Real Estate Relativity

Writing a “playscript” is an incredibly powerful way to conduct a competitive business review, according to this Harvard Business Review article (subscription required). The article advocates writing a “playscript” using characters and character analysis to define your company and competitive landscape for use as a foundational element in corporate strategy development.

The article argues that “traditional” strategy tools like five forces maps and blue ocean thinking are outdated because they assume a static competitive environment as opposed to a rapidly evolving one. The article argues that by drafting a “playscript”, companies are in a much better position to map the landscape and anticipate emergent competitive forces.

In developing a playscript, the article suggests focusing on the following:

1) Draft a current playsript: Broadly describe the setting in which you operate by identifying the other characters, their motivations, what role your company plays, how this role is perceived by others; it’s important to view your role as critically as you can through the eyes of others (i.e., perception is reality); map the links among all the actors and the rules that govern them; give voice to the value your organization adds.

2) Rewrite your playscript: the goal here is to rewrite your playscript and, if possible, reinvent the playscript for an entire sector by answering such questions like “Can my organization attract new alliances to my sector where I can then leverage these alliances to add to an existing link or create a new link in a customer-centered value chain?”; determine where there’s a value need and fill this need (the article cites Intrawest as an example of a company that filled a value need by creating alliances with partners that deliver an exceptional destination living experience which has allowed Intrawest to emerge as a dominant player in managing experiential destination resorts, whereas before its focus was on developing these types of properties).

3) Future-proof your playscript: consider how changes in your customer needs will affect your company by finding the correlation between who your customers are, what they want, and how they get the things they want (the article cites IKEA as a company that’s done this well by foreseeing high volatility in the prices governing the wood it uses to make its products so it purchased forests in Poland and the Baltic states to help stabilize prices, thus allowing it to confidently focus on dominating the low cost segment of the “lifestyle furnishings” market).

Since 2005, we’ve seen many playscripts written and re-written in the real estate industry with the advent of Trulia, Zillow, Redfin, etc. Since 2007, we’ve seen new marketing and customer acquisition playscripts written and re-written via the explosion of social media and social networking. And currently we’re seeing playscripts written and re-written with the emergence of mobile applications and augmented reality. What’s your playscript that will allow you to position your firm as a dominate player in your market? How do you plan to adapt to the changing needs of your clients and customers, especially in terms of mobile solutions? Who are the dominate characters in your company, your competitors, and the industry at large? Who’d you cast as Othello, Brutas, Caesar, Puck, Mr. White, Mr. Pink, Mr. Blonde?

Photo: tanakawho

This Harvard Business Review article (subscription necessary) makes a strong case for companies to create customer strategy departments and positions. One section of the article focuses on “Customer-facing functions” and makes some great recommendations:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) responsibility should migrate away from corporate IT and into the customer strategy department since CRM helps companies assess customers needs and wants and that’s the role of customer strategists
• Market research should break-out of the marketing department silo and extend to all departments and focus bilaterally on the aggregate and the individual (for example, creating customer profiles as espoused in the book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR) with a singular focus on customer for life (CLV) and customer equity metrics to measure success (here’s a sample lifetime value of a customer analysis from the Database Marketing Institute that will help you begin thinking about CLV metrics
• Customer strategists should drive the product development process rather than the engineers; the article notes that NOKIA launched NOKIA Beta Labs in Asia and enjoys 60% market share there because, in part, this developer community helps drive the product development process, whereas in the U.S. Nokia pursued a different strategy that has far less consumer input and has suffered

Voice of the customer is not a new concept in product design and development. It’s sure refreshing to see HBR tackle this issue. What’s your view of creating a customer strategist role in a company?

Photo: ishrona

What factors influence effective cross-functional team environments that spur the greatest innovations and competitive advantage? The authors of this study (.pdf) (focusing on manufacturing) determined that baldly implementing a cross-functional team approach is not a universal good. Notably, the authors found that cross-functional teamwork involving marketing may have a negative effect (the authors noted too, however, that this finding contradicts earlier studies). The authors conclude that companies should focus cross-functional teams on product design, development, and engineering so as to yield the highest gains in terms of innovation. I’ll posit that this finding can be applied to firms outside the manufacturing industry that are focused on software development and related product development activities.

Interestingly, this study (.pdf) concludes that many marketing departments exert positive influence on a firm’s overall market innovation in the following areas: advertising, relationship management, segmentation, targeting, and positioning. Marketing departments can influence product innovations through their overarching customer knowledge and insight into trends. Thus, a way to effectively involve marketing in cross-functional teams focused on software-related product development activities is to have the marketing team drive a voice of the customer ethos throughout the ideation and development process.

This study (.pdf) delves into programmatic methodology that can be used to predict strong and weak ties between users of a social network. From a community manager’s perspective, this is important because predictive activities can alleviate some oversight tasks while intelligently satisfying the needs of community members. As an example of practical implications of their research, the authors note that:

When users make privacy choices, a system could make educated guesses about which friends fall into trusted and untrusted categories.

…and…

Consider a politician or company that wants to broadcast a message through the network such that it only passes through trusted friends.

From a marketing perspective, it’s important to understand this as way to drive customer loyalty because as social networks continue to grow, predictive systems that deliver more relevant information in meaningful ways will drive overall customer loyalty. This could be a huge value add for such social network marketing/branding services like Facebook pages.

Related post: Peering Under the Hood at Facebook

To what extent does corporate reputation affect customer loyalty? This study (.pdf, begin reading at page 28) found that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the second most important factor influencing corporate reputation (with overall competency being first). In fact, CSR was found to have a higher impact on corporate reputation than product price. The authors posit that CSR impacts customer loyalty because such corporate behavior elicits customers’ positive emotions. Left unresolved is whether a company can over-leverage such CSR activities in its push to drive customer loyalty. In other words, where is a marketing line crossed in customers’ eyes where a negative emotion is associated with a company’s overt efforts to leverage its CSR activities; is there diminishing returns on such “cause marketing” activities.

Related post: Positive Authority and Digital Reputation

What factors keep an online community happy, involved, and engaged? The authors of this study (.pdf) found four primary things influence these three factors:

• Purpose: Clearly define the purpose and values of the community space with a well-articulated and succinct statement so people who join the community know what to expect, while internally defining your (i.e., corporate) goal of the community
• Monitor: Before you can know how a community vibe ebbs and flows, you must monitor the community’s interactions, and “embrace” community leaders perhaps by elevating their status within the community
• Feedback: Implement meaningful rating systems (the authors site a rating system that reflects users’ behavior as an example of a meaningful rating system, as opposed to a simple “top ten” type system)
• Organization: Clearly guide new community members about where to go, what to do, how to get acquainted, etc, while cuing or gently nudging existing users with meaningful suggestions and topics on how the community can grow and evolve

Related post: Community crowdsourcing and innovation

To what extent does employee loyalty and commitment to a brand drive overall customer loyalty? This research paper (.pdf) tackles that question and concludes that employee attitudes toward their company have a high degree of impact on customer loyalty. What the authors essentially argue is that fostering a corporate environment that espouses a unique and positive corporate culture grounded in clearly defined values goes a long way to inspire employees to be more engaged with their company and brand.  Once this baseline is met, the authors propose that brands create internal employee engagement indexes to monitor employee sentiments toward the brand (similar in concept to consumer engagement metrics) to ensure they remain committed to the brand and ultimately the customer. Thus, the company can ensure that it’s employees are working towards increasing customer loyalty. A perfect example of this is Zappos.

Related posts:  Creating a culture of creativity and innovation and Creativity Integrity and Brand Differentiation

Trust is a major driver of customer loyalty. How does a corporate brand secure this trust following a breakdown in service delivery? The authors of this study (.pdf) ponder this question and proffer some intriguing insights. The authors argue that negative emotions experienced by a customer following a negative service experience do not necessarily change his or her attitude towards the service provider; rather, the customer simply leaves the service provider. Although losing a customer is never good, this finding is somewhat good news because it seems that customers are unlikely to carry a negative emotion for long with respect to the brand following a service break-down, thus minimizing the chance of an emotive outburst via social media that negatively affects the brand. On the flip side, a brand can enhance the trust and loyalty of its customer base if it honestly admits a mistake and vigorously works to correct such.

Related post: Trust indicators in social network marketing

Very well drafted and inciteful list of predictions for 2010. The author, Ravit Lichtenberg, delves into what will impact innovation, while opining that mobile become even more central, integrated/social search relevancy will begin to trump search aggregators like Google, and marketers will demand ROI.

Excellent discussion on measurment tactics for Google AdWords campaigns. Discusses basics of setting up a custom report in Google Analytics to tips on interpreting data.

This research paper (pdf link) explores the “viral effect” in Flickr (used as a model of social networks in general) and found that the viral effect generally stays within close proximity of the original uploaders, social links are the dominant method to share and spread a message, and popularity of pictures grows over years. The paper is not a “gentle” read, but worth your time if you want to dig in deep on data analytical methodology.

