Why Real Time Breaking News and Blogging are Complementary
Real estate blogging has been a boon to consumers by describing the local housing markets in far greater detail than any news organization. The challenge in blogging has been in consistently maintaining market commentary with a journalistic discipline. I've been discussing the "breaking news" paradigm as the most time efficient way for blocs of agents, whether within a brokerage company or created via social networks, to maintain "ticker tape" market commentary to complement blogging. We're moving into the age of the "Real Time" Web.
Robert Scoble points out the problems associated with the compatibility of blogs and the Real Time Web:
The point is both blogging and micro-blogging have different communication purposes, but adds "dimension" to the writer:The first time I saw the real-time web, I saw it when my tweets showed up on Twitter search and friendfeed within minutes. Sometimes within seconds. Now, imagine a world where everything worked like that. That’s the real-time web.
The problem is that our blogs don’t participate in the real-time web. They publish via RSS. RSS is not real time. RSS only publishes when a service like Google Reader asks for it. It has no way to wave its hand and tell your reader “hey, there’s something new here for you to get.” So, most RSS aggregators just visit on a regular basis, looking every few minutes to see whether something new has shown up.
For blogs that’s just fine. After all, most blogs take a few minutes to a few hours to write and it won’t kill you if you don’t read my words here for 20 minutes or longer.
But there’s a new expectation that we’re having thanks to Twitter. We want everything now in real time. I want to see everything that was published now and respond to it now and I want to have conversations about all that in real time
- Blogging provides in-depth research, analysis and demonstrates domain expertise.
- Micro-blogging alerts and validates analysis, and demonstrates commitment to market commentary.
- Both enable conversations to happen.
Thanks Pat
I think you are right.
Marketing sources can and should be complimentary.
Too often marketing advice gets mired in "either or" arguments
For example use social media or pay per click or HomeGain
Interesting to see that within social media the blog vs twitter debate has also sprung up.
I generally take the view that one should use as many marketing methods that work and only limit the sources that don't pay off based on time or money spent.
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Thanks Louis, it's always a nice surprise to hear confirmation from you. I know you're pioneering new marketing methodology within HomeGain's products, and that will inevitably benefit your client base.
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That was very informative. Thank you!
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We are definitely moving closer to real time communication with micro blogging. Texting, Twittering etc, is really a conversation, or for marketers, a continuous touching of potential clients. Works for many, but others won't want to mess with it and will go for more conventional means of reaching potential clients, and conventional lead generation techniques.
I find a lot of urls I go to from my Twitter feed to be fascinating, but I don't go to Twitter to do research directly.
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Some newspapers have a little headlines feed and you can click on it to get the full article. I look at micro-blogging and blogging the same way.
On a related note, too much information can be harmful. Studies in picture recognition show that the longer subjects are exposed to an unclear picture, the longer it will take them to recognize what it is. This may be due to our brains clumping minor changes into previously held possibilities or unrecognizable pictures. (here's one link I found via Google: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/psych-intel/art5.html)
Taleb, in his book the Black Swan, described one experiment as follows: there are two groups looking at a blurred picture of a fire hydrant. The picture is unblurred over a series of n steps. Group 1 sees the picture unblur over each step. Group 2 sees it unblur every other step (so Group 2 will see Group 1's 2nd, 4th, 6th... nth picture... half of the number of the total steps). The interesting thing was that Group 2 recognized the fire hydrant at a lower level of unblur than Group 1. (I forget the exact number, but for example Group 2 could recognize the picture by the 6th level of unblur, while Group 1 might only recognize it by the 10th.)
Taking this concept over to analysis of news and markets, it may be that the minor details and updates given by micro-blogs or news updates only blur the big picture.
Again, paraphrasing Taleb, a person who reads a weekly review magazine might have just as much, if not clearer, knowledge of the world or of an industry as the person reading a daily paper, and probably more than one reading minute by minute updates.
There are two other parts to this: 1) the person reading the weekly is much less likely to be overconfident in his predicting abilities 2) the person reading the weekly has a lot more time
Not that I wouldn't check up on a stock before selling or follow something I loved with interest, but thought this was an interesting point to make on micro-blogging and high freq updates.
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I appreciate your insight here. Micro-blogging is being embraced by broadcast media as a viral broadcasting/content distribution media. If and when Twitter does become mainstream, it may change rules about how timely information can change consumer decisions, similar in scope to how the internet changes commerce.
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Great post. I like how you differentiated the blogging vs. microblogging concept.
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Informative! Blogging has been a great addition to our communicative channels with the public and I'm sure micr-blogging will be equally effective as long as the "selling bent" stays out of the picture.
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