The upcoming Media Convergence Conference in New York City, put on by The Economist, launched a video called Shift Happens, that helps put these changes in context.  They posted a fascinating video about the event here:

My favorite statistic: The average American teen sends 2272 text messages a month.

With numbers like that, and the often quoted 2008 NAR study that shows 87% of home buyers use the internet when making a purchase, I wonder how much longer people will continue to disproportionately spend money offline?

Tired of blogging? No Time?

Recently I came across this forum post by a beleaguered, blogging Realtor.

“when i first began blogging i was very excited i found out a way to reach the world and express my thoughts.My Real Estate blog began to be filled with content and awesome articles. As i continue to blog and expand my audience and continue to grow my business i have found myself exhausted and overwhelmed. I am exhausted every article requires time and thought something that i really dont have. i recently began looking for a ghost blogger but guess what i haven’t found one yet. Does any one have any suggestions?”

As the season gets busier for Realtors, a common issue is finding time to sit down and write a well written blog post with good content. It is wiser to keep a consistent output rather than flurries of activity, so if you only blog once a month that is preferable to a high frequency of blogs and then nothing at all for long periods. Readers will check in at regular intervals but if there is nothing there for ages you run the risk of losing them completely as they think the blog is dormant. Rather than leave your blog dormant until you find the time and energy to jump back in, consider this:

Microblogging

For example, Twitter. You only have to come up with a maximum of 140 characters and it’s becoming more and more popular. This is a great way to keep feeding new information while you formulate a more content-rich and keyword-focused blog. For double the benefit, set up an RSS feed of your “tweets” to your site so that your site gains a regular infusion of content.

Short posts that link out and keep your brand lively can be just as useful as ones that take an hour to write, so don’t damage your brand with poor, lazy posts just because you feel you have to crank something out. Just keep it short (literally a paragraph!) and link to something of interest in the local or national media or on a local web site that is of interest to your market. It could be a reminder of an upcoming “Green Up” day, beach cleanup, community-wide rummage sale, shred-fest, important school board meeting, music festival, property tax due date, you name it. Anything that is relevant to living in your community will take only a moment to write, can be keyword rich, and useful to your readers.

Ghost/Guest Blogging

This avenue is an acceptable route for SEO purposes as it can guarantee good content and add a fresh voice to your brand and blog. It also will provide great support for you in the busy season enabling you to focus on lead generation and getting out to meet your clients. Just make sure that the writer knows your business and your community. Hiring someone on another continent, therefore, would not help extend your brand or accurately represent your expertise in your local market.

Listen to your Analytics

If you are wondering how much effect your blog is having on traffic to your site and brand awareness then use Google Analytics to see if your efforts are furthering your business goals. You might discover what is working for you and help you to either trim the fat with certain content or provide motivation to expand more on ideas that are gaining traction.

Looking for Ideas?

Check out some of our Real Estate client’s blogs that perform well and have great content:

Bryan Bomba – Chicago
Brad Dinsmore – New Hampshire
Lomenzo Properties – Cape Cod
Wright Realty – New Hampshire

In addition here are some great tips at ProBlogger.com

In all the hubbub about listing aggregation services like Trulia and Zillow or the classifieds site Craigslist or any number of other new and emerging real estate services out there, some simple basics can get lost. If you are a real estate professional interested in getting the property you list seen by the most people there’s often a basic tool available to you: MLS IDX participation.

I know that it isn’t new or sexy. In fact, it’s really old. But getting your listing viewed by people who are genuinely interested in buying property can be achieved right out of the gate by participating in your MLS IDX. The people who see your listing via the MLS IDX are likely to have the following traits:

• Interest in buying property vs kicking tires
• Interest in working with a Realtor
• Interest in the geographic region served by your MLS

That’s the basics. If someone meets those characteristics then you probably want them to see your listings. By participating in your MLS IDX program you make it easier for more qualified people to see your listing.

Once you’ve got that basic piece down, then go wild with all the other aggregation and syndication options you can. In some MLS programs they will even handle the syndication themselves. If not, your web developer may be able handle automate the syndication as well (I know the real estate websites we make at Union Street Media can have syndication options enabled).

But start with the basics. Don’t miss out on all those people interested in buying, interested in working with a real estate professional and interested in your area.

Spending too much time managing new technologies to deal with your core business? You’re not alone. Let’s look at a brace of Harvard Business Review articles that address change, technological disruption and strategies for coping then close it up with an amusing video.

