Web 2.0 - Best Practices Award

Last year I awarded the first Mike's Corner Web 2.0 "Best Practices" award. Today I'm bestowing the award on a company that's had it's share of issues with regard to customer communication recently, Dell. The folks in Austin have decided to use the power of social networking to find out what people really want in a PC. They call it Dell IdeaStorm. Essentially it's a form of consumer transparency.

"Dell IdeaStorm launched on Friday, February 16. Dell employees are monitoring IdeaStorm to gauge which ideas are most important and most relevant to you. And we'll share those ideas throughout our organization to trigger new thoughts about how we evolve as a company. As your ideas continue to pour in, we will use this page to provide updates on ideas that Dell is considering. We'll also show you how your ideas are being put into action at Dell over time. Please check back to see your ideas in action."

The site uses a "Digg" social news style format to promote good ideas to the top. Idea Storm also features a discussion forum and section to preview and comment on upcoming products. The top voted ideas come as no surprise to me. High on the list is a "Craplet Free" system. Delivering a system with a clean operating system unencumbered by resource hogging trial ware, nag screens more. They are even using the site to determine how the site itself should be structured. The next step is "YouTube" style video upload section. I just wonder if they will allow the exploding laptop videos to make their way to the site?

I could see this same type of environment working for well for brokers. The Tuesday morning meeting is probably all but dead. It's a safe bet that most offices see a lot less of their agent staff these days. Home offices and mobile technology have seen to that. Allowing agents to participate in "digital brainstorming" sessions could provide brokers with a good road map for company initiatives and prevent investments in programs that may not be well adopted. Using this type of tool could be more effective than a digital suggestion box or Intranet due it's social structure and transparency. In a business model such as RE/MAX where decisions are made by committee, this could be an invaluable way for individual groups to post and work with new ideas. From a business planning perspective it would be great to take a historical snapshot of the decision making process from the birth of an idea to it's implementation and beyond.

On larger scales, such as Dell, the biggest obstacle I see to this type of program is manipulation of the system. Anyone with an agenda or just too much time on their hands could potentially "game" the site. An example is a thread that says "Bring Back The Dell Dude" For all we know that guy might be trying charge up the paddles on his 15 minutes of fame in hopes that the Idea Storm site can shock it back to life. Then again maybe there are people out there that actually want to go through the hell of those commercials all over again. I'm sure there are people hard at work on ideas to avoid situations that prevent unscrupulous use of the system. That said, I am of the mind set that there is value in pretty much all of the content, even at the long end of the tail.

Mike Antoniak, a tech writer for Realtor Magazine mentioned to me recently that Michael Dell publicly proclaimed he would be happy to sell a system with Apple's Macintosh OS X operating system on it. Now there's an idea I would love to see it stormed to the top of the list. Because for me personally -- Dude, that's the only way I'm gettin a Dell.

Interview: Damon Pace - HomeHugg.Com

Damon Pace, CEO of Incredible Agent wants consumers, Realtors and lenders to show the love. Pace has recently unveiled a new web effort entitled HomeHugg. The premise of the site is similar to popular social news and bookmarking sites like Digg and Netscape.Com.

"HomeHugg is very much like the social bookmarking communities that have gained momentum over the past year. Their popularity is based in discovering and sharing similar interests. HomeHugg members can share information and opinions with one another in order to identify the homes that meet their search criteria."

We asked Damon to answer a few questions regarding HomeHugg and he graciously accepted.

Q: Your web site states, "HomeHugg is a community of Home Buyers, Realtors and Lenders that help each other discover, save and share their favorite homes for sale or rent in their community." Can you explain individually, how Buyers, Realtors and Lenders can use your site and what the benefit is?

A:First, HomeHugg helps home buyers by allowing them to simply search any real estate website they want and save that home listing to their HomeHugg account. Once they save it to their account, other home shoppers may find that home and then save it to their account as well. With HomeHugg, the more members who like a home, the more exposure the home receives on our site. Which brings me to my second point. When a Realtor has a listing posted on their website and that listing becomes a popular home on HomeHugg, there will in turn be more targeted home buyers driven to the Realtors website to learn more about the home and possibly become a lead. Don't forget they also get paid when that listing sells. HomeHugg will be promoting that listing for them and hopefully it will sell faster because of the number of huggs it recieves. So essentially, Realtors are able to promote their clients' listings and drive traffic to their website at the same time. With HomeHugg, Lenders can play an important roll by promoting listings for Realtors, leaving comments on homes and therefore bringing exposure to themselves to build their business. We will also be rolling out other tools in the future to help Lenders become a larger part of the HomeHugg community. We believe Lenders play a significant, yet untapped roll in the online real estate marketplace.

Q: Do you plan to monetize HomeHugg in the future, if so, how?

A: Yes, we plan on monetizing HomeHugg someday. How? There are many different ways we are kicking around to help us monetize HomeHugg. For the moment, we simply want home buyers to use the site and Realtors to promote their listings as much as possible. Also, at Incredible Agent we have many different products that we currently monetize to help real estate agents. In other words, we're not dependent upon HomeHugg being enormously profitable in order to keep HomeHugg up and running. Obviously profitability is our goal, but we already offer great products to the real estate community and therefore have no investors to answer to other than ourselves.

Q: Explain the process for a Realtor to include a listing in HomeHugg

A: This is a very simple process. All a Realtor needs to do is visit http://www.homehugg.com/huggme/ and copy the html for their favorite "hugg me" link. From there they simply add that line of code to each of the listings on their website. Once that's done they can click on the "hugg me" link on each of their listings and insert the basic home information onto HomeHugg. Now that the listing is on HomeHugg, the other community members will find the home, visit the Realtors website and decide whether they want to hugg the home or not. It's that simple. We hope to make the process even easier as we develop the site out of Beta. Especially for our Realtor friends.

