Dec 11
19

Happy Holiday’s from the Being BOB Blog!

Enjoy some non-secular “holiday” songs from the Rockefeller Tree Lighting Ceremony hosted by Harry Connick, Jr., Megan Mallally and Al Roker.

Posted in All Posts & Comments Save these Dates Stuff Video by Being BOB. No Comments

Dec 11
14

Why Is The Middle Finger Offensive?

The middle finger is one of our species’ oldest and most ubiquitous insulting gestures. But why is waving one of your fingers offensive? David Clark answered this question for us back in 2009, and we’re reposting it today in honor of a one-finger salute that aired on MSNBC this morning.

The Middle Finger

Like the Devil Himself, the middle finger bears many names and adopts many guises. There’s the “single-digit salute” favored by punk rockers and rebellious celebrities. Or the “expressway digit,” a remarkable single-sign code by which California drivers communicate their complex emotions. It’s also known as “the bird,” a poor symbolic avian that is endlessly flipped and flicked. It can be displayed statically, waggling and waving, thrusting with rage, or drooping dispassionately from the hand of a rapper.

Long before punk rock and eight-lane highways, the middle finger was known as the digitus impudicus or digitus infamis (indecent or infamous digit) by Romans and medieval Europeans. Augustus Caesar once booted an entertainer for giving a heckler the finger. And the lunatic emperor Caligula — famed for such crimes as wearing women’s clothes and murdering indiscriminately — was said to have habitually offered his digitus infamis to be kissed by his enemies, just to flaunt his imperial disdain. Until, of course, one of those enemies stabbed Caligula in the neck.

Here’s what you can do with your Socratic method…

Even before the Romans, an Athenian playwright and comedian named Aristophanes created a feisty character who gives Socrates the finger. It was a unique way to respond to all those irritating questions. Nobody can say Socrates didn’t ask for it.

There are no convincing claims about the primordial “meaning” of the middle finger or the origin of its disrepute, except that when it’s stuck up alone it resembles a penis. (Some consider the fist below to serve an essential role in this resemblance to genitals.) I guess people think that’s answer enough, since everyone’s supposed to know already what a penis “means,” and it’s supposed to be bad.

Arab and Russian variations

Aristophanes might provide the earliest literary reference to the gesture, but that’s no reason to think he came up with it, or that the middle finger was offensive only to Greeks. The finger is somewhat universal, and yet, as with most things, different regions have their own variations: two of the most enriching, I think, are from the Arabs and the Russians. In Arabian lands, the equivalent gesture consists of an outstretched hand, palm down, with all fingers splayed except the middle, which sticks downwards. Perhaps it’s a little more ambiguous than the standard American finger, but I find it wonderfully evocative. The Russian version twists our anatomical expectations by bending the middle finger of one hand back with the forefinger of the other in a gesture they call “looking under the cat’s tail.” Few offensive hand-signs attain such splendid specificity.

 

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Dec 11
14

Rich Real Estate Agent, Poor Real Estate Agent

What separates Rich Real Estate Agents from Poor Real Estate Agents?

  • Are men better real estate agents than women?
  • Does age or experience matter?
  • Do top real estate agents use Trulia or Zillow? Or Realtor.com? Or Homes.com?
  • Does FaceBook sell houses?

 

In real estate there is no “right answer” on how to be successful. BUT, we have found that some agents are “more right” than others.

ActiveRain conducted a survey(1) of 1,758 real estate professionals to find out what separates the top real estate professionals (those earning over $100,000 a year, we’ll call them ‘Rich Real Estate Agents’) from the struggling real estate professionals (those earning under $35,000 a year, we’ll call them ‘Poor Real Estate Agents’). 379, or 22% of respondents were Rich Real Estate Agents, while 363 or 21% of respondents were Poor Real Estate Agents.

Here’s what we learned:


Demographics:

  • Rich real estate agents tend to be MEN (58% male). Poor real estate agents tended to be WOMEN (60% female). 47% of the survey was male.
  • Rich real estate agents have 11-20 years of real estate experience. Poor real estate agents had 4-5 five years of experience. The average was 6-10 years of experience.
  • The average age of the respondent was 51-60 years old. S/he is a college grad with moderate technology experience. Age did not matter between rich and poor real estate agents.