Here’s an article that details some interesting issues relative to search, recapping a Xconomy Forum on the Future of Search and Information Discovery panel recently held in Seattle. On the dais were Microsoft, Google, and a couple of University of Washington professors. Here’s some salient take-aways:

• It’s still unresolved whether vertical search will significantly impact general search
• The nexus between real-time search, consumer intent, and semantic search is where the search gold resides
• Hurricane Katrina taught Google a lesson about relevance and real time results
• Opportunities to compete with Google and Bing exist, but only on the edge or fringe such as applications that bypass search engines, employ automated content discovery mechanisms, use semantic search, or perfect mobile geo-search

Interesting quotes:

Google is like smoking cigarettes, it’s a habit that’s going to be difficult to give up. So what can you do? You have to think about the problem space. Google’s approach is to get people in and out of search engine quickly with their result. Not the right way to think about it. Right way to think about it is to think about minimizing time of completing a task, not minimize the amount of time to match a query with a url.

[O]rganize the information in a way that synthesizes the task that you want to accomplish.

Mobile is huge. Apple is the big fish at the moment. Android coming on strong. Won’t hold my breath on Microsoft.

Two things which potentially threaten us. [1] As we become bigger and older, it could become more difficult for Google to innovate…[2] Also worry about diminishment of sense of entrepreneurship.

The Wall Street Journal recently profiled calculator hobbyists who hack calculators to do weird (but ostensibly fun) things like making an Etch A Sketch, or a Tetris game, or synthesized music. The WSJ article also relates how a calculator company that was the target of some of these hacks sent cease and desist emails and letters to members of the calculator hack community for violations of intellectual property rights.

First, it’s understandable why the calculator company sought to protect its intellectual property. But there’s also an opportunity for the calculator company to foster a user community from this hack community, and the LEGO MINDSTORMS community offers an intriguing parable.

Product directors at LEGO MINDSTORMS first reacted negatively to a budding hobbyist community centered around their product, according to this MIT lecture, but have now embraced this community to drive product sales and innovation. Similarly, IBM has a developer community. And this research paper details how individuals update Google’s mapping system to make it more accurate, while this New York Times article discusses how a community of volunteer cartographers are logging details of neighorhoods.

Razorfish points out keen ways to leverage user-generated content (UGC). In the midst of all this social media mania marketers can leverage UGC to gain insight and develop relationships. A poignant take-away from the Razorfish blog post: UGC is  not problematic in it’s own right, rather it’s filtering UGC to gain actionable intelligence that will make for meaningful engagement with customers and clients to build long-term relationships with them. Best quotes from the article:

The problem isn’t with UGC, it is with the filtering, sorting and prioritization and that’s where the technology, the semantic web and also the ability to filter through the lens of a social graph is going to make a big difference.
…
Leveraging user-generated content are the same ones that marketers and sales people have been preaching for decades: 1) build relationships, and 2) provide value that fills consumers’ needs/wants.
…
Companies (and individuals) have long espoused transparency, of course, but the economic and viral advantages of tapping and responding to user-generated content are nudging us into arenas of more authentic rather than staged transparency.
…
The future of UGC global rights management will lie in solutions that strike a perfect balance between the goals of the copyright holder and that of the user.

Photo credit: jelene

In this MIT Sloan School of Management lecture on sustaining innovation, the CEO of W.L. Gore & Associates, Terri Kelly, has some great insights on how creative knowledge environments drive profitability.

W.L. Gore is a diverse and innovative company, creating products ranging from GORETEX to surgical devices. Kelly stresses to give your team the right tools, promote the right culture, maintain minimal bureaucracy, have high expectations for networking within the organization to connect and share knowledge, and recognize that leaders are “leaders” only if people actually want to follow them.

Define what you believe, define your guiding principles, define your core values, and define key disciplines. Use these four elements as the framework around which culture is nurtured, all the while recognizing that these elements must work as a system; any one element does not ensure success…it’s the interrelatedness of the components that promotes success. Culture is an active investment in terms of time, energy, and dollars, not a cost.

For W.L. Gore, this investment in culture results in amazing products like OPTIFADE hunting gear (play this game to see how it works). Obviously, W.L. Gore is doing something right. This Kelly lecture is well-worth 54 minutes of your time to gain some amazing insights.

Related post: Creating a culture of creativity and innovation

Free is not the future of business.

Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals, made this argument earlier this year at the Future of Web Apps conference. And this comment to Fried’s statement  makes a great argument based on simple economics: free is unsustainable from a product development perspective. So how does Red Hat make money by leveraging an open source system like Linux? Here’s a recent article that sheds some light on this, Red Hat is contemplating building a North American channel partner program, and it’s recently inked a deal with Amazon, and here’s an academic paper that points to three dominant ways by which to make money on open source:

• consulting and support services around the software
• derivative products built on the community project
• increased revenue in ancillary layers of the software stack

The article goes on to predict that by 2012 more than half of open source revenue generated will derive from commercial open source.

I’m in agreement with Fried, and align with Robert Scoble,

I love paying for apps. Why? Because when I do that I encourage developers to build more cool apps for me…Anyway, the main point here is that it’s not the app store that’s screwed up: it’s our expectation that developers should work for free.

Scoble’s argument also aligns with Chris Brogan,

Don’t ever feel embarrassed to charge for value. Never apologize that something costs money if you’ve determined the value of it.

Makes sense to me.

The label “social media” has lost its resonance in so far as the concept of “social media” has been reduced to a series of marketing tactics. As David Armano says in a Harvard Business Review blog article:

Let’s start with the challenges — the term “social media” itself is indicative of the state of affairs. “Media” limits our view of the movement, and brings with it the baggage of decades of advertising. Marketers are only too happy to view the social web as a new array of channels to market their goods in some shape or fashion. That’s because it’s a model they’ve used since the beginning.

Armano goes on to essentially say that “social media” represents a fundamental cultural shift. It’s a shift that started many years ago. In 2006, Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing uttered 10 words that embody this shift

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

This sentiment was re-articulated recently by Jay Thompson’s humorous, yet prescient, “Og the Caveman” parable

Back in the day, Og the Caveman would sit around the fire and talk about his day to anyone who would listen. The cave-ladies would roll their eyes while Og recounted his manly adventures, and cave-dudes would all be one upping each other with tales of who speared the bigger Mammoth…They had friends, and followers. There were popular cave-people, and there were annoying cave-people. And everything in between. Just like we have today. Only today we have whiz-bang technology tools to take our socializing and networking planet wide.

Indeed, it’s the technical infrastructure that’s a catalyst to this conversation enflamed cultural shift, most recently embodied by the battle for real-time search dominance. For example, a friend of mine recently commented on the uselessness (to him) of CNN in terms of real-time news and authority where, in the midst of the Mumbai attacks last year, the CNN anchor kept referring to Twitter as the source. Given this, my friend’s legitimate question was (still is) “So why am I wasting my time with you?” As a brand, CNN took a negative body blow.

Brands are not incognizant to this sentiment, this cultural meme, or gestalt-like shift to mine the real-time conversation core, and have launched full-bore social media marketing efforts to be part of the vein. But have these efforts been designed? Again, Armano, is on the money with this post on “filtering” the network economy and this presentation, Social Business By Design,

I especially like slide 23 where he points out an article discussing the concept of having a “Chief Social Media Officer”, which reminds me of turn-of-the-century job descriptions like Chief Electricty Officer and how irrelevant those titles were when electricity became as ubiquitous as air. So at a high-level what’s brand to do, be it a brokerage or agent brand?

As Armano demonstrates brand impressions–positive or negative–occur through many touch points, and as a brand you only have so much control. What you can control is 1) how you listen (through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blog, etc), 2) how you respond via these same channels, 3) what brand “persona” you want to convey via these listening and responding posts, 4) who you put in place to manage this process (are you serious and demonstrate that by hiring the right person for your brand versus having interns manage this process; the former indicates you’re in for the long haul whereas the latter indicates you still consider this cultural change child’s play), 5) architect your tactics by following a “designed” strategy. Here are four places to begin your strategy:

David Armano’s mind meme on design and his post on experiential design
Adam Singer on niche versus mass media
Understanding and measuring user engagement by Eric T. Petersen

Related posts: Choreographing Client Experiences on Your Website, Theatre of Cruelty in a Carnival of Real Estate, Twittering Away Your Digital Legacy

Photo credit: vkurland

Social media monitoring
Here’s a great list of conversation monitoring tools. The article points out some very interesting and straight-forward tips; I especially like the tip on this social media monitoring wiki.

Search use up, email use down
The Online Publishers Association released a study showing that consumers are spending more and more time on search  and content centered sites while dropping their use of email and instant messaging.

Social network use by mobile device
This study by AdMod shows that social networking is the most used application of iPhone and smartphones users and that Facebook is the number one accessed social networking site.

Target, 1958, oil and collage on canvas by Jasper Johns

Perfectly Competitive Innovation is a fascinating article on what drives innovation. The authors argue against the notion that patents and copyrights promote innovation. Rather, its a rich competitive environment that drives innovation.

In other words, regardless of copyright law, movies will continue to be produced as long as first run theatrical profits are sufficient to cover production costs; music will continue to be produced as long as profits from live performances are sufficient to cover production costs, books will continue to be produced as long as initial hardcover sales are sufficient to cover production costs, and financial and medical innovations will take place as long as the additional rents accruing to the first comer compensate for the R&D costs.

