Localization Available To Large Zillow Advertisers

Zillow announces a new toolset available to large advertisers that will allow for the ability to pinpoint different consumer segments often referred to in the advertising worlds as psychographics. The new program is called HomeDirect and according to the press release it's a patent pending process, something that should make the VC's very happy.

National advertisers are clamoring for this type of product for their online initiatives to improve their ROI's. The service is broken down into 4 categories:

-- Home and Geographic Targeting: Advertisers can target their online ads to visitors of a specific home's page on Zillow, much like an offline direct mail campaign. Advertisers can specify addresses, streets or ZIP codes.

-- Zestimate Value Targeting: Knowing the Zestimate™ values of individual homes, advertisers can choose to show their ads to specific home-value bands, by individual home or by neighborhood.

-- Move Predictor: Because of Zillow's extensive data on homes for salhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gife and traffic activity around a home's page views, Zillow can predict whether a household may be moving. This allows advertisers such as cable providers, financial institutions or home improvement stores to reach homeowners before purchase decisions around the move are made.

-- Psychographic Clusters: Advertisers can specify for their creative to be shown to households composed of any of the 65 psychographic clusters defined by the U.S. Census data, such as suburban households with children or high-income urban singles.

Localization is sort of the holy grail these days for advertisers. As advertisers continually try to move beyond keywords and banners, you'll see more and more efforts like this. It should be very interesting to see how unique the patent filing is and if it has the promise to become a licensing bonanza for Zillow. When I have time I will jump over to the USPTO (patent and trade office) site and give it a once over. If you're familiar with the patent filing, please comment on it here.

Featured Real Estate Blog

I've decided to start featuring what I think are good examples of good Realtor® Blogs. Great local content is the primary feature that I believe sets the standard. My first feature is The Harper Team, a Keller Williams team in Danville, CA. Here are 3 things that set this blog apart from the pack:

1. Local content that is "narrowcasted" to a specific audience. This establishes credibility and experience.
2. Clean, easy to navigate design. The blog isn't cluttered by useless elements and they have done an excellent job of integrating the design into the feed links. I wish we had time to re-design our blog to integrate with our brand better, which brings me to number:
3. Brand integration. This site blends into the overall web presence of The Harper Team. They have done an excellent job of delivering relevant blogging content without self-promotion, however, in the the likely event that someone is a prospect, they are only a click away from the content they need.

Pat Kitano of Transparent RE is working with John Harper to begin training their counterparts on the world of Real Estate blogging. I think they will be very capable educators indeed. If you're a Realtor® struggling with your blogging efforts, the Harper Team blog is a shining example of what to strive for.

Another Way to Get "Local" With Your Blog

Brought to you by the folks behind the Center for Citizen Media is Placeblogger. A new social network designed to bring together local focused blogging content at "the sidewalk level"

"Placeblogs are sometimes called "hyperlocal sites" because some of them focus on news events and items that cover a particular neighborhood in great detail -- and in particular, places that might be too physically small or sparsely populated to attract much traditional media coverage. Because of this, many people have associated them with the term "citizen journalism," or journalism done by non-journalists."

There is a submission category for Real Estate. I would urge any real estate pro with a blog to participate and take a look at the networking opportunities that exist in the site. Any chance you have to localize your blog traffic will improve your results tremendously.