The emphasis today is on property listings and not local content or consultative services helping consumers match their needs to the right community.  Hyper-local content is the most critical information for a real estate buyer to have when they are trying to answer 2 of the most important questions BEFORE they even conduct a single property search which are: Where should I live and do I want to live there?

Answering these two questions used to be something you could find by picking up a local newspaper or scouring a town/community website.

The nation’s latest news print circulation stats (down  7%)*,  ad revenue numbers (down 29% in second quarter)**  and newsroom staff cuts (down 10%)***   clearly indicate certain information staples won’t be around for forever.  Couple that with town budget cuts at the tail end of this recession and there is no way your local government is going to deem this type of information gathering and delivery critical.  With both sources of information on the decline it is both natural and imperative for the local broker to take the baton as the arbiter of hyper-local information.

Hyper-local content can span a single city block all the way to a 521-square-mile county.  In a real estate capacity it can take the form of the following topics below:

• After school programs and strength of district sports programs
• Local lifestyle activities right down to micro needs such as the cost to join the town pool
• Express commute time to major metropolitan areas
• Availability and cost of parking for commuter trains
• Local restaurant recommendations
• Preschool programs
• Last time a tax assessment was conducted
• Closest supermarket with good organic selection
• Summer concerts at the local colleges
• Local recreation programs
• Days and times local farmers market is open

This will dawn a new era of a real estate broker as editor in chief of their website and its agent constituency becoming the field reporters who back-fill all of the valuable hyper-local content.  If the agent, as the local reporter model doesn’t work, then there should be a wealth of talent in the market as a direct impact of the aforementioned newsroom layoffs to cherry pick from.

The most direct benefit of unique content creation is the natural search rankings and traffic that result.  If the strategy proves successful then the top search engines will recognize the local broker website as THE authority within the community.  Also consider the fact that some studies suggest that over a third of search traffic for real estate keywords includes location names and local references.**** This translates into a qualified prospect that is more likely to be closer to working with a real estate company and transacting.

Currently this concept is being executed in a variety of different forms on sites like localism, curbed, EveryBlock, Placeblogger and Patch.  The outside.in publishing platform can enable brokers to create and customize discrete Neighborhood News Pages for every community in their market.  This is all fed by RSS feeds of blogs, local media web sites and even Twitter.  Imagine Twitter streams organized by location and topic constantly flowing on a broker’s site with posts like “#MahwahNJ School board just voted against music program” or “#RamseyNJ Just ate at Varka, amazing Mediterranean food.”

Domus Consulting’s Breaking News network won an Inman Innovator award and is currently applying this concept to cities across America.   Tewspaper is an online newspaper built solely through social media.  The key distinction is that a web site’s content doesn’t have to be maintained via an archaic CMS anymore as it can be populated seamlessly by a conversation stream.

As the Realtor engagement point moves closer to the transaction it is imperative to capitalize on this opportunity.  Hyper-local content isn’t something a large national brand can execute successfully as it requires a group of people who typically live, eat, and send their kids to school in the same community as they transact real estate.  Real Estate is about relationships and trust through written word is the best way to attract prospective customers and retain them far after the transaction has concluded.

In the coming months we will be piloting this concept with a few brokers  in the Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate network.  It will give us a great opportunity to witness the strengths and weaknesses so that we can improve a model that may work for the masses.  I invite you to offer comments and look forward to engaging in a healthy dialogue to shape the brokerage of the next generation.

*Tim Arango, “Fall in Newspaper Sales Accelerates to Pass 7%” The New York Times, April 27, 2009
**Greg Bensinger, “U.S. Newspapers Post Steeper Declines in Ad Revenue”, August 27, 2009
***Michael Liedtke, “APME survey: Newspaper cuts clip younger workers”, Associated Press, August 31, 2009
****WAV Group, “Geo-Domain Targeting trending to assist Real Estate Marketing”, April 2009

Like us, if you are using WordPress to run your Website or Blog, you know how powerful of a platform it is. Here are 10 Awesome Things To Do With WordPress’ Custom Fields to help make your web destination bigger, badder & better.

