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Last Tuesday, I represented Trulia at the 2008 Carolina One Real Estate Marketing and Technology Trade Show in Charleston, South Carolina. Having attended many real estate industry conferences nationwide, this is the largest individual company event I’ve participated in to date. It was very well attended with approximately 900 real estate agents. Kudos to Carolina One’s Philip Cheves, Marketing Director, Les Sease, IT Director, and their team for putting it all together. A first class event for sure.

The night before the trade show, I searched for local Carolina One real estate agents online and on Trulia Voices. I made some notes about some of these agents and when I saw them at the show or walking up to the booth, I already felt like I knew them. I told some of them that I knew who they were and they were shocked, pleasantly of course. I was hoping they would have this feeling as I wanted to demonstrate to them how it would feel when an educated online consumer contacted them.

The first person I recognized walking in the aisle was Seth Siegler. I told him that I knew him. He looked at me like I was nuts Seth has a great understanding of how to make social media and blogging work for him. In fact, he also gave a presentation on social media at the conference. Nice meeting you Seth.

Then I met Foster Smith. He has a good online presence in the Charleston and Summerville area. We had some wonderful conversations about blogging, social media and Trulia Voices. I look forward to seeing him get more active on Voices.

One of the highlights of the trade show was meeting Millie Martin. She told me a very cool Trulia story. Once upon a time she wanted to post a piece of land she had for sale on Trulia but she couldn’t. I asked why? She said that her piece of property was priced at $9,000 and that the minimum price we allowed at the time was $10,000. She contacted customer service about her unique situation and we fixed it. So thanks to Millie, you can post real estate listed for under $10,000. A perfect example of how your feedback can help shape what we do at Trulia.

As the only Trulian at the event, I had a busy non-stop day. Besides manning the Trulia booth, I gave two presentations - Three Ways to Generate Business Online to a group of 40-50 agents. I received lots of great feedback afterwords about Trulia and have since followed up with many of them. The second presentation was called Agent 2.0 which I presented to about 900 agents. Easily, the single largest audience I have ever spoken in front of. An amazing experience that resulted in many great follow up conversations about Trulia, blogging and social media.

On behalf of Trulia, I want to thank everyone at Carolina One Real Estate and all the attendees for a memorable experience.

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