Twitter
Twitter is a little on the nose to me and I am going to predict a sharp decline in 2011. Sure, Twitter will exist in some form or another well into the future but to me it is finished as a mass marketing tool and will eventually be relegated to some important niche communications. Twitter’s revenue making announcement early last year completely lacked any corporate imagination and signalled to me to be the beginning of the end for the company (and a multi billion dollar entity) and unless they innovate well I cannot see the service lasting in its current format for too many years. It is great for cross communication and breaking news alerts and it should play on those strengths.

Google
Google has made a great move in move with Eric Schmidt stepping down at Google and being replaced with Larry Page. Schmidt has made just about every web developer nervous (including me) as some of his comments were against every moral grain the company had built over the years and some of his recent comments were just idiocy! Hopefully Larry Page can get the company back on track, his communication is poor, but hopefully he has worked on this over the years.

Eric Schmidt did an amazing job in his initial years of organizing the company and building revenues and profitability, but he has shown he struggles with communication and needed to be replaced.

Facebook
Facebook goes from strength to strength and has now reached a valuation of around 50 billion. It does however make you wonder how they are going to satisfy the demand from all investors for revenues, especially in the light of them recently raising another billion of dollars. This places pressure on the company to massively increase revenues when they already should be very profitable.

There are many opportunities for Facebook and it will be interesting to see if they show a little more imagination than the Twitter crowd. I think adding personal related services that are paid for makes just as much sense as the boring old advertising model favored by investors.

I prefer to use Facebook for just family and friends, however I now see some really good opportunities there for our business and Facebook give developers the tools to build out some pretty cool applications. Here are some of our recent Agent additions from my company. You should talk to your developers to get them to build out some apps for you just to test the water. All you need is your own page (not your personal account)

RWM Mosman Facebook Page
Raine and Horne Facebook Page
Ristic Real Estate Facebook Page
Graham Lynham Facebook Page

Will Facebook continue it’s amazing growth? Maybe, however, I see a more local version of my personal life, something that is open source and that I have 100% control over who has access to what. I havent seen it yet, and really do not know what it is – but it definitely is not one company controlling my whole digital personal life.

Groupon
How many companies are offered a buyout of billions of dollars only to reject it and see their valuation plummet in the ensuing years?  Yes, many we have already forgotten about. Groupon rejected Google’s billions and now have to compete with that very same company as Google has just announced they will be launching a competing service. There is a moral to this story – sell your bloody company when you get a decent offer. There are many businesses/ideas you can build with a few million/billion dollars.

Linkedin
I will stay on this site as long as it is free, but to me it is just a chest thumping load of junk. Currently it ranks below my own company site as far as referring traffic (all of the articles on this site are linked to my linkedin.com profile) and from what I can tell this is useless fro business to consumer. For business to business we might see something, but not for the real estate industry.

MySpace
Rupert got his money back on this investment early. But in the ensuing years MySpace has cost him big big money and he can kiss it goodbye as it is currently burning through 100′s of millions of dollars a year. It was a lame duck from the beginning (disorganized, spam) and is a perfect example of why you sell early! Listening to Rupert speak about technology is excruciating. He simply doesn’t have a clue, quotes like Facebook being a fad, Google struggling once it matures and then his continual assault on free news (BBC< AC etc) is childish and gets him nowhere.

Your own blog
If you have a real estate website and you are not blogging about local market, local news, local events then you are missing out the the biggest opportunities for personal and business growth. If you want to start on the ground floor, get a FREE WordPress.com blog and start playing. If you want a professional blog under your own domain name speak to your developer.

Wikileaks
Isn’t it wonderful that we have one news organization in the world that actually operates like all major news organizations once did? I hope there are many more years to come of people leaking information we should already know to organizations such as Wikileaks. Stand up for these freedoms we enjoy at all times and never be a hostage to your own motives!

Well, what used to be Word of Mouth, has now become World of Mouth, simply because it is now very easy for people to share their customer experiences with their friends over the web.

One of the most powerful examples of a customer using Social Media to complain about receiving poor service was a song written by Dave Carroll, uploaded to YouTube about United Airlines breaks guitars.

