Union Street MediaReal Estate and Ecommerce Web Design

Scott Nellé, one of our developers, just shot this over to me via Adium. It just goes to show that the best laid plans…

Enjoy.

Google Street View: 0

Plastic Bag: 1

Some of you may know that my Mother, Peggy Smith, is one of our clients. She recently redesigned her site and purchased the software upgrade with email notification. Over dinner one evening she mentioned she was sending her buyers new listings through the MLS web site rather than her own. It occurred to me that she could use her site’s own email notification software and benefit from the built-in branding it provides.

I then realized she’s probably not alone; the user registration is, after all, geared towards the site visitor. However, it could just as easily be used to the agent’s advantage for new leads that come from other sources.

My Advice:

When you get a new lead, ask for the appropriate search criteria and an email address. That is all you need to create a new account!
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A lot of useful demographic info on the use of mobile phones by Americans. Including insight along ethnicity, age and socio-economic factors.

Here’s the chart on what sort of data services people are using:

One of the insightful bits of sleuthing our friends at the Pew Research Center did was to examine “internet usage away from home or work.” They asked both two questions: the first was a “how often do you” style question and then the remaining was a more specific “in the past 12 months, have you” style question. Combining these results they discovered “that nearly two-thirds (64%) of internet users have gone online away from home or work, which could include wired access at libraries or in hotel rooms.”

They also asked about specific technologies used away from home: PDAs, wireless laptops, cell phones to tease out how many used wireless technology (as opposed to logging into a public terminal at a library, for example). Here’s what they come up with (emphasis mine): “41% of all Americans who have logged on wirelessly away from home” have done so with a PDA, wireless laptop or cell phone.

What sort of actions could you take to improve your business based on this information?

[Please note, this post may continue to grow in length as the conversation spreads and takes shape. I apologize if I miss any important bits of it. Also, if you want your certificate, the sooner you take the exams the better, because as the conversation grows, so will the coursework. ]

As I recently let loose in Twitter, there’s an entire education to be had in the comment thread on Galen Ward’s post about Trulia and their linking policy over at the Bloodhound Blog. This post was created to back up that statement. Consider this a pivot-table applied to qualitative data.

I’ve prepared a syllabus for you. Please note that not all of the answers to the exam questions will be found directly in the comment threads, but enough clues for you to determine the majority of the answers are present. Some questions (particularly in the second semester) will require creative thinking and problem solving extending beyond the comment thread on the Ward’s post. Outside resources are encouraged in all semesters.

• The first semester is a practical one, with hands-on worthwhile info on which you may be able to act. There are a few though-pieces in there, but it is primarily a “lab” class.
• The second semester is more of a seminar where you examine a controversial issue not for it’s controversy but for its structure.
• A laid back summer session has been assigned as well.

Enjoy. And if you post your answers to the exams publicly, let me know so I can send you a certificate of some sort.

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Just some small admin stuff, but I moved the Site Optimization Series table of contents to a page. You’ll now be able to access those posts directly from the sidebar.

There has recently been some chatter about long-tail-focused blogging, especially in that little corner of the blogosphere occupied by your local-loving real estate bloggers. And since I can’t help but wade into something that could possibly be measured I bring you this post.

What is the Long Tail anyway?

The Long Tail as a marketing theory was established by Wired editor Chris Anderson back in 2004 and or Clay Shirky in 2003. Wikipedia tells us that the Long Tail is used:

“to describe the niche strategy of certain business such as Amazon.com or Netflix. The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or “non-hit” items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail.”

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The HTML that will allowed on Craigslist should be enough to make a nice layout. You get images, tables (as much as I abhor table-based web development), headers and the font tag. Sure it’s like we’re rolling back the clock to 1999. But it won’t be too difficult to make attractive ads with the tags allowed.

I would consider the outcry to be pretty much a false alarm (let me know if I’m wrong here). But it still provided a great opportunity to listen to customers and hear what they think about real estate marketing efforts.

I didn’t get a chance to give a weekly overview of activity on the RE.web last week so I’ll do a quick rundown. Lots of deep thoughts were floating out there last week, the ripples are still spreading on some of them.

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I heard via an Inman Community posting that the popular classifieds-style site Craigslist has announced its intention to limit the use of HTML. An exceptionally heated forum resulted (warning, much of the language used in the posts lacks sophistication and subtlety).

I, personally, don’t have a problem with HTML in Craigslist, but some folks clearly do.

Wading through those forum posts yields some insight into the thinking of Craigslist’s social marketplace. I’ve filtered through a few, provided here to be used as a direction of Voice of the Customer research for anyone using Craigslist for marketing (I have added the emphasis and corrected spelling). Notice in particular which needs are being met or not met by HTML in Craigslist.

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The Pew Internet & American Life Project did a study earlier this year about usage of online video. The total percentage of people surveyed who had ever interacted with a video-sharing site was 48%. But even more intriguing is this:

15% of respondents said they had used a video-sharing site “yesterday” — the day before they were contacted for our survey. A year ago, 8% had visited such a site “yesterday.”

This little tidbit is a measure of recency, how often people come into contact with video online. So about twice as many people are making significant use of online video content than the previous year. Recency is a good thing to watch because it eliminates the individuals who tried it out and then never used it again. Recency shows us what is actually being used.

The report includes a lot of demographic data about video users as well. You can see it at  “Online Video Audience Surges.”