Nation’s 4th Largest Real Estate Broker To Provide Video Podcasting Services

HOUSTON (Feb. 28, 2007) – Real Living, the country’s 4th-largest real estate brokerage, has partnered with MLPodcast to provide their agent network with listing and community video podcasts. Using existing still photos, listing data and marketing copy, MLPodcast produces high quality music videos with professional voice narrations.

Michael Price, MLPodcast’s president stated: “The relationship we have with Real Living allows any agent or broker to order a video podcast production with little more effort than entering an MLS number in a Web form, along with a few mouse clicks. By connecting our Web services applications together, we have established a solid infrastructure for the creation and delivery of content. It’s an unprecedented vendor-client relationship.”

Video podcasting takes the concept of a virtual tour to the Web 2.0 level by adding the power of broadcasting and syndication. Consumers can gain access to listing enhancements through free subscriptions that push new content to Web browsers, video-enabled cell phones, iPods™ and other video-enabled mobile devices automatically. MLPodcast has also amassed a network of destination sites specific to the podcasting platform. Each client podcast is distributed to this network, which includes Apple’s iTunes podcasting directory, Podcast.Yahoo.com and more. This distribution greatly improves organic and direct referral Web traffic from search engines.

"We are very excited to work with MLPodcast," said Kaira Sturdivant Rouda, chief operating officer of Real Living. "Today's consumers want an experience, and they want it online. With MLPodcast, our agents are able to podcast community videos and property listings - giving the consumer a better view of their new potential home or community and making the agent more marketable."

One of Real Living’s Chicago area franchises, Real Living Helios Realty, is an early adopter of MLPodcast’s service with more than 25 active listings currently hosted in their broadcast feed.

“Podcasting our listings has really given us an edge,” said Joe Magliochetti, principal broker of Real Living Helios Realty. “Today’s market is characterized by increasingly tech-savvy home buyers looking for detailed, on-demand information, so putting these podcasts to work can be the difference needed to get homes sold faster, to the right buyer."
Visit www.mlpodcast.com to find out more about video podcasting for real estate. To learn more about Real Living, visit http://www.RealLiving.com.

MLPodcast Hosts CoRE Podcast

In an effort to do our part for the RE blogging community, MLPodcast recently offered to host the new Carnival of Real Estate weekly host audio podcast, which was graciously accepted. Working with Drew and David at Zillow the past few days has been a wonderful effort and I'm glad to have met them both, if only virtually. If you haven't listened to the first two podcasts, you're in for a treat. David does an exceptional job as an interviewer. The give and take is fluid and the questions/commentary are spot on. Take a trip to the Carnival and have a listen.

How Podcasting Impacts Local Search Relevancy

ClickZ has an article today from Patricia Hursh regarding the relevancy of local search. The article breaks down personal decision criteria, proximity and vertical search sites.

Regarding proximity, Patricia says:

"Today, proximity is typically the most important factor in presenting local search results. If a searcher includes a city name, Zip Code, area code, or address in her query, listings are usually ranked according to proximity to that particular location.

Unfortunately, with this approach consumers often have to sift through thousands of returned listings. Certainly not all these businesses are really relevant. Yet they're included in results simply because they have a name, qualified address, and phone number."

It's important when looking at the metrics of your web or blog traffic to identify the keywords and phrases people use in search engines to find your site. (If you do not have a good log file analysis tool, try Google Analytics, it's free and generates great data.) As Internet empowered consumers become more adept at searching in ways that cut through the clutter of millions of irrelevant results, they become more specific in the criteria they use. As mentioned by Patricia, street addresses are an example. We've known for some time now that a well distributed podcast feed provides an impressive amount of direct referral traffic to our client's web sites. In fact, one client receives over 3 times as much direct traffic from one podcast directory as they do from Realtor.Com. That's just the tip of the Iceberg. If you look at the long tail of direct traffic from their podcasting effort, they generated in the month of December a total of 138 direct referrals from podcast directories, 37 direct referrals from the local MLS site and a total of 28 direct referrals from all Realtor.Com sites including realestate.aol.com. (Yes, this client pays for enhanced listings with Realtor.Com) This client has also shown a steady increase in total page views since introducing podcasting from an average of 3,000 to now over 4,000 per month. Pretty impressive.

Now let's take a look at the impact of locality on organic search results in Yahoo and Google. The top referral by far to our client's site was Google organic searches. We know that a large portion of organic searches are the result of the widespread distribution of their podcasting RSS feed.

