Category: OfficeSpace.com Round Table

Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social media websites on the Internet. The mere act of talking about Pinterest is trendy. Penning an article about how to use Pinterest to grow your business-well, that’s even cooler.  This is not one of those articles.

At OfficeSpace.com, we’ve been reading these articles promising success stories of Pinterest and we, too, have been pinning diligently. We developed a strategy and pinned our favorite offices, office supplies, furniture and photos of spaces featured on our own website.  We have 175 pins, 18 boards and 16 followers.  These just all seem to be numbers without meaning at this point and we keep having this discussion- so what?

There’s talk about what the social media phenomenon is worth if they sell. Forbes thought $7.7 billion last April, but one major question remains: how does pinning actually turn into business?  We read about the large affiliate fees that Pinterest earns but not sure how that translates into revenue for us.

Sure Pinterest seems like great fun for crafts and food, but what about branding? I always see tips but haven’t heard many success stories.

To other CRE-industry folks out there, we’re curious: are you using Pinterest? Do you find that it has made a difference in your personal branding or grown your business?

We’d love to hear your stories!

For the past week and a half, I’ve been curled up on my couch like an Olympics addict.  I’ve even been watching the biographies NBC puts together for American athletes. These segments show the athletes training, past victories, their families and a final huge factor: their coaches. There’s no denying that the coaches are one of the most important people and an ever-present part of the most important meet of their careers.

I brought this thought with me to work and to the debate of whether or not a tenant needs a tenant rep broker in a transaction. Athletes don’t make their way up to the podium all by themselves now, do they? Much like coaches, tenant rep brokers provide the experience and guidance and negotiate on the tenant’s behalf.

Athletes look for coaches with experience:

Athletes don’t always make it to multiple Olympics, but coaches are often a familiar face. American track and field star Allyson Felix won her long-awaited gold medal yesterday under the coaching of Bob Kersee. If his name sounds familiar, it’s because he also coached legend Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Coincidence? I think not.

That’s not to say there are no newcomer coaches, but no one’s going at it alone.  A tenant rep broker provides the experience and expertise in the commercial real estate industry that a business owner is just less likely to have.  They know how to “coach” their tenants to the best spaces because they’ve done it before.

Coaches fight for bad calls for their athletes:

These Olympics seemed to be the Games of the inquiries. When fencer German Britta Heidemann pounced a decisive hit against South Korean Shin A. Lam’s during a clock malfunction, Heidermann was declared the winner and Lam’s coach immediately filed an appeal. Unfortunately for Lam, she lost her appeal.

Over at the O2 arena, gymnasts Alexandra Raisman (U.S.) and Kohei Uchimura (Japan) found themselves/their teams in 4^th place. Immediately, their coaches filed appeals complaining that they did not get enough credit in their technical scores. Both gymnasts subsequently won the appeal and made it to the podium, but one noticeable thing is that the athlete keeps their distance.  Their job is to perform.  Their coaches’ is to fight for them.

When tenants hire a tenant rep broker, they are hiring someone to be on their side.  The listing broker is looking out for his or her client, so why not have someone look out for you? The tenant rep broker will negotiate the price, terms of the lease and other contractual items.  They’ll fight the battles so tenants don’t have to get their hands dirty. The tenant can focus on what they do best: running their business.

Coaches provide guidance and analyze the competition:

During women’s diving semifinals, coach Vince Panzano was seen giving American Katie Bell coaching and a pep talk.  After gymnast Jordyn Wieber’s (U.S.) low beam score in team preliminaries, she was seen talking to her coach across the arena boundary.  NBC speculated he was talking to her about what she needed to do to qualify for the all-around competition above her teammates.

It’s the coach’s job to guide the athletes, tell them what needs to be done and to analyze the competition- brokers are no different.  Tenant rep brokers hear things in the “biz.” They often have an idea of which spaces are currently highly sought after, which neighborhoods are best and how various property owners may work.

At the end of the day, the tenant rep broker works for the tenant.  The space the tenant chooses is up to them. No one became the best in the world without a coach and a tenant rep broker will help the tenant find their best space and deal too.

By now, we’ve all heard the joke about brokers and the fax machine.  It’s no secret that commercial real estate has a dinosaur reputation when it comes to technology but times “they are a changing”- sort of.  Some brokers have embraced it while others haven’t.

While Facebook- Does it Extend to CRE? pointed to split camps on Facebook and CRE, there is less debate on Twitter, social media’s 140-character microblog.  Twitter is a conversation where experts come out on top of an array of business topics including  our industry’s very own #CRE.

However, not everyone or every top broker is on Twitter: an evaluation of the top 3 brokers (as determined by Co-Star’s annual awards) across 3 disciplines in New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago showed that none of these brokers had Twitter accounts.

With that said, there is an excellent community of brokers, brokerage firms and CRE services on Twitter performing some highly effective habits:

1. They are framing themselves as CRE experts by offering their opinion and feedback on various topics, articles and their own blog.