What Seems to Matter:

  • Rich Real Estate Agents invest 6x more in technology
  • Rich Real Estate Agents BROADCAST via social media
  • Rich Real Estate Agents spend 10x more on marketing

What Doesn’t Seem to Matter (either it doesn’t matter or everyone is using it poorly):

  • FaceBook
  • Real Estate Listing Web Sites – (Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com all enjoy 60%+ penetration)
  • Direct Mail

Technology

Rich real estate agents invest 6 times as much in technology as poor real estate agents. Every year the average rich real estate agent spends $3,000-5,000 per year on technology, while the poor real estate agent only spends $500-1,000 per year. So, for every one dollar that the poor agent spends on technology, rich agent spends six dollars. Think about this: the average rich real estate spends more money in a month, than some poor real estate agents spend on technology all year.

Where does this spending go?

  1. A top notch IDX site: Why? Because a good web site with home listings and lead capture is the backbone of any successful online marketing campaign.
  2. CRM or Lead management systems: CRM’s (customer relationship management systems or a database) are an integral part of their success. This is the most dramatic difference in the survey. Almost twice as many rich real estate agents use a CRM or lead management system than poor real estate agents.It’s this systematic management of their database that allows rich real estate agents to build a high volume business. This is the most dramatic and visible difference in the entire survey.
  3. Email Marketing: Rich real estate agents aggressively use email marketing. In fact, they touch their clients more frequently through email marketing than their less successful brethren. Many of them send automated listings via their IDX sites, and they are 54% more likely to use email newsletter and drip marketing campaigns.

Broadcast Social Media Marketing

Rich real estate agents are aggressive in using BROADCAST forms of social media to attract clients. What is broadcast social media? Any form of social media which allows a real estate agent or real estate professional to communicate in a broadcast format which is open on the Internet (unlike FaceBook which is only visible to your friends.)

What forms of social media are Rich Real Estate Agents using?

  1. YouTube and Online Video: We were surprised by this one, as online video has always seemed challenging and time consuming (from a production and editing standpoint). BUT, rich real estate agents are actively posting videos on YouTube , 78% more than poor real estate agents.
  2. Blogging: Rich real estate agents are actively blogging for search engine optimization and building a content library as a “net” for prospective buyers and sellers. Rich real estate agents are using ActiveRain (62%), WordPress (52%), and Blogger (26%) as the most popular blogging sites. Rich real estate agents seem to have a presence on multiple blogging platforms if not all three. (Full disclosure: this survey was conducted by ActiveRain which is the largest blogging platform and social network specifically built for real estate so we would expect the ActiveRain share to be high.)
  3. Twitter & LinkedIn: Rich real estate agents tend to use the micro-blogging platform, Twitter and the business networking site, LinkedIn more actively than poor real estate agents to broadcast their message and generate business referrals.

Marketing, Marketing, Marketing

The rich real estate agent spends 10 times more on marketing and advertising for their business. That may be the most shocking number of all. The rich real estate agent spends $5,000-$10,000 per year on marketing, while the poor real estate agent spends only $500-$1,000 per year. Again, a rich real estate agent is spending more in 2 weeks than some poor real estate agents spend on marketing ALL YEAR!

How are rich real estate agents spending their marketing dollars?

  1. Hire an Assistant: Top performers leverage their time. 26% of rich real estate agents use an assistant or an agency to help with their marketing, search engine optimization and their lead generation strategies, while only 11% of poor real estate agents use an assistant. Some of these top performers don’t know SEO from NBC but they realize the value of their time and the importance of hiring experts.
  2. Internet Marketing: Rich real estate agents prioritize internet marketing and lead generation in general. 2.75 times more rich real estate agents buy Internet marketing services or ‘clicks’ to their website than poor agents. 2.3 times as many rich real estate agents buy internet leads. Rich real estate agents realize that this investment in their business is likely to pay off because they have the system (IDX web site and CRM/lead management system) in place to convert their investment into business.
  3. The Local Newspaper: Guess what……..rich real estate agents still advertise in local newspapers. Hard to believe, given all the bad news in the newspaper business. But, if a home buyer or seller is looking for information in the local newspaper, the rich real estate agent is going to be advertising there.
  4. No More Door Knocking or Cold Calling: Rich real estate agents DON’T have time for cold calling and door knocking. They leave that to poor real estate agents who is more likely to hit the streets or the office phone and open up the phone book (shudder, shudder). Rich real estate agents may not consider calling expired listings as cold calling, which may have skewed the numbers a bit.

