The Future of Real Estate Blogging Platforms
Posted by Pat Kitano at 2/18/2009 11:30 PM 
Categories: social networking, New Business Models, Blog networks, Blogging, Social Media
Categories: social networking, New Business Models, Blog networks, Blogging, Social Media
With the blog now being touted as the new agent website, a newbie to the world of Real Estate 2.0 is confronted with a variety of options to start their blog.
Active Rain's policy change to charge new members $29 for a public blog will stratify the burgeoning agent blog space into three spheres:
1) Blogging "plug & play" platforms Active Rain and HomeGain charge agents for a blog with the value proposition of built in SEO, established traffic, and a mature community.
2) Blogging platforms customizing the Wordpress platform for real estate needs and agent ease of use charge about the same monthly fee as Active Rain and HomeGain, include companies like Tomato, Realivent, Ubertor and Incredible Agent.
3) Free blogging platforms are offered by real estate sites to engage their agent clients. Bloodhound and WannaNetwork offer Wordpress blogs free, which is the most flexible of the free blog alternatives.
Here's my advice:
It's best to get on any blog with your own domain name - all mentioned above allow you to do this. You basically need a central repository for marketing yourself and the blog, not a static website, will do this best going forward.
Here's the future of blogging platforms:
Right now all the blog networks above are essentially separate entities. The future of "blogging" is content syndication where your content - a blog article, a Twitter, a conversation on Facebook or Friendfeed, a newspaper article you bookmarked - is broadcast across multiple places. Eventually the Active Rains, Trulias and HomeGains will start incorporating Facebook/Friendfeed features where the conversations that now happen in places like Trulia Voices can migrate outward across various other platforms, including Facebook itself. These sites will welcome syndication because conversations happening outside their domain (as in Facebook) will draw more consumer traffic back to their sites.
"Conversations need to be heard"
Lesser trafficked sites like Realseekr and Zolve won't grow to be as massive as Active Rain because their current offering is essentially the same as the rest of the blogging platforms. Their best hope for growth is to understand this paradigm shift towards "ubiquitous" conversation, and re-create these conversations within "hybrid blog" platforms by including micro-blogging feeds like Twitter and Facebook, and embracing Facebook Connect (among others) to integrate their networks with Facebook. Then, these networks will no longer exist as isolated social network entities where its walled in members only talk with each other (and eventually leave because they want their conversation heard on a more massive platform that does adopt syndication features).
Thanks Pat for a great overview. The post simplifies nicely what is a complicated, ever evolving field. For the real estate space I'm looking out for the best examples of platform making content available vertically by neighborhood, city, region, country, continent.
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Well thought out. Any agent that is taking time to blog is creating valuable content that should enhance their connections with current and potential prospects. The creation of the content itself is time consuming enough -- to have to go and re-direct and re-distribute the content works is too much to ask. Interoperability is the key to your "Network Generation is the New Lead Generation" concept. There is no one point of audience consolidation; in fact, the audience is fragmenting around disparate content elements. Agents need the different platforms to have the same seamless link as Twitter and Facebook, or FriendFeed, for instance. Of course, the issue is how any platform then makes money for distributing the content....
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Thanks for the article, Pat. We are definitely paying attention to ways technology can enhance and syndicate discussions across several different high traffic and targeted platforms.
It is exciting to watch how this Web2.0 evolution in our industry is creating ways for our conversations and networks to follow us between our phones, blogs, and preferred social media outlets.
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Thanks Claudia, Dan, Mark,
I'm pleased to see others who can envision what's literally just right around the corner. 99% of the real estate industry's groupthink is focusing on SEO and blogging as "internet marketing du jour". Well, first, blogging and social media take care of SEO organically, and second, having a blog will be the foundation of a real estate agent's marketing message but it will only be a component of a complete online marketing strategy. An aside, but the future real estate blog may not be the article laden blog we're used to.
I would advise that the optimal strategy going forward to take advantage of the new "distributive" marketing platforms is to get on the major social networks that will facilitate broadcasting your message - Active Rain, Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, LinkedIn - and bookmarking / information sharing platforms like Google Reader, Delicious, and Digg.
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Pat-
No one lays these deals out better than you.
But do you agree that the point of all the above sites are to point a reader into a sales funnel? OR is the point just to converse with the end result somehow ending up in referral from a network "friend"? At the end of the day how does the commission happen in all this?
Also the group think I believe you are alluding to is a misguided idea of SEO.
