Archive for February, 2010
Dan Levitan, who needs no introduction to many of our readers, recently offered a blog post exploring a question so many of us ask. “If there is no white knight out there ready to rescue a homebuilder, why is the industry so slow to adapt.” Specifically Levitan highlights three questions on so many of our minds:
Good questions, ones Levitan and many others are working on solving. As always, we’re interested in your thoughts and experiences. Let us know!
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Quick note here to thank everybody accessing our white papers. The Social Media for Home Builders white paper is especially popular.
For you new visitors, New Home Feed is a marketing tool for home builders and their agencies to easily list, manage and sell new homes. New Home Feed is powered by Graphic Language, an agency who has worked with home builders since the mid 1990’s. To learn more about Graphic Language agency services, be sure to contact Graphic Language. Meanwhile, many of you have been sharing lots of great ideas. Keep ‘em coming!
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We are creating another white paper on why home builders must communicate with diverse web audiences using different techniques. We are focusing on blogs. In trying to understand why builders resist blogging even though they keep hearing they should, and keep seeing data suggesting they should, we polled our non-blogging clients and asked them. “You keep hearing from us and others over and over and over again that you should blog. But still you don’t. Why?” And one brave soul has given us an anonymous answer, shared here:
We are not blogging because of the additional manpower needed to manage the site and we cannot draw a direct line from blogging to an increase in sales.
So we ask you, are beloved, smart and super-talented readers: what would you say? Let us know!
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Picture an iceberg. Now picture an iceberg breaking apart. This is what is happening to the concept of a web site. Once you needed one big and mighty website. This is the iceberg. Now (we’re thinking about global warming metaphors here) current trends are heating things up and the iceberg is breaking apart. Your web presence is splintering whether you like it or not.
We explored the need to manage multiple web presences rather than one web site in a recent post. Judging by early reaction, this is a subject of interest. So we’re asking: would you be interested in a more formal white paper on this subject? We are extremely curious as to why so many in the real estate industry are ignoring what is so obviously happening with the Internet, and we suspect this is because denial is easier than addressing what’s going on, and this phenomenon would be treated at some length in the white paper. Also, if you are an expert, would you have an interest in participating or being quoted? Readers, please be in touch and let us know your degree of interest…
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In the current Vanity Fair magazine, columnist Michael Wolff dissects for his readers the dominant and emerging narratives in the fights over the “Internet’s next big thing.” Wolff dissects the web trends and places proponents of various philosophies into at least four schools: the platform theory, digital behaviorists theory, the “pay as you go” theory, and the “magical machine” theory.
The Platform Theory
Facebook is a platform. Google is a platform. The iPhone is a platform. More are coming. All are fighting for dominance. Wolff explains that Microsoft was once the ultimate platform but the definition has become a “more metaphorical construct, suggesting not just functionality but a framework of behavior.” As various platforms fight for (transient) ubiquity, if you have a product, and you want your product to reach a wide audience, guess what: you must have your message delivered through the various platforms, especially the popular ones.
The Digital Behaviorist theory
The Internet changes the way we think. As Wolff puts it, it “alters the desires and habits and actions and reactions of the people who use it.” As this “altering” plays out, remember this: the Internet lets people express naturally, in whatever language they choose. And people enjoy publically sharing thoughts and even hobbies. Consider Digg, which lets people flag stories, which harnesses individual “autodidactic expertise” to turn a profit. Consider Twitter, a real-time database of what users are experiencing. It’s the alive Internet. Having just a static web page? So last decade.
The “Pay as you Go” Theory
Collegehumor.com. Thedailybeast.com. Soon everything under the Rupert Murdoch sun. These are examples of sites where fees are collected in traditional ways. The website has content. People want it. Ad space is sold, so advertisers get in front of a specific audience. In the real estate space, think Zillow.com. They come up with a cool idea, people come to the website, advertisers get to show display ads to a targeted demographic. It’s old-school, top-down marketing. And there is a place for this.
The “Magical Machine” Theory
To Wolff’s thinking, the “magical machine” theory could also be called the “build-your-own-platform” solution. Meaning the right machine could, hypothetically, “reclaim the distribution monopoly that was so rudely taken by the Internet.” Kindle. iPhone (again). Skype. Google. The “magical machine” is something that does not exist, but might. If realized, it will be a platform controlled from the top by a company, like NBC once was, before it (and everyone else) lost control of content.
