Today, the world’s most popular sport kicked off the immensely anticipated World Cup in South Africa. Being a new fan of the sport, a friend told me that winning the Cup is comparable to winning the World Series, Super Bowl, Triple Crown, Stanley Cup and 15 Gold Medals; all in one day and one event. So it’s easy to see how for many countries around the world, all things will seemingly come to a halt… crowds will congregate in festive plazas, strangers will hug each other, tears will be shed, offices will flip television sets on in conference rooms and the most avid of die-hard fans will mysteriously feel under the weather and call out of work.
Experts have indicated that this will be the most watched World Cup (the 2006 final attracted over 700 million viewers) and it’s due in major part to the fact that this is the first truly “digital World Cup”. Every game is streaming online for free, every game is on the radio, hundreds of actual players interact with fans on Twitter, Twitter has created a custom landing page for the event, they also created special flag symbols that show when you #hashtag a participating country, apps have been created, thousands of blogs are covering the event, Foursquare has gotten involved and Google has even redone their homepage and search result pages. The list goes on and on..
The creating and sharing of content related to the World Cup via Facebook, Foursquare, blogs and Twitter (just to name a select few) has galvanized the masses and inspired more interest and anticipation than ever before. What this reinforces is our assertion that using these digital platforms will be (and basically already is) THE way to communicate with the future homebuyer. How are you communicating with the future builder consumer? In what ways can you engage in dialogue with them? How can you rally people together and create a buzz? How are you utilizing these technologies to further your business? There isn’t a set formula, but I’d love it if you all could hit the comments section of this post to share a thought or best practice. Here are a few questions that have just sprung to mind:
- Mobile devices like the HTC Evo and the soon to be released iPhone 4 have front facing cameras. How could live streaming and video calls positively impact your business?
- Are you utilizing Coldwell Banker On Location? Ever think of creating viral videos? Here’s a great viral video Nike put together to drum up interest in the World Cup.
- You’re definitely on Twitter already but are you leveraging it to its fullest potential? How often do you use #hastags? How could you use #hashtags to attract your next customer?
- I wasn’t shocked to see that statistics indicate that there are more searches on the twitter site per month than on Yahoo and Bing combined.
- How can Foursquare benefit your business and set you apart from your competitors?
- What ways could you leverage our iPhone and Android apps to impress and attract more Buyers and Sellers?
- How are you connecting the dots and marrying your online social presences together?
As I’ve said before, technology has revolutionized the way we create and consume content. There really is NO limit to how creative you can be in leveraging the mind-blowing technologies that seem to advance on a daily basis. You are your own media campaign..now go out and build a World Cup sized buzz in your local neighborhoods!
We’d also like to wish our Coldwell Banker franchises abroad whose national teams are representing them in the World Cup the best of luck. They’d include: Australia, Brazil, France, Greece, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Portugal, South Korea, Spain and of course the United States. Ole!
**Photo Courtesy of marcp_dmoz
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The interesting thing to me is how the social media efforts intrigued non-soccer fans to get excited about the World Cup as well. Same could be true for real estate.
BTW, let's go USA
Great write up. Agents should take a cue from the top and learn from this post that real estate doesn’t need to be all you write or blog about. Trending topics like the world cup and the oil spill give you an opportunity to engage consumers that aren’t looking to buy or sell this year (95% btw). Articles like this allow you to bring value to the consumers in your community and as mentioned tech has broken down the walls traditional media built. ANYONE can create and distribute content for FREE and that’s a big deal. Love seeing a company that has been around for so long adapting so well. Hope the agents “follow” this lead!
David – Great post. No yellow card for you this week.
@Chris – I agree. the more "relevancy" people can find to communicate, the better. It's always easier to find common ground with people through points of interest and dialogue than shoving real estate down people's throats and figuring out common ground later.
Now – if we could just come up with a way to get the vevuzela sound at our next open house? That would certainly turn some heads, huh?
@Chris Thanks and fantastic points!
@Dave yeah! No reason why we shouldn’t advance in the tourny!
One thing to keep in mind with the use of Facebook and Twitter is when at all possible, send them back to your own website.
As great as social media can be, you never know when one of your primary outlets for driving sales could disappear – we don’t own Facebook, Twitter or any of the other Social Media properties but we do own our sites and should be working to drive traffic to them.
This also provides diversification which is another necessity when using web 2.0 properties.
Great article, BTW.
Solid post. Completely unrelated but interesting fact, did you know that out of the 19 World Cups so far, 6 have been won by the host country. Doesn't look too good for South Africa this year though.
@Raphael Thanks. Unlucky for the South African team, I heard that every host country has made it out of their group. Not looking good!