Over 5 million people have now viewed the song on YouTube & Dave Carroll has just released a second song about the staff member at the centre of all the negotiations & allegations.

Worldwide there’d be millions of good & bad customer reviews shared daily over the web via sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Yelp, etc.

Whilst I appreciate that customer reviews over the internet aren’t a recent thing & understand that people have been posting reviews about products & services on the web via blogs, forums & social networks for quite some time.

For example, here’s the real estate section of an Australian site called Product Review.

However, recently I’ve noticed that there have been some important developments regarding customer reviews which could have a big impact on real estate agents.

1. New Australian Real Estate Agent Review Site:- Realty Ref
A new site has just been launched called Realty Ref where the site asks customers to share their real estate customer experience.

The site is currently asking consumers to share their experience based on…
“Feel cheated? Tricked or pressured? Lied to? Warn Others: Or Recommend Great Service.”

Unfortunately, with the public perception of real estate agents still below par, as per the annual Roy Morgan Image of Professions survey, real estate agent review sites like this are likely to become an online real estate complaints department.

2. Customer Reviews Located At The Top Of Google Search
The other day I was checking the ranking of a real estate agent’s site in Balmain & searched Google for the keyword “Balmain Real Estate Agent”.

At the top of the search Google came up with “Local business results for real estate agent near Balmain NSW”, plus a map & a list of 10 real estate agents identified from ‘A’ to ‘J’.

Amongst the list of agents that appeared, 2 real estate agencies had customer reviews appearing right beside their listing on Google.

Whilst the reviews weren’t bad reviews, one was definitely better than the other & could impact which agent a potential customer selected.

3. Customer Reviews via Mobile Phone.
There are a couple of major developments that are happening in the world of Augmented Technology that I read about in a post by Jeff Bernheisel.

Augmented Reality allows places to be identified using a collection of data that has been uploaded onto the web.

Augmented ID uses similar technology to identify people’s faces. Here’s a quick video from TAT demonstrating this mobile phone face recognition technology.

Imagine going to a Listing Presentation & before signing the agency agreement, the potential seller points their phone at you to check you out. Alternatively, imagine being able to use Augmented ID via your mobile phone to identify the people visiting an open home.

Whichever way it happens, customers armed with easy access to customer reviews, whether they be good or bad reviews, will have an impact on our industry as we move forward.

These online marketing foundations could be adopted as a good start up strategy for any new agent or simply a way that agents can build their profile & generate more business.  Either way, to begin building your online profile these first 4 steps are probably the best place for an agent to start.

1. Personal Domain Name

Secure your personal domain name. eg.YourName.com or .net.
To order your domain name, there are lots of domain name providers to choose from & the cost for domain names seem to be getting cheaper all the time. There are sites like GoDaddy.com, PlanetDomain.com, Intaserve.com & CrazyDomains.com just to name a few.

If your domain name has already been taken you can try putting a hyphen into the domain name. eg. Your-Name.com. There are lots of hyphenated domain names that are still available.

At present, there doesn’t appear to be any real benefit in securing the .com.au or .net.au unless you really want to. Your TLD, (Top Level Domain) YourName.com is better to secure if it’s still available.

Simply register the domain name & don’t sign up for the hosting packages because in a future post, I’ll show you ways that you can get your hosting for FREE.

2. Twitter

Secure your personal name on Twitter.
Once a Twitter username is registered then no one else in the world can create the same username. That’s why, even if you don’t want to use your Twitter account for a while, it’s still better to secure your username.

If Twitter.com/YourName isn’t available then you can use ‘underscore’ to create Twitter.com/Your_Name or you can even have the underscore at the beginning or the end of the username, like _YourName or _Your_Name.

The reason why it’s important to have your name within the username is that it forms part of the URL and this can help somebody find you easier on Google, Bing & other search engines if they type in your name.

3. Google Profile

Register your Profile on Google.
Having a Google profile enables you to provide a biography/profile of yourself on Google’s site. You can also include links back to your company website & links to any of your other profiles/websites.

Simply go to www.google.com/profiles and register today.

The same applies with Google Profiles, once the username is gone it’s gone, so it’s worthwhile going & securing your Google profile before someone else in the world with your name does.

