Friday afternoon Skype chat with Ed Kohler on Individual agent brand management

Mark Eibner: Welcome to Broker IPTV. My name is Mark Eibner and its time for our Friday afternoon skype chat with Ed and Ed welcome to the show.

Ed Kohler: Hi Mark how are you doing?

Mark Eibner: Great, how are you today?

Ed Kohler: I am good.

Mark Eibner: Hey just going to pick up on our conversation we had last Friday, we talked a little bit about localism. Today I think we are going to bring up the subject of, which is called not only company but actually individual agent brand management, what have you to say on that ad?

Ed Kohler: Well I think some of the things that I see online Mark with the brands is that people are still trying to figure out how to transfer their brand to the web and to me a brand is something where it's a consistent experience the people are going to have with the company. So online that could be a thing such as having high quality photos on your listings or making sure that all the agents within a company have good quality photos and content that's filled about on their websites. So instead a lot of real estate sites today have really, really inconsistent experiences from one listing to the next or from one agent to the next and that's a huge opportunity for a company to just really just say you know what, we are going to be consistently good across the board and I would love to see someone step up and get that done but I am not really seeing that yet.

Mark Eibner: Yeah so you have got some of the listings you go out to people aren't even putting their photo up on got for bid the MLS and if they are putting up a photo its usually something that's purely taken much less the company websites where they should in fact have what 10, 20 even 30 photos.

Ed Kohler: Yeah you know I look at kind of how on in brands and other industries there are companies that do a very, very good job having a consistent experience. For example you see hotel chains where no matter where in the country you go or in the world that you go to one of their properties, the experiences can be consistently good you know when you, no matter what room they gave you, when you walk into the room its going to be prepared, its going to be cleaned its... its really just ready for you and if you go to a restaurant chain like something like McDonald's no matter where you go to McDonald's in the world, you can expect the food will be of a consistent quality, will be delivered fast, it will be hot you know that sort of thing where over time that becomes the brand. The brand is the experience the people have with it but in real estate there are still very, very inconsistent from one agent to the next or even from one listing to the next. So hopefully people will understand it, really that's a big part of what it takes to have your brand become stronger.

Mark Eibner: What types of plans are I know you work with "Where to live" you are the broker or the author and writer for technology evangelist but what types of plans have you guys put in place to help some of your companies you work with say in the "Where to live" site have more consistency with their brokers?

Ed Kohler: At "Where to live" one thing we tried to do to help people make their brands more consistent and more... you know just have a better experience for consumers with their brand is to provide tools on the back end of our sites that show agents and show companies what it is they can do to raise the bar across their company. So show them on average how many photos they have on their properties and how many blog posts have they written in certain amount of time, how complete are their profiles of their agents, things like that where you can continually work to raise the bar and get it to a point where no people are going to no matter who they interact with online, its going to be a good quality experience.

Mark Eibner: You were saying like a rating system for agents when they come to the website that pretty much this agent consistently as 15 follows this agent consistently does one blog post everyday, this agent consistently has a video every week something of that nature?

Ed Kohler: There is a lot of ways that a broker could deal with creating a higher quality system both by having tools that could help agents but then also having tools for consumers to help them figure out which agents are some of the best agents in their system. So far what I am seeing at the broker level pretty consistently is people are starting to have tools for agents that we have like "Where to live" on the sites we build there are tools for agents to rate them on the back end of the site to show them what they could be doing to create a better experience for consumers.

Mark Eibner: Right.

Ed Kohler: But I have, would not yet using that data on the front end of our sites to sort agents for example based on different criteria and brokers to this point seem hesitant to do that but over time eventually someone will do that, but today that hasn't happened yet, it maybe that the event are happening more from companies outside of the industry. So maybe it will be a Trulia or a Zillow that's get there first. It is you know as people keep pushing the content, content and content into the sites, they are not going to throw only their content away and eventually they are going to use that content to start reading agents based on transactions or percentage of closing price or what you know the geographies they work and I mean they are not, they are not going to throw it away, they are going to start using that data to make their sites more valuable. So you know whether brokers will do it themselves, I can see where it could be a little bit politically difficult for a broker to do that because you know they don't want to you know irritate any of their agents you know because they are concerned that they will lose some agent.

Mark Eibner: Right.

Ed Kohler: But the same time they want to create a better consumer experience, so they kind of figuring out politically how to do that sort of thing.

Mark Eibner: Yeah makes a lot of sense Ed. Well hey we are going to wrap up today's show and look forward to talking to you next week. Once again this is Ed Kohler and Ed is the author of the blog technology evangelist and Ed, we appreciate your insight and tips for our broker viewers out there. We will see you next week, thanks Ed.

Ed Kohler: Thank you Mark.

Posted on September 03, 2009 06:28:53 by Blog Author