Week 12 - Post 2

1.LinkedIn: My husband and I each have a LinkedIn account, and have decided not to create an account specific to our business. This works fine for us for now because we are a small real estate business and it’s important to us to build personal relationships with clients.  Although we branded our business as Born & Raised Realty, we are personally known by many for the business services we provide in our community.  

In researching groups on LinkedIn, I found there are some groups that could benefit our business if we were to join.  Groups such as Real Estate Investor, which states it’s the most interactive Real Estate Investment centric community on LinkedIn, Real Estate Professionals Referral Group, which is a Referral network group for real estate professionals around the country and world, and Pete Asmus’ Real Estate Networking Group. Each of these group's purpose is to provide a source for real estate professionals, the first is for referring out of the area clients in need of a great real estate agent. The latter two are for networking with other professionals. 

2.Yelp: Our Yelp account is under my husband’s name rather than our business.  Prior to rebranding our business, all transactions were under his name. Most of our reviews are on Realtor.com, and Zillow.com. We only have four reviews on Yelp, and in full honesty, we didn’t have the best experience.  One of the reviews we received on Yelp was terrible.  I had hoped when prospective clients read the review they will be able to tell the writer is far from rational or reasonable in his posting this review.  However, two years after his initial post he updated the review and it just seemed like a bad review, nothing too far-fetched, although not at all accurate. What is worse is this was actually someone my husband new personally and tried to help. 

We know how important it is to respond to reviews, especially negative ones. My husband did respond, and perhaps it was too long and too detailed,apologizing and explaining how he gave 100% in his service to this client.  Basically, nothing would have satisfied this client. The basic, “I’m sorry you had a bad experience, please contact us.” would not have felt authentic and probably would have triggered him to continue trying to hurt our business.  Perhaps, only keeping potential clients in mind, and not the writer of the review, he could have responded something like, “We’re normally known for our exceptional attention to detail and customer service, and we regret that we missed the mark.”  Although my husband did not keep the response “simple, short and sweet” I think it was appropriate knowing the type of person he was dealing with.