4. Facebook

Register your profile on Facebook
Facebook has recently announced that as of this Saturday, June 13th at 12.01am New York time (2.01pm Sydney time) Facebook users will be be able to choose a username URL for their Facebook account.

It’s designed to make it easier to direct friends, family, and coworkers to a Facebook user’s profile.
This move by Facebook will also mean that people’s Facebook profiles will start to appear a lot more on personal name searches within the search engines.

For example, the new Facebook URL will become Facebook.com/YourName which can make it a lot easier for people to connect with you on Facebook.

Usernames will be issued on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and any other Facebook Pages that you administer by visiting http://www.facebook.com/username/.

Facebook Pages are designed for your business. There appears to be are a lot of agents & businesses that have started registering Facebook fan pages for their businesses & it may be a good idea to secure the Facebook username for your business at the same time. Eg. Facebook.com/YourBusinessName

Whilst there are lots of others sites like YouTube, LinkedIn, etc that you may want to register with, these are the Top 4 things you should do first.

Technology
Keep a familiar navigational style similar to current portals however utilise the latest web 2 technology to improve functionality without sacrificing usability. Don’t try and reinvent the wheel, just make it better and go faster.

Bandwidth and storage is cheap these days so the site would feature high resolution photos and full screen slideshows.

Data
Create an upload centre offering multiple ways for an agent to upload their to the portal properties including an api, xml feed, and even the option to scrape the agents site as a last resort. Individual agents would be encouraged to petition their data pushers to connect to the system.

The portal would create an industry schema for the transfer of real estate property data. The schema would be openly offered to anybody who wished to use it and other industry players would be invited to assist with its improvement.

Sharing with Consumers
There is so many options to share data on the web these days. I would create plugins for use with all range of social networking sites and internet tools. Things like Plugins for Myspace and for Facebook, Widgets for Google Desktop, Google Maps content, Gadgets for Windows Vista and Customisable RSS feeds so the public can plugin to whatever hardware or software they want.

Sharing with other Websites
Create an API so other websites can plugin content to their own sites. As an example a webmaster running a community portal can copy and paste some code and now serve up properties from my portal. These plugins will still show advertising from the site.

Extra Features
You will not be able to pay to be ranked higher. You will not have to pay to get any extra service. What is available for one shall be available for all except for maybe beta testing of upcoming features. Third party companies would be encouraged to provide extra services to agencies capitalising on the data with the only proviso that it enhanced the solution to the agent rather than detracted from it.

Enforcement
Agencies will be given no warning before penalties are applied for cheating the system. No preferential treatment shall be given to any office no matter their size, listing numbers or franchise affiliation. If duplicate properties are detected then the agency shall first get a warning with further detections resulting in an escalation of penalties resulting in a total ban. Far too many infringer’s are let off because the represent the best part of $200 per week in income.

Revenue
The model would revolve around charging companies who wanted to advertise to the visitors to the site rather than charging the data providers. Agents would not be charged unless they wanted to pay for specific advertising on the site. An agent could pay for ads on the index pages promoting themselves to sellers. They could not promote themselves on specific properties. The ads will be minimal and aesthetically fit into the design of the portal.

The ad system would allow advertisers to geo target their advertising down to the level of suburb and advertisers will be charged only a on successful per click basis. A building and pest inspector, solicitor or financier working in just the Hamilton area of Brisbane could have his adverts shown just on property for sale in the suburb or district. A company could also equally choose to target to whole regions or states as well.

The advertising module would provide the flexibility so that advertisers could self subscribe to the advertising with monthly budgets and automatic charging of credit cards. The advertising would allow for the use of fixed size images or text.

Rollout
Negotiations would be held with all the major data providers to provide agency data, but there will be no salespeople on the ground trying to flog advertising or subscriptions. A minimal operations team with virtually no salesperson ensures costs are kept at a minimum. Minimal staff requires virtually no executives or sales team salaries, bonuses and ancillary costs. No regional managers, state managers and national managers. No cars, travel, telephone, accommodation and expense accounts. No convention sponsorships or industry panels to fund.

The rollout process until launch would remain very tight lipped with no fanciful claims setting expectations too high and providing ammunition for competitors to feed upon.

