Harness The Power of Neighborhood Knowledge
Brian Boero of 1000WattConsulting recently published a post entitled Online real estate's final frontier: The neighborhood. As the words in the comment box kept flowing I realized perhaps the comment was better suited to a full post. I recommend reading his post before completing this one, it's dead on.
I have addressed on many occasions the need for brokers and agents to embrace the fact that their roles as advertisers and marketers now include that of producers and publishers. There are no real barriers to entry regarding resources and knowledge to adapt to the shift in today's marketing landscape. It just requires a commitment. The successful RE professionals of the future will stop over thinking the web and realize that consumers primarily want 3 things when they are engaged in a new media experience.
It is impossible to deliver the type of neighborhood content that a consumer truly desires without having in depth, feet on the street intelligence gathering and the experience necessary to craft and present community content.
David Gibbons and I discussed this concept in a recent podcast interview. Consumers want to experience your market knowledge. They want your unique perspective on community and they realize that they are paying for that consultative service. A semantic web is going to take care of pulling together all of the dry data points when it comes to community. More interestingly though, semantic technology is going to result in an uncanny ability to place relevance on generated content that lives in a cloud outside of tax data and crime stats.
The web has changed the profile of the consuming public. This change is resulting in an empowered consumer seeking transparency and holding a completely different set of expectation levels. If you see that as an opportunity, not an obstacle, you'll be joining a small network of folks that will emerge as the architects of new and profitable business models. If you A. Avoid Over Thinking and B. Wrap your mind around the concept of content production and publishing as opposed to merely advertising and that old path of least resistance, "getting back to basics":, you can enjoy driving from the Catbird seat with some of the RE.net folks that can attribute most of their business to these type of efforts.
We have many clients that have created really great neighborhood tours that are not only great enhancements to blogs, listing presentations and web sites, they are powerful tools for creating exposure to agent and broker brands through search engine optimization. Below is a screen shot that shows the power of Hyper Local community content.
A First American Title Fastbroadcasting client who is primarily a buyer's agent asked her rep how she could take advantage of Video Podcasting without any listings. She recommended that the agent (Patti Lacy, Coldwell Banker United) go out and take a few shots of her farm area and build a community tour. She went a little wide with it by keeping it focused on Katy and West Houston, but the results are nothing short of amazing. Her chosen keyphrase of "Katy West Houston Real Estate" show up as number 1 and number 7 placements in Google.
In selecting a real estate professional, consumers want the confidence that your knowledge of community will help them make one of the toughest decisions to one of the most difficult questions of life: Where do I raise my family? Do you know the educators in the area? Which day care is the best suited to a growing family? Do you know as much about the farmer's market as you do about the local big box grocers? In my mind this is where the rubber meets the road in establishing the value of your services. There are many Web 2.0 tools are perfectly suited to your ability to market that gray matter database of valuable information.
Check out some of the community content our clients are syndicating across the web and start to think of ways you can harness the power of community in your marketing efforts to set yourself apart from the pack. If you would like some tips on the best way to use our service to accomplish this, please email me directly (mprice AT mlbroadcast dot com, I have some great ideas and I'm in the mood to dispense some free consultation!
I have addressed on many occasions the need for brokers and agents to embrace the fact that their roles as advertisers and marketers now include that of producers and publishers. There are no real barriers to entry regarding resources and knowledge to adapt to the shift in today's marketing landscape. It just requires a commitment. The successful RE professionals of the future will stop over thinking the web and realize that consumers primarily want 3 things when they are engaged in a new media experience.
- Listings with all of the relevant and useful enhancements that come with them.
- The value of their current property
- Neighborhood Information.
It is impossible to deliver the type of neighborhood content that a consumer truly desires without having in depth, feet on the street intelligence gathering and the experience necessary to craft and present community content.
David Gibbons and I discussed this concept in a recent podcast interview. Consumers want to experience your market knowledge. They want your unique perspective on community and they realize that they are paying for that consultative service. A semantic web is going to take care of pulling together all of the dry data points when it comes to community. More interestingly though, semantic technology is going to result in an uncanny ability to place relevance on generated content that lives in a cloud outside of tax data and crime stats.
The RE professional that starts to seed every corner of that cloud with unique, hyper local content will be glad they did.If a "relationship map" is going to be delivered with objects of information, you want some of those objects to be yours. Look at Google's "universal search" and the impact it has on my point. Every document, every audio file, every video you produce on neighborhood content or listings is now a part of search. A highly relevant link to a podcast in iTunes will be just as likely to show up as a web site, in fact that is already starting to happen in many cases. A PDF brochure that has been properly structured is just as "searchable" as a static HTML web document. The same goes for a Flickr database of photos or a channel of videos in Yahoo video. By producing and publishing high quality, relevant content, you are greatly increasing your opportunity to gain that all important "top of mind" awareness with prospects at every stage of the process, including very early stage consumers that may not enter into a transaction for years to come. When they do, you will own that little piece of gray matter that says, let's call "Ima Realtor", I've been following her community content and blogs for years. Don't just take my word for it, ask Teresa Boardman, Dru Bloomfield or Jay Thompson how many of their clients started off merely as blog viewers or casual commenters. Ask Connor MacIVOR about the almost immediate impact his MLBroadcast feed had on his search exposure. You're bound to find out more than you ever wanted to know about the impact that good "hyper local" content has on your efforts.
The web has changed the profile of the consuming public. This change is resulting in an empowered consumer seeking transparency and holding a completely different set of expectation levels. If you see that as an opportunity, not an obstacle, you'll be joining a small network of folks that will emerge as the architects of new and profitable business models. If you A. Avoid Over Thinking and B. Wrap your mind around the concept of content production and publishing as opposed to merely advertising and that old path of least resistance, "getting back to basics":, you can enjoy driving from the Catbird seat with some of the RE.net folks that can attribute most of their business to these type of efforts.
We have many clients that have created really great neighborhood tours that are not only great enhancements to blogs, listing presentations and web sites, they are powerful tools for creating exposure to agent and broker brands through search engine optimization. Below is a screen shot that shows the power of Hyper Local community content.
A First American Title Fastbroadcasting client who is primarily a buyer's agent asked her rep how she could take advantage of Video Podcasting without any listings. She recommended that the agent (Patti Lacy, Coldwell Banker United) go out and take a few shots of her farm area and build a community tour. She went a little wide with it by keeping it focused on Katy and West Houston, but the results are nothing short of amazing. Her chosen keyphrase of "Katy West Houston Real Estate" show up as number 1 and number 7 placements in Google.
In selecting a real estate professional, consumers want the confidence that your knowledge of community will help them make one of the toughest decisions to one of the most difficult questions of life: Where do I raise my family? Do you know the educators in the area? Which day care is the best suited to a growing family? Do you know as much about the farmer's market as you do about the local big box grocers? In my mind this is where the rubber meets the road in establishing the value of your services. There are many Web 2.0 tools are perfectly suited to your ability to market that gray matter database of valuable information.Check out some of the community content our clients are syndicating across the web and start to think of ways you can harness the power of community in your marketing efforts to set yourself apart from the pack. If you would like some tips on the best way to use our service to accomplish this, please email me directly (mprice AT mlbroadcast dot com, I have some great ideas and I'm in the mood to dispense some free consultation!
Labels: community, hyper local, neighborhoods, real estate marketing
posted by Mike Price at 1:22 PM
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