We decided to do a test using the street name of a podcast as an example of how someone might search. We used just the street name (no numbers) of the listing along with the name of the subdivision or neighborhood in Google. It was absolutely amazing. In almost every instance the search results dominated not only the first few results of the page, in some cases the first three pages generated results from a podcasting directory, or directly to the XML file used for the feed.

Digging further, we started using phrases from the descriptions of properties, specific community phrases and more and we were pleased to find our client show up in the top results just about every time. As I've mentioned before, the underlying technology of syndication that helps make this happen is nothing new, in fact it's been around a long time. It's just recently that it has become an integral part of the web and computing in general.

I've found the "RE.Net"* to be somewhat infatuated with web video lately. And that's great. But most of the fawning is over media that assumes someone is looking at property listing or web content in the first place. Video podcast distribution, when done right, provides not only a means to enhance a listing or content, it provides a a powerful new way to drive relevant, local traffic.

Want to know more? E-mail me. I'll be glad to give you a personal demonstration.

*I'm not sure if it was Greg Swann that originally coined RE.Net, but it sounds a damn site better than "blogosphere", wouldn't you agree?

The Land of Cheese & Web 2.0

One of my favorite daily activities is reading my news alerts from Google and Yahoo. A few carefully placed keywords, and voila!, once a day I get access to content that just a few short years ago required human intervention, a pair of scissors and a lot of dead trees.

Today I found a Gem from the Wisconsin Technology Network entitled "Podcasts – time, place, and player shifted media" It's a very concise and insightful article on Podcasting for business written by a sharp guy named Paul Gibler. He manages to provide a plethora of links and information. The best part of the article is the list of questions businesses should ask themselves about podcasting.

"How do I promote my podcasts? Be sure to get them into all the major podcast directories (see below) in addition to using your more traditional promotional mix.

This is one of the things we at MLPodcast excel at. I would take the issue a step further and apply the Long Tail principal to the equation. It's not just the major directories that are important. We distribute to any and all directories that accept a podcast feed. It amazes me the amount of traffic and search engine optimization that result from submitting to directories you might otherwise never consider.

I recommend reading Paul's other articles as well. UPDATE: Paul sent me a link to his blog, the articles are great. Check it out

Google Zeitgeist '06

The Washington Post reports Google has released it's annual "Zeitgeist" report that peeks into the most popular search terms over the last year. Podcasting showed up as number 4 on the list. I found it intriguing that one of the items was the interest in the popular Web 2.0 programming language "Ajax". YouTube was absent from the list entirely. It seems Web 2.0 issues and technologies dominated search in 2006.

"The top search terms were words related to user-generated content, such as blogs, social networking sites and podcasts."

The impact that user generation and RSS based content distribution are having the web is sure to be top amongst the year end "wrap-up" technology articles that will no doubt be gracing my bookmarks and feed reader in the coming weeks.

"40 Is The New 30, Baby"

A new client asked me today about the demographics of the average podcast user. Nielsen, Forrester and Pew Internet Life have been doing studies on podcasting since early 2005. For some reason the media continues to act surprised by the fact that mature adults have embraced new media. I've read dozens of articles after each release of new data. You'd think a 90 year old great, great grandmother had just swam the English channel. The article that showed up in my news alerts today from the Eagle-Tribune in Andover Mass. has to be the best example yet. The lead in sets the tone for the article. I cracked up when I read it:

"New media is no longer just the province of the pubescent. A growing share of its audience is old. Ancient. Like, even over 40."

The writer has some fun with the recent Nielsen stats that were released regarding YouTube and other New Media demographics. Of particular interest are the stats regarding podcasting:

"Podcasting consumers: 47 percent are over 35. All told, the digital revolution illustrates a theory heretofore popularized only by pudgy, balding men in too-tight pants: Forty is the new 30, baby."

Another stat released was something I am very familiar with. There are plenty of over 40 women that are classified as casual gamers. Count my lovely wife Laurie amongst them. If you met her you would never guess that she loves to fire up the X-Box and blow the crap out of alien invaders playing HALO with my daughters and their friends. I've yet to play anything but a bad round of golf on a gaming console.

New media marketing activities like blogging and podcasting are no longer fads or the exclusive domain of the early adopter. Given the demographic of the home buying public, they are actually more targeted and, in my opinion, have better ROI opportunity than any other medium. If you're making your media buying decisions based on how and where you consume media yourself, or how people in your sphere of influence interact with it, you could be making some poor choices.

If New Media isn't a category in your budget planning for next year, perhaps it's time to fire up your favorite web 2.0 spreadsheet application, loosen the belt on your "too-tight" pants and give some serious thought to moving a chunk of that old media money to a new column.

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