When asked,”What is the most effective marketing or advertising that you do?” rich real estate agents answered: 1) Personal referrals and word of mouth, 2) blogging, and 3) professional referrals and business networking.


So what does NOT matter? When we looked at the data of what separates the rich real estate agents from the poor real estate agents, technology, broadcast social media, and marketing stuck out. In contrast, the following services were surprising in that they did NOT stick out. This could be that every agent is using them; some could be using them well while the rest are using them poorly. The survey could not tell the difference
.

1. Facebook: 90% of real estate agents are using FaceBook. Period. Pause. There could be a whole survey on the best ways to use FaceBook which may say Fan Pages are better than Business Pages or Places. But on its face (ha ha), FaceBook does not sell more houses for the rich real estate agent versus the poor real estate agent.

2. Home Listing Aggregation Sites: When asked, “Do you advertise or use the following real estate web sites to market your business?” we saw surprisingly high penetration for the following web sites on average:

  • CraigsList 68%
  • Trulia 64%
  • Realtor.com / Move.com 61%
  • Zillow 60%
  • Homes.com 25%

There was no discernible difference between rich real estate agents and poor real estate agents in their usage of these sites, with one exception: Trulia had a very slight skew towards greater usage among poor real estate agents. In fact, Trulia and FrontDoor Real Estate from HGTV (only 14% usage on average) were the only two real estate web sites with a slightly higher usage among poor real estate agents, perhaps due to the free marketing tools and profiles offered by both web sites.

When you look at overall site usage, some interesting observations come to light. It’s not surprising that Craigslist is the most used site, considering it is free. However, we were surprised to see Trulia with a slight edge over Realtor.com and Zillow. Realtor.com should have a higher penetration given that it is the NAR-sponsored web site. We would have expected Zillow to have higher usage than Trulia, given the amount of publicity that Zillow has attracted from its successful IPO. (Rumor has it that Trulia is preparing to go public in the near future, so it will be fascinating to see their results.) Trulia had a very slight skew towards greater usage among poor real estate agents versus rich real estate agents.

3. Direct Mail: Over 60% of respondents use direct mail to market their business. Pause. That’s the same percentage of respondents using Zillow, Realtor.com and Trulia. Perhaps people still open the mail and hire their real estate agent based on the refrigerator magnet. More poor real estate agents report using direct mail than have an IDX site. In 2011 how is this possible? Either direct mail continues to be HIGHLY effective or we, as the real estate industry have been slow to change behavior. Hard to tell from the survey, but we at ActiveRain have our suspicions.

By the way, some things are unexplainable but if you are reading this and you use direct mail and you do not have an IDX site do yourself a huge favor and invest in a good one. It could be the reason you make a huge jump in 2012.
Other things which are hard to explain:

  • We are 16 years into the Internet Revolution and three years into the Do Not Call Registry, YET more real estate agents knock on doors and cold call than advertise on the Internet.
  • Realtor.com is the official site of the National Association Realtors (NAR) and has been around for 15 years (or so), but is falling behind Trulia in real estate agent usage, and only slightly ahead of Zillow, both of which have existed for 5-6 years now.
  • Direct mail is the most popular form of real estate advertising. The US Government and Postal Workers Union thank you.
  • Only 15-16% of real estate agents use an assistant to help with marketing. How valuable is your time? If you use this as a metric, most real estate professionals don’t think their time is that valuable .

Not every rich agent is going to follow the exact same road map. I’m sure everyone knows a real estate agent out there with no website who rarely uses email that would land in the ‘rich agent’ category. Of course these types are becoming more and more rare as the years go by and consumer behavior changes.

