Share/Bookmark

Real Estate Agents, Online Lead generation & Inbound Marketing

REALTORS® HAVE to provide access to great information about things like schools, neighborhood amenities, resale value, etc. to be competitive and are more likely to be found online by home buyers. Blogging is a natural way to do that … and by providing both the tools and a group of REALTORS® creating content, RMA is lowering the barrier for any oneREALTOR® to create great content and be found online.

Managing and nurturing leads to be at the forefront when prospects are ready to buy is no easy feat. A single REALTOR® might use a variety of tools to try to keep up with all her potential leads and struggle to manage a large list of prospects. RMA is automating this process for their agents so their leads are automatically qualified, segmented, responded to and nurtured with relevant information until they are ready to make a move, letting the agent focus on the sales part of the equation.

What Do Most Real Estate Agents Do Now?

• Most ‘web marketing tools’ are still focused on traffic, not conversion or helping you actually sell! Eyeballs don’t help in the real estate business.
• Most offerings didn’t embody built in best practices – they are tools and you have to figure out how to use them yourself.
• You can start with a ‘small’ investment to build a site with a blog, only to find out that if you want SEO … add money … you want to capture lead intelligence … add money. And it all starts to add up really fast.

The Solution

Inbound marketing isn’t achieved with some software program.  Inbound Marketing is a process that requires executing a well thought out plan AND is unique to everyone.  Inbound Marketing is mutable and adaptive to each an every industry that wants to deliver sought after information, messages and communications.

At rehavaPress.com we focus on on helping REALTORS® develop, build and execute Inbound Marketing startegies based on your individuality.

Contact us today for a FREE, no obligation consultation about your online real estate strategy.

###

About Steve deGuzman

Steve deGuzman is a National Speaker on Real Estate Technology and has been featured at events such as

• Real Estate Connect
• RE BarCamp
• RETechSouth

as well as many local and regional events focused on technology for real estate.

Share/Bookmark

New Social Business Platform Nimble Transforms the Way People Manage Relationships

Denver, Colorado (02/20/2012) – rehavaPress.com has announced their solution partnership with Nimble. Nimble is a Social Business Platform that combines relationship management and social engagement into an affordable web-based solution.  It integrates LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google, email contacts and conversations into one seamless, intuitive environment, empowering small businesses in today’s socially connected world to attract and retain the right customers.

Created by Jon Ferrara, the founder of GoldMine, a pioneering SFA/CRM product, Nimble is the only solution on the market that integrates the “4 Cs” — contacts, calendar, communications and collaboration — to enable professionals to effectively manage the way they see, hear and connect with their company’s most important asset: their business contacts.

“The problem today is our contacts and our communications are in too many places,” said Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. “Between IM, text messaging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Skype and email, we can’t keep track of it all. Trying to manage all of this in eight different tabs on your browser isn’t the solution. We created Nimble to solve our own needs and we’re bringing it to the world to help small businesses solve theirs.”

Steve deGuzman, Founder of rehavaPress.com states, “We are excited to announce this new solution partnership with Nimble.  We are pleased to offer our customers Nimble which unifies email, calendar and social channels in one application.  This will allow our customers to easily see all of the communications made with their contacts no matter where the conversations took place.

Nimble is the next evolution in relationship management – a social relationship manager that makes it fun and easy to nurture personal and business relationships.

About rehavaPress.com

At rehavaPress.com, our goal is to build systems for your organization that will analyze your customers and opportunities, and help your company be more efficiently by examining your current business, sales, marketing, and customer service processes. For more information, please visit our website at  rehavaPress.com or call us at 843.747.4762.  You can also join us socially on Twitter @rehavaPress, on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/rehavapress, or on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevedeguzman.

About Nimble

Nimble was founded in 2009 to help small businesses transform their communities into business opportunities. Nimble opens a whole new channel for businesses to engage customers in two-way dialogue, leveraging the power of traditional CRM and social media with its web-based social business platform, Nimble. Located in Santa Monica, Nimble is in the heart of the Southern California tech community. Please join the conversation on Nimble’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/nimble, LinkedIn and on Twitter @nimble.

###

Share/Bookmark

rehavaPress Becomes Official Nimble Partner.

Nimble 2.0 has arrived and we think you’re going to love it!