Initial and ongoing promotion would never involve costly traditional media. No newspaper advertising billboards, tv shows, tv adverts or anything similar. Viral marketing techniques would be built into the system encouraging visitors to pass on and share the website and specific properties with friends via emails and social networking tagging such as del.ico.us, digg, stumbleupon, google bookmarks and others.

Free advertising coupons (lets say for $50 worth of advertising) would be provided to potential advertisers on a limited basis. Only so many would be released with every successful person able to invite 5 or 10 other people to also get a free coupon.

Privacy
All agents would acknowledge that their properties would be promoted though numerous means (as already mentioned) including gadgets, plugins, rss feeds etc etc but at no time would agents data be resold to third parties.

Testing
Everything would be tested, tested tested, and trialled with focus groups before releasing. Nobody wants to release another Myhome that whilst being a vastly superior site on a technology level, it was a site that visitors hated with a passion.

Now here is the big question! Would such a portal work in the current landscape? How much would it cost to create?

Firstly we will take a look at the giant of Real Estate in Australia realestate.com.au.

Overview: Without doubt the leader in most regions of Australia. Will continue sit around the 3.5 – 4 million mark in visitor numbers. REA will struggle to grow this number in Australia because let’s be honest how much more room is there for growth? REA has a number of problems. To begin with REA are the best at what they do and all large media companies love the marketing spend of real estate agents, so they will never be left alone to sit and count the cash.

Another problem is that in the next 12 months we will see large new entrants such as Google, Yahoo and MSN enter with their FREE classifieds websites. REA will continue to be aggressive in international acquisitions and will look to see its revenue base expand as it continues to make purchases in weak competitive markets.

As for the current website it is getting a little long in the tooth and REA will no doubt look to launch a new site soon. They will also need to forge closer ties with agents and make them feel that they are pulling together in the same direction, this sometimes means dropping the tough stance on fees and being a little more flexible. The new site will really need a stronger clearer focus on agents property listings rather than 3rd party advertising. The company will also struggle in the long term to lift revenues from agents as competition will drive down annual fees significantly into the future. The site still performs day in and day out and with more than triple the daily unique browsers of its nearest competitor will see it reign at the top for quite some time.

Threats: Fairfax (Domain.com.au) has now Rural Press in its bed and with the Macquarie Media going top to tail – REA will have its hands full keeping an eye on its local business whilst pushing to grow internationally. Google, Yahoo (maybe partner with News Ltd in talks) and MSN are all looming large with their FREE classifieds offerings and this will have a long term impact on annual agents revenues.

This creates another problem for REA. Once the FREE classifieds sites come online will also have to be very careful about intrusive 3rd party advertising as Google, Yahoo and MSN classifieds websites have a very clean and unobtrusive advertising model that has a strong connection with site users. Google Base will be the main problem once they launch here in Australia because Google will also include its classifieds listings in search results meaning consumers can get this property information from the search engine without having to go to another website. MyHome has had no impact whatsoever on REA and I doubt they have the know how and mettle to make a challenge in the short term. However MyHome cannot be discounted in the long term IF they stay the course and admit to – and fix the current site.

REA recently integrated/added the Home Renovation section to their website and it has an impressive array of articles and hints and tips for home buyers and renovators. This will no doubt bring in more advertising revenues and has been a great addition.

Future: REA will eventually do a deal with MySpace (which will carry REA listings much like Facebook now do) and possibly Yahoo if Rupert gets his way. They will continue international purchases and growth of many of these fledgling companies and I see real potential here for them. They have already seen impressive growth in New Zealand and the UK and will continue to push heavily in these areas. Will still be at the top in 3 years but its lead will dwindle and their agents revenues short term will stagnate and then fall dramatically once the free classifieds sites start to bring agents results. All in all I think the international future is bright, but Simon Baker and his team will have their work cut out for them to stave of competition from rivals even his hip pockets and visitor numbers cannot match. I see a Digital TV station (IPTV) feeding data to lounge rooms and possibly a TV show on a rival network to Nine.

Links:
www.realestate.com.au
www.domain.com.au
www.yahooclassifieds.com
www.liveexpo.com
www.googlebase.com
www.facebook.com
www.myhome.com.au