In about three hours, I will be teaching an introductory social media course to a full class in the technology center at the Rhode Island Association of Realtors in Warwick. In February, I had participated in a RIAR sponsored panel discussion series called "Surviving the Tough Times- Using Social Media to Promote Your Business" and was interested to hear the opinions of RI Realtors regarding social media. I found there were basically three mindsets or approaches to the types of Realtors who attended the seminar.
There are basically three types:
1. The realtor who has incorporated various social media and networking sites into their marketing plans. They realize the importance but also have a working knowledge of how to utilize the most of the various applications and settings.
2. The Realtor who has joined facebook or linkedin because they were persuaded by an article, a friend, a co-worker, or family member but has no clue how to use site. They are overwhelmed by the sites and their functions, and have not figured out how this can help their business.
3. The Realtor (generally older) who has no interest in engaging the social media/networking sites. The basic feeling is "I've been successfully selling Real Estate the same way for 30 years, why change now ?...Why do I need to do this?" They are not only overwhelmed but skeptical and resentful towards social media. Their knowledge is limited to the stories they read or see on TV that highlight all the negative aspects of social media "I read that kids coming out of college aren't getting job (or losing their jobs) because of provocative facebook profile pictures" or "All I know about myspace is that it's the top resource for kidnappers, child molesters, and other deviants"
We quickly discovered that there were a majority of 2 and 3s in the group. So RIAR's education director, Norma Mousseau and I concluded that RIAR needed to develop a course that would teach Realtors how to successfully promote their business through social media. BUT- it has to be an introductory level course, we need to take baby steps. Our goal in creating the class is to convert the 2s and 3s to ones by creating a confidence through the knowledge,understanding, and the individual's control of the medium
In today's session, we will have a general overview and history of social media but will spend the majority of the class walking through the process of creating a profile for facebook and linkedin. There will be a good chunk of time allocated towards privacy settings to illustrate to our students that they have complete control of their profile and what is seen and what is hidden.
We have a maximum amount of registrants and a few who asked to be put on a waiting list for our next session, so the demand is definitely there. Hopefully, today marks the first of many classes...