This is how this post begins, “Businesses need to outgrow the “gangly teenage” phase of social media and adopt best practices to get the most out of Twitter, Facebook and other tools, said national experts at the Social Fresh conference Monday in uptown Charlotte.” Makes you want to read more doesn’t it? Here you go: How Social Media are like Sex

This is a cool little ditty – a story about how one company went from Anonymity to Fame With Just One Tweet. This is about how social media is changing how companies make news and how the new world of public relations is practiced.

Realizing this story is about one in a billion, this post titled  The Social Media Revolution: Statistics Show Social Media Isn’t A Fad Anymore layers bullet point after bullet point, suggesting social media might be the biggest shift since the industrial revolution.

Get out your surfboard. Wax up your game plan. Another foreclosure appears to be on the horizon. At least according to Bigger Pockets who offers four reasons why and five things you can do to hang ten.  Surfs up! Here comes another foreclosure wave

For the here’s something cool part of the blog, check this from Microsoft Office Labs. Vision 2019

With new media economy turning the old on its head, and marketers seeking alternative ways to measure the impact of their online investments, Harry Gold from Clickz provides 11 things to measure beside clicks and conversions.

Twitter seems to think that Geolocation is very important to the future of their service. Which is why they are planning to attach location to your tweets. We agree. The implications for real estate are considerable. What do you think?

As we persevere with our dialogue regarding the brokerage of the future, we believe that mobility will be a key factor given the vast amount of work real estate people do in the field. Here are 9 very useful apps for business from ReadWriteWeb.

While social networking has spread quick and wide in real estate, there are still many who are using it with a 1.0 mindset. Here are a few easy to follow simple rules for social networking

Business week writes about the leaner boomer economy and how the typical trade up brands are contending with diminished sales from their bread and butter clientele.

You keep hearing how important it is to blog. And deep down, you know you want to try it. But you wonder if you can or where you will find the time. Well blogging is not supposed to be arduous. It can be fun. And simple. After all, it’s just you being you and talking about things that make up your everyday. Need more support? From Problogger, How to Write Short, Snappy Blogposts.

Alexandra Samuel explains on Harvard Business Blog how you can create an original online presence that engages customers with an entirely new online experience through 3 instantly effective social media ideas.

For the “this is cool” segment of Friday Blog Scan, Google Wave, the new tool for communication and collaboration coming out later this year is explained quite extensively here.

For those of you work inside the marketing departments of your companies or setting up fan pages on Facebook, InsideFacebook published 10 Powerful Ways to Target Facebook ads Every Performance advetisor should know. As more advertisers shift their attention and budget to Facebook Ads, it’s crucial to understand its targeting capabilities.

Brian Boero at 1000watt put together a great list and review of 15 real estate apps available on the iPhone. Some you may have heard of and some you may not. All are worth checking out.

For the “this is cool” segment of Friday Blog Scan, those of you who use the iPhone you know that its battery has life issues. Well according to CrazyMikeApps this new app will help you keep your iPhone juiced.

We all have heard of Jamba Juice. We all know they sell fruit smoothies. What else do you know about them? In their effort to build brand recognition they have made some critical mistakes. As a result, stock is dropping. Sales are falling off. Sound familiar? Fast Company did an indepth post on the issues surrounding their latest marketing problems and what they are doing about it

So you realize that conventional marketing isn’t working for you. Even your website and blog are getting less traffic than ever before. Don’t fear. There are many other ways to draw attention and market yourself. Click Z offers 25 Ways to Make Friends, Fans, and Followers.

As we continue to research, think, plot, imagine and create the brokerage of the future, we continue to be inspired by companies outside the real estate space thinking along those lines. Marc Davison from 1000watt gave us this blog titled Real Estate Freestyle – what if? that draws parallels between the Coca-Cola dispenser of the future and real estate of the future.

More about API’s. We’re excited about these because they are, according to Elias Bizannes,  “the center of the mashup culture that is permeating the web”. They allow different websites to interact with each other to create new ideas. Read it in detail on his blog titled: The business model of API’s.

Chris Johnson over at Guerrilla.me put together this blog titled Ten Preventable Mistakes Realtor Blogger Make that delves into the inherent mistakes agents are prone to making when blogging. This is hard hitting, in your face, good advice.

Lee Odden put the Best and Worst Practices of Social Media Marketing together on TopRankBlog. Some of this is obvious, some not so but all presented in a way that is fresh and easy to understand. It includes best practices and worst practices. Bear in mind though, social media is still new and arguably experimental. But it helps to have guidelines. These are great ones.

