For those of you looking for a bit more information on The Real Estate Channel (formerly The Gateway), an Interim Report has been posted. The RE.net will surely start to buzz about it.
Archive for March, 2008
At first I was a little discouraged about the results from my informal survey about ‘Who is your blogging target audience’. Blogs aimed primarily at REALTORS was the hands down single category winner. The concept of REALTORS blogging towards other REALTORS just baffles me as the majority use of this medium.
However, as I stepped back a second I realized two things - first, the CRT blog’s readership is probably skewed more towards ‘industry’ members and blogging towards REALTORS makes a ton of sense (ie Michael Wurzer’s FBS Blog). The second, and more important, is that ‘Prospective’ and ‘Any’ Clients tally up to be almost the same as REALTORS. This gave me a lot of relief - as I still holding my ground that there is a lot of opportunity out there for ‘Client’ targeted blogging, and that the secret recipe/combination for it hasn’t been formulated to perfection yet.
I am still inquisitive though. If you are a REALTOR visiting here, and are in fact blogging towards other REALTORS, please get in contact with me. I am trying to grasp the concept of R2R blogging. It just reminds me of the time I had to leave the room before I started to chuckle out loud when Russ Caper (eREALTY fame) asked, when are REALTORS going to have time to do their jobs if they are busy reading and replying to 1.3 million other REALTOR blogs?
About REALTOR® Confidential:
CRT, in conjunction with the Information Central and Public Affairs divisions, has created an online video series to educate our membership about technology-related topics. REALTOR® Confidential is also a project to investigate how to best use Web technologies to communicate. Following the CRT mission, we will share this knowledge with members and the real estate community. In the first season, we follow 2007 NAR President Pat V. Combs as she and her staff implement new technologies. The audience finds out what works for Pat and her staff, what doesn’t, and why.
Look for the first episode in April 2008.
In a follow-up to how blogging is over-rated, I am curious who your targeted audiences are. Please take a moment to answer who you are blogging to. Feel free to pass the link along as well!!
Quick little idea here. As I was exploring the interwebs today, I realized that REALTOR information is EVERYWHERE. If you change brokers, get married, get a new cell number, how do you keep all these in sync? You could always keep a list of sites that you added your info to. Or you could make sure all inbound links to website can be tagged and tracked, such as www.yoursite.com/index.php?ref=yelp (this one would refer to yelp.com). When you check your logs (you do monitor logs to see where traffic is coming and analyze your ROI right?) you can see which are being used, and make sure those are up to date. If you have plastered yourself from here to Timbuktu this works great, you only maintain the ones that are working for you - the others can lay to rest.
This of course fails miserably if your change your domain name.
Are there any other services that automate identity syndication similar to the listing syndication sites (Point2, etc)?
Ackkkk…before you burn me at the stake - hear me out. This is a continuation of my thoughts inspired by the Clareity Summit.
I think within the first 10 minutes, Gregg said those exact words ‘Blogging is over-rated’ — so if you are still looking for someone to go after once you finish reading this, it was Gregg!! Although I think it was on the tip of everyone’s tongue, he just called it out.
I can’t agree more. There I said it. It’s not that blogging doesn’t have a place, or when used correctly, won’t yield great results — its just that blogging isn’t for everyone, and used incorrectly is just a waste of the author’s time and could prove detrimental to any search engine placement you were trying to achieve.
Let’s whittle it down to where ‘blogging’ came from, ‘web’ + ‘logging’, or in other words an online journal. So blogging is journaling in the public view. Journaling in its raw form has had several studies showing that it can have medical, emotional, inspirational, academic, stress reducing, etc benefits. Yet not everyone does it.
But wait, with so many positive reasons, why doesn’t everyone do it? Simply, because it is not for everyone and when used incorrectly could amplify negative issues. Bingo - lightbulb - viola!! The same goes for blogging.
So how do I determine if blogging is for me and that I can create a valuable resource?
Tweeting, the final frontier
If you can’t get enough of us via the blog, inviting us out to speak at your sessions, or hanging out with us at the blog room - now you can follow our chronological thought patterns via Twitter.com. How we (I) use this, is still in the experimental phase - right now it seems like it will be a thoughtpad for myself and a way to quickly disseminate quick tidbits of CRT goodness.
If you aren’t fully sold on Tweeting, you can at least check out what we’re thinking here. You can also subscribe to it via RSS.
We’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about ‘How can Twitter fit in my business’. So, what better way to figure out an answer than start to play with it. We’d love to hear your feedback on how you are tweeting.
Don’t have a clue what I am even talking about? Heather Norton gave a few great twitter tips and tricks last week.
Good thing I like to listen to myself!
Replace Medical with Real Estate
This morning, NPR had a story about Medical Blogging. What I found most interesting was that is you replaced ‘Medical’ terminology with ‘Real Estate’ lingo, a lot of the concepts, issues, and tactics still make a lot of sense for this industry.
- Blogging Creates a relationship with never meeting the ‘Doctor’
- ‘Patients’ are hungry for this information
- Privacy Concerns - there is a fine line
- Some are geared towards marketing
- Others are directed towards their peers and/or the industry
- Unprofessional Blogging (ie venting and pouting your frustrations) just comes off immature
I like it when others do some of my homework for me.
Completely off topic. I woke up this to see the following headline in my Google Reader. It was completely upside down. Its text. Maybe I am a bit tired and the novelty of it upside got the better part of me, but OMG!
Check out the comment thread here
Andrew - please confirm that I am in fact not about to go off the deep end!
There has GOT to be a use for this, or at least I want there to be.
update: I am not going crazy! Phew. But how cool.