Moving toward a world in which the constant is change

According to John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison in their HBR article “The New Reality: Constant Disruption,” models of economic and business change followed something along the lines of Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium model, where significant turbulence is introduced, change in response to that turbulence occurs and then a period of calmer equilibrium follows.

For example, once centralized electric utilities learned how to capture the economies of scale in electricity production and distribution, businesses could focus on how to reconfigure their own operations to take advantage of this new infrastructure, secure in the knowledge that the basic infrastructure was now stable.

Makes sense in a consumer-product world where things are made and physically shipped. However, it doesn’t sound like the world of today where we all have multiple Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, iTunes and more profiles (how many of you have old Friendster accounts to throw in there as well?)

The authors continue by outlining a fundamental difference between the consumer-goods and product driven past to the service-industry and communication driven present:

Today’s core technologies—computing, storage, and bandwidth—are not stabilizing. They continue to evolve at an exponential rate. And because the underlying technologies don’t stabilize, the social and business practices that coalesce into our new digital infrastructure aren’t stabilizing either. Businesses and, more broadly, social, educational, and economic institutions, are left racing to catch up with the steadily improving performance of the foundational technologies.

The end conclusion of the article is: if the above is an accurate picture of the world then we are in for continuous disruption rather than the punctuated equilibrium of the past. The authors believe that the combination of digital computing as the driving technology with the easing of regulations and other policies will create a constant state of change.

If you don’t like disruption that’s a pretty scary picture of the future if not the present.

Luckily, the authors produced another article.

The core and the edge, defining moving parts in a world of change

In “How to Bring the Edge to the Core,” John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison outline a strategy for business organizations to work within an environment of constant change. They begin by creating definitions for a concept about “edge” vs “core.” This edge/core concept can apply to many aspects of your business and life:

• Markets: existing/profitable market is core while an emerging market is edge
• Personal traits: primary experience/skills/talents are core while developing/hobby/auxilliaries are edge
• Geographies: saturated and developed geography is core while emerging geographic market is edge
• Products/Services: existing commodity-like product/service is core while new/under-developed products and services are edge
• Business practices: established practices have resources and well-developed policies, edge practices operate with few resources or management oversight.

Basically, edges occur anywhere there is growth potential. There may be a practice that is untapped or addresses a currently untapped market.

Core occurs anywhere the potential for growth has already been seized upon. A core business practice is currently capturing most of the available resources and has well defined processes/policies to maintain itself. At the organizational level, the authors define core as “where the money and resources are today.”

Integrating edge technologies into the core, an outdated strategy?

When confronted with a new technology or business practice (aka a disruption) some organizations follow a strategy of trying to integrate or absorb the new technologies/methods (edge) into their established practices (core). A logic pattern like this might occur:

1. Twitter is a new communication technology.
2. Email newsletters are a communication technology.
3. Let’s use and measure Twitter the same way we use and measure email newsletter technology.

If we follow through with this line of thinking, we will short-circuit the available growth potential of Twitter for helping with customer service, market research, etc.

Here’s another example of a core-absorbing-the-edge strategy, see if it sounds familiar:

1. Someone invented a computer thing called a website and all of our competitors are getting them.
2. These websites involve computers.
3. The IT gurus know about computers, let’s put them in charge of our website.

This line of thinking is how more than one organization put the communication tool with the largest growth potential in the hands of a group which is not traditionally known for its marketing or communication skills.

Because these examples are so much fun I’ll give you one more, from the ad agency side:

1. Someone invented a thing called a website and all of our clients want to buy one.
2. You look at these website things on a screen.
3. The television ad production team knows about screens, let’s put them in charge of websites.

Remember those websites with 90 second “skip intros” that took so long to load? Now you know how that happened.

When you put the same burdens and requirements of a developed, core business practice onto an edge technology, your success and results will depend on the size of the hammer you’re using to put a the square peg in the round hole.

Core support for edge practices, a strategy for constant change

The authors suggest an alternative strategy: instead of integrating edge practices into the core, you extend support from the core to promising edge practices. You probably caught that last phrase: “promising edge practices.” If we all were adept at identifying the promising edge practices then we wouldn’t much need to read the Harvard Business Review in the first place.

The authors do help us out though, here four attributes to define the promising edge practices:

• offer significant headroom for performance improvement
• a large potential user base
• require modest investment for participation at the outset
• offer the prospect of significant short-term returns to support bootstrapping efforts by lots of participants

Note that the phrase “performance improvement” is included in these four attributes. Just because edge practices aren’t held to the same set of criteria as core practices, doesn’t mean there is a blank check on performing edge work. Some method for measuring performance improvement will need to be adopted, even if it is much different than that of your core practices.

