Google’s AdPlanner (need to register for the beta) has the potential to unleash the power of traditional demographic marketing analysis to long-tail search strategies. This is a great tool because it allows media planners to target niche sites in a highly effective manner while focusing on distinct consumer segments. For example, let’s say that I’m […]

Assume you’re a brokerage firm with a wide distribution of properties over several zip codes. Aside from basic syndication to online aggregators, what’s another strategy to market your listings? One fee-based option that many aggregators offer is enhanced listings. Before you pay, however, ask them to prove their merit.
Assume you cover these two zip codes […]

After a couple of months, I decided to give Wikia another test. The theme this time is “golf course homes”:
“golf course homes for sale columbus ohio” Google Wikia Winner is Google because it lists relevant, real estate oriented blogs with posts focusing on the specific search query.
“golf course homes sanibel florida” Google Wikia Winner is […]

What does Peter Gabriel’s new online project The Filter have to do with real estate search? (NOTE: I went through the The Filter Q&A and have to say it was eerily prescient).
What if there was a site where a consumer would 1) define the location where they want to live (via natural language, drop down, […]

This post on Transparent Real Estate offers a concise, easy-to-follow, tutorial on how to use Twitter and Friendfeed for real estate business development purposes. And this Owyang post further explores these concepts.
Taking Kitano’s and Owyang’s lead, your micro-memes would update your existing, new client, and prospective clients with your market knowledge, your insight, your new […]

Thanks to this SEO blog I found this post, which details a new type of Yahoo! search that’s in beta mode on Yahoo!SearchIndia. I performed the search “mumbai real estate” and got this:

eMarketer reports that a recent study on traditional media’s use of blogs shows that 57.7% of respondents–US journalists –use blogs to measure sentiment.
Identifying Expressions of Emotion in Text (core study found here, registration required) is an intriguing “blog sentiment” study that identified targeted, emotion-laden words–”seed words”–and retrieved 173 blog posts from the Web that contained […]

This video, sourced from Bring the love back, beautifully illustrates the new dynamic–and power shift–between consumer and brand.

This post on the SEOMOZ.org site, is an excellent resource on tactics and considerations as it relates to managing your online reputation.

eMarketer issued a report that blogs are big business (or have the potential to be). According to the article, advertising opportunities abound for traditional advertisers in the blogosphere as the number of blogs grow and readership increases.

And this research paper from MicroSoft adCenterLabs discusses intriguing concepts in tracking blog information flows with an eye towards […]

Epitaph of printed classified advertisements:

And this commentary corroborates the physical evidence.
For newspapers, these are the end times, or something very much like them. Every week provides a new marker on the road to apocalypse: hundreds of layoffs in Los Angeles, circulation scandals in Dallas…
… and …
The rise of the Craigslist model has devastated classified advertising […]

Go2Web20 is a great place to view what’s available in Web 2.0 tools and services. To make sense of the madness, read their blog. TransparentRE also lists some great Web2.0 tools.

TouchGraph is an excellent tool that gives you “visual insight” into a site’s external linking structure and relationships, which is a good starting point for website competitive analysis.  Let’s compare Redfin, Zillow, and REALTOR.com.
Redfin’s linking relationships

Zillow’s linking relationships

REALTOR.com’s linking relationships

The visual representation of these relationships allows you to quickly explore the link structure of […]

This new application is similar to Intero’s Terabitz application.

Storytelling is one of the most important marketing concepts in our Web 2.0 world, argues this TrendWatching briefing paper. The key is helping consumers tell other consumers a version of the story that stays true to tenets of the brand.
As more brands (have to) go niche and therefore tell stories that aren’t known to the […]

An e-Marketer recent report shows that moms are a major power on the Internet.

Notice how FrontDoor.com leverages this fact. And this research article points out that women adopt e-Service loyalty programs at a higher rate if their enjoyment and perceived social presence of the site is high. Notably, the researchers point out that
In particular, […]

T.S.O.L. (True Sounds of Liberty), a 1979 Cali punk band, reached out to their fan base, paid off a legal debt, and is touring again (all according to their website). Punk Social Network = (Passion * Fan base * Clear call-to-action).

How do you launch a Web 2.0 media campaign? You don’t. If you’re thinking of “launching” “campaigns” in the Web 2.0 media space, you’ve broken your legs out of the starting gate.
How does a corporate brand manager “launch” a Web 2.0 “campaign” to counter (or embrace) a consumer-generated product review like Dirt Devil vs Electrolux […]

With social networking sites surpassing search engines in terms of popularity, will the marketing value of search engine optimization diminish over time? This article makes a great case that the usefulness of organic search for consumers may eventually wane.
Interesting question: when a social network community provides answers–as opposed to an algorithm–can anyone really “optimize” their […]

Summary of Self Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing:
Panelists:
Tara Hunt www.horsepigcow.com
Chris Heuer www.theconversationgroup.com
Jeremiah Owyang www.web-strategist.com
Deborah Schultz www.deborahschultz.com
Hugh MacLeod www.gapingvoid.com
David Parmet www.marketingbeginsathome.com
Key take-aways:
Passion for people. Put passion into product.
Let go to gain more.
Social objects are the future marketing.
Technology changes, human behavior does not; nothing replaces listening, nothing.
A story without love is not worth telling
Hunt (horsepigcow.com): […]

SXSW update: Since this is my first SXSW since 1990, I’ve had to re-orient myself to the pace and orgiastic creativity of the scene. Thus, no long posts on the relevancy of this year’s SXSW to the real estate industry until I’ve had a chance to digest properly. Nevertheless, here are the salient take-aways, as […]

Contemplating a social media campaign? Don’t go about it in the “traditional” media planning sense. BuzzMarketing has a titillating thought on this concept. And this social media slide show gives an entertaining and educating primer on why traditional media planning will not work well in a social media context.

