Editorial
Front Page - Friday, September 17, 2010
Terry McDougal teaches educational edge in technology
Erica Tuggle
Terry McDougal, co-owner of McDougal Design, teaches a class at the Chattanooga Association of Realtors on the fundamentals of establishing a YouTube account. This class is designed to build the basis in YouTube technology so that Realtors can make the step to capturing their own video in no time.
- Erica Tuggle
Terry McDougal commands his classroom with an iron fist in the hopes that Realtors learning the technology skills to bolster their sales will be saved the feeling of regret of losing a deal due to ignorance.
McDougal is teaching classes at the Chattanooga Association of Realtors on the fundamental building blocks for Realtors to provide valuable tools to their clients. These come in the form of YouTube know-how, search engine optimization and other “techie” tools that are rapidly becoming must-haves for the plugged-in world.
Since establishing McDoug-al Design in 1986, Terry and his wife, Jennifer, have been doing pre-press graphic work with an emphasis in real estate advertising for real estate magazines and have learned all about remaining plugged-in to keep a cutting edge on their career.
Connected to magazines across the U.S., Jennifer says they realized that the onset of computer programs allowed everyone to have access to becoming their own designers. The McDougals got through that period with their business, and waded through the market fluctuation that affected their work, she says. After that, Terry says, they decided to reassess the business and try to determine what the real estate advertising and marketing business would look like in the future.
“We saw real estate advertising online beginning to mature, so we decided to build a product to address that real estate need developing online,” he says.
This turned into the portal the McDougals developed and still use today called “Your Home Dream.”
Jennifer says with the economic downturn, the times were tough, but they had a good product, and the more they studied it, the more they saw the trend going online.
She says, “In local markets, there is still a need for magazines, but you can’t get everything that you can online. By the time they are done looking at our system, we hope they have it narrowed down to at least their top three home choices, maybe.” She says they are offering their clients essential services through the tools of virtual tours, YouTube and marketing the Realtor, all skills that Realtors can build a foundation in during the classes Terry is teaching for the CAR.
He says, “The objective of Your Home Dream is to create a single point of entry so that an advertiser or subscriber to our system will have all of the components available to them so they can exercise their marketing strategy in a single portal and then use the components which are the best players. Our objective is to simplify their life when it comes to the marketing of their products as much as possible.”
“We teach on a perspective on how to integrate,” he says. “It’s not enough to put a video on YouTube. The statistic now is that every minute, 24 hours of video is being posted to YouTube. It’s impossible for anyone to see it all. Getting your videos into a position where they can be seen by the right people is part of what we want to do.”
Besides making the Realtor stand out to clients, Terry says he tries to get his students to realize that the things he is teaching are already things they do every day in their analog life, only they are not thinking of it in a digital way. Every day, his clients do data acquisition, search engine optimization, publishing, analyzing and improving the original product based on the information, but they are doing this in analog and need help to make these processes digital, he says.
“It’s a new world and a new way of thinking about things, but it is old. We are translating what we already know into the digital world to meet our analog needs, and we have to understand those processes and how they integrate into what we are already doing,” he says.
The McDougals have set up their business in Cleveland, Tenn., and will design anything as small as a business card, up to the national advertisements they have done in the past, Jennifer says. She says they have learned a lot from working in their region as well as working with others across the U.S. that has exposed them to the trends that are occurring nationally.
Although, initially she hesitantly put away her hand tools in favor of a computer design when the digital world took over, she says she is glad she got on board. The beauty of sites like Your Home Dream is they allow people to go online and see their home not only marketed to this region, but also the world, she says.
“We have people that have looked at our site from Germany, China, Australia, England and the world. You’re not in an exclusively local market, you are in a global market, especially in Chattanooga because of the opportunities that have come with Volkswagen,” she says.
Terry says, “We want to serve the needs of our customers that they cannot reach on their own. It is difficult for anyone on their own to reach a global market. It’s a lot easier if you have an integrated product with you and those in your market have a combined presence.”
Jennifer and Terry have been married 30 years and in business together 25. They break up the time between work and home with day trips with their sons, but even then they see things that will integrate into their system, Jennifer says with a laugh.
“You are either going to embrace it or you are going to fight it, and we have chosen to embrace what is ahead because there is always going to be something down the path,” she says.
Terry has classes scheduled through the end of October, and says he will teach at the CAR as long as they want him to. Terry’s classes and others for getting the educational edge can be signed up through Susan Barnette at the CAR office.
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