Real Estate Marketing SEO Blog

Video Marketing Just Got Easier (A Little Bit)

Video is one of the most misunderstood aspects in marketing real estate today.

This is because of the perception that video requires Commercial quality production in order to be effective. Nothing could be further than the truth.

For the purposes of this post allow me to divide online video into two camps.

1. Commercial Quality Production
These are basically either video virtual tours or essentially what amounts to a commercial for your business. No matter what, video has a learning curve, especially if you are going for the high end look and feel. WelcomeMat has made that a bit easier creating what in essence is a ELance for video production.

The Video Production Board on WellcomeMat is your quick and easy way to anonymously post a project and find a video producer that best suits your needs; whether you are hiring a producer for the first time, or looking for someone new to fulfill a specific need, the Production Board is your spot!

2. Guerrilla Marketing

I believe this approach much more effective in the online medium.

• For one reason the high end type virtual tours and commercials are as BORING as a course in calculus. Remember there is a reason people are leaving their television sets to go online. TIVO is a big hit for a reason. Even high quality has a "been there seen that vibe".

There is so much more you can do creatively with video.Put your focus on the story you want to tell, rather than worrying about production. Typically your audience will be more forgiving on your quality as the content ramps up. However, commercial grade production with a guerilla creativity can be highly useful. And it is as easy as operating your own family camera.

What do I mean by Guerilla?

• Visit your "farm area" and interview happy clients and old time residents. Piece together residents and kids all enjoying the community. Get the public plunge, the neighbors walking dogs and smiling. Get snapshots of the shopping and amenities of living in this great community of people.
• Do a 007 type Hunt for San Diego's best Home Value. Let your creative juices flow on this one. Basically you do a tour of the best values in your market. Doesn't this sound better than San Diego's Foreclosure Tour? The word Foreclosure can conjur up visions of fixer uppers.
• Do you know all those flyers your escrow, title, and inspection guys give you? All that stuff noone ever reads? Interview your rep and have them explain the legal stuff in human terms. You will have a better chance of writing them into your next offer if your client already "knows" them.
• Virtual Tour. Yes a virtual tour does not have to be so virtual tour like. Who said it has to be so empty, so vacant of life? Add some pep to it, without making it seem too crowded. You can also put an edge on the video by not making it follow the same formula that everyone else follows.
  
  There is a natural human law where we have to know how a "story" ends. It causes us to want more. Thus, for example showing a child jumping off a diving board into the pool, but cutting right before she enters the pool could leave the viewer unsatisfied and desiring a finish. Haven't we all heard the phrase, "I just need completion" in a broken relationship?
  
  There is another element that artists use quite a bit where they will place symbols or objects that have no relationship at all with an otherwise symbiotic design. Thus, a round object in a very square room will draw attention. Over the centuries it is believed that some artisians have actually crafted in almost subliminal markings to make their point.
  
  I am not saying to attempt outright manipulation. But as a thought I wonder what would happen if you placed a magazine on that round object that had a headline that said, "San Diego's Best Home Values", Or "San Diego's Best Home"?
  
  I hope that has helped you to get your creative juices flowing.

The New Much Larger Faster Internet

What could happen if the entire U.S. was on broadband high speed internet? Sergey Brin of Google is pushing for a new initiative that would open up the entire country to what he calls "wifi on steroids". This would no doubt put the U.S. at the top of the Nations with Broadband list. Brin says it is shameful that we currently sit at number 15. onthe list.

What this means to you

• How about your own television show
• No more fights with your cell phone company
• You would be able to serve up much larger packets of data to your visitors instantly. True real time interactivity would be possible.

The Government is currently looking at this possibility.

Is America the New Debbie Downer?

Even before the recession hit (darn there I go we are not in a recession by technical standards) we heard that the economy sucked. Never mind that we had the longest growth in U.S. history and unprecedented unemployment.

A new article at the Washington Post mirrors my sentiment in Why We're Gloomier Than The Economy.

Soft? You betcha. In recession? Quite possibly. And a crisis in the financial markets has rattled nerves for months now. But so far, the economy is holding up better than it did during the last two recessions in 1990 and 2001. Employers haven't shed as many jobs, the unemployment rate is still relatively low, and gross domestic product has kept rising. Things are nowhere near as bad as they were in the Great Depression, or even during the severe recession of 1982-83. The last time consumers were this miserable, in May 1980, the jobless rate was 7.5 percent and inflation was 14.4 percent. Now those numbers are 5.5 percent and 4.2 percent respectively...This has left economists trying to figure out why Americans' perceptions are so much more negative than the data analysts use to measure how things are going....

