The Social Media and Technology Symposium was designed to teach over 200 real estate professionals how to effectively utilize marketing and social media strategies and current technology to promote themselves and enhance their business.

DocuSign presented an hour long session to introduce DocuSign electronic signature solutions. Doug Rybacki, DocuSign’s Director of Product Management, presented to 60 attendees which included real estate professionals who also use zipForm or WINForms.

Some common questions Doug was asked included “How does the signature get in there?” as well as “How do I sign up?”

How to Sign Up:

Just go to the DocuSign real estate web site and click the “Buy Now” button.

You can also go to the DouSign and zipLogix site at click “Buy Now” as well if you use zipForm or WINForms.

How the Signature Gets In There:

First, the sender creates an envelope and uploads the documents for signature. The sender addresses the envelope with the signer’s name and email address.

Then DocuSign sends the signer an email notifying them they have documents to be signed.

The signer clicks on the secure link, authenticates himself or herself into the system and goes through a process to adopt an electronic signature.

Advanced Functionality

Some hot topics in electronic signature included Anchor Tabs and Templates. These features make the process of tagging a document so easy. Anchor tabs can drop initial for a buyer on each of a 10 page purchase agreement in all the correct places at the correct size. Templates enable you save even more time if you tend to send the same types of documents to your various clients.

If you missed DocuSign at the Citrus Valley Social Media and Technology Symposium, you can catch us in San Diego at RE Bar Camp San Diego on November 12th and at REALTORS(s) Conference & EXPO 2009 November 13th – 16th.

How does electronic signature and online contract execution help real estate agents? Dave Thorpe, DocuSign’s Business Development Director, recently attended the mid-year NAR Conference in Washington, D.C.

Dave poked his head into the Bloggers’ Lounge, and found out about some interesting lab sessions about bringing social media technologies into real estate:

“Using social media to promote your business & Social media in practice” – REALTOR® Presenters: Heather Elias and Daniel Rothamel

“Twitter: Increases your sphere of influence” – Todd Carpenter, NAR’s social media manager

Will You Be My Friend on Facebook? - Presenter David Shumaker with NAR’s Information Central.

Which were also livecast (livetweeted) at www.twitter.com/crtweet

Dave also checked out the Business Technology Forum, with presentations by:

- Todd Carpenter
- Bob Hale
- Richard Mendenhall
- James Kimmons
- Shannon Williams-King

The integration of technology in business offers many advantages. For example, integrating social media technologies enables REALTOR® s to connect with others, build relationships and take advantage of word of mouth marketing.

Integrating DocuSign into real estate also offers distinct advantages to enable real estate agents to save time and make more money. By using electronic signature and online contract execution services, agents also experience higher customer satisfaction. Homebuyers are already asking for DocuSign:

I’m planning to buy a place in the next couple of years, and I would definitely pick a realtor that uses DocuSign over one who insists on paper forms. – Nick Ward, Associate Engineer – BBN Technologies

Understanding how technologies, including social media, electronic signature and online contract execution technologies, impacts the real estate industry enables agents, brokers and others to realize substantial cost and time savings.

But having been through the hassle of trying to sign long legal contracts, I would have welcomed the chance to take this document-signing process online…When it comes time for me to buy a house down the road, I’ll be sure to ask my agent if he or she is using electronic signatures. If not, I might just look for another agent. – Sam Diaz, Senior Editor – ZDNet

Image courtesy of flickr user ~MVI~ under creative commons

An’s personal perspective regarding social media means that she sees these technology tools as a way to interact with and make connections with our customers and participate in conversations that are already happening. By sharing ideas and blog posts, we’re contributing to the creation a stronger information network about electronic signature and online contract execution.

She’s written about us before, when she discussed a social media principle, “Immediacy in all things”:

Acting on new, validated information when appropriate moves things forward more quickly than before.

She has an interesting point – accelerating business processes makes sense in this economic climate. Reducing the cost of sales/sales cycles are especially important in a time low economic growth, such as the one we’re in now. For example, one of our tools, DocuSign Connect for Salesforce, enables users to:

• Send documents to any Salesforce contact from within Salesforce
• Capture contract and envelope data in real-time with automatic updates to your Salesforce account
• See all contract status and data within the dashboard tab, thus enabling visibility into all contract activity across the entire organization
• Eliminate the need to rekey data, by automatically injecting data into Salesforce Objects

Our customers use DocuSign to quickly create and manage ‘transaction networks’ where people come together to authenticate and close deals online faster and more reliably that is possible with paper.

This extends Enterprise 2.0 technology and thinking to include Enterprise 2.0 PROCESS adoption. The connections that DocuSign enables help build trust relationships and require businesses to think about collaborating with their customers with control and security.

An wrote about changing patterns of interactions one tweet at a time. We’re changing business processes one envelope at a time. How are YOU using social media or Enterprise 2.0 tools?

If you are a developer or an ISV who is looking for a platform for business critical applications, you will like the DocuSign Developer Program. DocuSign has developed an extensive API that allows some very powerful extensions to be built that extend the DocuSign Electronic Contract Execution (ECE) service into a great number of business critical applications.

For example, the DocuSign Connect service allows real-time delivery of status and form data to any application in real time. We’ve built a Connector for Salesforce on this technology that allows deep integration of data status into Salesforce. There are more opportunities out there for Connect that many businesses would find very valuable.

Off the top of my head, I’d expect to see developers create tools for Sharepoint, RSS, SAP, or even DocuSign connect that automated credit card transactions… Any business process that could automate downstream delivery of data and/or status is a target! Through our API, the entire sending or signing process can be literally EMBEDDED inside other applications. If you are an expert in a business critical application that works with documents, forms or workflow, you can turbocharge it with DocuSign.

Why would you do that if you can do the above with a digital process?
We created the DocuSign Developer Center to provide developers access to DocuSign electronic signature and electronic contract execution (ECE) resources to foster solutions that streamline business processes like the ones above. DocuSign Connect, the cornerstone of this dev center, is a suite of integration services designed to extend DocuSign Service capabilities into existing systems or new applications. DocuSign Connect comprises of DocuSign Connect API and DocuSign Connect Service.

By joining the DocuSign Developer Community, you’ll get access to all the tools, tips and resources you’ll need to develop and deliver your own integrated electronic signature solutions. With your free DocuSign developer account, you can develop your own DocuSign solution and help your organization realize the cost savings, transaction control, and green benefits of electronic signature and online contract execution processes.

You can:

• Download the DocuSign Connect API 3.0 Developer Guide
• See live samples
• Download the DocuSign Connect API 3.0 SDK

This is just the beginning – we have more innovations to come in the near future. I’ll keep you posted on developments and you can also check out our forums and follow us on Twitter (@DocuSign).

Image courtesy of flickr user bfick under Creative Commons.