We hope that you ask yourself “What kind of things will I be investing in for 2012?” and will those investments pay off like they have for the rich real estate agent.

What do you want to be in 2012? A rich agent or a poor agent?

 


Posted in All Posts & Comments Real Estate Stuff Technology by Being BOB. No Comments

Dec 11
12

You’re wasting time with QR codes

Every brand is trying to catch the attention of today’s on-the-go consumer. Many are turning to these things called Quick Response (QR) codes or other types of scannable 2D barcodes. For the unfamiliar, and judging by some surveys, that’s most of us, QR codes are those the little blotchy square barcodes popping up on everything from coins to the unmentionables of Olympic volleyball players. These kinds of bar codes come in many flavors, including the black and white QR variety, multi-colored Microsoft Tags, and others.

One thing these tiny 2D codes are big on is hype, with proponents touting them as the bridge between the offline and online world.  But that offline to online bridge is structurally flawed for most and may be keeping many brands from reaching most of their audience effectively.

Here are five key reasons why:

Not everybody has a smartphone

The simple fact is that most mobile phones cannot read a QR code.  While smartphones are the fastest growing segment of the mobile handset market, the Nielsen estimates that 60 percent of cell phones in use today are not smartphones. Surprising, right? You wouldn’t advertise in a language most of your target audience doesn’t speak. Why are QR codes any different?

The process can be confusing

2D bar codes are not monolithic. There are multiple types of incompatible codes and many different barcode readers, leaving users to figure out which reader is right for which code.  A quick search of “QR Code Reader” in the Android Marketplace or iTunes Store returns hundreds of free and paid apps.  It’s a bit much for a general consumer and can quickly turn the whole QR experiment from interesting to frustrating.  Why does this magazine ad prompt me to download a reader first before using it, while another just shows a QR code? Which bar code app do I choose?  Does this app work for my phone?  Will it work with the code I’m trying to scan? It’s a mess.  And, most codes don’t reinforce the brand image in anyway, unlike branded URLs or vanity numbers.

They lack cross-media functionality

Advertisers want to maximize their marketing spends effectively, and many are willing to experiment. But QR codes have their place. Flashing a QR code on a TV screen for 3-5 seconds at the end of a commercial or using them on highway billboards probably aren’t the best ideas.  And of course, they are completely incompatible with a radio promotion.  The lack of cross-media functionality is a severe limitation on the QR code’s use as a direct response method across all kinds of ads or promotions.

They may be too much trouble for the consumer

Consumers are notoriously unreceptive to learning new, complicated behaviors without an obvious, substantial benefit. And the QR code is nothing if not a behavior change. Consider that before a user can scan a code she must:

  1. Plan ahead and download a QR reader app, hoping that it is the right app for the code she will download.
  2. Find a QR code of interest.
  3. Check the lighting or disable the camera’s flash to reduce glare which can muck up the scan.
  4. Frame the code in the reader’s phone camera lens just right.
  5. Hold the phone very still.
  6. Scan the image.
  7. Wait while the image uploads (using a portion of her limited data allotment)
  8. Finally click the mobile URL or whatever the software sends her to activate the content or get the promotion.

For most people, you’ve lost them at the first step because they don’t have a QR reader to begin with, don’t understand how to use it, or simply don’t want to bother. And lest you think it’s just us older folks who aren’t clamoring all over QR codes like today’s tech-savvy youth — think again.  It seems many of them don’t get QR codes either. A survey of high school and college students by marketing firm Ypulse found that 64 percent of respondents didn’t know what a QR code was. Of the 36 percent who did, less than one in five had ever bothered to scan one.

A bad experience could be prohibitive

A poor or failed QR code experience could leave a frustrated user with a negative experience with the brand and the promotion itself. In a recent survey conducted by Lab24, only 13 percent of those polled were able to successfully scan the survey’s QR code that was provided to them.  In other words, nearly 9 of 10 attempts failed.  That’s an astounding failure rate for something that’s supposed to let people engage with your brand on the go.