This sentiment was echoed by MIT Professor Eric von Hippel in a lecture where he discussed innovation occurring in kite surfing where practitioners put their innovations under a creative commons licensing scheme to thwart an attempt by manufacturers to exploit their innovations under traditional intellectual property rights law. Perfectly Competitive Innovation similarly points to many case studies and scenarios demonstrating that innovation does not necessarily need the traditional intellectual property rights rubric to thrive and survive.

Photo credit: cliff1066

According to MIT Professor Eric von Hippel’s lecture, Democratizing Innovation, manufacturers traditionally look to the center of the market to drive innovation; that is, with their penetrative questions to and analysis of this market, manufacturers think they can discern what to do in terms of innovative product development initiatives that meet consumers’ needs. What Professor von Hippel actually found is that innovation does not come from the center of the market, it comes from an extreme market fringe driven by localized users and early adopter user communities pushing the limits of an original device or prototype. As an example of this, about 22 minutes into the video, von Hippel discusses how these types of communities quickly drove up sales of Lego’s Mindstorm product, while morphing Lego’s original concepts of the product. And about 28 minutes into the video, von Hippel goes into how user groups drove innovative design in the kite surfing market while putting their design innovations under a creative commons licensing scheme which hobbled manufacturers’ attempts to exploit these innovations. This video runs a little over one hour.

Empathy, collaboration, human centered feature/functionality, storytelling, and culture are themes that drive innovation through design thinking. Core phases of design thinking: inspiration, ideation, implementation.

On inspiration of ideas: use the world as a source for new ideas; focus on research that is ethnographic, anthropological, and qualitative versus just quantitative; focus on extreme users and strive to understand their world from cognitive and emotional levels.

On ideation: build things to learn about your ideas; rapid and low cost prototyping and iteration is key; prototyping allows you, as the designer/innovator, to get a sense of what you’ve learned and refine your ideas over time with stakeholder feedback driving the process.

On implementation: use storytelling and construct a story around the ideas you have, the more likely that your idea will make it out of R&D; a story frames the idea.

Culture ties together inspiration, ideation, implementation. Culture is its own inspiration.

This is a  fascinating lecture on innovation (57 min, well worth your time).

This New York Times article on how corporations can foster innovation within their R&D departments by adopting decentralized (i.e., “federated”) approaches to funding and team structure, spurred me to conduct some research regarding this topic; here are two great finds:

TED conference speech by Charles Leadbeater on outside-in innovation and how this type of “innovation-in-use” phenomenon has profound impacts on business:

Research article discussing how universities can support and spur regional innovation; fascinating read on Georgia Tech’s success in this regard.

Related posts: Creating a culture of creativity and innovation, Innovation considerations for real estate firms

Facebook’s recent purchase of FriendFeed is a multichannel marketing boon. Mashable detailed some threats Twitter may face with respect to the FriendFeed purchase while pointing out some threats to Google too. Regardless as to how the game (err war) plays out, as a marketer you’ve just been handed another delicious marketing tool to leverage. I’ve previously written about the potential power of Facebook and Twitter as multichannel marketing tools. The basic gist of the argument is illustrated by how Dell Computer leverages Facebook and Twitter.

A quick perusal of Dell’s Twitter and Facebook landing pages demonstrates multichannel marketing at it best: Dell has Facebook pages and Twitter handles for Dell Lounge, Dell Outlet, Dell Small Business, etc. The beauty of this from a multichannel marketing strategy is that a consumer “subscribes” to a particular channel (out of a choice of many) and self-selects which topic (i.e., channel) is most important to them knowing that Dell will centralize almost all of its communication to them about this particular topic via this channel. This works well for the real-time search features of Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s how this plays out on Facebook’s new real-time search feature for “dell lounge”:

Here’s how the same search plays out on search.Twitter.com:

Here’s a Facebook search result for “delloutlet“:

Here’s a Twitter search result for the same:

As a real estate marketer you could do something like Dell by setting up niche-specific Facebook Pages and separate, corresponding, Twitter handles (for example, focusing on foreclosure investment advice in your market niche). Anyone who fans your Facebook page or subscribes to the corresponding Twitter channel has an expectation of receiving targeted advice related to the topic you’ve identified. For example, in the case of foreclosure investment advice you could update/tweet about listings, market stats, your general thoughts, etc, while cross promoting both channels (for example, on Dell’s Twitter page you will notice they promote their Facebook pages). The synergies realized between both platforms will go a long way towards reinforcing your expertise and further position you as a trusted advisor.

Art can inform business decisionmaking and processes in so many ways. And choreography is one artform that does.
Choreography is designing a series of movements to convey an expression of an idea. The best choreographers apply a scientific approach to their dance notation. These choreographers carefully map movement through time and space–in essence navigate time and space–and have their dancers execute complicated series of steps ending in a penultimate conclusion or outcome.

Your website is a mosaic, a stage where you showcase, display, and promote your content and expertise in myriad forms and elements. Your clients and potential clients must navigate your website, working through the mosaic.

Relating design to desired outcomes
You can help your website visitors navigate your website mosaic by mapping their movement through your website, choreographing their experience to end in a desired outcome. What’s your desired outcome of a visit to your listing detail page? Mortgage origination and, thus, mortgage prequalification? Driving inquiries directly to your agents in certain instances versus routing inquiries to your e-commerce team? Each desired outcome necessitates choices with respect to design, navigation, branding, calls to action, etc. If mortgage origination is more important than direct-to-agent inquiries, then your page design and architecture coupled with your calls to action will be different if direct-to-agent inquiries were the penultimate outcome.

Test, measure, refine, roll-out
Once you’ve settled on a desired outcome (or set of desired outcomes), test which set of inputs (i.e., button placement, calls to action, etc) garners the highest and most qualified response rate. This is called A/B split testing. For example, let’s say in your marketing brainstorming and competitive analysis you’ve determined that these two mortgage origination calls to action may garner highly qualified inquiries: “Qualify for a first-time home loan? Find out here” versus “Prequalify for first-time home loans now!”. To determine which is the most effective, set up a testing array. Essentially, what you’re determining through such an array is which verbiage and button placement drives the highest response and conversion rates. Once you’ve applied an A/B split test methodology to each primary element that supports a desired outcome (or set of desired outcomes) on each of your discreet website pages, and determined the optimal verbiage and placement of such, you’ve in essence created guideposts throughout your website mosaic, allowing visitors to dance through your content and data.

Photos:
ZUrigo
Ctd 2005

Deux Gros Nez, an eclectic, wonderful restaurant in Reno, Nevada, closed its doors a couple of years ago. It’s where I, as a dedicated employee of Tim Healion and Jon Jesse (then owners of Deux Gros Nez), learned about community, service, and the power of passionate brand ambassadors:

Flickr tribute

YouTube interview

A person’s thoughts on its closing

Deux Gros Nez opened its doors June 18, 1985 and began serving espresso, scones, focaccia, and frappes in a gambling town. It was open 24 hours a day, but where 99 cent breakfasts and watered down coffee were king, the Duex Gros Nez cuisine appealed not to the masses. Nevertheless, Deux Gros Nez cultivated a tribal following. This was my first lesson in niche marketing: don’t worry about the masses, worry about perfecting your niche brand and appealing to a niche audience.

This niche audience from the very beginning included lawyers, punks, doctors, architects, professional athletes, artists, etc. Each person had their own reason for frequenting Deux Gros Nez but the common unifying thread was the passion of the owners for delivering “honest” food and a dining experience that was outside the norm of a gambling town (frequent patrons were often met with a friendly greeting along with their type of coffee–brewed, espresso, cappuccino–waiting for them before they walked in because the owners knew what time they’d arrive and remembered what they liked). This was my second lesson in niche marketing: be passionate about what you do, focus on honesty, be passionate and concerned about your customers’ needs.

Part of my job was to train new hires to aspire to a high degree of customer service. The challenge was to inspire part-time employees–many of which were college students, snowboarders, and the like–to engage each customer on a one-to-one level. This was a tall order considering that only two or three employees on any one five-hour shift would have to take the orders, prepare the food, serve the food, bus the tables, ring-up orders, keep inventory, re-stock, and wear a bolo tie (purchased or homemade, the best homemade one being a hollowed-out egg run-through with a string). Sometimes we failed in our quest for customer service excellence. But many times we succeeded. And this success was embodied in creating “wow” events for Deux Gros Nez guests. For example, I would inspire our team to recognize the sound of a dropped utensil when it hit the floor. If you listen carefully, each utensil has a different tonality. This was useful when, on a crowded Friday night, a guest would invariably drop a spoon and the team member working the floor would replace the spoon before the customer asked. This created a great customer service “wow” event, marked the Deux Gros Nez brand in the mind of the guest, and created an incentive to come back. This was my third lesson in niche marketing, especially as it relates to a service industry: training and a appreciation for ensuring that your customers have the best experience goes a long way towards inspiring those customers to be your brand ambassadors.