Assuming you’ve identified an edge practice or technology, what do you do?

To exploit opportunities on the edge, executives must resist the temptation to prematurely integrate edge resources into the core of their operations. Instead, they should determine what resources they can offer to help scale the innovations being developed by edge participants. This could catalyze the development and deployment of growth platforms, platforms that edge participants can then use to more effectively design and deploy new innovations.

Note that the focus is to incorporate as many participants as possible. A core business unit, according to the authors, should be interacting and supporting as many edge units as possible to increase the opportunity for growth and information exchange in a changine world.

Here’s that funny video I promised at the beginning:

Image by GustavoG via Flickr

Instead, you should read this post by Chris Brogan. He outlines a tactic that will be very effective. Somewhere along the way, while using this tactic, you will figure out what your strategy should be.

Required skills (which are within your grasp to learn, no holding back please):

• Ability to use online spreadsheet or other data tool (think Google Sheets)
• Ability to use online communication tools such as email and Twitter
• Willingness to continually explore online social networks to find allies

Image via Wikipedia

I usually try to stick to the internet marketing side of the real estate discussion and avoid getting into specific pitches and market narratives. But I just read a post I want to make sure my audience reads and discusses.

Seth Godin has a recent post using the marketing of the scientific concepts of evolution and gravity as a metaphor for understanding how you pitch and position your product. The post is brief and uses real estate as an example throughout. The basic premise is that gravity is accepted more easily than evolution because gravity can be quickly demonstrated (drop something vs wait multiple generations to see evolution at work) and because there were no previously held beliefs with which gravity was in conflict.

To restate, what makes a concept easier to sell:

1. Concept does not displace, refute or disagree with a previous concept
2. Concept can be demonstrated very quickly

Seth uses real estate as an example of an easier concept:

Five years ago, if you wanted to persuade people to buy real estate as an investment it was pretty easy.

1. The existing worldview was that real estate was a pretty good investment.
2. You could see, in the course of weeks or months, the price of homes going up.

Magic. Who’s in? Bid, bid, bid.

Of course, now times have changed. That first premise (real estate is a pretty good investment) is a bit shaken. People don’t see their home prices going up. In the face of this changed sentiment, Godin notes:

Real estate, of course, has a long row to hoe now. While there may be a long-term story to sell, it’s in conflict to a painfully learned new worldview, and it’s happening slowly. Perhaps there’s a better story to tell.

Sadly, he doesn’t go on to elaborate what that better story is. But those of you who are working in real estate can and should be able to find out what that story is. You’re also in a better position to develop that narrative than anyone else.

Seth does give two tactics to consider when developing your new and better story:

Tactic 1: Try to tell a story that complements an existing story rather than calling it out as false.

Tactic 2: Try to make the ‘proof’ as vivid and immediate as possible. Like an apple falling on your head.

I like to make sure that there are tangible things you can do with information and strategy so I’m going to wrap this up with the following to do list for my real estate audience (and as usual, I bet even if you aren’t in real estate you can find a way to make this stuff work for you):

1. Develop a two sentence version of a real estate marketing “better story” that conforms to the two tactics outlined by Seth Godin above.
2. Change the text on your most visited web page to reflect this new and better story. For backup on this, read my previous post about your making your home page reflective of the current world view.
3. Report back how this works for you. Help some other people change their story in their market.

Image via Wikipedia

Blogs are great for sharing information that is relevant to your business. Fresh content, added at a regular basis, keeps readers coming back and keeps the search engine spiders coming back to index your new content.

However, sometimes good posts get forgotten over time. The content of the blog post may still be relevant, but the post itself is somewhere at the end of a several pages of archives. Those forgotten pages can still serve as landing pages since search engines will display them. However, all your new readers may not get around to digging into your archives to find that good information.

If you want to increase engagement with your new blog readers and also make use of that great content you’ve already posted, here are two tips:

Put your best content in the sidebar

Determine your “required” reading for the sidebar based on posts that are most read, most emailed or when people spend a lot of time on them. That gives you your readers’ input. Then think about pages you think are important and maybe put some of those in there as well. So you’re balancing what you think is important with what your audience thinks is important.

If you’re using your blog for online marketing, it’s important to keep your best and most important content visible at all times. This would information that helps you qualify a lead, or increases engagement to the point of getting a customer to contact you or buy your product/service.