2.  They are using Twitter to promote their Twitter newsletters, blogs and websites.

3. They insert a little personality and conversation to take away some of the “your broker is invested in the sale more than you” façade.

4. They are forging relationships with others.

5. They are creating excellent name recognition with their strong presences online. You often see the same names come up over and over again for recommended tweeters as they align themselves with the connotation of #cre.

Just as important as what one does, there are “don’ts” that effective CRE tweeters practice as well:

1. They are not promoting their spaces or at least, not to excess.  While it seems to be a more popular practice on other mediums such as Pinterest, few major tweeters are listing spaces on Twitter

2. They are not spamming followers with useless and annoying information and hopefully, not viruses.

3. They are not going off topic: top CRE tweeters are known for their CRE expertise.  They are not known for their sports knowledge, photos of their family or anything else.

Are you part of the #CRE community yet? If not, no better time than the present to get started and find us @officespace!

There’s been a lot of talk regarding why CRE brokers should not promote their business on Facebook. The main gist: Facebook isn’t a professional network. None of your friends are on Facebook looking for a 5,000sf office or a 10,000sf industrial warehouse.

Yes, Facebook is fairly social and personal but on the other hand, as the largest social media engine, Facebook is a perfect branding vehicle for a brokerage firm or individual broker. It’s easy to control content for the most part and is a much more visual medium than many other social media tools. The photo album feature is easy-to-use and links come with a nice preview, even when you are sharing a link from another Page. Coy Davidson and Blanchard and Calhoun Commercial are great examples of broker and brokerage pages with depth.

First, create a Page for your professional life.  Leave your profile personal so your friends who are interested in CRE can follow you on the Page and you can spare the rest.

However, don’t just create a Facebook page because you feel you have to have one. It’s a waste of time to create a page and never use it to communicate with your customers or worse, randomly update it every few months which definitely sends the wrong message. If you have a Facebook page, you’ll want to ensure that it looks as professional and polished as everything else you do.

When posting, it’s important to think about customizing your message for Facebook. Even though sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slideshare, and blogs provide a way to link back to your Facebook page., you want to post with care. Many Facebook pages look like a mishmash of photos, slideshows, hashtags and bit.ly’s and other items not properly formatted for Facebook. There are few discussions, replies or status updates formulated specifically for Facebook. In short, it looks sloppy and abandoned.

Facebook culture leaves very little patience for spammers so you want to think twice before linking your twitter feed to your Facebook feed. If you want to use the same tweet, re-do it for Facebook by taking out the hashtags and leaving the URL text out of the body of the update. Real estate is still very much visual and Facebook leaves much more opportunity for photos. Make use of the photo album feature and facilitate and lead discussions. Facebook’s newest format Timeline lends itself to numerous branding opportunities. Create the perfect Timeline cover, include tidbits about your company history in the timeline and rearrange your featured items along the top right (the “photos” box cannot be replaced).

Does Facebook translate for CRE? Yes, absolutely! It’s a great visual social media tool to reach many users. Time might be a premium and there are better websites for CRE specifically, but if you’re going to do it, do it right.

We recently completed our beta launch in Portland OR in late January of this year and it went well as far as I could tell.  In the first 3 months, we had connected around 350 tenants to landlords, property managers or brokers.  Tenants had found space using our site and leases were being executed.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  The challenge for us, however, had been educating brokers on our new service and how it actually works for parties, the broker and the tenant.

Nevertheless, when it came to launching in another city, I didn’t want to execute the same way.  What bugged me was despite the email campaigns in Portland highlighting our new service to brokers, I knew at best, only 20% of those emails were being opened.  We sent beautiful folders to every broker describing in detail how our service works but I was sure a large percentage of those went unopened and into the recycling or worse into the trash.  So, we began brainstorming other ideas.  Our goal – to reach every broker and explain exactly what it is we do and again, how OfficeSpace.com can help them.

This past week, we announced the launch of our new service, starting in Denver, while we were at an industry trade show.  Instead of sending out direct mail, we delivered customized gourmet cupcakes complete with an edible OfficeSpace.com logo to every brokerage in greater Denver – that was over 600 cupcakes in total.

I reasoned even though it’s an edible item, certainly people would remember who gave it to them.  We built a campaign around our delicious delivery, building anticipation through our social media channels.  We created postcards to go with our cupcakes letting everyone know we were celebrating our birthday in Denver – and the cupcakes were free, just like our service.  We encouraged our recipients to use social media to tell us how they liked our gift and we waited.

I can already definitively say this campaign was much more successful and cost-effective than our first and here’s why: when we began to make our follow- up calls, people wanted to talk to us.  They wanted to tell us that they liked our clever idea and more importantly, they wanted to know what the company was doing.

If we could be this creative just to get their attention, what would that mean for the types of products we could create to help them? We achieved what direct mail could not: a captive audience (with full tummies to boot!).

Susie Algard
CEO & Founder
OfficeSpace.com
follow us on twitter: @officespace_com
follow me on twitter: @susiealgard