This is not to say that Deux Gros Nez (which means “two big noses”) did not have a reputation with some people as being somewhat snobby, and that every person who dined there became a brand ambassador, but the restaurant cultivated passionate brand ambassadors worldwide, as evidenced by the fact that people flew-in from all over the world to be at the farewell party (see the Flickr tribute above). The Deux Gros Nez community continues on Facebook via The Fort group page. This was/is my fourth lesson in niche marketing: passion combined with a willingness to pursue excellence and honestly engage your customers inspires your customers to keep your brand flame alive, even when you’re gone.

Tim Healion (known as “The Chief” to all who frequented Duex Gros Nez), currently, has transferred his passion, honesty, and pursuit of excellence to one of this nation’s top professional cycling events, the Tour de Nez. Chief, thank you and keep it going.

Aligning website landing pages with targeted social media marketing channels will yield higher on-page conversions (as defined by increased showing appointments, chat requests, 1-800 number call-ins, etc). The challenge many real estate marketers face today is effectively managing the flow of social media traffic with an eye towards ROI. It’s a multichannel marketing issue, which starts with controlling user client and potential client expectations so to avoid the “mishmash syndrome”.

The mishmash syndrome occurs when all sources of traffic to your website converge without any clear indication from whence they’ve come combined with no clear indication as to what they’re to do once on the site. Confusion reigns, frustration mounts, bounces occur. In other words without controlling the expectations of the originating inbound users it’s very difficult to align on-page calls to action to users’ needs and expectations. In fact, your website may–at first glance–look something like this:

Confusing signage and message

Controlling expectations could be as simple as clearly defining what types of information you’ll engage in on a specific social media platform. For example:

• clearly indicate on your website to follow you on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn for specific information
• set up a LinkedIn professional group or Facebook Page where you’ll focus your information and interaction around a specific topic like real estate investment advice in the age of REO
• begin slowly migrating your Twitter updates to centralize around a cloud of topics or invite current followers to “subscribe” to a new Twitter handle that will focus exclusively on this “topic cloud”
• start using targeted Facebook ads to drive traffic

By doing something like the above you’ll let your sphere opt-in to specific channels which thus frees you to narrowly focus on the specific themes or topics you’ve identified. Once you’ve begun engaging new or migrated followers via these defined channels you can begin tracking flows to your website and testing and optimizing the website to meet these users’ expectations.

For example, let’s assume you have a call to action on your website home page something like this: “Join our new Facebook page for real estate investment and REO advice” (as opposed to simply saying “Join us on Facebook”). As you begin to gain fans to this specific page you have a fairly high degree of confidence they’re there for a specific purpose and you could initially provide studies, market stats, reports, essentially any base level research and information regarding real estate investment and REO and ask for comments and feedback regarding these posts. This builds authority and credibility.

Once you’ve developed a healthy degree of dialogue (i.e., engagement) you can begin driving people back to your site for targeted activities, for example: “Just listed a sweet foreclosure investment property” with a link back to a landing detail page specifically targeted at this Facebook fan base and their Facebook friends, perhaps even with a welcome message like “Thanks for visiting us from Facebook, glad you’re here” (a simple script that recognizes the originating URL should do the trick nicely). And then knowing that this fan visitor is likely comfortable with “tech” perhaps your primary “contact me” call to action is a prominently displayed and colored button that says “Click this button to text me if you want to set up an appointment”, with a thank you message after the click like “Thanks for texting me, I’ll text you back shortly and we can set up an appointment. Make it a great day.”

These types of tactics go a long way to realizing a 1-to-1 dialogue. These tactics allow you to focus on a specific niche, target an engaged clientele, position you as an expert to this clientele, and close the loop in a manner that’s satisfactory to this clientele.

Related posts:
Clients are not cows
Responsiveness drives differentiation

O’Reilly on underlying Web 2.0 concepts and its future application
Excellent O’Reilly web 2.0 summary and whitepaper on Web 2.0; really good discussion on the nexus between collective intelligence and the real time web and managing the content/data flows therefrom.

[T]he Web is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an “information shadow,” an aura of data which, when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mind bending implications.

How Twitter can improve its real time search relevancy
Cogent argument as to how Twitter can improve its real time search results. Author argues for an algorithm that considers trust, authority, and relevancy, as well as hitting on some of the collective intelligence concepts discussed in the O’Reilly Web 2.0 article mentioned above.

Social network usage between Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter
Succinct analysis of a social network usage, showing cross-network usage and general demographic trends.

Chris Brogan interview
Excellent interview with Chris Brogan on how he’d run an airline and implement some social web karma; great insights, well worth the 9:58 investment of your time. The interviewer, Shashank Nigam, CEO, SimpliFlying, asks some really good questions. My comment after listening to the interview: That was seriously cool.

Semantic Web
This post re-confirms to me that the semantic web (i.e., Web 3.0) is still a ways out from being widely deployed, yet absolutely filled with so much promise and visionary thinking.

Dunkin’ Donuts
Insightful post on how Dunkin’ Donuts uses the social web to extend its brand engagement. Dunkin’ Donuts’ recently released Dunkin’ Run app is a nice, simple deployment of a social app that has a built-in ROI component: buying doughnuts.

Vyoom
Interesting TechCrunch profile of Vyoom, which is a social networking site that gives you redeemable points for your participation. The more points you accumulate, the more stuff you can buy. Not sure whether this will work as a stand-alone application/concept, but could certainly see this applied in a rewards program under a major brand (e.g., Southwest’s Rapid Rewards program).

Twitter
Interesting ideas on why Gen Y may not “get” Twitter.

Data Visualization (32 minutes): Eric Rodenbeck, founder of Stamen, discusses how data visualization allows one to tease-out non-obvious yet meaningful observations from arcane data sets. The interview also includes a short discussion on how data visualization can enhance real estate search (around 16 minutes into the interview). Jon Udell’s series is awesome, which is where I found the Rodenbeck interview.

Clay Shirky on how social web platforms have the power to change history (~17 minutes): Shirky gave this speech in May 2009 and details how platforms like Twitter can enable social change, potentially even revolutionary change. Especially excellent points made regarding mass media asymmetry.

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, interviews Trent Reznor (~45 minutes): Reznor gives some really great insights into the music industry and its nexus with “the Internet” while detailing his creative power struggles with record labels.

Social media is social what?
A call for dropping the term “media” from the phrase “social media”. Compelling argument to drop the fascination with the platforms and concentrate on the quality of the content and product.

Public relations social web tactics
Long list of new products and services pitched to a Kentucky-based director of social media (two of the brands he reps: Maker’s Mark and Knob Creek bourbons). Very interesting list of social media “newness” and implicit insight into public relations 2.0 tactics.

Interviews with semantic search pioneers
Summary of interviews with key semantic web players from Google, Ask, Hakia, Microsoft, Yahoo, and True Knowledge. Some topics: shift from “popularity” based search results to “credibility” based search results.

There is a reason I choose Southwest Airlines as my preferred airline: client attentiveness. There is a reason why I don’t pay attention to accumulating miles with a competing airline to ensure preferred boarding status but love Southwest’s Rapid Rewards program: client attentiveness. There is a reason I am a self-appointed brand ambassador for Southwest Airlines: client attentiveness.

Let me give you an example: Gate changes are a fairly routine occurrence in the airline industry and, arguably, it’s up to a passenger to ensure that he or she is aware of such occurrences. But in my opinion a company that cares about its clients would ensure that passengers are notified of a gate change. Once upon a time, I arrived at a gate, noted that my flight number was still listed, noted that there were not any delays listed, noted that I was 40 minutes early to boarding. I relaxed. Around boarding time I noticed that no one was boarding, yet my flight number was still listed. I checked my email and text alerts to see if a gate change had been sent to me. I waited another 10 minutes while the airline staff chatted amiably. I walked up to the counter. The airline staff chatted amiably. I stood there. They chatted. I stood there. They chatted. I interrupted. I received a stare and one word, “Yes?”. I asked if the flight was still boarding, and I was met with something like this: “We announced a gate change 30 minutes ago.” Amazed, I asked then why my flight number, route, and time of boarding were still listed behind them. There was no response. I then asked where the new gate was. Across the airport I was told with a hint, “You better run, or you may miss it.” Stunned, I turned to my fellow gate-waiters and announced that the flight we’d all been waiting for had a gate change and that we’d better run or we’ll miss it. I sprinted to the new gate, told the gate staff there that several other people were following me, luckily they held the plane until all the other passengers arrived. I was thanked by these passengers while I sat in my seat sweating. I was stunned. And even though I had accumulated enough “points” to achieve preferred boarding status, that was the day I decided to purge my airline miles from that company as soon as possible, stop using that airline as my preferred airline, and stop trusting that airline’s “CRM” messaging. That was the day I decided to “try” Southwest Airlines. And I have been a happy airline traveler ever since.

Accordingly, it was no surprise to me when Rob Hahn of 7DS told me that Southwest Airlines has the highest NetPromoter Score of any other airline. NetPromoter Score essentially answers one question: how likely are you to recommend me (or my service)? I recommend Southwest to everyone I meet who relates a poor airline traveling experience. I tell them my story. I have yet to experience a marginal flying experience with Southwest Airlines. Have I met individuals who’ve had an unpleasant experience with Southwest Airlines. Yes. But they are far less in number than compared to other airlines. An essential key to Southwest Airline’s success is client attentiveness.