Wellesley College economist Karl E. Case and two co-authors researched how changes in the value of homes affect what people spend and got a curious result: When home prices are rising, people spend more money. When they are dropping, they don't spend less money. With stocks and other assets, by contrast, spending both rises and falls with prices...people spend more when house prices go up and worry more when prices go down, but don't actually spend much less," Case said. "That could explain why consumer spending numbers have been much more robust than you would expect if you look at consumer sentiment."

And it is getting old to hear folks claim this downturn is a complete meltdown in the economy. Not to sound like Lyoyd Bentson to Dan Quayle in their VP Presidential debate. But, I knew the last recession and as bad as it may seem this is not 1990! And the old timers who sold houses in the 70's would say the same to me and you. The lesson is the markets go up and down. A fool does not prepare for either. Since I no longer sell real estate after the last downturn you can guess how well I prepared back then.

Welcome To Your New Community

So I am just about to go on Priceline then I will get a cup of coffee...

I am now getting up to get my cup of Starbucks....

Sorry though I was Tweeting.

Seriously is this how bad its become that we are so geeky now that we actually give a damned what some other marketer is doing in 120 characters or less? Just let me check out right now if my life is so bleeping boring that I actually will follow what some other gal or dude is doing on a moment to moment basis.

This is like the Real World meets the Internet!

I gave up on Tweeter when I saw some gal tweeting that she was about to step on a plane. Huh?  Look social media and 2.0 is nothing more than make-up on old concepts. It is a marketers dream and notice most of this social stuff is marketers trying to sell marketers.

Hey I have a novel idea, I wonder if web 3.0 will actually sell you some real estate. Remember that concept called commissions? Everyone thought 2.0 was the new real estate. The commissions proved it. What it became was an excuse to stop being a salesman.

When in all actuality it wasn't the widget or social marketing that sold the property up until a short time ago. It was called a kickass real estate market whereby my 8 year old could have financed his future Ferrari.

I swear, am I losing my freaking mind? Strategies to track my favorite tweets with sites like http://tweetbeep.com/ . Are you kidding me?

People, listen. Take off your propeller and just focus your eyes off your screen for a few minutes. Come down off that Cola high, and open your window. Smell those Summer Roses? Yah, reality is setting in. Good. Now, go down the street and talk to your neighbor. Just knock on the door and say hi.

Apologize to then for not being a better neighbor because you have been busy in a virtual community whereby you chat with IronThor and follow all of MarketingGodz Tweets. Tell them you are better now and you want to participate in the real world. In a real community. Promise them you won't buy anymore Koolaid.

Welcome to the real community. Welcome to humanity! Now ask them if they want to buy some real estate! ;-) Selling sucks but thats why you make the big bucks.

MLS.Trulia.com

All hail the new MLS.Trulia......

What happens to free?

Its worthless, maybe partially valuable, or eventually after hooking users like a drug, it charges a fee.

As a for instance, Active Rain is trying several revenue models that include various advertising and paid blogs. Trulia who took a battering last month is opening up its Trulia Pro:

What this company has done has been remarkable. It has out Realtored, Realtor.com by becoming THE online source for Listings without actually being a Realtor. It has become the online spot for listings by dominating the engines without being a Realtor. While NAR's members has handed them their proprietary content and even their mindshare (Trulia Voices).

This is what all the whining was about at BloodHound. But it is too late. Game over. But it was inevitable when the industry could not effectively manage its own listings.The only Gorilla in Trulias way now is Google.

Welcome to the beginning of the new real estate business. Congrats to Pete Flint and the Management team for a flawless strategy.

The industry has literally handed over its protected content to an outsider for no other reason than its members lust for better marketing than its leaders could provide them. Certainly Trulia must feel that it has reached a high enough "addiction" rate that it would be tough for agents to stop using the listings portal. Thus it is safe now to start demanding, I mean asking for a fee. Brilliant!

More Trulia and MLS Related Links:

• Trulia Battering (I link here for the Trulia controversy. I do not support the uninformed postulating on SEO which is a conglomeration of ideas that are for the most part poorly formed opinions by many-not all- who simply do not not know a page rank from a link, from a nofollow to a dofollow and their purposes. This bullet falls under my category above called partially valuable. But the problem with that is the poor blokes who will base their whole online marketing strategy on some BS that somebody wrote who wants to sound smart because they got a mildly competitive word ranked. Word of advice: do not base your marketing on something you got off a comment or even a blog post or article. This falls under the whole notion of free advice. If you do not pay someone, then there is no accountability, thus it is worth what you paid for it, NOTHING. And a low budget is no excuse for the delusions of grandeur caused by an orgy of free information available on the internet.Can you tell I am a tad annoyed by all the bad advice floating out there? But I digress...)
• How Do You Compete With HomeGain and Trulia?
• ERA Real Estate Feed Trulia
• The Great Realtor Giveaway
• Universal MLS
• MLS.Google.com
• Microsoft and the Loss of the MLS
• Real Estate MLS gone

Recession Repression

The World is truly freaky! Lots of bad news and lots of good news. Foreclosures are crazy, to fill my gas tank I need some of that no down financing from Countrywide. All while retails sales is higher than expected. How can that be? As always I try no to report the bad real estate news, only the good. And good realty news is good for sales!

