Web 2.0, Social Networking, Blogging, and Real Estate

In a recent post I included a link to a pdf of Web 2.0 companies compiled by Jamie Glenn of Trulia. Tonight I came across a similar list at the vFlyer blog.

We’re spending a lot of time at Union Street Media thinking about how to help our clients in the real estate industry leverage the new opportunities that are available online. This article at vFlyer does a great job of providing an overview of what’s out there and I highly recommend it as an introduction to all of this.

One of the resources mentioned is a real estate social networking site called ActiveRain. Realtors can set up a free profile there, connect with other real estate professionals, create a blog, and join discussions. You can visit my profile at activerain.com/andyvota and Union Street Media founder Ted Adler’s at activerain.com/tedadler.

There is a good overview of the site at activerain.com/action/default/welcome. One other bonus of being on ActiveRain is that the search engine pickup of the site is quite good — things posted there seem to show up on Google and other search engines very quickly.

Another post of interest is at Inman.

Participation in all of this new social media (blogs, social networks, wikis etc.) is difficult to gauge but several recent attempts have been made to try and measure audience participation. The latest is Forrester’s new Social Technographics report – which came up with this fascinating segmentation.

Coming up with good domain names

One really useful feature on LinkedIn in my opinion is their “Answers” section – where professionals can post questions and receive answers to them from their peers.

I was perusing the real estate and technology sections and came across this post about brainstorming domain names.

We’re commonly asked at Union Street Media about the whole domain name process – criteria for choosing a name, how to come with a name, and how to register it. The post above is a great resource for researching great domain names.

Real Estate Connect SF07

I just returned from San Francisco from the Real Estate Connect conference. It was an excellent experience and I was really impressed with Brad Inman’s ability to get at the core issues in a really thoughtful and provocative way.

Some of the great content can be found in the videos on InmanTV.

Real Estate Video by – Real Estate Blogger

Presentation material from several of the keynotes are available online. Jamie Glenn of Trulia gave a really interesting survey of 50 online marketing tools for real estate – from blogs and social networking to search. Check it out yourself at http://post.inman.com/t/72308/3721853/6051/0/.

Also check out the NY Connect in January of 2008.