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Sarah: We are all here of course to talk about Social Media.  Now, I have to admit that I’m a bit of an IT moron actually, unlike most of you here, but ultimately, the internet and any internet site, all it’s trying to do is reach people.  So it’s people we should concentrate on.

So it’s not surprising that when you link together like-minded people who can share things that they’re interested in, it’s a fantastically useful marketing tool; and the internet allows us to do that incredibly quickly.  That’s effectively what online social media is.

Now I think one of the most exciting things about the internet is the way it creates a level playing field for everyone.

Male: [unintelligible] I’d like to be where it begins…

Sarah: So unconventional.

Male: [unintelligible]

Sarah: Perfect…This is David Hart by the way, he’s my business partner.  That was meant to be on the screen before; that’s why I’m telling you now.

Anyway, I think one of the most exciting things about the internet is the way it creates a…oh, we’ve got no sound either.  I could pass my thing..

It creates a level playing field for everyone out there, especially businesses; but one of the downsides to this very one-dimensional world is it’s very difficult to be seen or heard.  So this is where social media steps in.  It allows you to reach people and have one-to-one conversations that you could never have had before.

A few years ago, I launched my dating site, “My Single Friend”, and the success of that site lead to the launch of Tepilo.com about three months ago with David’s company, Codegent.

It’s a simple, but beautifully built site — I didn’t actually build it so I can say that — which helps you through the process of selling your house without paying an estate agent, and saving the £10,000 that you’d have to pay an estate agent normally, and allowing you to stay in control as well.  So how did social media help with this launch?

Well, the short answer is massively.

David: OK, well, we’ll also look at the why-how results and learnings, and we can’t do that really. So why do we need social media?  Hmm, well Tepilo is not a household name yet.  We didn’t really have a huge amount of money to market it, so we wanted to create something…what we really wanted to do was prove something would work, and a good way of doing that was using social media.

We wanted to create a buzz around the different phases of the launch we were going to do.  It was also tying in with Sarah doing the latest series of Property Snakes and Ladders.  So we thought if we launch it around that time, we can obviously ride a little bit on the coattails of the publicity that she was getting.

Then finally, we thought it was a real cool way of getting feedback instantly.  We kind of launched it in three phases and what we were able to do, we’d just put stuff out there and say, “Do you think that’s a good idea?  Do you think that’s a bad-good idea?”

People were saying, “Oh, actually I’m confused about how to upload a home here” and we could react instantly.  For us, again, that was an awesome tool that we could get instant, live feedback about how we were doing.  So that’s the why-how.

Well when I first spoke to Sarah about Twitter she’d had some problems before with Facebook with someone nicking her against he.  Didn’t you have to kind of…

Sarah: Meander it back again through some lawyers…

David: …to wrestle her…

But, so I said, “Oh, you probably want to register on Twitter because I reckon that’s kind of the next thing that’s coming around the corner.”  Sarah was like, “Oh, OK, I’ll register my name, but I’m not going to use it.”  So what we did, we…

Sarah: It was much more fun than I thought it was gonna be…Look we’ve got…yeah, sorry about that.

David: So she started kind of using…

[Baby crying]
[laughter]

David: Oh, technology and babies never…  She started using the Twitter account…

[laughter]

We just brought him along so we’d have a bit more sympathy!

Sarah: In case we really fucked up!

[laughter]

David: We made sure…so we created Sarah Beeny a Twitter account on a Tepilo account and as Sarah was talking about more and more about things that she was doing, we could push people toward Tepilo and obviously not in a too obvious way; and made sure that when she was on TV she was talking about the fact that she was Twittering and that kind of thing, and you know, grew us a bit of a ground swell in what we were doing.

Then the most important thing, she was not just talking about Tepilo.  She was talking about the everyday things like oh, I’m about to have a baby, or this is my favorite [unintelligible] routine, so that was important to do it in a credible way.  Oh yeah, and we obviously made friends with some influences, people who were out there who preferred to be Tweeted; people like For Homes, uh…

Sarah: Mydeco.