Make a “forgotten in the archives” post

Look through your blog and find good articles on page 2 or 3 of a category archive. Those are good candidates to revive with a “forgotten in the archives” post. Remember that the marketing goal of this kind of post is to help new readers find the good stuff they missed when you were first starting to blog.

It’s even better if you can tie the “forgotten” posts together under a theme or topic and run it with a headline like “4 great blog posts about marketing real estate online” or whatever is relevant to your business. This helps create the foundation for a content cluster (I’ll blog more about that later, but if you look at our Twitter for Business post you’ll get the idea of content clusters).

Another advantage of this type of post is that it doesn’t take a lot of time but provides a lot of value to your newer blog readers. I’ll make an example “forgotten” post tomorrow or later this week to give you a sense of what one might look like.

Here’s a nerdy statement to sum it all up: Fully exploit your intellectual property assets by re-packaging existing content to engage new site visitors and increase marketing value of prior efforts.

David Wood writes on his blog about a Google presentation about use of mobile services. The presentation, by Sumit Agarwal who is the product manager for Mobile at Google, includes a lot of insight into Google’s approach to developing applications and is very much worth a read (especially if you’re into developing software).

But from a straight-ahead data standpoint here are some interesting revelations about the way people are using mobile devices and Google’s mobile products:

• There is latent demand of mobile users for carrying out search enquiries – a demand that i smolstly being inhibited by fear of high data charges
• Every weekend, the demand from mobile devices for map tiles reaches the same level as the demand from fixed devices.
• People seem to want to search for the same sorts of things – in the same proportion of times – regardless of whether they are using fixed devices or mobile ones.

This is the sort of thing to think about when looking to the future of human and computer interaction. Thinking about these data points leads to more questions and thoughts, of course.

People want to use data services on their mobile devices more

The primary barrier to people using data services appears to be price. This price will certainly go down in the future. Here are some questions to think about:

• How will this affect my marketing efforts?
• Will my current marketing efforts be sufficient in a world where mobile devices are used as often as large screen stationary devices?
• What will have to change and why?

On weekends, map-based services are used equally by mobile and desktop devices

When William Gibson said that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed I always thought he meant geographically (better cell phones in Asia, for example). But the future could be distributed by any of the dimensions, and here is an example of distributing the future based on time.

If mapping and locality are significant to your business, then you get a free glimpse at the future for two days a week. Make the most of it!

People aren’t different just because they’re sitting in a desk at work.

If people are searching for the same kinds of things from their mobile device as they are from their desktop, then perhaps some beliefs about “browsing habits” are either incorrect or changing. That and perhaps we’re carrying our work around with us all the time with our shiny iPhones and Android handsets.

For those who are afraid of change this last point is at least some solace: What you know about your site visitors now is applicable to a future mobile web world. People aren’t changing what they’re interested in, they’re just moving around while they’re interested.

Image by Essjay is happy in NZ via Flickr

For those of you who have already read my Long Tail and business blogging strategy post, here is a review of a critique printed in the Harvard Business Review. I always like to see opposing viewpoints and I hope you do as well.

If you aren’t Long-tailed out I’ll get a copy of the HBR article and add my own two cents to it.

There are a lot of questions and concerns about syndication of mls listing data in the real estate internet marketing space. Let’s start by looking a little bit at a listing and then approaching two potential strategies for using that real estate listing help market a property on the internet.

A real estate listing is structured content

A real estate listing is pretty much a data set that describes a property. Usually this includes pictures, some quantitative data about square feet and bedrooms etc and some “remarks” field narrative description.

But when the dust settles a real estate listing is just a collection of facts and narrative about a specific property. There’s no real difference between a real estate listing and any other type of marketing content on the web. And the phrase “marketing content” is key here. Ultimately, people don’t buy the content itself, they buy the thing the content is describing: the house.

Perhaps, if some of the listings are much better written then someone looking to list their house might choose to list their house with the agent that did such a good job. But for now, lets focus on listings as strictly marketing content.

Two approaches to syndicating real estate listings

One of the great things about online marketing is the ability to quickly and easily spread your message around the world. And since listings are already highly structured chunks of content, spreading listings is even easier than other kinds of content. You can easily get your marketing message out there.

Since, traditionally, the listing data was a lure to bring in customers (you couldn’t look at this marketing content unless you were doing business with someone who had access to it) some people prefer to maintain tight control of that marketing content to bring in traffic.

Each of these strategies are useful, but for different objectives:

• Spread your message around: primarily increase human exposure to your marketing message
• Maintain tight control: primarily leverage SEO value of your marketing message

I’m going to outline both of these strategies and give them fancy names.

