Tech Success Starts With Early Adopters

When I originally formed the concept of MLBroadcast, (originally MLPodcast), I wanted to be the first company to put a real estate listing in iTunes. I've been involved with listing enhancements and distribution for a long time, in fact, it dates back to 1995. My involvement with Quicktime technology sparked my keen interest in what was happening with audio podcasting. I knew it was a matter of time before Apple extended the DTD (document type definition) to include video content for podcasting.

I also knew my first clients would be Diane and Bruce Kink. I have worked closely with them over the years on several technology fronts and knew that they would embrace the concept of syndication and distribution immediately. After converting all of their listing photos to videos (click here to see the feed), we added the very first real estate video podcast to the iTunes podcast directory. That was in February of '06.

The press picked up on it quick and we ended up with local articles, national articles in Inman and B2B magazine and more. It was basically the birth of our company. I took the idea to my business partners, Jay Jackson, our CTO and Mark Basile, our Exec VP. We incorporated officially in June of '06 and have been going great guns since.

I wanted to take the opportunity on our company's 2nd anniversary to talk with Bruce Kink about early technology adoption and a little more. I think you'll enjoy listening to the podcast interview.

Thanks to Bruce and 100's of other early adopters, we are innovating in the space of the distribution of listing enhancements and the best is yet to come. I will be featuring interviews with more of our clients soon, coming up next, Connor MacIVOR of Paris911.com.

Click Here To Listen To The Podcast Interview With Bruce Kink

Click Here To Subscribe To Our Podcast In iTunes

MLPodcast™ Re-Named To MLBroadcast™, Launches New Services & Pricing

MLPodcast™,has re-named to MLBroadcast™. The branding change ushers in a an extension of their service offering beyond video podcasting to include the submission of client videos to popular sharing destinations YouTube and Yahoo Video.

In addition to the name change and additional broadcasting services, MLBroadcast is announcing a new lower pricing structure. Michael Price, Co-Founder and President was quoted as saying "Our new branding effort is something we've had in the works for a while now. Our service was designed to help real estate professionals take advantage of syndication technologies to distribute their listings and community content. Video sharing sites have matured into syndication destinations that provide not only additional traffic, but vast improvements in the ability for listings to be found in organic searches."

In addition to the name change and new service announcements, MLBroadcast is announcing a pricing change that lowers the cost of their video episode production to $29. The fee includes a professional music score and professional voice narration service. Videos are created from client provided photos. The previous price for the service including the voice over fee was $49.95. There is a one time set-up fee of $49. "Improvements in our production capability have allowed us to create a price point for our service that should make it a fairly easy decision for any real estate professional that wants to take advantage of the power of Web 2.0 and syndication", said Co-Founder and Executive Vice-President, Mark Basile.

Price also stated, "MLBroadcast brings together services that address the most important new issues in real estate technology today, Syndication, Video and Mobile delivery of content. Our goal is to solidify the traction we have in these areas and continue to improve a platform that provides maximum exposure to our real estate clients' content."

InmanTV Posts Connect Conference Videos

It's interesting how the web has changed the way business is conducted at so many levels. It used to be that when you attended a conference, if you wanted to have a copy of a session or a keynote, you had to pay big bucks for an audio or video tape whether you attended the event or not. You also had to wait for it be produced and mailed to you. Not so in the world of Web 2.0. As I mentioned in a previous post, bloggers report in real time on what's taking place during events. The innovations in digital video allow the capture of event sessions to be uploaded almost immediately after some of them take place. It's a great marketing vehicle for events like Inman and should go a long way toward helping them increase attendance at future events.

InmanTV is in the process of posting some great video, including the Welcome Address, a lively, but civil conversation with Zillow CEO Rich Barton and Dale Stinton, CEO of NAR and more. I thought the idea of taking questions from the audience via text messaging on his iPhone was a brilliant idea on Brad Inman's part. I only wonder if he had to change his phone number afterward (Maybe I'll text him and find out :)

Special thanks to Jamie Glen of Trulia for including MLPodcast.Com in his list of 50 tech innovators during the welcoming address presentation and more importantly, for saving the best for last. :)


Technorati Tags: connectsf mlpodcast NAR Zillow

MLPodcast Viewer 1.5 Released!