David: Mydeco, SPAREROOM, Dreamhomesource [?], these sorts of people who were really good, and we could re-Tweet what they were doing and they could re-Tweet what we were doing, that kind of thing.

OK, creating some results.  As I said, we’re not a household brand.  We’re not Vodafone  with huge amounts of money.  What we wanted to do was just prove that this was a concept that would work, that people kind of got the idea of generally, you ask people do they like spending £10,000 on an estate agent or don’t they?  Most people fall into the latter, so that was quite an easy battle to win.

What we really needed to do was get at least a kind of critical mass of proxies on the side before we launched because obviously you went there looking for a site, looking for property and there’s one in Wales or something and you were living in London, that would be pretty rubbish.  So we were able to get 300 properties prior to launch which meant it was kind of credible-ish.

Tepilo has got about 2,000 followers.  Sarah has got about 16,000+ followers.  But now at just three months into it, we’ve already got almost 5,000 properties uploaded on the site.  It’s more than [unintelligible] pretty happy with that in this climate   And, brilliantly, we had three accepted offers in the first month which is like absolutely awesome, and we’ve had some massive — sorry, a. is bullet point for this one — we’ve had some massive interest from potential partners and that kind of thing.  We’ve felt it has worked really well.

OK, so learnings.  What did we learn?  Well the first thing is make the most of your assets.

[laughter]

In this case there were two assets.  Codegent as a digital agency, and Sarah with her knowledge of property and everything else.  Obviously, we couldn’t have done it without her.  I kind of like to think she couldn’t have done it without us, but she probably could’ve found somebody else.

Sarah: Certainly couldn’t have done…

David: I generally think every business has something that’s special about it.  It’s kind of like what have we got that we know about that we can really push?  So Sarah being on the TV at the time, we’d be mad not to push that while she was doing this.

People talk to you all the time and they ask questions and they want to be responded to.  We encourage people to feed back through the site and also through Twitter.  It’s really important that we’re responding as quickly as people are asking us questions.  The other thing also is, people are talking about your brand even if you haven’t instigated it.

So everybody always says…we say this so often, like, “Oh, isn’t it amazing that nobody ever listens to Sarah; her advice is always right.  And, Oh, by the way, she’s always pregnant.” So actually the whole point about people not listening is claim to the point of the show.  This is Sarah’s fourth baby and…

Sarah: I have been pregnant a lot.

David: Yeah, she’s had twelve…she’s got twelve babies.

But it’s really important obviously to be aware of this stuff and go what, “OK, how are we going to respond to this?  Do we need to respond to this?”  and it’s just a real opportunity for branding to see what’s happening and then kind of responding.

So, where are we now?  I mean it’s obvious, there were lots of opportunities for people, for us…we could’ve emailed people every week, but there was no real reason.  So we want to make it really clear that we wanted to create dialogue because dialogue is really important in social media, but you have to do it in a way that’s responsible and people didn’t feel like they were being spammed.

It was really important we didn’t go, “Hey, Tepilo, this weekend do something…” you know, every other day just annoying people.  You have to make it relevant and interesting.

The other thing is making it really easy for people to share on their social networks as well.  So obviously, people uploading their own homes must have a vested interest in promoting it themselves.  So we made it very, very easy.  Soon as you uploaded a home, one click and it’s on your Facebook, or one click and it’s published to Twitter.

The other thing really is thinking about the long tale of [unintelligible], I mean, Sarah was on TV a lot and that…

Sarah: But I think it’s really important not to underestimate the power of even the tiniest, tiniest bit of media.  Everybody’s got a local newspaper or local magazine or a really tiny website, but it’s those small, little bits of noise that create an overall bigger noise.  So don’t ever think you’re too big for any bit of media, whatever it is, whatever mention it is anywhere.