Read the article. It’s pretty easy to grasp, written for a lay audience, and a fun read too. The reason we call attention to the article in such detail is quite simple: gone are the days where you build a website and are done. Today, you must be investing in a full, holistic, cohesive web identity. You cannot be monolithic, and your messaging will be pitted against an ever-engaged public, a public whose commentary about your company will be just as prevalent as your own messaging. Many of us are becoming pretty broken-recordish about this whole thing, but the way web trends are moving cannot be ignored, and to think the work stops once the site is built is extremely naïve, at best. Or as Wolff puts it, “it’s Google’s world and we just live in it.”
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Google’s latest – Google Buzz – aims to tie together all Google products into one nice, pretty, social-network-y bow. Everybody’s talking about it.
At the office, many of us once had hotmail, then Yahoo mail, and now much is Gmail. Could something similar be happening here, a migration like first we had Friendster (remember Friendster?), then Facebook, now this? Time will tell.
What the Google wizards tell – or claim – is that Buzz has five crucial pieces:
- Auto Following
- Rich, fast sharing (public and private)
- Email integration (we like this – so annoying switching from Facebook to Gmail and back, plus there are the friends who contact via Facebook, others via email, the dinosaurs who refuse to join Facebook…)
- Applying lessons learned from other social media experiments and keeping the good stuff (Google is expert at this. Remember searching on Alta Vista, then Yahoo, now Google…you see the pattern…)
- Mobile! (More witchcraft: Buzz will know where you are, will have voice recognition, and you can say/click “nearby” to see friends nearby, and what they are saying…)
Google wants buzz to be the “poster child” for using social media in an open environment, adhering to principles of transparency. Will you use it? What do you think? Any early adopters out there? We want to hear your thoughts.
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We just got an out-of-the-blue kind of call to build a new website for a Texas builder. We note not to brag, at least not just to brag, but to share a new expression. When describing why they wanted a new website, our contact said, “In preparation for the turn-around.” Got that? “In preparation for the turn-around.”As though its as sure, and as close, as Wednesday following Tuesday.
Everything is anecdotal if you aren’t the economist running and reporting the data, right? So let’s call this completely scientific and thoroughly valid evidence that the elusive, 2-years-late turn-around is imminent…
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Big thanks to Dennis O’Neil over at O’Neil Interactive for his post on New Home Feed. Dennis shares what he’s liking about New Home Feed, and we’re interested to note what Dennis calls out as the benefits he sees:
- They’re not a listing site. They have no interest in hoarding listings, leads, impressions, or controlling clicks. They work for the builder, and create a marketplace for directories to compete for your business.
- Independent data. They’re delivering builders metrics, as a third party, detailing what listing sites are getting you the most activity.
- Fresh Listings. That’s their own phrase, but New Home Feed is touting strong commitments from listing sites to prioritze the data from their listings.
- Data Control. They provide builders with community-level control of what information goes where. If you want community A, B, and C to go to Trulia.com, and community C, D, and F to go to NewHomesDirectory.com, but communities A-Z to go to NewHomeSource.com and Move.com, its all possible. This kind of control was previously only achievable for the national builder crowd.
A company, large or small, reflects the individual input of each employee. And so its interesting and cool to notice what impresses smart guys like Dennis and how it compares to the things we say when talking about New Home Feed.
Anyway – big thanks Dennis!
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We’ve got a new white paper live – Social Media for Home Builders – and we’re really proud of this one. Not only does it break down the whole social media thing into easily digestible chunks, but there is lots of great feedback from industry experts, folks like Carol Flammer of mRelevance, Scott Posner of red rocket LA, Jim Adams of New Homes Directory, and our client and friend, Allison Buffum, of SummerHill Homes (great blog at SummerHill Homes – love the design, love the content).
If you are a marketer in the home builder space, you really should download the white paper. You’ll like it. It will help you.
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We are in the process of creating a marketing budget calculator for use by users of the soon-to-launch newhomefeed.com. And we have a question for you home builder marketers:
When you are calculating your budgets, how much do you calculate for a monthly “per community” online marketing budget? Do you plan on $400 per community per month? $750? $1,000? Please let us know in comments, or shoot me an email.
This information will help us blow your mind. Seriously.
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