MLPodcast has released an all new web based viewer window for our client's video podcast content. Recent advances in display devices and software such as, iTunes, Apple T.V. and the upcoming release of the iPhone have changed the standard video display size for podcasting content. This change allows us to provide a web viewing experience about twice the size of our previous interface! Along with the viewer size change we're now displaying detailed listing information that was previously only embedded in the podcast feed data. A "View More Listings" link has been added that takes the viewer to the broadcast listing page in the MLPodcast video directory.

Beginning today, all podcast episodes will be produced in the new file size. We have many more features, improvements and distribution partnerships to announce soon as well. Stay tuned!

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.

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.

Nielsen: Web Eyeballs Have Deeper Pockets

Nielsen Analytics and Scarborough Research released a new study that reveals that younger and wealthier consumers are turning to the web and hand-held devices in large numbers to consume video content.

"Video on PCs and iPods actually is expanding the audience for broadcast and cable programs.."

Interesting was the 35 to 54 year old demographic, the sweet spot for Real Estate advertising.

"There is a clear generational divide in broadband adoption. The 18-34 demographic represents 34% of those with broadband connectivity in their household. Though consumers 55+ are less likely than their 18-34 or 35-54 year-old counterparts to be broadband customers, broadband penetration among this older age group will likely increase. The 35-54 demographic is currently most likely to have home broadband access (45 percent)."

The metrics we have been able to collect regarding users of Video Podcasting do not include the same deep demographic data, however, the anecdotal comparisons of traffic patterns and users of Podcasting would indicate very similar results to the Nielsen/Scarborough data. I did a presentation recently to a large broker office. The sales manager of this office is probably the most astute person in the industry that I know when it comes to understanding media, marketing and technology's impact on the future of the industry. He wanted to start year off with a very emphatic reminder that traditional media has taken a back seat to interactive and stressed the importance of moving dollars to where the eyeballs are. I think he got through to them.

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 Impact of RSS

Really Simple Syndication. I'm pretty sure most of you are tired of hearing about it. I'm also pretty sure that most of you haven't really given any thought to the impact it will have on the future of computing. While reading an article in Mary Jo Foley's Microsoft blog on ZDNet, it revealed a quote from an MS engineer that should put it in perspective.

"But over on Microsoft's Channel 9 site, Bruce Morgan, a software development manager on the IE team, who describes his job as "lead(ing) the Vista RSS platform, IE UX (user experience), and IE setup teams at Microsoft," confirmed that builds of the next version of IE do, indeed, exist."

When MS finally gets around to rolling out it's new operating system, you'll begin to get an idea of just how much this technology will mean to every application you use.

The early adopters that have started distributing their content and media via RSS feeds are already seeing a return on their investments. With the latest innovations in software development, the best is yet to come!

Another Apple Milestone - The iPhone is Here!

As expected, Apple unleashed it's latest major product announcement yesterday. The iPhone has arrived and it is nothing short of amazing.

"iPhone is a widescreen iPod with touch controls that lets you enjoy all your content — including music, audiobooks, videos, TV shows, and movies — on a beautiful 3.5-inch widescreen display. It also lets you sync your content from the iTunes library on your PC or Mac. And then you can access it all with just the touch of a finger."

This phone is beautiful and even operates on the Mac OSX operating system. To those who have never experienced OSX, this means stability and ease of use. It also means that full blown applications can be developed to work on it. Now you can see why Apple hasn't released a Tablet computer, they leapfrogged the mobile world with a device protected by a stack of patents. Touch Screen controls and Keyboard, Conference Calling, WiFi, Bluetooth, Broadband Internet access in a REAL Internet browser (Safari), random access "visual voice mail",free IMAP E-mail with in line photos from Yahoo, camera, photo management system, Video and more are packed into a design that only Apple could create. Your MLPodcast videos will look and sound awesome on this new device! It's slated for release in June '07 with Cingular. Knowing Apple, that could be any day between now and then.