Over the past 365 days the Nimble team been listening to your feedback. We heard when you said you wanted to integrate your Facebook Pages with Nimble, we listened when told us you needed the ability to add custom fields to contact records, and we understood when you said you needed more privacy options. All of your great feedback is the reason why Nimble 2.0 now exists!

Nimble 2.0 focuses on three pillars:

● Social Discovery – Each day, it’s hard to know where to start strengthening your relationships. Nimble makes this easy. Every morning Nimble sends you one email full of new engagement opportunities. You’ll also find one unified stream of all your incoming messages, requests, likes and more in the Notifications section under the Social tab.

● Improved Usability – At the heart of Nimble is the contact record – the embodiment of the relationship with the customer. Nimble contacts have an all new and improved user interface which effortlessly pulls together all related messages, activities, deals, and includes the contact’s live social stream. Nimble has also added custom fields and tabs to support the unique ways our customers relate to their contacts. In addition, Nimble is just plain faster throughout the application with improved navigation and better data importing tools.

● Privacy & Marketing Integrations – Nimble now includes the important ability to choose which messages to share with your team either by default or on a case by case basis. It also allows for powerful third party integrations with apps like Wufoo, HubSpot and MailChimp!

The Nimble team invited a few beta testers to try Nimble 2.0 early and here’s what they are saying:

“The easiest way communicate with everyone.  Now, everything is finally in one place. No matter where you need to (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) everything is in one place. We don’t know how itcould be any easier.”  Steve deGuzman rehavaPress.com

“What I love about this product is the user interface. It’s very easy to find relevant information when I need it. The integration with contact management, activity management, sales and marketing automation, traditional and social media communication tools, and collaboration features into one web-based solution makes it very convenient for people like me to get a pulse of what’s going on in my network.” Michael Brito, Edelman Digital

“Nimble is by far the most advanced of the cloud-based CRMs out there. I’ve tried SalesForce, Solve360, Zoho and Affinity Live. Nimble is the cleanest CRM that I’ve seen; and automatically pulls down social network profiles of all your contacts. Seamless integration with Google calendars (a first compared to all of the other CRMs listed above). It’s far more reasonably priced than SalesForce, and a far better product for Google Apps users. It’s obvious that it was started by the same minds behind Goldmine; and why Google invested in the company.” –David Schulman, CloudOPX

“Nimble is the bedrock of our engagement toolset which nurtures our client relationships so that we can successfully meet their needs with our programs and services. Thanks Nimble, for putting engagement first in your product.” – Israel Vicars , Aegis

“I use many different systems, some for team management, some for client communication, some for task and productivity. I recently started using Nimble and find that it is among the top 4 windows that need to be open on my desktop at all time. It’s a really intuitive CRM that connects my email, social media and contact and deal information in one easily accessible location. Highly recommended if you’re looking to make your business more efficient and productive.”– Steve Lack Genlack

Visit the Nimble website to view all of the exciting new ways you can use Nimble to engage your community!

If you have any questions you can leave a comment below, email us at steve at rehava.com or tweet to us @rehavaPress!

Share/Bookmark

Nimble Social CRM

BOTTOM LINE:

PROS:
Simple, sleek interface and effective navigation. Unique, skillful integration of contacts, social networks, e-mail, and calendar. Keeps updates and other data synched with native sites. Lets you explore connections of connections. Paid business versions.
CONS:
Can’t create e-mail folders. Can be slow. Not enough help files yet. No mobile connectivity.
COMPANY:
Nimble
SPEC DATA:
Type: Business, Personal, Enterprise, Professional
Free: Yes, Yes
OS Compatibility: Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS, Windows 7
Tech Support: Free e-mail and Web support.

By Kathy Yakal

Many’s the time I’ve wished for a way to check Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn from one place. I grow weary of having to open another tab or window to see what everybody’s up to, or to post some news. Nimble Contact now offers a simple, clean framework for keeping up with your social media networks simultaneously—it also throws your Google calendar and e-mail messages into the mix. You give Nimble Contact your login information, and it pulls a good portion of your data in, letting you edit and add records as needed and keeping everything synched. Using an effective combination of tabs, buttons, and menus in an attractive, intuitive interface, Nimble Contact serves as a clearinghouse of conversations and connections, letting you view your social streams individually or collectively.