Here’s something fun. 40 Sexy and Creative Typographic Logo Desgins. Given the typical real estate logo that often includes a company embedded inside a house, these examples serve as nothing other than eye candy or inspiration to go beyond typical.

According to Zillow’s David Gibbons, blogging is so 2008. This comment created a quite a discussion on line that culminated with this vlog by David explaining in detail what he means. It’s worth the 10 minutes to better understand what it mean to consistently reevaluate your marketing strategics year after year.

Despite the death toll within the newspaper industry, smaller newspaper are persevering according to TechCrunch.

ComScore published this chart naming the top 20 countries for social media engagement. Russia tops the list followed by Brazil and Canada third. Read more on ThisIsHerd.

From Programmable Web this week – How to add GEO data to your blog posts

The prep work actually began on July 24th 2008, the day after we launched publicly at Real Estate Connect in San Francisco.  Anyone who has ever built a web site with a fixed deadline and budget knows lots of features and functions fall off the cart as launch day approaches.  Those features and usability tweaks became the foundation for today’s redesign.  As September (2008) approached, we  felt it was imperative to get some outside consumer perspective, as it is easy to  overlook obvious flaws internally staring at the site for almost 6 straight months.  You can check out some of the findings in a post entitled “Building a consumer site in a vacuum,” I wrote earlier this year.  Lastly, we have been working on growing our editorial strategy from both a written and video perspective so we needed a better delivery/merchandising mechanism.  That’s how any sound web development project should start, with a list of requirements and clearly defined objectives.

Our 4 objectives were:

Reduce branding space and make property search more prominent to drive more traffic to our affiliates

Our old site used too much of the home page real estate for branding so consumers were very confused as to what they should do first on our site.  Our usability study validated this definitively.  We have a very a strict philosophy of delivering the highest percentage of consumer web site traffic to our affiliates in the least amount of clicks possible.  Today there is a clear hierarchy of action when you land on our home page.

Provide flexibility to more easily merchandise video and written content
With some extensive tweaks to our content management system we now have the ability to surface previously buried content from our Live and Learn sections to our home page.  We believe this is one of our key differentiators as a brand- to connect with consumers before, during and after the real estate buying and selling process through written word and moving pictures.

Highlight our new video platform and Premier Selection program
Today our video section houses all of our originally shot video from Stephen Saint-Onge as well as any licensed video from various sources.  In total we have launched with over 40 videos and quickly look to grow our library before the end of the year.  This is all made possible by Brightcove, the top video platform employed by web media companies such as NYTimes.com, AOL.com and WashingtonPost.com.  It was very important to choose a flexible/robust platform as it gives us the freedom in the future to implement a national and local video strategy all controlled centrally by the brand.  Unique playlists can be developed for affiliates, individually highlighting topics appropriate to their local market.  The great part about the video platform is the ease of which our affiliates can implement it locally.  With two clicks they can take our exact video player with all of the associated videos and put it on their site.

Our Premier Selection program makes its way onto our site with a robust landing page which showcases our foray into the luxury real estate market.  This page was also built to be “portable” for our affiliates, as we have made the Flash introduction and the HTML all available so they will be able to implement an identical version locally if they wish to do so.

Provide as much of the assets for the enhancements to our affiliates
At the outset of this project we made it very clear that we wanted to give our affiliates the ability to piggyback off of our investment in world class web design, development and licensed platforms.  That is why we produced supporting assets such as a robust style guide, HTML with CSS, images, icons and flash all with the intent of allowing our affiliates to replicate the new look/layout seamlessly and cost effectively.

I encourage you to take a look and let me know what you think, as I have already begun thinking about the next evolution of our consumer web site.  Don’t be shy as we have already had an overwhelming response via our social media channels.  Below are a few excerpts to get the ball rolling:

The useful part is that Twitter can be a great way to both learn of news events and survey what people are saying about them. It’s no substitute for firsthand reporting and rigorous editing, of course, but it can be a fascinating supplement. This is according to John J Edwards in his piece published on WSJ here.

Some good tips here (5) on how to improve your website ranking Google published on Homegain Blog.

Jeremiah over at Web Strategy takes Chris Brogan’s 50 ways marketers can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing and splits them up into categories by the following objectives. Listening. Talking. Energizing. Supporting. Embracing.