaper or magazine ad. With modern technology, brokers can now know where a site visitor comes from, how long he stays on the site, what he does while there, and where he goes when he leaves. Google, and now Facebook, are adding important dimensions to consumer searching as well: search results can be filtered by a consumer’s known personal preferences, geographical location, and income profile. These increasingly sophisticated tools are dramatically changing real estate marketing—and at the same time, are requiring brokers to become more knowledgeable about how to maximize their advertising investments.
The sad state of affairs is, however, that brokers and MLSs are acting like marketing FSBOs and public relations do-it-yourselfers. Not without reason, of course: there’s just too much going on in the industry and in the national economy to allow much time for the knowledge those modern marketing tools are demanding. Real estate company owners and managers simply don’t have the time and resources to cope with the technology evolution in internet marketing.
What does that mean for us as real estate trade associations? Well, for one thing, it means that we have a new opportunity to service our members by providing education about internet marketing, search engine optimization, web page design, and consumer behavior. Secondly, it means that we can provide some important community resources which enable our members to leverage their advertising dollars. The MLS domain project is one of those, as is a resource like Realtor.com. Learning to use web site statistical tools, tracking consumer preferences, and keeping members appraised of the impact of new marketing developments such as Open Graph is yet another.
Finally, one of the real issues we have as real estate trade associations is the understanding that our very governance structure gets in our way. Our Board of Directors and governing committees are usually comprised of members—who are, by definition, real estate practitioners. They are internet marketing FSBOs, technology hobbyists (if we’re lucky), and short-term volunteers. That’s not to say that they aren’t bright, well-intentioned people who want to do the best for the association and the industry: they are. But it is true that they are first of all real estate specialists being asked to make business decisions in an increasingly specialized and complicated technological environment.
Even more importantly, how do we as association managers and MLS directors, keep our own knowledge level current and useful to our organizational decisions? How do we learn enough to know how to help our members?
I don’t have an answer to the question you asked, Brenda. But I’m thinking. I’m thinking.
Anybody else got an idea? | 
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