QR codes do have their place, such as comparison shopping in Best Buy if someone is so inclined and technically enabled.  A recent comScore survey reinforced this point. Print publications and product packaging were the top two sources of scanned codes, with most activity happening in the home or in a store.  Scannable barcodes have their uses, but slapping them everywhere without thought for the medium, message, or the target customer is misguided.

Consumers deserve better than this. They deserve simplicity. They deserve value. They deserve respect for the time they spend interacting with a product, a business or a brand. Marketers must heed this call or risk building a wall between themselves and the consumer increasingly wary of the value we can deliver to their mobile phone. We can do better.

Joe Gillespie is the President and CEO of Zoove.
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Dec 11
11

Facebook is about to change itself into a usage U-turn

People use Facebook a lot. They use it to share photos. They use it to invite people to events. They use it as an address book and messaging system. They use it as a games platform.
The growth has been so staggering that Facebook is by far the most popular website and can’t even fill its existing ad display inventory.

When a company has achieved complete market domination, it usually hones in on its core features and makes every effort to keep

things clean and simple. This is the reason Google’s homepage and search results barely changed for 10 years while Google’s revenue and profits skyrocketed.

Facebook, however, has different ideas. Despite the often rumored Facebook fatigue, Mark Zuckerberg thinks that sharing will double every year. Now that we can already Like everything on the web, what else can we possibly share?

Enter the rumored Read/Watch/Listen features that are expected to be launched on Thursday at the Facebook f8 conference. Now, your profile will automatically be updated with everything you are reading, watching, and listening to. On one hand, it’s a pretty cool way to share content and see what people are consuming. On the other, it’s a whole new barrage of sharing activity when people are already sick of sharing. Yes, it’s cool to know that you liked an episode of CSI. Maybe I’ll check it out. But if that indicator is lost amongst the   sea of every other bit of media that you have ever consumed, it doesn’t really mean much.

People definitely like to decorate their profiles, and unfortunately Facebook profiles are quite spartan and rarely updated. In the early days of Facebook Platform, people could add apps to their profiles like “Where I’ve Been” and iLike to show off where they’ve travelled and what songs they were listening to. The iLike model worked really well and people were not creeped out by it.

Sites like Clicker.com that partnered with Facebook early on for instant personalization already incorporate a stream of what you’re watching, but they’re localized and do not syndicate everything back to profiles. Users have been very comfortable with this type of functionality and have embraced it since it helps them navigate the content on websites. However, Facebook has historically had huge headaches when automatically syndicating activity back to a profile from a website, such as the 2007 user revolt over Facebook Beacon. I fully appreciate an attempt to make profiles alive again, but perhaps there is a middle ground between adding apps and automatically populating your profile with everything you’re consuming from around the web.

The biggest issue Facebook faces in rolling out new features is that its 750 million users already have a very clear definition of Facebook: photos, events, address book and casual games. Essentially Flickr + Evite + Plaxo + Yahoo Games. Users are kind of open to brands being part of this mix because everything else they use has advertising. Trying to get them to do anything else is like pushing a rock up a hill.

The average Joe absolutely doesn’t understand the new “subscribe” feature. For some reason, Facebook thinks my neighbor’s 16-year-old would like to “subscribe” to Sheryl Sandberg and Tom Anderson. What for? On Twitter people are following celebrities and the asymmetrical relationship makes sense. On Facebook — which already has Facebook Pages for celebrities and brands — the subscribe feature makes no sense at all. Instead, Facebook should have considered letting individuals automatically populate a Facebook Page from their profiles and add a “Like” button for the Pages to their profiles.

The new double newsfeed is completely perplexing. The bigger layout in the middle makes sense and completely apes the polished Google+ look with larger photos and more spacing. But the layout to the upper right with a scrolling feed of news is confusing. One of them updates by clicking; the other updates automatically. One of them has large fonts and a lot of space; the other has small fonts and is tightly spaced. One of them requires you to click to see more; the other one has a hover feature to see more. One of them uses the browser scrollbar; the other has a mini scrollbar that appears on hover. It’s like two websites got mashed into one. I am getting text messages from anthropologists in San Diego asking me what happened to Facebook today. In previous iterations of Facebook I could always explain why the new version was better. This time, I frankly have no idea.

