As a real estate firm with a sophisticated website, what other websites are your top “competitors”? Obviously, your local market competitors are your competitors. Similarly, certain national aggregator sites are too. But what about non-industry sites? Like eBay, Amazon, Cabela’s, Home Depot, Facebook, etc? Arguably, they are too. Why?
Internet consumers experience a variety Website experiences […]

Kevin Hillstrom, President of MineThatData has written an excellent whitepaper on conducting a multichannel forensics analysis. Why is this whitepaper an important resource to real estate firms? Because real estate firms are engaged in complex multichannel marketing endeavors. But only a handful of these firms analyze their data from a multichannel perspective.
How does a firm […]

David Parmet, in a recent interview, talked about how Stormhoek winery and English Cut custom tailoring used social media strategies to promote their new products and brands: Stormhoek blog and English Cut blog. Both brands have a bit a Kula in them.
The salient part of Parmet’s insight lies in his admonition to brands everywhere to embrace […]

By using Facebook, an agent could create their own Web 2.0 brand while controlling their sphere of influence and network. Real Living has already established this platform for it’s agents (or was it an agent, or group of agents, establishing this platform Real Living?). What a great way to kick start the engagement process while […]

Eric Peterson continues to provide great insight. He has an exclusive profile of the Microsoft Gatineau project. At first glance, the Gatineau project is quite impressive. What’s particularly pleasing is that it appears to have been designed for marketing personnel and business managers. The visual representation of the data clearly indicates relevant campaign success and […]

Arguably, nothing messes with a firm’s loyalty and/or CRM strategy more than a multitude of false consumer profiles polluting a CRM database. In seeking to elevate one’s marketing engagement index, it’s often helpful to understand the demographic profile of a consumer. But if such a consumer does not self-report this, or if such data is […]

Blog data mining
Analyzing blog comments
Modeling blogosphere trust
Privacy in ubiquitous computing
Predictive analytics
Predicting demographics based on browsing behavior

Where is the real estate industry on this chart? In terms of brokerages, arguably it’s between 2005 and 2006. Many real estate firms still encourage their agents to pursue off-line sphere of influence strategies (i.e., volunteer at the local charity, pass the business card around, wait for the call, etc) without a similar focus on Internet […]

Create value for the swarm. That is the overarching goal of a swarm business mindset. Swarm creativity embodies the passion that drives this goal, along with coolhunting as an adjunct exercise. Real estate, as an industry, seems well-poised to take advantage of swarm creativity.
Nicholas G. Carr, of the Economist.com explains the basics of swarm business:
To […]

Below is some fairly recent research on motivating and behavior factors underlying social networks. The theme of this set of research is to explore how the “echo boomer” or “millennial” generation uses social media. Since real estate is an engagement-oriented Internet based service, firms should study the motivations underlying their potential recruits and future customers […]