Well the same goes for people supporting an industry going through change: vendors, suppliers and agencies need to observe the markets they serve just as closely as those operating within it. Why? Because if you don’t, you end up creating a major gap in client satisfaction that will open the door for new competitors to move in. Before you know it, existing suppliers are on the outside looking in, wondering what happened.

This occurs regularly within real estate as we have seen vendors come and go across all categories – from Website to virtual tour vendors – from coaches who fail to stay up on new changes to application providers who build it once and never improve the software.

Do you want to matter? The secret is as easy as placing yourself in the customers shoes. It’s what the best brands do and it’s precisely why they remain successful.

What better time than now to get real and make sure you are meeting your client’s needs, in a way that’s relevant to the market of today. This extends across all verticals and across all categories. For instance, here are some true examples from the last 10 days that I have personally experienced that had I been the marketing manager, I would be getting busy on fixing immediately.

• At a recent conference at a major hotel, catering was requested for a small, working lunch in a meeting of 12. The quote was $75 per person, for hotel sandwiches. Even a ponzi schemer couldn’t put that in their expenses with good conscience. Being in NYC we literally walked across the street and brought back a sumptuous lunch for 12, for $38 total. Outcome? The restaurant across the street sees a new opportunity to delivery catering services to hotels throughout the city. Add $100.00 for deliver and it’s still a deal.
• Exhibitors display in hotel ballroom.  Exhibitor needs another small table on which to display collateral.  Do you rent one for 3 hours from the hotel for $750 or go down the road to Office Depot and buy the same one for $200? Choice. I’ll take option #2. Final Answer.
• Bulb goes out in the taillight of my car.  The dealer wants to charge me $300 plus parts to swap it out.  So I spoke to a friend with the same car, who showed me how to undo two screws, and swap the bulb out myself in 5 minutes. I just hope my hairdresser doesn’t give me a reason to try to cut my own hair! (again)

What’s the moral? I think it’s obvious. The world has become a viable resource for many things. Competition comes from all around you. But so is opportunity.

Harness your marketing team. Release them to learn what your clients like and don’t like. Prepare to fix those things that matter most. The ones that will make you stand out from the crowd. Be militant about managing client satisfaction. Leave your customers no choice to seek out a substitute. For Realtors this could mean replacing you as their agent with the new kid on the block that has mastered social media marketing to someone who has figured out they might be able to do it better and cheaper themselves.

Bob over at Active Rain provides a nice illustration of why the Long Tail matters.

Who needs a fax machine when you have a cell phone?

Reggie introduced us to ZingDing, an interesting take on the virtual tour concept.

Joe over at Sellsius explains TokBox. This could save agents who work with tech savvy client a lot of time.

Happy Weekend!

Each year that I attend the National Association of REALTORS® conference, I come away with some new buzz.  The conference is a great way to tune into buzz-worthy people, topics and catch phrases.

Here are my top 5 buzz-worthy take aways from this year’s conference.

Number 5:  www.tinyurl.com will convert long urls into tiny ones. Great for those hosted virtual tours, slide shows or web commercials that have dozens of letters in the url. Just go to this website and change the url to the street address or something else more meaningful. (For example: http://tinyurl.com/NARBuzz)

Number 4:  www.ping.fm will update your status on multiple social networking sites. Talk about one stop shopping!

Number 3:  Go to www.Meetup.com to find groups and people with similar interests in your area. A great combination of technology and traditional networking!

Number 2:  Be social on social media. If you were at a party you wouldn’t follow someone around without introducing yourself. That would be rude. Take some lessons from offline manners and apply them to the online world.

Number 1:  Give some “link love.” This is a new term I heard from some ultra cool online agents. When you write a blog and include a link to another site you are giving “link love.” When someone links to your site you are getting “link love.”

Agents are finding more and more ways to combine traditional offline business building techniques with current online tools. Those agents are also seeing the benefits of this practice in their bottom lines. I know if you are reading this you are probably already a believer, but if you are still on the sidelines, there has never been a better time to get in the game. Go ahead, join a new social network. See you on Facebook!

First of all, “Microsoft Live Labs?” I guess they have stopped trying to differentiate themselves from Google anymore. The presenter extolled the virtues of the technology and claimed how simple it was to automatically reconstruct a three-dimensional space from a collection of photos of a place or an object. In laymen’s terms, it allows you to create a wicked cool 3-D version of any space simply by snapping 2-D digital photos.

I was skeptical to say the least. I have seen a number of photo-stitching options that really just create a panorama and don’t offer a truly 3-D output. In a previous life, I actually worked for a company that attempted to monetize all of the “brand-less” items on a music video, movie or TV set via virtual tours. Each set took nearly an hour and half to shoot with a rare and expensive gyroscope camera.

Alright, so I watched all of the video clips of Photosynth in action on YouTube and it was about time to conduct some primary research of my own. I grabbed our Nikon D40 SLR and went into the courtyard here at 1 Campus and literally just started snapping photos rotating clock-wise 15-20 degrees with each shot while panning from ground to sky. I didn’t even use a tripod and the whole exercise took less than 2 minutes. I pulled out the flash card and downloaded all of the pictures onto my computer. I then went to Photosynth.net downloaded the plug-in/synth creator and then the magic happened instantaneously. The program automatically figured out how to stitch all of the photos together and turned them into a 3-D model in which you could navigate as if you were physically eating lunch with me. Text can’t describe how easy, cool and powerful this could be. Take a look:

When I was listing my house, I remember choosing between all of the photos the listing agent took of our house when we put it on the market. He had already taken multiple photos of each room at different angles. Had he known about Photosynth, he would have been one step away from making a virtual tour presentation of my home. . This could easily be the first program that will make creating virtual tours something EVERY agent can do.

Now it still is in “Lab” state as it doesn’t yet work with a Mac (typical Microsoft) and you don’t have the option of making the output private. Also, it is very picky with flash/non flash based pictures and it does have some problems stitching photos when you don’t shoot room corner to room corner. The biggest concern is that Photosynth requires a plug-in. Consumers are skeptical these days about adding anything to their computers forfear of viruses. Microsoft does claim that they had this embedded in the Summer Olympics web site and the penetration is incredibly high already.

I encourage anyone who reads this post to try it once. I guarantee you will be hooked. The key will be taking it from cool functionality to ROI based real estate application.