Historically, Facebook has always iterated very quickly and added features quite capriciously, even if it pissed users off. However, the features were well thought out and eventually people grew accustomed to them. This latest barrage of features is quite far from Facebook’s core usage patterns and just doesn’t make sense.

Steve Jobs has left a generation of techies who are constantly asking themselves, “What would Steve do?” Definitely not this. Facebook, you’ve already won, it’s time to chill out a bit! Bigger pictures = good. Two completely different newsfeeds on one page = bad.

Posted in All Posts & Comments Politics Technology by Being BOB. No Comments

Dec 11
11

Everything You Need to Know About the Facebook Update

 

You might have noticed that Facebook changed last night. Inline photos are a little bigger, the top bar a little blockier, and a news ticker now rests in the upper-righthand corner for real-time updates. Overwhelmed? We’re here to help.

This latest flurry of updates caps off a steady flow of tweaks over the past few weeks. You now subscribe to your friends’ updates as you would an RSS feeds. You can subscribe to people you’re not even friends with. You can organize friend groups by type (in Google+ fashion), not just for chat purposes. And you also have more on-the-fly control over who does and doesn’t see your wall posts. All of these features come together to make Facebook feel different, even if it’s fundamentally unchanged at its core. Here’s a look at the new Facebook.

 News Ticker

The immediate reaction to the news ticker—my immediate reaction to the news ticker—was that it was redundant. We have a feed already! It works fine! But I suspect that in the long run, Facebook will further differentiate what goes into the two feeds, especially with the addition of subscriptions. It’s Twitterish in the rate at which updates fly in, but the content is still very much Facebookian.

Right now, there’s a lot of overlap between the updates in the news feed and those in the news ticker (especially since it’s morning on the East Coast right now). But going forward, I can envision a lot fewer likes, and comments showing up in the main news feed.

 

 News Feed
Facebook sees the news feed serving as a digest. There will always be recent updates, but probably mostly from people whose profiles you actually visit and only the types of updates you actually care about. Facebook is very gung-ho on the concept of top news, which are posts flagged by some algorithm they’ve developed, and which will keep those updates in your feed for a considerable amount of time. This is what keeps Facebook from devolving into just an over-crowded Twitter.

 

 

Photos
Seeing a huge-ass thumbnail plastered in my feed was actually a welcome change. And now, when you upload or are tagged in multiple photos, it shows up in a stylish, multi-panel design. Good work, Facebook!

 

 

 

 

Subscriptions
Want some (or all) of someone’s updates, but don’t necessarily want the baggage of being FB friends with them? Just subscribe to their feed. People will still see who you are following, so it’s not a work around for your stalking antics. But it’s especially nice for those people who want to share their life and work with a broader audience without getting too personal. What Pages does for companies, Subscriptions will do for individuals.

 

 

Friend Lists
There’s been some form of grouping on Facebook for awhile now, but now Friend Lists are much more useful on Facebook. You can easily send updates to one or more groups without sending to all. Think of these like circles in Google+.

 

 

From Gizmodo  By: Adrian Covert

Posted in All Posts & Comments Events Politics Stuff by Being BOB. No Comments

Dec 11
7

The Smoking Facebook Addiction!

We’ve all been there; You’re at an outing or a dinner table with friends but itching to check your email or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Google+ or Yammer or whatever digital hit of serotonin you prefer. Have you ever “gone to the bathroom” in order to check email or come up with a socially appropriate excuse to pull out your Smartphone just so you can check your @ replies on Twitter?

Remember when the critical mass of smokers used to leave the table or meeting in groups to go indulge their habit? I straight up open my iPad  at bars and parties, and then feel more guilty about that than drinking.

A new British study released today backs up what we otherwise know intuitively, that Internet usage is increasingly becoming an addiction. Out of 1000 people surveyed after being cut off from the Internet for 24 hours, 53% reported feeling “upset” about being deprived of online access and 40% said that they felt lonely after not being able to connect to the Internet. Participants described the digital detox akin to quitting drinking or smoking and one even said it was like having his hand chopped off (!).

This British survey comes after a University of Maryland study in April that came to pretty much the same conclusion — With one student saying that she was “itching like a crackhead” after abstaining from any form of media for 24 hours. Geez.