Let me give you an example: Once upon a time, there was a gate change on a Southwest Airlines flight where a gate attendant announced the gate change via the public address system then walked to the boarding door area and announced it again and then invited us to approach the desk if we had additional questions or needed help (the physical act of stepping from behind the counter to the boarding area–breaking the client-attendant barrier if you will–got our attention). That’s client attentiveness in action. Simple but memorable. Here’s another experience: I just recently received an “anniversary” card from Southwest Airlines thanking me for being a Rapid Rewards member. The card included a coupon for a car rental discount. A minor “wow” I’ll give you that (a big “wow” would have been some additional rapid reward points <grin>). Nevertheless, the anniversary card is simple yet effective. Because when I received this card I remembered all the “wows” I’ve had with Southwest Airlines over the last year; thus, reinforcing my decision to stay with them again this year. What attentiveness have you given your clients recently?

Related reading: Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company. Why this book relates to this post: Southwest is designing its client relationship and service experience.

Photo credit: hiddedevries

Brand engagement

This presentation, The Audience is Always Right, by TBWA\ Berlin Media Arts team is one of the best I’ve seen explaining how brands need to reconstruct their core ethos pertaining to consumer communications. It delves deep into a situational analysis and then delivers some very meaningful aphorisms as guidelines:

• Start with a simple truth
• Create time, don’t try to buy time
• Tell a story that makes peoples’ conversations more interesting
• Leave room to think and ask questions by being imperfect, weird or contradictory
• Make the idea easy to find (searchable) and easy to tell (spreadable)
• Content isn’t king. Conversation is king

Online community lifecycle

This research article chronicles major research and studies on how online communities begin, mature, and evolve. The article focuses on a lifecycle analysis (inception, creation, growth, maturity, and death) and success metrics (for example, size and number of contributions and how willing any one member shares details about him or herself and how widely these details are shared). The article is very well researched and offers a compelling list of ideas marketers ought to consider when considering when, how, and why to engage consumers via social networks and other online communities.

Crowdsourcing is an important concept in the viability, pertinence, and relevancy of the social web.

A recent crowdsourcing search odyssey of mine (really a two hour drop down the Google search rabbit hole) began with a fairly innocuous @robhahn tweet:

I read recently that a 2-person combat team is four times as effective as a single shooter… anyone have any references to study of this?

This tweet intrigued me, as I thought it likely had something to do with Mr. Hahn’s insurgent marketing in real estate series. @PatrickHealy immediately stepped up to the plate:

@robhahn this should give you what you need: http://bit.ly/15eqQ4

Shortly thereafter I weighed in with this research article. But alas, Mr. Hahn was not satisfied:

@PatrickHealy close… but i’m looking for research showing 2 man team vs. 1 man ops

@ericbryn actually, wanted to see just how much more effective a 2-man fireteam is vs. solo shooter; maybe applies to agents…

Thus, inspired, I began a more substantive series of searches, which yielded these tasty tidbits, but nothing directly on point:

Discussion of information needs assessment and power of teams in edge organizations – Relevant to the insurgency series because the article discusses the shift from top-down command and control decision making to empowering teams and individuals to make relevant decisions based on timely and accurate information. Edge organizations promote a structure comprised of agile distributed networked units, which favors insurgent marketers.

How the information age has affected command decisions in USAF from Desert Storm to 2005 – Relevant to the insurgency series because the author analyzes the USAF shift from centralized to decentralized decision making. Decentralized decision making is key to enabling insurgent marketers to exploit the command and control decision making process that’s sometimes endemic with larger competitors.

Theories about net centric warfare – Relevant to the insurgency series because the article discusses how shared information resources contribute to cohesive mental models of the battlefield that results in increase combat effectiveness. Shared knowledge shared quickly enables insurgent marketers to exploit weaknesses in larger competitors’ information flow.

Discussion of basis for combat operations going to a STRYKER protocol – Relevant to the insurgency series because the report discusses how STRYKER forces are geared to respond anywhere in the world within 96 hours, stressing tactical mobility, lethality, and survivability. Insurgent marketers must strike quickly and with precision to weaken their competitors.

Uses of misinformation in war gaming operations – Relevant to the insurgency series because this article touches on how too much information causes humans to focus on the technical aspects of how the information is delivered rather than the context of the information and how this phenomenon leads to misinformation. An insurgent marketer can exploit this nuance in the sense of releasing highly relevant, highly targeted communications that are in direct contrast to a competitor that focuses on broadcast messaging. Here’s a nice quote from this article:

The gold lies in human thought—assisted by modern communication and computers, not distracted by them.

The reason why I’ve detailed this search odyssey is because I think it’s an interesting exercise in crowdsourcing and thought leadership. Mr. Hahn is a thought-leader in the real estate industry (recently securing a columnist slot within the Inman tribe). But this, in and of itself, is not enough to motivate me to spend a couple of hours helping Mr. Hahn. So what did? Yes my motivation was driven partly out of friendship. But it also has to do with sharing in the learning experience. That is, I enjoy the way he thinks through issues, the cogent arguments he makes for whatever position into which he plows his sword. Part of the way to enrich this experience–a more personal experience with his thought-leadership–is to participate in the germination of an idea. And that, I think, is at the heart of crowdsourcing–the act of helping give birth to a knew idea. The core of crowdsourcing is, essentially, the core of the social web: willingly sharing knowledge, participating in the expansion and distribution of this knowledge, and taking leaps forward together as change agents and innovation artists. Rob, happy reading.

Photo credit: rp72

Semantic technology and artificial intelligence

There’s lots of discussion lately about the semantic web and well-deserved praise over applications like Wolfram Alpha that employ semantic web theories to deliver relevant search results. In 2002, a short article discussed the concept of the “wisdom web” and highlighted many of the innovative concepts we’re seeing applied today. Future applications will likely employ intelligent agents to accomplish much of the “secretarial” type functions manually input today by humans into search engines, social networks, and other Web applications and platforms (here’s a great summary of intelligent agents in the evolution of Web applications).

What is innovation? How does one recognize it? Will I know it when I see it?

Wikipedia says:

The term innovation means a new way of doing something. It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. A distinction is typically made between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully.

Here’s a Booz, Allen & Hamilton book review of “The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation” (Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, authors) that offers an interesting perspective:

The authors disapprove, for example, of the widespread American practice of benchmarking, in which companies keep a scorecard on their competitors’ business practices to stay a step or two ahead of them. This, the Japanese would say, leads to incremental improvement, not to true creativity or knowledge creation. In a Japanese company, knowledge is thought to be internally generated from basic principles laid out by top management, then improved on by brainstorming from within the ranks and finally some amount of feedback from external sources.

A U.S. use-case example of the above is the development of the 3M Post-it note:

The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company…gives its researchers time to play around in the lab and then to “socialize” knowledge by using the office as a beta-testing site. Co-workers were skeptical when one researcher passed around his innovation, little pads of sticky-backed yellow paper. But the Post-it was the future, and it worked.

This line of reasoning resonates throughout Rob Hahn’s post insurgent marketing: as the main brand players in an industry focus on carpet bombing their competitors, insurgent type marketers exploit weaknesses. Similarly, Seth Godin touches on this concept when he references “heretical marketing.” Finally, Matthew Ferrara hits on this concept too.

Innovation cannot be trained, but it can be fostered in terms of firms encouraging the development of creative knowledge environments (the 3M example above is illustrative of this). What are you doing to foster innovation in your firm?

Photo credit: IH (40)

Metrics
Here is a great primer on RFM analysis, which I believe has applicability to social media marketing. The foundation of RFM is something that can drive the establishment of engagement metrics as well as allowing marketers to do a better job at managing the social media marketing channel.

Social media
Scoop44, an online “newspaper” founded by college students, received a two-year grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (nice to see the support of online journalism pure-plays; eventually we likely will not even make the distinction). This site is a nice blend between traditional reporting and new media functionality.

General coolness
Anyone interested in exploring and discussing graphic design issues should consider visiting this site. It’s an excellent compendium of thought-provoking topics and trends related to graphic design. Cutting through social media chatter will depend more and more on effective design to engage people once they’ve stepped past the social media veneer.

Thank you to Nic Brisbourne and his The Equity Kicker blog for (a) highlighting an intriguing video of UK journalists debating the veracity and viability of blogs and (b) pointing out an excellent presentation on the Customer Development Model. Both offer some tasty take-aways.