Social networks will change the way real estate professionals interact with their clients. Terms like engagement, conversation, and community underpin social networks. And in “off-line” environments real estate professionals have likely “engaged” in meaningful and relevant “conversations” while building a “community” of long-term clients.
Yet many real estate professionals are reluctant to embrace social networks as […]

You either have high home prices or lower home prices and lower home prices are what we want, and people shouldn’t be afraid of that,” said Robert Shiller, Yale finance professor, in a Reuters interview. Most of us care about our children and grandchildren, and these people have to buy houses so why would we […]

Here’s a great example of multi-channel marketing: the Maximum Ride literary series. The first book in the series refers readers to this blog, which refers readers to this YouTube video.
Real estate professionals can use similar tactics. For example, on listing presentation collateral, refer prospective clients to your blog, from your blog refer clients to your […]

This post argues that an online real estate search leader has not emerged since 2005, given that the recent Inman Connect attendees “still talked about them last week as if they were launched yesterday.” Interesting argument. But consider the Inman audience: real estate centric folks like sales associates, consultants, media, pundits, etc. Where were the consumers […]

Many posts have been written on this paper, Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from Google. What’s interesting is the influence of proximity on predictive markets. According to the paper, sharing an office had the highest influence (as opposed, for instance, communicating exclusively via email) and part of cultivating an innovative culture […]

In a real estate market that’s shifted poles (like if Earth’s south and north poles switched) what’s a well-known tactic for survival? Surf.

Youth, sometimes, needs to embrace history. Anyone remember DoubleClick’s privacy fiasco in 2000, the resulting state and federal government investigation, and the apex of it’s resolution? Seems like Facebook could have learned a few things from tech-bubble-run-up-history–at least with respect to how to manage a blow-up from a PR perspective (DoubleClick is still around, after […]

At its core Trulia applies intense competitive pressure to traditional media firms that historically–in the collective sense–bilked real estate firms out of millions–if not billions–of dollars for essentially non-measureable advertising. Sure there’s the one-off case of a person who walks in the front door of a branch office clutching a Sunday advert who actually purchases […]

UPDATE: Since I posted this in Dec ‘07, I’ve interviewed numerous brokers and agents who’ve said that Trulia’s delivered lots of real business to them (i.e., high quality traffic that resulted in leads that closed), and that their clients are extremely pleased with the exposure their listings get via the Trulia vertical. Further, several interviewees […]

Jeremiah Owyang
HitWise 

For the past couple of years, pundits of “real estate data transparency” have loudly argued that real estate firms must “accept the inevitable” and allow property listing aggregators to scrape their firm’s real estate listings, or for these firms to post their property listings “everywhere” a consumer will search online.
The analogous situation, claimed by these […]

Consumers will now have the opportunity to rank doctors. Will real estate firms feel similar pressure in the near future to allow consumers to rank their real estate agents? The real estate industry will no longer be able to hide behind the argument that “professional services” is not a product and, thus, inherently “unrankable.” If […]

It looks like this company is winning the Chicago real estate search engine optimization strategy and execution race. These representative results speak for themselves: 60647 homes for sale, and 60647 townhomes for sale, and 60647 condos for sale all have this website listed in Google’s top slot (at least as of the date of this […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

In 2004, Inman News profiled e-mortgage processes. In the ensuing years, paperless mortgage processes have improved but have yet to achieve wide agent adoption rates, as do many other real estate technology initiatives (e.g., real estate ecommerce centers). Could this be a classic example of the Technology Acceptance Model theories at work? ( Wiki definition […]

According to McKinsey, global companies are increasingly using Web 2.0 technologies to engage their customers. Tapping web services, collective intelligence systems, and peer-to-peer network capabilities were the top three technologies companies were currently deploying or planning to deploy. Respondents indicated that customer acquisition was the number one reason they were deploying social media (the respondents also stated that they use […]

Social media has created a challenge for website brand / product managers. Where social media is a rich fount of ideas, product information (negative and positive), etc, website brand / product managers have a challenge in using web analytics from these sources to drive site optimization (in terms of user experience, performance, etc).
Two recent research […]

eMarketer predicts that in 2007 advertisers will spend $900 billion on social network advertising. As a real estate professional witnessing an explosion in social network sites (e.g., Active Rain, TruliaVoices) aimed at agents (and consumers), what are some first steps to engage this form of real estate marketing?
Step 1: Just understanding it. In this regard experience is the best instructor. […]

Notes from my presentation on ROI at the recent Inman Real Estate Connect conference:
Issue: What are the first steps real estate firms should take to get a handle on their data to enhance near-term and long-term ROI on this data?

Since 80%+ of all originating real estate transactions begin on the Internet, firms should consider utilizing […]

What does the recent market success of Guitar Hero have to do with innovative concepts in real estate marketing? Activision, the third-party publisher of Guitar Hero, recently dethroned Electronic Arts. Activision’s market-leading success is due, in part, because it created a social object in Guitar Hero.
Attendees at the 2007 Connect conference will recall Hugh MacLeod’s […]