Setting up a WordPress blog on your own choice of hosts is usually less than $100/year for the hosting, and the WordPress software is free. You can make your blog private, requiring access to log in and to be able to receive posts as they are published.
Once you've got your blog up and running, you can select a design or theme for presentation. Since it's an internal site for your agents and employees only, you can have some fun with this theme selection as well. There are thousands from which to choose.
Next you set up your employees and agents as users. These users can have different levels of permission, with "author" being one choice. Let's look at the type of information we can publish and how our company blog can be used:
- Sending memos and announcements about meetings or activities.
- Transmitting leads to agents via their email, cell phone text messages or both.
- Receiving information about the activities of agents or their locations.
- Giving a private RSS feed to clients as well, so they can receive notices about their transactions or listing showings.
- Using chosen security options, you can even upload documents that can only be opened by those with the proper access.
Those are a few uses for our brokerage communication blog. I'm sure that you can think of more. Visualize a blog category for an agent, as in category name "Mary Smith." By posting all communications both to and from Mary with this category, you'll have a running record of everything written going backward in time.
Your agents can even use their voice over their cell phone to post updates on their activities to your office staff. By using Jott.com and their cell phone, the posts can appear automatically in the blog in their agent category.
Going even farther, you can have the broker able to call in a post to Mary's category that she'll receive automatically via email or text message. Yes, you can do it directly from phone to phone or phone to text/email. However, this captures the communication in history. Sometimes we need this documentation of what's happening, or when a lead was assigned.
This article isn't to give you specific instructions on how to do it all. But, hopefully you have a new appreciation for the power of the blog for brokerage management and communications. It covers two very big requirements, being both effective and inexpensive.