Q: Do you have plans to accept bulk uploads of listings from brokers and large agent teams?

A: Yes, we will be developing a seperate set of tools just for brokers and Realtors. Our community is rooted in helping Realtors find ways to communicate with the home buyers and promote their listings. There will be several different ways for Realtors to highlight their skills and services to our members. Bulk uploads of their listings is only one of those ways.

Q: How does HomeHugg integrate with other Incredible Agent offerings?

A:Ultimately, Incredible Agent is about utilizing Real Estate technology to help agents get more leads and sell more homes. We offer everything from real estate websites and lead generation to blogging and training. We believe in order to be truly Incredible on the Internet you need to integrate all the tools and opportunities available into your real estate business. HomeHugg will be a part of our overall solution by helping our agents market themselves to home buyers, sell their clients listings faster and drive traffic to their websites to in turn get more clients.

Q: What do you think the reaction will be from the Realtor community regarding a consumer's ability to actively comment on a listing?

A: I've thought about this subject for a long time. We also run another website called http://www.IncredibleAgents.com (with an "S" at the end). It is our real estate agent review website that allows consumers to leave reviews for Realtors. We've noticed the majority of the reviews have been positive. Some of them are from agents directing their clients to the site and some have just found their agent and left a review. I firmly believe the same thing will go for home reviews as well. I realize it may be somewhat controversial for people to leave comments, but who says those comments have to be negative? As a Realtor selling a home, why can't you have the home owners go to HomeHugg and leave their comments about the home? What about neighbors or friends of the home owners who are familiar with the home and neighborhood? Why do we automatically assume that comments will always be negative? Why can't we be proactive and use positive comments to help sell the home?

The truth of the matter is that we have to think about ourselves differently when it comes to the Internet. We are only at the beginning stages of the "Recommendation Economy". It used to be that you could live anonymously and run your business with very few consequences to your actions. Today, anyone can say anything they want about you or the product you're selling and share that with the rest of the world. Think of it this way...Realtors and Homes are the equivalent of politicians and movie stars; the Internet is just one big paparazzi. They get to say and do anything they want. My point is that we've lost control over our Internet personas, so do everything you can to make sure you beat the papparazzi to the punch and manage your image appropriately. This goes for everything you care about, including your personal reputation, your business and the homes you're selling.

Ultimately, the real estate community may initially be bothered by leaving comments, but soon they'll begin to see it as an opportunity more than a problem.

Q: How many listings do you think it will take for you to consider HomeHugg a success?

A: That's actually a very tough question. To be honest, I haven't thought of it in terms of quantity yet. I guess the real success of HomeHugg will not be measured in how many listings are on the site, but rather in how many home buyers are using the community for their home search. It's very similar to the whole chicken or the egg question. What comes first, the listings or the home buyers? I believe if the buyers are there, the listings will come next. The interesting aspect of HomeHugg is that home buyers can add listings to the site as well as Realtors. It's the first site to allow anyone to add a home listing without actually being a Realtor or Broker. The whole premise behind HomeHugg is for it's members to add listings for other members to find, not to only search for listings on the market. Therefore I believe the number of active home buyers will be our measuring stick, not the home listings themselves.

Digg That Podcast

Digg, the venerable social news resource has recently added podcasts to their site. Now you can discuss and share podcasts and individual episodes within the podcasts. New to the podcasting section is something they have dubbed, "Active Digging". If you digg an episode within a podcast and don't come back to digg it again within two weeks, that digg gets subtracted from the count (it still remains in your profile). MLPodcast has added Digg to our ever expanding network of podcast distribution sites. Digg does a great job of parsing and presenting the feeds, although their video viewer is set to a larger size than the current standard size of a video podcast, stretching it out a bit. We will be releasing a new version of our viewer soon and along with it we will be generating a larger dimension video file, so this will no longer be an issue as we move forward with our upgrades. Here are some examples of "Dugg" podcasts.

Are You Digging It?

If you're a relatively new blogger, you're probably spending a great deal of time trying to figure out the best way to optimize your blog's traffic. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to submit your post to popular social news sites like Digg. What is a social news site? It's a user driven portal that allows viewers to vote on the quality of articles submitted. The more popular the article, the better exposure it gets within the site. Bloggers who regularly submit articles have experienced considerable increases in the amount of traffic their blogs receive. Digg is the first and most well known site of this kind, but there are several others you should be aware of as well. ProNet Advertising has a great "Beginners Guide To Digg" that will help you understand the landscape of social news and how can impact your blog.

Reddit: Recently acquired by CondeNet, Reddit is a no frills social news site that takes only seconds to sign up for.

RealEstateVoices: Realestate voices was recently launched to provide real estate specific social news services. It's a regular read for me, and I usually get so wrapped up in the articles I forget that I went there to submit one.

NewsVine: The most comprehensive site in the world of social news is NewsVine.Com. It categorizes storys very well and features top notch design and navigation.

Netscape: Netscape has shifted gears from a browser / web portal company to a social news site

"The Netscape portal has evolved from a portal that is programmed by us to a portal that is programmed by you — the audience! All of the stories on Netscape are submitted and voted on by users. The more votes and comments a story receives, the higher it is ranked in the list of Top Stories."

Stay tuned for my year end top ten list of things agents and brokers should be considering for 2007 when it comes to technology and the web. What do you think the list should include?