SEO implies traffic which is supposed to be about leads. But it is no guarantee of such. A Number one position in Google and 50 cents will get you a cup of coffee. (not at Starbucks though)It might create traffic. It might not. If it gets one traffic, it will produce leads depending on the visitors search query and the conversion elements on the site.
However, your statement that SEO is taken care of organically through blogs and social media doesn't seem complete to me. I am not sure what you mean. That build an optimized blog and you are good to go and traffic it will come? Tweet and they will come? Back to the 1990's myth with the original hype again, "build it and they will come?"
SEO a site and that does not mean anything for positions unless the site has inbound links. Which does not come with the free copy of wordpress.org or wordpress.com unfortunately or the offer AR has put out there.
Personally as a guy who produces thousands of visitors every month to my own and client websites may I object to that notion?If that is not what you meant please help me understand your point and what I am missing.
I suppose the disconnect for me also is the hype (and it is hype if it does not produce an ROI) around this new media and that it is only about conversations. I get the conversations but that is like saying that leads are about SEO. We are drawing fuzzy implications that unless skillfully executed are simply not so.
In my mind it is about thought leadership. Building tribes if I may further that meme.Isn't the conversation the path to creating the marketplace authority and personality so that the prospect raises their hand to want to get more of what you got?
What is suspiciously missing in any of the discussions in the new media is the path to Return on Investment. It has been missing since day one back in the 90's especially in real estate.
But the order taking days are over in real estate and just showing up will not be enough. Sure an occasional referral may come ones way. But if the effort to reach a continuity is harder online than off, the agent is better off door knocking, calling on expireds, or networking old school, etc. At least its more fun.
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Tim, I always enjoy our conversations, off and online...
From a pragmatic "I'm a real estate agent conversing on the social media in order to cultivate clients" perspective, the function of the conversation is to point the prospect to the goal - nowadays it's a blog that is the container of an agent's marketing. Becoming "friends" is actually the goal, and it's far more easier to make friends with social media applications than ever before.
Pardons, I tend to dismiss "old school" SEO, where the objective was to fortify a static website so that it placed highly on search engines. What I presumptiously meant was that agent participating in blogs and social media will gradually gain SEO presence naturally without doing anything SEO technical. Also, I believe an agent building the social network around him/her will be far more effective in cultivating leads from their second degree of separations than search engine referrals that are predominantly irrelevant. However, I know a SE optimized site will provide different sources of "leads" and is complementary to the social media. I know your SEO solutions / system work Tim so take my remarks as off the cuff.
If conversations are widely distributed as I've posited, they become components of personal branding, i.e. "I'm always reading what Guy Kawasaki is saying everywhere". Two years ago, conversations were only read on the blogs themselves and it took a lot of time to develop a presence in front of a target audience (for an agent, that's their community). Social networking in the community combined with the blog (and SEO) as the marketing foundation is a far better way to network.
Physical networking? Cold calling? No fun at all. I hardly think that's efficient when all an agent really needs to do now is to develop an online network of friends and referrers (Facebook is adding 480,000 new users per day, so it's past a tipping point with consumers, especially in this recession where career networking becomes a given). Aren't referrals the most effective closing tool?
And yes, these online conversations you deride can be very vapid!
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Pat,
Great articles as usual bro. I see video syndication becoming more relevant than boring blogs. Text has become less exciting because of everything video delivers and transfers Online. You agree? Video syndication resources like http://www.TubeMogul and http://www.TrafficGeyser are becoming more popular. Also with companies and services like http://Mogulus.com allowing mobile live streaming and eventually mobile video syndication, more of the Web is going to be moving away from text. I'm not saying it will happen overnight, but in terms of SEO; you can upload a video to YouTube and put your target keyword phrase in the title and description 3 times. If you use http://www.WordTracker.com or even http://www.google.com/sktool/# to find a keyword that isn't too competitive, you'll be on the FIRST page of Google within hours after posting on YouTube. All of this is showing us that video searches are becoming more popular simply using text for small descriptions for relativity to the search query. Photos are already being searched based on image tags too. My point being is this. Video syndication is more the future of blogs in my opinion.
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I agree that blogging is huge. No doubt about it. While the platforms you mention do allow you to point your own domain there (and this IS an essential thing) I still recommend to all my clients that building on your own host and maintaining a property all your own is vital for professionalism and true control. I just don't see the ultimate benefit of using a platform like ActiveRain as anything other than a satellite in your social network. If you're going to pour this much effort into a piece like this, make a place that's your own that you can fully control and own.
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