You’ve probably seen the signs in your city – the distinctive black and white “for sale” signs suddenly dominating each neighborhood. Over the past year, Compass has grown its footprint – completely changing the world of real estate with a blend of top-tier agents and world-class technology. The goal of Compass is to own 20 percent of the market share in the 20 largest U.S. cities by 2020. To collaboratively reach this goal, Compass is using Workplace from Facebook to revolutionize the way its employees and customers collaborate and to achieve this goal collaboratively. Its recent industry dominance may have something to do with its first-class agent and employee online community.
We’re excited to announce an impressive achievement today: Compass has won a 2019 SWOOP Analytics award for Outstanding Collaborative Performance on Workplace. Compass ranked third in the Top-Performing Large Community (5,000+ users) Category. It’s the only organization in the category that has been using Workplace from Facebook for less than one year, and Talk Social to Me is proud to share we’ve been partnering with Compass since its Workplace launch as expert community managers and strategic counselors.
SWOOP Analytics is a social network analytics platform that help organizations drive faster adoption and ROI of their investment in collaboration tools.
The Compass use case is incredibly compelling in that both its customers (real estate agents) and its employees are utilizing Workplace together. The Compass leadership team set sights on using the platform to communicate and collaborate to preserve its company culture as the company scales quickly. The strategy of open sharing and global connectivity is clearly working, bringing agents together in key regions and for important learning initiatives, while also supporting employee collaboration and culture-building as the organization rapidly grows.
The SWOOP award earned by Compass validates the necessity of good community management and strategic support to foster collaboration.
“Today, still so many organizations believe that ‘if you build it, they will come’ when it comes to online communities. From the start, the Compass communications team invested in strategic community management. It has driven significant value, and we couldn’t be more proud of our client and internal champions at this amazing company.”
– CEO Carrie Basham Marshall, of Talk Social to Me
What Worked? How Compass invested resources to make it to the top.
Early on in our engagement, Talk Social to Me worked with Compass to host deep-dive discovery interviews with stakeholders, develop strategic and structural infrastructure recommendations, create and deliver training content, and interact with agents and employees as virtual Community Managers and group moderators. We created numerous Getting Started Guides, a Group Directory, and managed the Workplace Help Group to alleviate the workload of the Internal Communications team.
How Compass is Driving Change and Growth
The Workplace experience at Compass is designed for two very diverse populations – from employees who need to brainstorm, collaborate, learn, and feel connected to each other, leadership, and customers; to agents who need support, networking, tools, and resources to grow their business on a daily basis. Here are some key ways Compass is using Workplace to drive growth:
- Leadership Connection – CEO Robert Reffkin and other leaders host a weekly live Q&A on Workplace called “Coffee & Tea,” where everyone is encouraged to come together over coffee or tea and watch on Workplace. It is viewed by 70 percent of employees each week.
- Referral network – The Global Referrals and Recommendations group is dedicated to giving and soliciting agent referrals and vendor recommendations. Talk Social to Me developed a custom weekly update report and a monthly health check report for the Internal Communications and leadership teams. Part of this process included manually combing for and tracking agent referrals, recommendations, and off-market listings to report on the ROI being generated through connecting Compass agents across the country using Workplace.
- Continuous learning opportunities – The “Agent Mastermind” and “Agent as CEO” groups give agents opportunities to participate in a continuous learning cycle to share best practices and solve business challenges. Seasoned professionals and newcomers come together to provide thought-provoking insights on how to elevate the profession and co-create the future of real estate in real-time.
The inaugural SWOOP Awards, given by SWOOP Analytics, are based on the largest known public analysis of Workplace from Facebook networks. The global benchmarking encompassed 68 organizations, representing more than 630,000 individuals and more than 15 million online interactions. The analytics company’s 2019 Benchmarking of Workplace Networks was released March 8 in Sydney.