Commercial Property
InternetCrusade: Missionary Impossible
Saul Klein, John Reilly and Mike Barnett, principals of the Internet Crusade stump around the country for a grueling number of events annually in order to promote the National Association of Realtors" e-PRO certification. Is it worth it? "The crowds aren"t huge," says Klein, "but they show up because they are inclined to do it anyway." According to Klein, he and Mike Barnett do two to three presentations all over the country to Realtors a day, five days a week, three to four weeks a month. Each presentation, usually booked through a Realtor association nets between 15 and 30 in the audience at $359 a pop. Event discounts bring the cost down to $299 per attendee. That"s 46 Realtors bringing in about $13,754, before the hefty royalty partner split to the NAR and other expenses. Thank heaven for closing ratios. Klein says the e-PRO closing ratio is about 50 and 80 percent, or about 800 a mong since last year, when figures improved from about 500 converts a month. The slow start was because another company had the NAR e-PRO contract and took the money and ran. A lot of Realtors were burned and lost their money - about 2,000. InternetCrusade had to regain their trust, says Klein. Today, there are about 8,500 Internet certified Realtors who call themselves e-PROs, including about 2,500 original e-PROs. Klein says about 4,000 are taking the course now and will be graduates for a grand total of about 12,000. About half the e-PRO certifications were sold are full price, he says. But because of bad blood over the certification in the past, the Crusaders elected not to have a renewable certification, so all their sales are one time only, which means they have to constantly get in front of new people with no renewal cushion. A lot of people don"t know it, but there are three versions to e-PRO certification. In addition to the basic course, there is a course for association managers and property managers. One of the ways the InternetCrusade gets people to its seminars is by hosting mail lists for Realtors and their associations, where Klein publishes the Crusaders" travel schedules. InternetCrusade maintains about 150 lists for nonprofits at no charge. In addition the team has six lists for e-PROs including one for graduates, AETalk for about 1200 association executives, MLSTalk for MLS executives, MLS information an RealTalk. "It"s all done by hand, so you know, we are just touchy about it," says Klein. "People say why don"t you hire some help, but we don"t trust other people. It is a lot of work. For John, it is about six hours a day. I do it four hours a day, and we do it on weekends, holidays, Christmas, New Year"s." Sounds like a thankless task.... "We like doing it," says Klein. "We are helping people communicate, and a lot thank us. We have a lot of people who support what we do, but there are also those who don"t understand what is involved, and it is taken for granted." The largest of the listservs(tm) is RealTalk. "Technologically, what allows communication to take place is a mail list," says Klein. "Subscribers are people with an interest in the real estate community, primarily practicing Realtors. The way we have built the population of RealTalk is through live presentations and asking people if they want to participate. We collected their e-mails with their permission. Anybody can sign up for it who is interested in reading it. It"s an open enrollment." Klein says that anybody can post to RealTalk, but Spam, viruses, html and self-advertising vendors have all contributed to a change in the way RealTalk is edited - by hand. "Too much marketing would kill a bulletin board," says Klein, "so our concept was we wanted to create an online conversation in different categories that would lead to the development of a community. Now we have about 12,000 members on RealTalk, the difficult thing is the amount of contributions. We get up to 200 posts a day." Klein says the list is edited for a number of reasons. "A mail list is an e-mail address," he explains, "and at some point that will get a virus. If we allowed automatic releases, we would get viruses. So we release manually, and now we have filters in place, so we can delete about 10 to 15 viruses a day. Also if someone hits reply and says "me, too," then the reply includes the whole digest and we won"t post that. If we see profanity, we"re careful about that. There is a screening process on the posts, and it"s all done by hand." Are the posts censored? "Almost all of them get posted," says Klein. "There could be a delay because we are on the road and can"t work on the list. Sometimes people submit their posts in html which we move to the html mail list. When it combines posts to make up the digest, it would have a lot of machine language, so we have to copy and paste it into a brand new e-mail list. Sometimes we don"t have time to go in and do it. If it"s Spam, we don"t approve that. What about vendors? "If a vendor has never surfaced in the community before, and all of a sudden they tell how great their product is, we won"t post that," says Klein. "If someone has been helpful and the community has accepted them we will let them get away with an ad occasionally. In their signature line, they can link to their Website and that is all predicated on providing something of value to the community. We have to keep list alive which doesn"t happen by itself. If we allowed anyone to post about their service, we would get a lot of flak from the Realtors." What about trainers? "They are interesting," replies Klein. "We do have trainers who post occasionally and that"s sometimes helpful. "Any trainer who posts on RealTalk gets a lot of benefit," he points out. "A trainer might throw one piece of information out there that is valuable, and for that, they get to promote their signature line and invite people to join their mail list. If I could do that, then I wouldn"t have to travel all around the country, and I could take advantage of all the hard work someone else has done and put into e-PRO." "We don"t have any problem with trainers for the most part," says Klein, "but we don"t often see that reciprocated. I can"t think of any trainer that has gone out to their student body and suggested that they should participate on RealTalk. We have posted many things and sometimes they have been overboard about promoting their products, and we"ve always wondered - when do we see some reciprocity? We know several who have their own lists, and we never see them promote RealTalk." Have you talked to trainers about it? "We"ve talked to a couple of people about it," says Klein. "Stephen Canale, Allen Hainge, and we have had conversations with Pat Zaby, Matt Ferrara. We know all these people. We say - we don"t mind you posting, but maybe you should post something on your list. We"ve never been insistent. We are open and we don"t censor." What do you get out of RealTalk? "Our belief is that there is a power in creating an online community," says Klein. "There is a wealth of untapped knowledge and information that people never had before - a publishing vehicle in the Internet. Some are great writers in bits and pieces. Every time someone gets an e-mail, they are going to see InternetCrusade, so it is constant exposure. It also gives us a venue to create and write." Why not monetize it? Vendors want to get to the list and post, why not charge them to do so instead of letting them advertise themselves for free? "Sometimes, they scrape e-mails from the list," says Klein, "or they use it for free advertising. Our thought is if they can contribute, they want to help us build the community, and we get a lot of exposure out of it. Occasionally we sell a header, and we are selective as to who we will do that with. "Being able to post to the list is the key. Our philosophy is we want content that is valuable to Realtors, another side is it is a great place for people to complain about vendors. That can teach vendors a lot about customer service. People are always saying, why don"t you make the list do this and that, but it has always been free. We don"t have a lot of time to spend on this. We do believe in it." Is it possible to have the community pay to be members? "We just haven"t done that," says Klein. "We felt that the content was valuable, and they didn"t feel that someone else was getting rich off their content, so we haven"t gone to a subscription basis. We are working on bulletin boards right now, a bulletin board is where people can go to a Website to post something and then people go to the Website to read it, but we believe more people will click on an e-mail to read than go to a Website. On a bulletin board, we could charge people because the material is searchable by topic. A bulletin board is a Web-based solution so Realtors can go to a Website and make their posts in predetermined threads for anyone to read and for anyone to read it they have to go to the Web." But that means you are pouring work daily into a product that doesn"t have a price tag on it. When do you get to hit the beach? "With wireless, you can do this from the beach," laughs Klein. "For both of us to be able to write more and distribute it, it is fun to do. If I could do more of that instead of two to three events a day, I"d be happier, but now to get Realtors to take a course to learn more about technology, we have to keep on doing it. It"s nice to have a contract with NAR, that gives credibility with the program. "Besides, we are teachers. We love to teach."Social Media Company Singapore commented:
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