Real Estate Relativity

Owyang delivers an excellent summary of Facebook’s new “Engagement Advertising” tool. This tool seems well-suited to real estate brands that want to showcase a particular niche or market they serve, particular the “Fan Style” ad targeting luxury verticals (it could also be interesting to allow the Facebook community to “gift” someone a $50,000,000 property to generate buzz on that property using the “Virtual Gifts Style” ad platform).

This paper points out that social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook have huge potential for high advertising revenue gains because “the cost of gaining new customers is practically nothing [since] users join voluntarily and provide their own content through their profiles. In addition, the cost of running the sites’ web servers is relatively low.”

The authors do point out, however, that significant revenue gains might be limited because these sites must constantly innovate to retain and attract new “customers”, it’s easy to launch rival social networks, and consumers have lots of choices as to which social networks to use.

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 all). And speaking of bubble-run-up, check out this vid.

UPDATE: Obviously FaceBook backed off on this approach. Personally, I’ve experienced less interruptive advertising lately on FaceBook.

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 giving agents the ability to serve existing customers and find new customers (particularly echo boomers).