Nimble Contact’s founder was also a co-founder of contact management system GoldMine, and this background shows. The site is all about relationships, not just about consolidating much of your online messaging, but seeing the relationships that exist and building new ones. This is true of the free version reviewed here, Nimble Contact, but becomes more evident—and powerful—in the site’s paid versions: Nimble Team ($9/user/month), Nimble Sales ($19/user/month), and Nimble CRM ($29/user/month). These advanced editions offer more marketing/sales and collaboration tools in addition to everything available in Nimble Contact.

The Nimble family has one major competitor, and it’s a formidable one: HootSuite (4 stars, free- $5.99/month for Pro version). Like Nimble Contact, it lets you view social streams from one site, but it connects to several sites beyond Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, like WordPress and MySpace. HootSuite also offers mobile versions, and it’s faster than Nimble.

A Familiar Beginning
If you’ve ever used financial software or websites for online transactions and statement downloads, you know the drill. To get started, Nimble Contact asks for your social network and e-mail login information (at this point, Nimble only makes direct connections with Gmail and IMAP accounts). Gmail connectivity requires only your e-mail address and password, but for an IMAP account, you’ll need to enter your e-mail address, host names, and user name/password. I have a POP account, so I had those messages forwarded to Gmail, which worked fine. One problem, though: I can’t send my POP mail from Nimble using my domain name; all outgoing mail is dispatched using your Gmail address. HootSuite’s setup is similar, but abbreviated.

You’ll also import your contact database, unnecessary in HootSuite because it doesn’t offer social contact management at the level that Nimble does. Nimble brings in contacts directly from the social networks and Google, but if you’re using Outlook or other software, you’ll have to export your file as CSV and map it to Nimble Contact’s default CSV format. There’s a help file describing this process in the Nimble Community Center (and little else there; the site’s help files haven’t ramped up yet). You’ll also select the correct calendar in Google to synch with Nimble Contact.

Should you need to return to the setup area after your initial work, you just click your name in the upper right corner. The tabbed screen that opens displays your maintenance options. You can change your password, for example; add or deactivate networks; import more contacts; and see how much space you have remaining (2047MB is allowed, but you can contact the company if you need more). HootSuite has a similar setup page.

No Confusion
There’s little chance you’ll get lost in Nimble Contact. The interface is uncomplicated and uncluttered, and you’ll use tabs and buttons for navigation. The first tab, Contacts, contains your database of people and companies (Nimble Contact pulls companies out of your records and gives them their own entries). All appear in list format and are divided into Recently Viewed, People, Company, and Recently Added. You can search the lists for individual entities. Each listing is earmarked with the name of the networks that connect you; clicking on one of these tags opens a list of all records with that connection.

You can also enter people or companies manually. The contact record contains address, phone, e-mail, Web site, Skype ID, and social network accounts fields. When you click on the Add button for Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, Nimble Contact goes out and finds possible matches, displaying a picture and address for each, so you can select one. HootSuite, of course, can’t do this.

To open a contact profile, just click on the name anywhere in the site. Contact profiles are complex pages, offering many options. You can click the Edit button to get back to the original page; delete the record; send a Facebook or LinkedIn message; and merge duplicates. The latter can come in handy, considering that people sometimes use different versions of their first names on various networks, like my sister. I selected the record I wanted to keep, clicked Find/Merge Duplicates, grabbed the correct record from the ones offered, and clicked Merge. It worked great, leaving only one record containing everything.

Yet More Contact Connections
There’s more on the profile page. You can add a task or event concerning the contact that will appear in the Calendar, or enter a log activity. The bottom of the page is reserved for your interaction with that contact. You can click tabs to choose between viewing all related entries, only messages (divided by network), or only activities. Messages and related pictures display there, not just lists of entries. HootSuite doesn’t offer this; its contact management is limited to brief profiles of contacts.

Finally, your contact or company’s Social Stream appears in a vertical pane on the right. This column provides a running commentary, a collection of that entity’s latest tweets or status updates. If there’s a person or company that’s connected on Nimble Contact, that information will appear at the bottom of the column, along with their social connections.

You can do a lot of work with your calendar from other places in Nimble Contact, but clicking the Activities tab gives you the whole picture. You can toggle here between a list view and an actual graphical calendar (unfortunately, the calendar begins at 12 a.m. and you can’t change that setting, though you’ll be able to in the future). The calendar works much like Google’s calendar, and in fact, the two stay synched with each other no matter where you enter the data. You can create tasks and one-time/recurring events, both of which can be linked to contacts. Day, week, and month views are available, and all-day events are supported. Missing here: reminders. HootSuite does not offer calendaring at all.