I find the debate curious. Universal McCann’s 2008 Wave 3 study points out (page 22) that 17.8 million people in the UK have read blogs; this 17.8 million represents 32.1% of the total 16-54 population (in comparison 60.3 million people in the US–33.2% of the total 16-54 population–have read blogs). It seems to me–based on the anecdotal comments of the UK journalists in the video–that UK traditional news media has metaphorically walled itself up and studies blog culture with a telescope, as opposed to latching on to the interesting facets of blogs that attract readers and then combining these facets with traditional journalistic norms and ethos (during the debate some very sound and rational points were made about the role “traditional” journalism has in terms of checks and balances, fact checking, etc). Nevertheless, some very powerful apps and news platforms could result by embracing social web norms. For example, why not take an EveryBlock approach (see Russian Hill) and combine that with traditional beat reporting on the more nuanced and interesting stories cited in the raw data feed. Indeed, one could use EveryBlock data to track patterns which could form the basis for an investigative reporting series.

A visit to slide number 27 of the Customer Development Model presentation offers a succinct and cogent illustration of a consumer-centric product/service development process. The key elements of the slide: Build, Measure, Learn integrated in the overall development life cycle. If I were able to question the UK journalist panel, I’d ask a couple of questions: Do you know of any UK news company to have empaneled a group of consumers that routinely gather their news from blog sites so as to find out why these consumers like these blogs and how they use the blog information in their daily lives? Do you know of any UK news company that has analyzed what apps or smart phone devices their consumers use on a daily basis and how they would like to have news integrated in similar ways on their devices? The answers to these questions begin the consumer-centric design journey.

Finally, this article makes a compelling case as to how certain facets of the Customer Development Model can be a disruptive factor in the real estate industry.

Let’s assume a situation where intellectual property and licensing issues are properly resolved and set with respect to granting outside developers access to MLS content and data.

If you’ve heard of an MLS (or a broker with a VOW) that has engaged a group of skilled programmers similar to what Washington D.C. did with its content and data, please let me know. Don’t you think something wonderful could happen with real estate search similar to what’s about to happen with bioinformatics?

Dialogue between bioinformaticists and semantic Web developers has been steadily increasing for a number of years now as widespread data integration problems have clearly begun to impede the progress of research.

This is not to say that challenges don’t exist,

[I]f you’re talking about traversing [information and data] computationally, then it’s much more challenging to make sure everything means the same thing and that the object that you’re getting to on the next path has the same persistence, quality, and structure that you’re expecting to operate on.

Nevertheless, the vision for a more collaborative and effective future is vibrant,

Ultimately, what the semantic Web community hopes to have are applications that will make the complexity of the technology as invisible as possible.

The real estate industry has an existing standardization body: RETS. It seems to me that an MLS (or broker VOW) could provide great value to its public and real estate industry stakeholders by adopting a RETS standard (thus, at some level, solving the data standardization issue raised above) while opening its data pantry to a group of developers, similar to what Washington D.C. did with its Apps for Democracy contest held last year (according to the Apps for Democracy website, the city realized a $2,300,000 value, not to mention the fact that the public now has some nifty tools),

The first-prize winner in the organization category was a site called D.C. Historic Tours, developed by Internet marketing company Boalt. The information about area attractions came from the city, but Boalt developers decided how to present it…The site uses Google Maps as the basis for enabling users to build their own walking tours of the city. It pulls information from Wikipedia, the Flickr photo-sharing service and a list of historic buildings.

Imagine a pool of widgets, desktop apps, apps for iPhone’s, Blackberries, etc, that slice and dice real estate content and data in novel ways. The public would obviously benefit by accessing real estate information in ways that are most meaningful to them. The content/data provider benefits by engaging the public at a deeper, more relevant, and effective manner. And real estate agents ultimately benefit because a more satisfied, more qualified, and more engaged buyer or seller equates to increased business opportunities.

Photo credits: ducks (SleepingBear), tightrope walker (tallkev)

Semantic coolness
I stumbled across the Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (SIMILE) program at MIT. Rather than try to summarize what they’re doing, here are some examples: Music Composer Research Database, click a composer’s name to see what happens; UK Traffic, click a blue dot on the map to see what happens.

Web 2.0 coolness
Excellent interviews of Tim O’Reilly by HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan. Discusses baseline concepts of what it means to “be Web 2.0″; change in thinking and corporate ethos and individual creed.

Art
Wonderful missive on the nexus between art and Web 2.0. I especially enjoyed the author’s discussion of what “avant-garde” means–as originally put forth in this essay–in the 21st century. Both are meaningful reads because each author broaches core issues relating to a wide cultural shift in collaboration across different societal strata.

Social media coolness
Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities, has contributed to a seminal eight part series whitepaper on redefining theories underlying how information spreads across the globe. This series’ concepts are particularly important to brand management practices employing the social web as a strategic messaging tool.

This is an interesting research paper compiling a list of research about online communities. The article details the social, psychological, and emotional benefits people derive from online communities. The article relates these benefits to organizations and defines success metrics for online communities. This is one of the best research articles I’ve found in recent months concerning social web communities and organizations.

Here’s a short article describing how federal chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, is launching a new site, data.gov, which purportedly will allow for the development of more public-facing applications using raw data feeds from government sources. The article also discusses some very innovative uses of Washington D.C. government data that developers submitted for a contest called Applications For Democracy that Kundra directed while he was chief technology officer for Washington, D.C.

Are your prospective clients having to act like abalone divers to interact with you? Abalone divers furbish themselves with an abalone iron to pry off abalones from submerged rocks. These divers are committed to their task, as abalone is considered a divine delicacy to some. But if prospective clients have to work like an abalone diver to communicate with and engage you, chances are they’ll dive elsewhere.

Concierge service is not a new topic, it still resonates. Let’s assume you have a robust lead acquisition strategy that runs the gamut from SEO, SEM, social media, targeted print ads, etc. Let’s assume too that this strategy yields a healthy inbound inquiry pipeline. Let’s also assume that–if you’re a brokerage–you have a decent eCommerce, relocation, and/or Internet lead management team that responds in a timely manner to these inquiries whether they’ve come in by email, telephone, or live chat. Finally, let’s assume that as an agent you get lead inquiries directly (from your blog, website, broker, etc) and/or leads are routed to you via a relocation or lead management team. What’s the average response time to these direct-to-agent or eCommerce-to-agent leads? If it’s over 15 minutes, I posit that is too long (for eCommerce-to-agent leads, I say response time should be under 5 minutes).

According to the 2008 NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers:

• 21% of home buyers say reputation is an important factor when choosing an agent, which is the second most important factor out of eight factors polled, the number one factor (at 29%) is agent honesty and trustworthiness
• 93% of home buyers rate responsiveness as “very important” when considering agent skills
• 84% of home buyers rate communication skills as “very important” when considering agents skills
• 67% of all buyers interview only one agent in their search process

Do prospective clients visit the following types of sites more often than real estate websites: BassPro.com, Cabelas.com, Zappos.com, Craigslist.com, Geico.com? I’ll posit that your prospective clients are visiting these types of sites more often than any one real estate site. Thus, their customer service–their concierge service–expectations are being set by these entities. Where does your service level measure up related to these companies?

Put yourself in the shoes of a consumer who goes to BassPro.com and contacts their customer support staff and gets a response within one minute or less (especially if he/she used live chat). Would you say this consumer has a higher likelihood of being satisfied and that BassPro likely created a good vibe for its brand in the mind of that consumer? I’d say yes. Now what would happen if that consumer had to wait for 48 or 72 hours for a response to his/her question that common sense tells him/her should take only a couple of minutes? I’d say a bad vibe is created. Granted, if the customer is committed enough, he/she may try to pry a response out of BassPro by recontacting them. But the more he/she has to try and pry the customer service abalone shell off the rock, the less likely this customer will remain with BassPro. And if prospective clients have to pry a response out of you, the less likely they are to engage with you.

Prospective clients expect responsiveness. And their expectation for this responsiveness is being set OUTSIDE the real estate industry. Thus, it’s incumbent upon real estate professionals to step up to the client concierge service plate and respond as quickly as possible to inbound lead inquiries.

Where do you want your trustworthiness and reputation factors to be slotted in a prospective client’s mind: as uncaring and lazy because you don’t typically respond in a timely manner, or that you’re concerned about prospective clients’ needs and desires? Thus, meet 93% of home buyers’ expectations and set a standard to respond to inquiries in a timely manner. If 84% of home buyers consider communication skills as very important, how are you demonstrating your communication skills–as ignoring a prospective client’s requests, or by addressing him/her with alacrity and professionalism?

Don’t make prospective clients pry a response out of you. Remember that 67% of prospective clients contact and interview only one agent during their search process. Increase your odds of gaining a client’s trust and business by quickly responding to their inquiries.

Photo attribution: Abalone divers, Queue

Blogging:

Here’s a good history of SEO since 1999, which is valuable to understand how things have changed over the last 10 years. Change is a constant with the Internet and SEO…what “worked” yesterday may not “work” today. Thus, focus on passionate, relevant, and niche content as a way to ground your SEO efforts on a solid foundation. My opinion: relevant, niche content will remain king for SEO.

Social networks:

According to comScore, Twitter gained the most visitor traction in March 2009 (9,313,000 unique visitors), a 131% growth over February 2009 (4,033,000 unique visitors).

Social media coolness:

UC Berkeley’s Opinion Space allows you to visualize your opinions relative to others. This article gives a good overview of the process.

Here’s a nifty resource on topics related to setting up Key Performance Indicators for your webiste. KPIs allow you to measure the success and effectiveness of your website.

