Real Estate Relativity

As always I am grateful to Owyang to lend his insight and foresight. Here’s another excellent missive on the “Intelligent Web”. In summary, he posits that machines will begin extrapolating relationships and driving recommendations for connections from the juxtapositions and nexus between “our behaviors, context, and preferences”. Sounds a bit like the semantic web. Spinning through the comments on this post brought me to the Innovation Insight blog where Guy Hagen explores MIT research related to “reality mining”, which you can find more about on the MIT Web site. And this research paper out of UC DAVIS demonstrates how the MIT Reality Mining data set was utilized in tracking behaviour via mobile phones.

Imagine an iPhone application overlayed on a real estate firm’s listing data set, where the iPhone reports back over time thousands of user’s mobile browsing habits (i.e., driving around looking at homes for sale or rent). Having such data would allow firms to target advertising, Web site promotions, and give predictive insight over their competitors with respect to fluctuating markets (e.g., patterns will emerge over time that will tell a firm which neighborhoods, etc, are capturing consumer interest, thus enabling a firm to deploy marketing and agent resources towards these locations ahead of their competition).

This paper argues that allowing consumers to “co-create” or “co-author” products–i.e., directly engaging and encouraging consumers to participate in new product development processes–taps vast wells of creativity while exploiting certain cost efficiencies in terms of labor. Similarly, this paper explores how Web 2.0 will fundamentally (has fundamentally) changed the manner by which companies must brand themselves. Gone is a command and control ethos. Emerging is an empowerment and transparency ethos:

• engagement replaces interruption
• diversity and self-expression replace conformism and unity
• the media of the masses replace mass media
• granular insights and rich data replaces generalisation
• conversations in marketing replace control

As examples of this new paradigm, the paper points to Dove’s (note too the related contra-positive consumer-generated videos) and Nike’s strategic Web 2.0 marketing successes.

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 the “affiliated” sites much faster than conducting such an analysis using Google or Yahoo tools. Thus, you can better assess your weaknesses, strengths, and opportunities in cultivating or disabling the same or similar relationships.

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 website for social networks? In fact, in this context, one can argue that the concept of “optimization” is a legacy marketing principle more akin to “push” marketing concepts as opposed to “engagement” or “Web 2.0″ marketing concepts.

Let’s consider this phrase “semantic social network”. Via Google, I get this result, and via Wikia Search I get this result; as of this post, I am awaiting help from my FaceBook community.

Obviously, Google and Wikia will return a faster result than the community, and arguably the time I am waiting for the community to respond to my request (if it responds) I can peruse the myriad results via the two search engines. What I am hoping for, though, is that the community will point me in a direction that’s more pointed and vetted via its collective consciousness.

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 want high home prices. We want economic growth, we don’t want high home prices. 

So, as the slow ride down continues, what’s happening in the realm of social media that will help you when the ride hits bottom and the ascent begins anew? For starters, Business Week Online in its Feb 21, 2008 issue, is a great source for ideas.

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business—including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite. citation

Here’s a tip elite athletes adhere to: remember your competition is yourself and those out there who take the time to do one little extra thing, whether it’s one more hand-eye coordination exercise, or 55 more stairs to run, and it’s that one little extra thing that can separate a winner from a loser.

Ideas circulate as fast as scandal. Potential customers are out there, sniffing around for deals and partners. While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to. citation

Yes, social media will change the way real estate practices are conducted. One way–for the better–is simply to allow you to engage in a more meaningful discussions with clients and potential clients. As a real estate professional, blogs operate as your authority imprimatur. As mainstream media begins to gobble up the blog premise and “commoditize” this presence you will look out-of-date and “old school” if you similarly don’t innovate your mode(s) of communication.

Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like—you guessed it—blogs.” citation

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 papers shed some light in the cave in terms of mining Web content. Imagine putting your hand in the Yangtze River and trying to catch a sturgeon minnow between two and three inches long. This is akin to conducting a simple keyword search and then singularly perusing each result to discern relevancy (one’s mind conducting semantic correlations to net down relevant results). The challenge is to derive a tool that drives the “semantic sifting” process higher up in the process, thereby making it more efficient to find relevant results.

Jean-Pierre Norguet, et al, discuss semantic analysis of website usage and how to apply this analysis to on-going website development. Nortguet’s approach combined web server log files, site content records, content calls by browsers, and TCP/IP packets. The Norguet team then ran these through an ontology-based OLAP tool. What it derived was a visual representation of interest values pertaining to certain categories of content. This visual representation demonstrated that despite a category’s breadth of presence across a website, interest value indicators provide valuable insight into consumer use patterns. Nouguet argues that visually displaying interest values allows for intuitive decision-making, which aligns more accurately with mapping and responding to consumer interests.

Michelle L. Gregory et al, explored a framework that allows users to map blog entries, query results sets, understand themes, and see how blog content changes over time. Gregory modified a tool called IN-SPIRE–which uses semantic indexing, among other things, to categorize result sets–to analyze 7,000 blog entries chosen at random. In addition to the powerful filtering and querying aspect explored, Gregory demonstrated how one can use this tool to build multi-lingual analyses using one’s native language. The team also delved into the realm of affect analysis. What they showed was powerful visual representation of positive versus negative feelings about a particular blog topic (taking the pulse of a slice of the blogosphere on a particular topic).

Some immediate applications of these types of analyses–in one’s native languge or across a multi-lingual website–are in improving web product development, mapping political sentiments, or sentiments pertaining to one’s own or a competitor’s product.

Jeremiah Owyang explains the concepts and value of social networks from a marketing perspective in an easily digestible manner. Yang et al (registration required), Battiston et al, and Hill et al discuss the scientific underpinnings of these topics. Juxtaposing these discussions against one another leads to some interesting insights with respect to social media marketing.

Yang notes that in 1967, Stanley Milgram demonstrated that mutual acquaintances drive social network strength. As Yang elaborates:

“[T]he probability that two of someone’s friends know one another is much greater than than the probability that two people chosen randomly from the population know one another.”

Yang illustrates the concept of this theory by pointing to the success of Hotmail, which grew from 0 to 12 million users in 18 months.

Battiston explores how “trust” factors between actors in a social network affect the dynamics of recommendations in that social network.

“Trust plays a crucial role in the functioning of such socio-economic networks, not only by supporting the security of contracts [sic?] between agents, but also because agents rely on the expertise of other trusted agents in their decision-making.”

What Battiston drives towards is that trust-based modes of recommendation have an inverse relationship to traditional modes of recommendation, which are primarily based on the volume of recommendations as opposed to the value of recommendations. Battiston argues that trust-based (or value-based) recommendations are inherently better at promoting more satisfying results to actors within a social network.

This, in turn, promotes the propogation of sub-group cultures to form within the social network. And as non-trustworthy agents drop out of the network (because prior recommendations did not fulfill specific trust elements as dictated by the requesting actor), the sub-group refines itself overtime. As more sub-groups are defined within a social network, “network neighbors” emerge amongst members of these sub-groups, where these network neighbors operate as conduits between different sub-groups.

Yang demonstrates that sub-group performance, in terms of marketing results, out-performs all others (this was measured in terms of traditional transaction response rate metrics).

Accordingly, marketers must seek out sub-group network neighbors. These individuals are the brand influencers and advocates within a social network. Jerimiah Owyang has an excellent post on the visual display of this information. Leverage Software has developed a product which likely can visually display these sub-group cross-over individuals, thus making the selection of influencers and advocates easier. Perhaps these individuals would be great focus group candidates, “real time” collaborators in product development initiatives, etc?