28 Aug You have who looking after social?

We have come a long way from social media being a hassle that can be handled by anyone and everyone.

Topic – How to kill your brand on social

Mentor – Joel Leslie

• Community Managers
• They are your front window
• Think of them as a community – a tribe

Property Management Matters with Kasey McDonald – Communication is the key but HOW you communicate is critical.

Transcript:

Kevin Turner: Our guest all this week is Joel Leslie. Joel is from Propify.online. You’ll find a link on all the pages on RE Uncut this week. Propify actually manages your property on social media, and that lead us, Joel, into what we discussed yesterday, I want to follow on from that. You talked about the community manager. I quite often hear that a lot of social media is just simply managed … it becomes the receptionist’s role. That’s clearly not the right thing to do.

Joel Leslie: No, and that’s where it really started out, years ago when social started, is no one really knew what to do with it. I remember, at the time, I was the head of technology at Raine and Horne in Sydney, and a lot of companies around the place were blocking use of the social platforms because they felt that it was just taking up so much of the employee’s time. We took the opposite approach and encouraged it, and we were one of the very first companies to actually manage our presence, the Raine and Horne presence, on Facebook at that time.

Joel Leslie: What was happening, we found in our offices, and the reason we did this, is because we found that the receptionist was managing a lot of this content, and this was a very strong marketing role that we saw needed to be managed by marketing departments, not necessarily someone at reception.

Kevin Turner: Yeah, I can understand how that happened too, Joel, because having come through that whole era when social … I started in real estate when social media wasn’t even born. In fact, they didn’t even have mobile phones when I started, but that’s beside the point. But when social media first came out, it was very much, “Oh, we’ll just whack our listings up there,” so that was the outlet for listings. Pretty much no one really saw it as an opportunity to have a conversation and build relationships.

Joel Leslie: There was no concept of conversation, and at the time, it was more about sharing a property onto social media, say Facebook in this instance, because this even predates Twitter in some cases, and there was no real perception on what the message should be and how you should do it.

Joel Leslie: Now, things have changed to a degree and, yes, a lot of the offices have moved away from having their social media managed by the receptionist, and in some cases, the reception is actually quite a good content manager per se, but they’re actually not the content manager of the organisation. So that needs to be a very big understanding there is, do we continue to have the receptionist in the office managing our Facebook page, or is this now something that’s big enough for us to actually engage someone, or a tool, to help us to do that?

Kevin Turner: Yeah, see, therein lies the point. I just want to make that point. We’re not saying that the receptionist, per se, is the wrong person to do it, but that role is important enough now that it’s a standalone role. It shouldn’t be a tacked-on role to a receptionist, really is what you’re saying. I mean, your receptionist may be very good at social media-

Joel Leslie: Exactly.

Kevin Turner: … in that case, she would then become the community manager.

Joel Leslie: Or part of that community manager role, so she can actually engage with tools, so she can have a tool that helps her do that, or she’s part of the communication between the company that you have engaged in managing your community and the receptionist could be the best person to provide that information; “Hey, guys, we’re doing this, this week. We’ve got the local barbecue at the soccer. We’ve got this property that used to belong to Nicole Kidman down the road, that might be really good to put on Facebook,” all that type of thing. That could be actually the best leeway, but because they’re actually doing so much and we rely on receptions to do so much for all our offices, this is just another task, that they really just don’t have the time to.

Kevin Turner: Okay, that’s the who. Tomorrow, when we come back with Joel Leslie, we’ll talk about the what of social media. Joel Leslie is our guest. Joel is from propify.online. Joel, talk to you again in the morning. Thanks, mate.

Joel Leslie: Thanks.

For more information, check out Propify.