Home prices go up in California so says FNC Inc.

Prices appreciated in 15% of ZIP codes in San Diego, 25% in Orange County, and 24% in L.A. County  this from January through April.

“We are seeing signs that certain ZIP codes, typically in coastal areas, are beginning to stabilize and even appreciate from their end-of-2007 lows," said Robert Dorsey, executive vice president for Data and Analytics at FNC.

The Pending Home Sales Index, a forward-looking indicator based on contracts signed in April, rose 6.3 percent to 88.2 from a reading of 83.0 in March. It’s the highest index since last October.

Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, says:

“Bargain hunters have entered the market en masse, especially in areas that have experienced double-digit price declines...Sharp price reductions are leading to a quicker discovery of price equilibrium points. The West is already seeing year-over-year gains in pending contracts.”

Three Types of Blogs

There are three types of blogs. But IMHO only one for a Realtor.

1. The Mega Blog like LifeHacker or Dave Taylor.
2. The Conversationalist. This falls in line with what you see mostly by the blog purists on the web. And I believe it is useful but can lead to very non targeted content production. I really do not think it relevant to making sales.
3. The Authoritarian. This is where you draw your line in the sand and say who, what, where,and why you exist. Why you matter. Some call it transparency.

I believe the more you stay in the realm of item 3 the more successful your business will be.

And while I am at it, it really isn't about blogging. It is about content creation. A blog is just software. Content Creation is about publishing and can occur on your website and/or on others websites.

Adwords Wins!

I found this somewhat daring. Google is claiming that Obama and McCain won because of their Adword spends. Google's Greenberger who was in charge of getting the campaigns to buy ads with Google claims that Hillary lost because of her sporadic spending.

This fuzzy logic works well in sales, but I am pretty sure that the Google Algo works a little bit more logically than this claim.

We think it's not a coincidence that the two savviest primary campaigns with Google are the winning ones.

Except I think there is a lesson that even though on one side the candidate was almost counted out and he kept pushing. Whether he won because of Adwords though, and not a larger combined mix of marketing is debatable.

2.0

I have over the years poo pood the hype of social this and social that. 2.0 this and that. User generated content. The so called conversation.

Suffice it to say, that in a sentence 2.0 to me is nothing new. It is very good MAC make-up on WEB 1.0 and even WEB 0.5 ;-) I know that's two sentences.

The biggest value of whatever it is, is that it is a marketers dream. See any real people socializing for the pure joy at Facebook? Not much. But boy we are all twittering and poking wondering where the dollar is.

However, as I have done, and many in my circle understand is that what the social media is great at is getting a message syndicated quickly and exponentially.

I have also posted that over the years that if you want to watch the future of the net, then watch the political races. In 2004 we saw Howard Dean do miracles for his career on the net. (Seriously, how can a guy who is Governor of a State that does less business than many metros become as powerful as he has become so quickly?).

Well, watch the Obama campaign as they are gearing up to man a web "propaganda" machine to get the word out. I am not a fan of the guy, but I am a fan of good marketing. This I cannot wait to watch!

The mistake they need to watch out for however is singing to the choir. If they wish to expand their base they need to not do what most of the real estate conversational blogs are doing. They need to target their prospects specifically by going into their social hangouts online and winning them over.

They also need to get their large base of social posters energized to spread their message. This will be interesting to watch.

More Links
Blog Commenting for Clients
How To Dominate Your Local Real Estate Market-Dave talk about real estate marketers, but he is pulling from his knowledge of human persuasion and behavior. His new book Subliminal Persuasion is a must read to understand propoganda in America and its roots. Very surprising.

Is the Housing Bust Over?

Thats what Dr. Steve Sjuggerud says in his most recent post. Actually he says we are near the bottom. So what does that mean? If your buyers are waiting they will find out they waited too long. And Sjuggerud is pretty good. I read his letter when he was recommending Housing Stocks way before they were sexy, and he dumped them way before we heard the word bubble.

I list his analysis over at the Positive Real Estate site. I am not sure if you get what this site can do for you. It lists a library of positive news on your profession, on your product-housing. No bad news is allowed. And the bubblistas have tried. I simply will not be fair and balanced. Its all roses and flowers all the time. Well pretty much anyway.

It gives you a starting point in compiling a ton of reasons why now is a good time to buy. And you are welcome to add these stories in yourself.