Real Estate Relativity

The New York Times has a great read on how Obama embraced social media to help win the election.

Thomas Jefferson used newspapers to win the presidency, F.D.R. used radio to change the way he governed, J.F.K. was the first president to understand television…Senator Barack Obama understood that you could use the Web to lower the cost of building a political brand.

Consider the following:

3,099,323 supporters and 527,783 wall messages on an Obama Facebook page.

136,083 subscribers on an Obama YouTube channel.

This user-generated Obama video has 11,696,725 views as of this posting (and is this a good, bad, or neutral brand impression? Does it matter?):

An interesting theory raised in the New York Times article is that by embracing and using social media’s power to organize and influence–and help raise $600 million–traditional party foundations have been irrevocably shaken, if not permanently altered. Similarly, it seems to me that many firms today are in a place where the political parties were pre-Obama: comfortably employing “tried and true” models to promote, build, sustain, and manage their brands.

Yes, entities like Trulia, Zillow, etc, injected much needed creativity and transparency into the historically balkanized and feudal-like operations of the real estate industry. But the industry has now largely absorbed the impact these entities had and is now challenging them in certain ways (e.g., by demanding accountability in terms of lead quality and conversion as opposed to just click volumes). However, it’s social media that will change the foundations of the real estate industry, just like it did in the recent presidential campaign.

Further, what’s brilliant about social media is that in and of itself it’s transparent. You want the inside scoop on Obama’s strategy? It’s no secret, really, because you can just see what his team put together. That is, you can model your own social media strategy on Obama’s (e.g., look at how the Obama team structured its Facebook page and YouTube channel) and deduce what strategic choices were made by studying the tactics employed. For more strategies, I encourage you to also visit Owyang’s blog.

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 achieve this status, a swarm-business aspirant must follow three principles. First it must “gain power by giving it away”. For instance the MySpace social-networking site works by granting its users the ability to determine its rules and content. Second, the company must be seen to “share with the swarm”—IBM, for example, has backed Linux’s open-source software with cash and code. Finally, firms must “concentrate on the swarm, not on making money”.

HBS Working Knowledge elaborates on swarm creativity:

There are five essential elements to collaborative innovation networks: learning networks, sound ethical principles, trust and self-organization, making knowledge accessible to everyone, and internal honesty and transparency.

Following Carr’s lead, a real estate firm must first abandon its possessive brand centrality and opt for a more decentralized brand presence. This means consumers, employees, real estate agents, vendors, and management equally “own” the brand. This means, at the core, a firm must open itself up to transparency and honest consumer review; which really means consumer ratings of its website, agents, customer service and then using these ratings as forums–conduits–to engage these consumers as collaborative partners to create a better value proposition. Internally, a firm could create a collaborative swarm between agents, IT, marketing, and management to build on the collaborative concepts derived from the consumer-based swarm insights.

For ROI-minded owners and managers, a swarm exercise is likely a hard pill to swallow, let alone ever digest. This is because swarm creativity lends itself to indirect monetization strategies (as does most social media). This could also be related to the fact that real estate as an industry, at first glance, is not really engaged in new product development processes (swarm creativity naturally lends itself to new product development ideation).

What is the real estate product? A house. What is the service? Representing a buyer or seller while giving advice.

This description is a bit facetious, but the point is that real estate professionals should begin looking at their entire web presence–and service value proposition–as an ongoing product that constantly requires new strategies and ideas that evolves in line with consumer expectations. If 10 swarm exercises yield one new service enhancement strategy that increases customer loyalty and retention, arguably the swarm exercise is worth it; especially if this strategy enhances a full-service agent’s consumer value proposition. In this example, ROI would be indirectly realized: as consumer satisfication increases, referals increase, and competitors suffer a corresponding competitive disadvantage (assuming they are late adopters). By implementing a consumer swarm idea, a firm has rewarded the swarm: first by listening and second by acting on its advice. This, in turn, promotes further honesty and integrity within the swarm and, hopefully, within the firm itself; eventually driving higher ROI over the long-term as internal strategies become integrally aligned with near real-time consumer driven initiatives.