Messages, Messages, Messages
The Messages tab takes you to a clearinghouse of all your messages, no matter where they originate. There are separate subtabs here for e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, or you can view them all together (messages are marked with icons so you know where they came from). These entries are private messages you’ve sent and received on the networks and in e-mail, not tweets and updates from friends. You can, though, enter a status update to be posted to one or all the social networks, a welcomed feature. HootSuite does this latter, and even lets you schedule it (which Nimble Contact doesn’t), but the only direct messages you can see are from Twitter.

Nimble Contact and Gmail are close friends. Whatever you do in one is reflected in the other–to a point. Nimble Contact’s e-mail client lacks some of Gmail’s flexibility and sophistication. You can’t, for example, create folders and file messages in them. Everything you want to save goes into one big archive. There’s no spam-handling or filtering. But Gmail also doesn’t have all the contact data immediately available in the fashion that Nimble Contact does. Nimble Contact does let you do basic mail-handling tasks (reply, reply all, forward, star, and attach files) and add related tasks directly from a message.

If you’ve forgotten how you know a contact (signified in blue text) who sent you an e-mail, you’ll see their face and a profile when you open it. If someone sent you a direct message through a social network, you can view whatever profile is available and add them to your database, or send a message back (this does not constitute making an official Facebook friending or other connection).

A Sociable Tab
The final navigational tab takes you to the home of your social network connections, though you’ve already been dealing with them in every other part of the program. Like in the Messages area, you can view your latest Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn status updates and tweets all together or individually, as well as write comments and retweet. If you click on a contact’s name, you’ll see their Nimble Contact profile, and if you hover over a name in the LinkedIn list, you’ll see an abbreviated LinkedIn profile. Click on the Profile tab, and you get your own status updates and tweets.

The Twitter stream is notable for a couple of reasons. First, it carries over your categories, as HootSuite does. Second, if you or a contact has a particularly active social network life, there’ll be some extra information included there. You’ll see what Twitter contacts that person is influenced by, and who they influence. There’s also a Klout Score (a measure of an individual’s overall online influence) and a Twitter Timeline and Twitter Mentions. HootSuite does all this except for the influence numbers.

Here’s where the Nimble Contact/Twitter connection gets really interesting, and its capabilities start to bump up against the paid versions. Nimble Contact makes it easy to not only keep up with what your contacts are saying and doing, but what their contacts are saying and doing. See an interesting comment made to a comment made by your contact? Click on their name, and you’ll see their profile. Then you can follow them or import them as a contact.

It’s hard to get lost in Nimble Contact, or to be in a screen where you can’t do what you want to. There’s a lot of duplication of available functions, so there are numerous ways to do the same thing. Surprisingly, this is not confusing. HootSuite’s slide-out menu helps you move from task to task easily, and also makes tools available where you need them.

A Very Promising Launch
Nimble Contact doesn’t necessarily the sites it links to, at least not at this point—you’ll still want to visit them for some things. You can’t play Facebook Scrabble or Mafia Wars from the site, for example, and Gmail/Google Calendar still have some functions that Nimble Contact doesn’t. Nimble Contact lacks many LinkedIn tools, like job-searching, recommendations, and suggested contacts. Your Twitter functions, on the other hand, carry over quite well, and Nimble Contact amplifies them; the only significant Twitter function you don’t see in Nimble Contact is suggestions of people to follow and Twitter trends.

But the point is, you can do numerous things with your social connections in Nimble Contact that you can’t do in the native sites. And you can do them from the same venue, without opening a new tab or window.

Nimble has accomplished much with its launch of Nimble Contact and its paid family members. And the company promises regular updates, so there’s more connectivity coming. Its free version offers more to social network “listeners” than HootSuite does, considering its social contact management and calendaring, email support, and profile-based integration of social streams. It lacks HootSuite’s free reports and multiple stream-watching, and its sales/CRM versions can get pricey for large teams, but the connectivity it facilitates is unparalleled. I’d suggest that anyone who uses multiple social networks and supported email systems check it out and continue to watch its development. Nimble Contact beats out even the very capable HootSuite for Editors’ Choice in social media dashboards because it “gets” contact and social media management better.

Copyright (c) 2012 Ziff Davis Inc. All Rights Reserved.