Happy New Year!

Some readers here don't know I also have a small presence on Active Rain ("AR"), a real estate professional community and blog network with a devoted core of participants. Here's a review I published on AR:

I admit I'm not the most appropriate to do an Active Rain year in review because I didn't have enough time in my schedule to participate fully in the AR experience. I've always been very impressed with Active Rain's growth and spirit, and see it as the bellwether for the direction of real estate blogging. Pardons, I'm going to break the year end review rules because I couldn't think of how to write a retrospective . Instead, I'll go with my natural inclinations and try to scope out the future evolution of Active Rain in 2008.

The Active Rain business model

Active Rain has become the definitive national social network for the real estate community. It will continue to thrive on just the loyalty and participation of its growing member body. But social networking business models have yet to graduate beyond the concept of leveraging traffic to attract an advertising revenue base. The lack of a clear cut business model without fees, commissions and subscriptions forces Active Rain management to contemplate on how to make money. That first lesson was learned with Move.com's cancelled acquisition agreement with Active Rain.

To start off, here is a major fix that needs to be addressed by AR... it doesn't seem difficult to implement... it amounts to adding supplemental search functions like "Search this blog", Search across favorites", "Search across Associates" "Search across Groups" ... or even contracting with Google to supply this functionality - - -

Searchability

Search functionality should extend to individual AR blogs and groups of blogs, currently the only search seems to be across all AR blogs/comments, etc. For example, searching across Active Rain blog content for search terms like "move.com and active rain" yield way too many random blog posts from too many individuals. Similarly, any consumer searching for local content either at AR or Localism has the same problem for geographical or city query terms. The individual AR blog requires search functionality so that readers can refer to them more easily than through the generic and cumbersome AR search query.

(Note: even in this article, I find it much easier to provide links to articles at other blogs than go searching for an appropriate one within AR)

Once consumers and others in the AR network can find the blogs they want to track, the next step is to find ways for AR blogs to stand out and be referenceable.

Individualization

The imminent launch of AR outside blogs will help distinguish individual bloggers with their own domain names and the platform will presumably search and other advanced blogging functionality. Outside Blogs will enable AR bloggers to establish their own independent blogs on the AR platform they are comfortable using. This is a positive, natural step that will bring hosting revenue into AR.

Regionalization

As discussed above, consumers can't search easily through AR, ergo it's hard to find local content specific to their needs. AR is a national blog network that doesn't serve regional or local content well in a SINGLE CATEGORICAL WEBSITE (although I note that Localism is trying to do this with sites devoted to Counties and Cities). The power of local blog networks is on demonstration at the Orange County Register, where anyone, including real estate professionals, can set up a blog. Now it behooves all Active Rainers in Orange County to set up an OC Register blog and repurpose (cut and paste) their content in order to attract the Register's consumer audience. By doing so, do you see the paradox? It's likely much easier and efficient for an OC real estate blogger to capture OC eyeballs and leads at the OC Register than at Active Rain. In fact, as more online regional newspaper begin to develop blog networks, the Active Rain blog will eventually be relegated to serving as the "Base Blog" from which content is created and then distributed to other blogs in blog networks like the OC Register's. And frankly, its better to have your own blog under your own domain name to serve as this Base Blog. In the long run, Active Rain may serve as just one more niche blog network, one that serves the real estate professional community.

Is there another business model that will serve up an AR blogger's local content more directly in front of their targeted local audience? Brokerages are being left out of the picture in this escalating race to developing blog networks by mass media.  Can AR can partner with regional and local brokerages to automate the distribution of their own agents' AR blog content through their broker websites? This would work to get brokerages up and running with blog functionality (which, by the way, none seem to have right now) and also reinforce AR's relevancy to these brokers. If the partnership were structured as a traffic "trade" - blog content for brokers, exposure for agents - without fees, it would be a win-win for both sides, and AR would become more entrenched as a content distribution play.

Active Rain's differential advantage over other social networks

Nothing beats Active Rain as an online resource to gauge the state of the real estate industry as viewed by its practitioners. I thought activities like Project Blogger were successful experiments in establishing an in-depth, sometimes fanatical, dialogue on what makes real estate blogging work (despite the grumbling, which btw was kind of interesting). AR's hyper-participation is evident by massive comment streams... this list of the top 20 all time "active" posts all have over 270 comments. Comment streams have become an integral part of the mass social media, the public has gotten used to it by contributing to sites like USA Today and other popular blogs. For me, I find it nearly impossible to keep up with comment streams and still have a job . Bravo to those who do and are community leaders for their effort.

Generic social networks like LinkedIn don't support the deep community spirit exhibited by AR. Eventually, Web 2.0 media/social networks will evolve to cater to professional communities on a B2B paradigm... sort of like LinkedIn for industries. When this happens, AR will be positioned correctly as the real estate professional network, and may be acquired for its leadership position.

Localism is a good concept to create a product separate from AR with the express mission of connecting real estate professional with consumer. Again, in execution, Localism needs better search functionality and focused local/regional coverage to be more effective in reaching consumers. Maybe it's Localism that should be positioned as the content distribution play for brokerages as detailed above. 

One more random observation: What % of real estate professionals will blog?

I joined Active Rain via referral by Teresa Boardman back on August 24, 2006. During that week between August 20-26, 499 other Rainers registered, and of these 499:

22.6% of Active Rain registrants activated a blog
4.8% of Active Rain registrants achieved the 10,000 point level

Of course, it's a small sample, but it seems like about 5% of real estate professionals who do try to blog will eventually adopt blogging.

Thanks to Jennifer Fivelsdal and Colleen Kulikowski for coordinating the Year in Review. I'm honored to be a part of the group.