So that brings us onto partnerships.  This is the other thing that I think is incredibly important is you must be open to partnerships.  We’ve got some fantastic partnerships with MoneySupermarket and forhomes  and mydeco, but the great advantage with partnerships is that you can get what you’re trying to say goes to all of their audience; and what they’re trying to say goes to all of your audience.

Ultimately the customer, which is the person who ought to be winning from all of this, gets all the information that they’re interested in to you, but because it’s all relevant, then they’re benefitting from that as well.

So kind of everyone is a bit of a winner; the customer, and both of you.  So team up with as many people who it makes sense with as possible.

David: OK, and the final one is experiment, test, and react; and…afraid to fuck up fast [?].  It’s really, really important, especially if you’re doing something new — new not as in rocket science, but in a new site — it’s really important to see what’s up there.  If something is not working, then change it or take it off or pull it down, but don’t be afraid to encourage people to respond…and be ready to react kind of quickly.

And that is what we have to say.  Thank you.

Sarah: Thanks very much.

[applause]

Male: We’ve got time for one question and then we’ll abbreviate from there, and that is, “How did your celebrity status influence this as opposed to the genuine, original social media aspect?”

Sarah: Well, I think there’s no point in pretending that it doesn’t help to a certain extent, but I think it’s interesting because, social media I think, it’s a level playing field.  It does get your voice heard better, but without social media it’s nothing really because you need it to get out there.  I feel that probably if you had to choose between the two of which is most powerful, social media is probably more powerful because it works without that celebrity status; and celebrity status doesn’t really work without social media.

Male: Great, thanks so much.

[applause]

Q & A:

What happens when offer accepted? Who sees sale through?

Tepilo allows people to buy and sell property, but it’s not an online estate agent. The idea is that you take control of your own property sales, marketing and negotiation, removing the middle man and saving a commission. So once an offer has been accepted it is down to the vendor and buyer to instruct solicitors just like they would ordinarily. Tepilo has no involvement other than creating the environment for people to do this.

Who will be our ‘editors’ of social – our best friends or strangers?

Not really sure what this question means. It may be to do with the idea of who editorialises the content we see. In other words, with so much noise out there, how do we find something meaningful and who will find it for us. I think it’s less to do with whether someone is a friend or a stranger, but more to do with trust. So if I trust a source then I’m more likely to read content that they recommend. People who Retweet relevant (to me) stuff, are going to be trusted more than those who just talk about themselves and their lives.

Do you manage your own Twitter account?

Sarah manages her own Twitter account. I think if you go in and read her Tweets it would be pretty self-evident that she is writing them.

What does tepilo mean?

Tepilo is a fictional castle that Sarah’s dad used to make up stories about when she was a child. The name evokes a magical place where anything is possible. Plus there is something there about an Englishman’s home being his castle (or her castle!).

Do people follow @tepilo after they’ve bought & sold their house?

I imagine they are more interested before or during their house purchase. Tepilo tweets are more to do with what is going on in the housing market as well as the odd bit of news about successes from the site or new functionality. We encourage everyone who uploads their homes to the site to tweet about it, but they don’t need to follow us to do that.

How much did your celebrity status drive success in social media vs social media itself? SM adding incremental traffic above your existing fanbase?

Obviously it helped enormously in terms of creating followers. A few people seemed to have an issue with this, but that’s kind of missing the point. Why do people believe that “success in social media” is measured by the number of followers? Having followers is one thing, but how you use that opportunity is a totally different one and we tried to illustrate this in the short time we had. We used social media effectively to create a buzz around what we were doing through the different phases of the site launch. The key challenge was to get content (ie houses) onto the site before the site went live, not just to get loads of @sarahbeeny followers. We planned what we were going to say and when we were going to say it, and we encouraged people to feedback when we released new functionality. In our opinion that was a great example of using social media effectively. Celebrity inevitably amplified this effort, but doesn’t  somehow invalidate it.

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