Raymond Raffety posted on June 09, 2009 23:57
I have been burning the midnight oil for the last week or so getting a new design and some new social networking features ready for the American Agent Network portal site.
Social networking is something that has become extremely important for businesses in today’s world. It is THE new way to do business.
Sure great sales people always did this. It's called their sphere of influence. With the tools available on the Internet today, it becomes much easier to expose yourself to not just your immediate sphere of influence, but your second and third generation spheres of influence. What I mean by that is that with the technologies and ever growing set of communication tools available today your sphere of influence can deliver your credentials easier to their sphere who can then deliver out agin to their sphere.
Think of moons revolving around planets which revolve around stars which revolve around galaxies.
You are the galaxy.
You may not know it, but you have a lot of friends of friends of friends out there.
This has become especially important as traditional marketing venues fragment. I started my business life in the Real Estate business. In the late 70s and the early 80s, the big real Estate franchises had a large advantage. They could collect funds from their franchisees to pay for BIG advertising campaigns. In the early 80s, the CENTURY 21 Real Estate National Advertising Fund had about $40 Million dollars to buy marketing. They spread it out a bit, but it was mainly focused on big television campaigns in the three major networks.
That bought a lot of advertising back then.
They had a 97% recognition rate. A gold jacket made you immediately recognizable as a Real Estate Agent. You could prospect by simply putting on the jacket, walking through the grocery store and have people come up and start asking you about real estate.
Today, they would have to spread about the same dollars over tens or hundreds of channels. Plus television viewing is giving way to internet surfing. You would have to spread those dollars across thousands or millions of web sites to get anywhere close to the impact.In
January of this year, Century 21 has shifted most of their marketing funds to digital (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/090323-075312) where they get a much bigger bang for their buck and proven better results.
They are getting closer, but they still don’t really know how to harness what they have. They have tens of thousands of sales people. Each one of those is a sphere unto itself. If they could direct all of those spheres and the spheres of those spheres in a single direction, towards a single goal that benefits not just the whole, but also the individual, then they would be able to move a galaxy.
That is why I am so excited about the new features we are introducing. We think that we have some ways to make every member more powerful by leveraging the whole network. We are just now starting to put some of the technologies in place to do that. The network model of team building is already the physical representation of that. The whole network is structured to be uniquely positioned to take advantage of just this power.
Aren’t these some great times?