The Flagship and the Fleet

Image via Wikipedia

This is an internet marketing strategy to gain qualified human visitors to your site by syndicating your real estate listings. You have a primary site where you might gather information so you can sell the person the house (your flagship). Then you’d get your content onto as many other sites as possible (your fleet). All those places where your content is syndicated need to point back to your site (so people can get from your fleet ships to your flagship).

Flagship and Fleet might be right for you if:

• You can identify other sites where your target audience exists.
• Your content could fit in well on those sites.
• Your content can link back to your main site.
• There is a potential audience visiting other sites that currently does not visit yours.
• You care as much or more about “quality” visitors as you do about overall visitors.

Process for deploying Flagship and Fleet

1. Identify your syndication media (GoogleBase, Trulia, Zillow, a guest post on a blog, whatever).
2. Get your listing content in order so it fits the requirements of your syndication medium (your listing needs to be compelling enough to get real humans to follow you back to your site).
3. Put your listing on the external sites
4. Identify which syndication sources are performing well and find more like them
5. Repeat

How does this listing syndication strategy work?

The main concept here is to put your listing in front of more people than you would if you kept your listing to yourself. The people who read your listing information on another web site and then click through to your website should be more interested in the property and/or your services (they’ve already consumed the data and are more likely to take action).

If you’re interested in magnifying the effects of this listing syndication strategy, Vincent Socci has some thoughts on using the advertising platforms of the aggregation sites at the Geekestate Blog.

One of the drawbacks is that you limit the search engine optimization potential for the listing. But the quality of the leads should be better than general web surfers (assuming you’ve done a good job of identifying good web sites with whom to syndicate).

In your analytics you’d want to see a general increase in referral traffic and you might suffer a nominal drop in search traffic.

If the search traffic is better for you, then read on about The Whirlpool.

The Whirlpool

Image by MShades via Flickr

If your content is unique and well targeted for search engine optimization (SEO) you may want to bring visitors directly to your site from search engines. This internet marketing strategy is aimed at increasing your traffic from search engines. As before, you’d have a primary site where you do business (your Whirlpool), but your visitors will come directly from the search engines instead of from targeted syndicate sites.

The Whirlpool might be right for you if:

• You know what keywords are valuable for your niche
• Your content is unique and not duplicated elsewhere online
• You have the ability to create extra-engaging landing page designs for your listing
• You don’t mind having a high bounce rate

Process for deploying the Whirlpool

1. Identify your valuable keyword(s)
2. Write your listing to include appropriate amounts of your valuable keyword
3. Prevent your listing from being anywhere else online or
4. Make sure your listing is sufficiently augmented on your own site if it’s listed elsewhere (your MLS’s site, for example)
5. Include immediate conversion tools on the listing page (If done correctly, your audience will land directly on this page)

How does this real estate listing SEO strategy work?

The main concept for this internet marketing strategy is that you protect the originality and uniqueness of your content to draw in specific visitors who can only get that content on your site. I’ll be frank and tell you that this is not very easy in today’s world of syndicated, aggregated and shared content. But if you’re willing to work very very hard you can accomplish it.

One of the drawbacks of this strategy is that you may miss out on potential visitors who are looking at other aggregate sites (Realtor.com, Trulia, Zillow etc).

If you are executing this strategy well you should see an increase in your search engine traffic for your pre-determined key words. Ideally you’ll also see an increase of landings on your listing page.

Strategy vs Strategy

Though I prefer the Flagship and Fleet approach myself, there are times when The Whirlpool is appropriate as well (exclusive listings, for example). And you can mix and match on a case-by-case. You can also run both strategies (on different listings, of course) and test them out to see which one works better for you. Here are some items to consider:

Visitors and Quality:

• Flagship and Fleet may deliver less total visitors of higher quality
• The Whirlpool may deliver more total visitors of lesser quality

Listing Competition:

• Flagship and Fleet listing syndication will put your listing in direct competition with millions of other listings on a aggregation web sites like Trulia, Zillow etc.
• The Whirlpool listing site will be in direct competition with millions of other sites on the search engine results pages.

Primary Audience:

• Flagship and Fleet requires listing content that is compelling enough to get human beings to leave their trusted syndication/aggregator site and visit your marketing site.
• Whirlpool requires listing content that is sufficiently search engine optimized so that search engines place it near the top of searches for your valuable keyword.

Hopefully, you’ll start with your objective clearly defined and be able to use this to help craft the best strategy for your listings.