Tomorrow’s Marketing and the Mobile Agent Today with Nobu Hata

Nobu Hata Speaks to Honolulu Realtors

I had the pleasure yesterday of attending a seminar hosted by the local chapter of YPN, which is the Hawaii Association of Realtors’ Young Professional Network. The title sponsor was Old Republic and the featured speaker was Nobu Hata of Edina Realty in Minnesota. Nobu is a nationally acclaimed speaker and contributing author for the National Association of Realtors’ blog.

Nobu Hata demonstrating Google’s new social aspect to search…Hawaii Life in #1 Spot

The Key Points

The topic was “Tomorrow’s Marketing and the Mobile Agent Today.” He packed in a lot of good content within the 3 hours:

1. Google is now factoring social into their search through Google+. A thumbnail of our own Katie Minkus’ face showed up under HawaiiLife.com as we appeared in the #1 Spot when he Googled “Hawaii Real Estate”
2. How much more empowered consumers are by the tools at their fingertips.
3. How mobile devices are making up a larger market share every day – 7 Million new cell phones were activated on Christmas Day!
4. The power of Google, tracking analytics and how to identify what works and what doesn’t.

What I’m pretty impressed to say, is our company is already aware of these trends and we will continue to keep up on them to stay ahead of the curve. What was exciting to see was the number of Realtors in the room with perhaps over 150 in attendance. Those that showed up see the power of internet marketing, the power of search and the power mobile devices. I saw a lot of people taking notes, which is encouraging. The question becomes, how many Realtors will actually implement some of the things he covered?

The Challenges

Not to discourage anyone, however here are some of the challenges:

1. He showed how it was possible to copy the HTML code off a site to copy what is working for another company. The challenge with this is Google recognizes “unique content” and that if you copy someone else’s site, you won’t get the credit. In addition, Google is always changing their algorithms, so what works today may not work tomorrow.
2. He recommended  going to start a WordPress blog. This is a great recommendation, however unless anyone does blogging full time for a living, it will be very difficult to get the page ranking of a more established site. For instance, if I were to go write a blog post today on Diamond Head Real Estate on my own (new) site or were to write the same exact article on Hawaiilife.com, the article on our blog would actually show up. Why? because Hawaii Life has an established track record of authority with the search engines.

You know the saying that goes “if you can’t beat them, you might as well join them?” In order to overcome the hurdles above, I followed a similar path and philosophy of Neal Norman, Kauai’s top producing Realtor, Dano Sayles,  Maui’s former Top Producing Coldwell Banker agent and so many other Realtors throughout Hawaii have decided to do. We joined Hawaii Life!

What other real estate firm in Hawaii do you know that has been nominated for national awards in the last few years and has cracked Pacific Business News’ Top 10 Real Estate Firms within a few short years of opening its doors? Feel free to contact me if you’re a Realtor here on Oahu and ready to take your internet marketing and presence to the next level.