Slideshow - Website 2.0 - Creating the Conversational Web
Posted by Pat Kitano at 9/16/2008 8:58 PM 
Categories: Blog networks, New Business Models, social networking, Lead Generation, Social Media
Categories: Blog networks, New Business Models, social networking, Lead Generation, Social Media
Websites as brochureware aren't credible as society embraces social media to validate brands, products and services. The real estate industry is quite unique among verticals in that its members have embraced facets of the social media, particularly blogging, for marketing purposes.
At BlogWorld / REBlogWorld starting this Friday, we'll be discussing a new paradigm for real estate brokerage sites that leverages the social media to elevate agents' online presence... without blogging:
That's pretty cool. I wish I could make the conference. Maybe next time. I really enjoy your reading your posts.
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Tx! I wish Hawaii had a conference we can attend!
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I do too! Hard to get away when your running real estate company and raising seven children. Not a bad place to be stuck
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The FIABCI conference is in Hawaii in October - no excuse needed to go now
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Mahalo Tony!
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Great slidedeck as usual, Pat.
I'm interested in your thoughts as to maintaining quality of the conversational website. Although our company has built a wide variety of conversational and socialized widgets, we often struggle with the implementation end of the process.
As the ease and volume of the conversation grows using these tools, so too can the noise in the form of trolls, spam, etc. The more conversation, the more administrative investment can be required to control the noise. Sites from USENET to ActiveRain has experienced this. Newspapers and universities have staff members, interns, or students to look out for such noise but what does the small brokerage do that is already "pedalling as fast as they can" in this economy?
Many advocates of the conversational approach offer up community policing as an inexpensive solution but 1) flagging requires a community mature enough to have people sufficiently "invested" to be willing to commit to identifying such content and 2) the community has to be willing to be participate and be policed. The worst case, USENET, is an example of a community that self destructed because the members themselves were unwilling or unable to police its own.
I dont yet have a complete answer as we are still trying to trying to sort this out ourselves. Thoughts?
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Tony, you bring up the community management responsibility question. Two possible solutions: 1) Keep the community closed by inviting, selecting or vetting its participants, 2) Like social media celebrities Seth Godin and Charlene Li, refuse comments and position the blog as a pulpit. Frankly, I see the value of doing this to maintain quality.
I believe that social networks with reader value will maintain a consistent quality standard, the same as blogs. Notice there is a new shift in reader attitude within the social media that generally discounts irrelevant or superfluous content in base constructs like blogs (unless your blog is based on superfluous content). The conversations and other banter has shifted to Twitter, Seesmic, Disqus, etc.
I believe the same philosophy to content management can be maintained on a social network... just don't let the dogs out!
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Completely agree. I've gone from my current officesearchtoronto.com static website (brochure) to a wordpress blog and have already noticed a increase in traffic. Being able to communicate one on one with your customer, priceless!
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Glad to hear the testimonial... it seems like a no-brainer to use the social media for consumer marketing purposes.
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