Add this insight to the yet un-proven concerns that Smartphone usage leads to Cancer and the smoking analogy becomes more and more apt (see image left). But for the moment Goggling the name of a movie you can’t remember is hands down a lot healthier than smoking an actual cigarette, at least physically.

For the moment at least!

 

Posted in All Posts & Comments Politics Stuff Technology by Being BOB. No Comments

Nov 11
5

Changing Real Estate Marketing Technologies

Although many may not believe it, the real estate industry is actually one of the most tech savvy industries around today. The necessity to cover numerous territories and the demand to provide all inclusive services makes the real estate professional almost dependent on the technologies available to them.

This dependency has pushed many real estate professionals to jump on new technologies and quickly become familiar with the various ways to maximize their time and build their businesses by attracting new buyers, sellers and investors. The bi-product of this trend has been a strong demand from the real estate industry for technology companies to continue pushing the envelope to build faster, more efficient and more effective real estate marketing technologies.

Technology for the real estate industry has evolved so quickly over the past 10-20 years. We can still remember pagers being ‘high-tech’. Every Realtor seemed to have had one as it allowed them to be even more accessible than most real estate professionals probably intended. These types of technologies changed the way we thought of and worked with a Realtor. Now, our real estate agent is more accessible than ever, which leaves them with less time in the day to focus on important aspects of their business, like marketing their business and their clients’ properties.

Welcome new marketing technologies that make a real estate agent’s job more about inbound lead generation and less about call volume and how many business cards can be passed out in one day.

Real Estate Technology Goes Local

Chris Thorman, who blogs about property management software at Software Advice recently posted a very interesting article titled Searching for Real Estate Made Easy: Geo-Fences and Mobile Phones. This article sparked us to look deeper into new marketing technologies and share them with our audience. We feel that technologies like the one we’re about to mention will help to change the way real estate is marketed and discovered by prospective buyers, sellers and investors.

The real estate technology market has been flooded in recent years with “location-based” applications to help buyers find properties in their area. With little variation, they all work in about the same way:

  • Start an application on your mobile phone;
  • Utilize your phone’s GPS to determine your location; and,
  • Have the application retrieve location-based real estate data.

What if a prospective real estate buyer didn’t have to initiate an application to get real estate data? What if the data just came to their phone automatically?

Sound far-fetched? Well it isn’t. Advertising company, Placecast, has developed a service called ShopAlerts and we think it has very interesting implications for the real estate industry. ShopAlerts allows users to opt in to receive marketing messages on their phone from retail stores that are nearby. For example, a person would sign up for alerts from Old Navy and would automatically receive tailored text message marketing notifications each time they were close to an Old Navy store.

This could work in the same manner for the real estate industry. Users could opt in to receive alerts about specific types of properties. And when they near those properties, they cross a “geo-fence” which prompts an automatic notification to be sent to their mobile phone.

Essentially, a person lives their life and in the meantime, receives notifications about properties they’re close to that match what they want. Is this ideal marketing or what?

 

Where Is Real Estate Marketing Technology Headed?

The way we see it, real estate marketing is going to continue to evolve and improve to a point where just about every step of the marketing process becomes so automated that a Realtor can literally start and complete an effective marketing campaign in minutes from their phone or computer. We are a long way off from this currently, but with the addition of new technologies like the one mentioned above it will not be long before homes start marketing themselves.

  • With all of these continuous developments and improvements, we have some questions for you as the real estate professional:
  • What are your thoughts on these new technologies and where they are headed?
  • Are you open to the marketing process being as ‘hands-off’ as possible?
  • Do you feel that the marketing process can or should be ‘hands-off’?
  • What technologies do you think would completely change how you do business as a Realtor?

We would love to get your take on these burning questions as you are the pulse of the industry. Simply drop us a comment below with your take on all of this. We will do our best to provide you with some useful insight on how to use the majority of these technologies to your advantage and how to leverage them going into the coming years and real estate market trends.

Gleaned from an article by Vinny LaBarbera

Posted in All Posts & Comments Listings Real Estate Technology by Being BOB. No Comments

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