Mashable has a Social Media Hub series and has compiled a list of the social media scene in New York City.

I’m starting something new this week. My goal is to compile a weekly short list of quality resources about blogging, social networks, and social media coolness.

Blogging:
The FutureBuzz is one of the finest blogs I’ve found discussing how to market your blog and blog posts. Adam Singer, really takes the time to dig deep into issues. His posts take some time to read and digest, but you’ll be a better blogger for taking that time.

This post on the Conversation Agent blog has 50 tips on content ideas that generate buzz. Similar to the FutureBuzz blog, I encourage you to peruse this blog, as it really challenges you to think through issues, like this post that digs into the future of the press and its historical role as the “Fourth Estate”.

Facebook:
This post discusses a new Facebook app that lets you choose which Twitter updates to sync to Facebook. TweetDeck also has a nifty feature that lets you do the same. Both are easy to use; the former app, however, requires you to add the hashtag “#fb” to any post you wanted synced to Facebook (useful if you want to add your posts to the “#fb stream” that’s searchable)

The Huffington Post has a page devoted to Facebook. It’s a nice compendium of Facebook-related information.

Twitter:
Sending photos to Twitter is fun. Currently, the leading app for this is TwitPic. A competitor to TwitPic is on the horizon. TwitGoo has quietly launched a competitive service. I have not tried this yet, but it seems well-positioned to give TwitPic some competition.

Random social media coolness:
One of the hottest topics in social web is “crowdsourcing“. The issue is meaty because if the concept plays out favorably, brands conceivably will begin releasing more engaging and consumer centric products and services. This article discusses the broader concept as to whether creativity itself can be crowdsourced. For a previous discussion of creativity and innovation see my earlier post.

Photo credit: .Martin.

Chris Brogan’s recent post challenges marketers to begin thinking of ways to use the social web to leverage traditional marketing expertise:

Marketers, are you paying attention to who’s spending how much and where when you read magazines, watch TV, or see billboards? Are you extrapolating out what it means to you, your business, etc?…If you’re in media, the stories are all around you. The model’s broken. Yep. The numbers are smaller. Yep. People aren’t as into paper. Yep. Ads online don’t make as much money as on paper. Sad, but yep.

Consider too this statement from Brian Solis:

While numbers indicate that Social Media Marketing may, for now, be recession proof, it is not idiot proof. Engaging in transparent conversations in social networks to build brand-centric communities is meaningless without intelligence, sincerity and a real world business acumen that can tie participation to important business metrics.

Assume a day in the not too distant future where 90% of your competitors have viable and cogent strategies for utilizing Facebook, Twitter, blogs, video, social CRM applications, etc. In this environment, where’s your edge? Where’s your competitive points of differentiation? How will your messages cut through the noise and fragmented media channels? I say it nets down to two main buckets: Creativity and Integrity.

Creativity

Calder's 1968 Nenuphar In The Lincoln Gallery

@doverbey (aka Derek Overbey) is a creative person, a talented marketer and prolific–and effective–user of social media. This year he attended SXSW for the first time and knew he could meet people like @scobleizer, @gapingvoid, @guykawasaki (for those who’ve never attended a SXSW, that’s one of the hallmarks of the conference and its appeal…you can actually speak freely with many experts in a variety of disciplines…if you can get on their radar). @doverbey turned “could” into “did” by thinking creatively. Knowing that people like @guykawasaki would be hit from all sides and at any time of day for a chat-up, drinks, meeting requests, whatever, he knew that if he had any chance at wrangling a substantive and informative conversation from “stars” like @guykawasaki he’d have to have a “hook” and “angle”; in short, a creative and compelling reason to get these people to spend some time with him. His brainchild: “100interviews“. His methodology: a wordpress blog, some t-shirts, a flip video camera, and a targeted Twitter promotion prior to and during SXSW. His outcome? Visit his site. Here’s what Derek has to say about the experience:

When @morganb (Morgan Brown) and I decided to conduct some interviews at SXSW, I knew we had to have a hook. The thought on trying to do 100 interviews in 4 days had a nice ring to it and provided us with a platform to stand on as we went out and started to secure interview subjects. But I think the aspect that really pushed us over the top was using Twitter to promote and secure the interviewees. Once we secured a couple of bigger names like @guykawasaki, @chrisbrogan and @garyvee and started to tweet that info out, we had people literally coming to us asking if they could get involved. We leveraged the social aspect to do the work for us. Then when we were at the event, people felt like they were missing something if they were not involved because all their social media friends were participating. In closing, I would say this experience showed me the “true power” of social media outside of just connecting. It can really be leveraged as a additional marketing arm but must still have the good idea behind it.

Derek walked into a situation where many of the attendees were just as prolific users of social media as he is, and where many of these individuals perhaps had similar goals to his, but out of literally thousands of attendees he got substantive face-time with these thought-leaders, and captured telling interviews by using his marketing prowess and creative thinking to come-up with a compelling “hook” that was just different enough to make these thought-leaders stop, take notice, and contribute. And in the process he’s branded himself as a social media leader too.

The take-away: You can do the same with your brand by looking at what’s not been done in your vertical in terms of a promotional strategy and use social media to leverage this uniqueness. In a sea of banality what’s your concept that’s simple to execute, but has a “nice ring to it” that will create a buzz tsunami?

Integrity

Integrity

Trent Reznor of NIN is a great artist. Whether you like or dislike his music, it’s unlikely you’d disagree that he’s been uncompromising in his art as well as his business acumen. Take 40 minutes out of your day and listen to this interview where Reznor’s answers to the DIGG community questions deliver keen insights into how he’s blended art and business into a strategy that not only propels his brands, but also keeps his core constituency front-and-center and conversant with these brands. What’s clear from the interview is that he’s confident in his own vision, and has been from the start. There’s a point in the interview where he describes how he strategically broke into the music business in the late 1980s by sitting back and really understanding what his unique value was to the music industry, aligning himself with the right label, and using then ground-breaking distribution models (e.g., MTV) to get his art heard. In essence, he looked at his core strengths and passions and leveraged such in the “alternative music” niche that existed at that time. Reznor focused on perfecting his art, stayed true to his vision, and created a truly unique sound which differentiated himself from the crowd of other bands. And once his audience “found” his music, he engaged this audience with ever-increasing diversity coupled with new technologies and distribution methods to increase this engagement (see his recently released iPhone app under his NIN brand for the most recent example of this.

The take-away: Understand your core values and define how you’ll make a difference and then have confidence in your brand, your vision. Keep an uncompromising adherence to these values as you deploy new services and utilize new technologies to spread your vision. And when a constituency embraces your brand, engage this constituency and demonstrate that you understand its core goals, wants, and needs by developing products and services that align with these core values while adhering to yours.

Photo credits: Creativity photo, Takomabibelot; Integrity photo, Jahat

Real estate marketing professionals interested in farming, cultivating, or harvesting customers should consider something new. Livestock management perhaps? How about genetic engineering of new hybrid corn? Better yet how about driving a combine or cultivator? It’s time to shed these agri-centric terms that are so often used in conjunction with traditional Customer (Client) Relationship Management (CRM) theories.

Potential and existing clients are neither livestock, corn, nor wheat. Clients are people who have families, passions, wants, desires, and needs. And they likely would not want to be managed, cultivated, harvested, or farmed. Instead they’d likely want a meaningful interaction with your brand where you treat them like a human rather than like an uninformed data element.

As a first step to embracing clients and potential clients as living and breathing HUMANS, rather than disembodied data nodes, firms ought to shed certain traditional labels of CRM as well as agri-centric terms in favor of human-centric labels. Use “client” rather than customer; clients seek professional advice, customers purchase products. As a real estate professional who’s positioning yourself as a trusted adviser and subject matter expert, aren’t you more interesting in engaging clients as opposed to just pushing products?  Similarly, use “engagement” and “conversation” rather than cultivate or nurture; engagement implies a recognition that your client has a role in the CRM process and conversation recognizes that you’re goal is to enlist the client in a dialogue, rather than having them passively remain rooted in your system like a seed and plant in a field until they’re harvested at maturation.

Words matter. And labels inform your conduct. If your CRM system focuses on the human touch, the people element, then your CRM operations become more focused and in tune with promoting engagement and brand partnership. Consumers want to trust your brand. Give them a reason to do so by acting like you trust them.

Photo credit zieak

If one stops and ponders the amount of data and content users add to Facebook on a daily basis, it’s truly staggering. I’ve often wondered what the Facebook data team does with this data and content. Recently, I stumbled across two insightful articles and a video series that sheds some light on this.

The first article discusses how the Facebook data team uses statistical analysis to make informed product development decisions (the article also touches on Google’s use of data modeling and statistics).

Facebook’s Data Team used R in 2007 to answer two questions about new users: (i) which data points predict whether a user will stay? and (ii) if they stay, which data points predict how active they’ll be after three months?

For the first question, Itamar’s team used recursive partitioning (via the rpart package) to infer that just two data points are significantly predictive of whether a user remains on Facebook: (i) having more than one session as a new user, and (ii) entering basic profile information.

