Union Street MediaReal Estate and Ecommerce Web Design

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.”

Alright. We’ve done the broad-stroke overview of website optimization. We’ve established some objectives. We took a side-road to learn a bit about picking something to measure on our website. Now it’s time to benchmark.

Why Benchmark?

The goal of a benchmark study is to figure out how your site is performing before you do anything at all. If done well, it should give you a good base from which to try and test different site changes (optimizations, hopefully). So you’re going to get two things from your benchmark study:

• A ruler by which to measure performance of your website (so you know if that big increase really is great or if it’s pretty typical)
• Some general insight into the patterns of use on your site (what pages are people going to often? what search terms are they using to find your site? Are they converting from search terms? How many visits to your site is typical? Whatever KPIs you are using).

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Another map post.  Today it’s foreclosures, via HotPads.com.

A little run-down in the week’s runout, in case you missed it all:

• Trulia does Google Street View
• Flickr does Video
• My personal pic for Bad MLS Photo of the Week
• Catfight at the Dogpound yields lessons in civility and philosophy
• How-to on Hashtags

Long rumored and now live. The example above is from Dunstan Orchard. A few quick tidbits:

• 90 Second time limit. May sound confining, but frankly, it will probably save us all from ourselves.
• 150MB per video file.
• Pro members only (a pro account is insanely inexpensive).

All in all it looks pretty good.

I’ve long loved Flickr for it’s easy to use interface (and plugins that hook right into my iPhoto) and the great way of sharing photos online and putting them in blogs etc.

Now that same experience is translating over to short video clips. I also like the exceptionally clean interface of the video player itself: it’s all about the image and not at all about the play button. Very cool.

Do you use Flickr? How might you use this tool?

You’ve read the Twitter resources page. Or maybe your Twitter-fu is already rocking the free world: you’re tweeting left and you’re tweeing right. You’re following people who post insightful-tweets. You’re looking for the next thing to do with this whole micro-blogging thought-exchange.

Enter: Hashtags.

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