For the second question, they fit the data to a logistic model using a least angle regression approach (via the lars package), and found that activity at three months was predicted by variables related to three classes of behavior: (i) how often a user was reached out to by others, (ii) frequency of third party application use, and (iii) what Itamar termed “receptiveness” — related to how forthcoming a user was on the site.

The second article, posted by the Facebook data team in response to this Economist article, gives a very insightful description as to how the Facebook data team uses statistical analysis to answer an important question:

We were asked a simple question: is Facebook increasing the size of people’s personal networks? This is a particularly difficult question to answer, so as a first attempt we looked into the types of relationships people do maintain, and the relative size of these groups.

What the Facebook data team found was that a user’s passive network is 2 to 2.5 times larger than their active network (i.e., a reciprocal network where there is an active two-way communication happening), and that a passive network is just as important as a reciprocal network in building buzz.

The stark contrast between reciprocal and passive networks shows the effect of technologies such as News Feed. If these people were required to talk on the phone to each other, we might see something like the reciprocal network, where everyone is connected to a small number of individuals. Moving to an environment where everyone is passively engaged with each other, some event, such as a new baby or engagement can propagate very quickly through this highly connected network.

I’ll take a leap and say that these findings helped drive some of the reasoning behind the updated profile home page and business page “lifestreaming” functionality. Facebook’s focus on having people set up a profile–and updating this profile–and immediately engage with other people, coupled with an emphasis on increasing a user’s penetration within their passive network, is critical to Facebook’s continued growth. [Update: for an excellent three series analysis of the new Facebook pages go here, here, and here]. We can see an example of this passive network effect below where a Facebook user posted a short note that his twins are soon to be featured on CSI, the news spread quickly and opened up several channels of commentary:

Here’s an additional link to some interesting insights by Facebook’s former head of data and analytics, Jeff Hammerbacher, into Facebook’s approach to data analytics and lessons learned (these are fairly long videos, but really really fun to watch). Hammerbacher discusses how they analyze terabytes of data in near-real time to allow their various business units to make more informed decisions. My key take-away from the videos is that a graphical display of data that allows users to also “hack” the data to gain deeper insights yields great product development and customer relationship management gains.

Although many real estate brand managers have embraced social media and are pushing their executives and agents to start a blog, join Facebook and LinkedIn, etc, many are still reticent to step into the space. Questions like these are fairly common: “What if someone says something bad, or posts a rude comment, or is just really nasty on my public page?”, “How can I keep out the competition?”, and “How can I control what’s being said?”

These are relevant concerns and may stem in part from a generalized mistrust of consumers’ ability to “properly” “understand brand message”, or from feelings of insecurity in the worth and veracity of one’s brand. But sweating the minutia over message, taking a parens patriae like attitude towards the consumer, and adopting a defensive posturing towards one’s competition as a way to temporarily stave the social media tsunami actually play into the hands of any competitor who’s already joined the social media party.

Questions:

• Do you believe in the transformative power of your brand?
• Do you believe that your brand is better than your competition?
• Do you believe in what you’ve built?

If the answers are no, then read these books as starting points to rejuvenate your brand: The Black Swan, Purple Cow, and The Art of the Start. If the answers are yes, then set your brand free with social media. Spreadabilty is the key, and one of the most efficient ways to accomplish this is via social media.

If you believe in your brand, use the recently updated Facebook Page platform and Home page lifestreaming features to spread your message to your friends, core constituency, and clients. If you believe in your brand, use Twitter like Comcast does via its @comcastcares profile to engage customers and solve customer service related issues. If you believe in your brand, embrace the fact that maybe one of your competitors will “fan” your Facebook Page but then use this opportunity to overwhelm them with the greatness of your brand and use this platform as a subtle recruiting environment. If you believe in your brand, figure out creative and low cost buzz-worthy tactics to get a spotlight on your greatness (look at the buzz that @doverbey created at SXSW: he’s using a wordpress blog as a repository for 100 video interviews and promoting it via Twitter while attending SXSW…and now he’s in the SXSW buzz spotlight as a participant, rather than an attendee).

Social media is here to stay. And the longer you wait to begin using social media to spread your brand message, the the more opportunity your competitors have to spread theirs at the expense of yours.

Hitwise and Google show that foreclosure searches are creeping up on “traditional” searches regarding properties for sale. UPDATE: RealtyTrac reports a 6% rise in foreclosures in February 2009 over January 2009, with a 30% increase over February 2008. On March 12, 2009, Hitwise reported that foreclosure searches are on the rise.

Hitwise: Forclosure Searches on the Rise

For fun I ran the top five Hitwise searches in Google Trends to see the differences between the search reporting engines. Google had slightly different data.

free foreclosure listings, foreclosure listings, foreclosure homes, foreclosure, foreclosure.com

Next I compared the search term “foreclosures” against search terms “homes for sale” and “real estate for sale” over a 12 month period. Here’s what I found:

foreclosures, homes for sale, real estate for sale, US, Last 12 months
Then I focused on Nevada for the same search phrases: forclosures, homes for sale, real estate for sale, NV, Last 12 months
Finally, I narrowed the searches down to Las Vegas: foreclosures, homes for sale, real estate for sale, LAS VEGAS, NV, Last 12 months

Here’s an excellent article on the PR 2.0 blog about the new homepage design features Facebook will soon release. The article gives a reasoned analysis of the new Facebook feature-set as well as possible implications for brands, individuals, and services like Twitter and Friendfeed.

What could be considered the Wall 2.0 or quite simply, a personal or branded activity stream or timeline for people, public figures, and brands, the company is placing your in-network and external network activity at the front-and-center of your public profile for friends, associates, and followers to not only stay up to date with you[sic] aggregated Web activity, but also participate in the stream.

New Facebook Home Page

The new Facebook home page likely will have positive implications for real estate professionals. First, the new filter feature presumably allows you to separate your contacts into separate channels, monitor those channels, and more easily converse within those channels. This allows you to use Facebook as more of a social media multichannel marketing tool (i.e., by monitoring separate channels you can prioritize those channels and, thus, respond appropriately and in a timely manner as needed). Second, the real-time “stream” feature will give you an accurate pulse of your sphere’s goings on, which is useful in choosing which contact to engage immediately or at a later time (this feeds into the multichannel marketing nature of the filter feature). Finally, the “publisher” aspect of the new Facebook home page seems to give you a more useful–and engaging– way to update your sphere.

The comments in this post offer an “in the trenches” snapshot of many issues framing the current real estate crisis. The dialogue between Scott and the listing agent is particularly fascinating and elucidates the inherent challenges agents face in a market where traditional and foundational norms have been so acutely destabilized.

As a real estate brand, wouldn’t you like your customers to be this excited about their experience with you?

Powder Mountain Utah Best Day of Skiing

Powder Mountain Utah Skiing Fabulous Day

I shot these videos after an absolutely transcendent day of skiing at Powder Mountain, Utah. Yes, conditions have lots to do with having a good versus great day of skiing. And yes skill level and equipment affects these considerations too. But a great day of skiing begins with the actual resort (or in the case of Power Mountain the “un-resort”).

Powder Mountain is the absolute antithesis of “big brand” in that it has a minimal choice of groomed trails with tons of choices for “off piste” skiing. There is no lodge per se, no massive repetitive brand messaging throughout its 7,000 acres. Rather, the Powder Mountain skiing experience IS the message.

It’s an authentic experience where skiers choose their routes and create their own affinities, relationships, and partnerships with the Powder Mountain brand. And it’s clear that Powder Mountain’s owners are passionate about skiing, which further elicits emotional bonds with their customers. I (we) created our own skiing experience and carry that experience and promote that experience. I (we) are brand ambassadors for Powder Mountain.

These same attributes and creeds apply to real estate professionals too. Here’s authenticity and an experience that delivers a powerful brand message. My take-aways from Jim’s video: he’s passionate about honestly representing clients, he’s passionate about his chosen profession, he’s a professional, and he’s not afraid of a fight (a good attitude to have at the negotiation table). Through this video I get a sense of who he is and what he’s willing to do for me as a client. His reputation is his personal brand and his personal brand is his reputation. And by honestly and transparently allowing clients and potential clients to viscerally “experience” his personal ethos, he’s implicitly hitting on issues discussed in this excellent post about managing your digital reputation, which I too have discussed but missed some insightful angles discussed by the FutureBuzz .

Digital Trends is a big topic and this post really goes through a substantive analysis of Edleman’s recent predictions.

The digital train is tearing down the tracks and has no signs of slowing. Every industry is being reshaped by the expectation that everything should be digitized. Add digital hungry consumers with web devices, NetPCs, Kindles and smart gaming consoles and you’ve got a multichannel marketing and distribution train wreck.

Multichannel marketing considerations will certainly be primary this year as fragmented consumer relations with brands accelerate. Thus, firms like SAP have begun tracking social media interactions. Despite the inherent trackability problem presented by fragmented brand interactions with consumers, firms are either “in” or “out” of the social media space. And it seems evident to me that firms should be “in”, as this report on how telecoms use social media demonstrates; given this, here is a list of great tips list for creating content that spreads.