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!

Then today it all went pear shaped as Biz Stone (Co-founder) announced a ‘non traditional’ way they will allow advertising on Twitter without telling us what it is – a great way to get spin going, especially when you are as popular as Twitter!

In my opinion Biz Stone and Twitter have just showed how dumb people can be when it comes to monetizing popular free programs. What did MySpace do? Sell advertising. What did Facebook do? Sell advertising. What is Twitter going to do? Sell advertising – albeit wrapped in a ‘non traditional’ catchphrase. The crux of all of this is that no-one has any idea how to make money out of free software that is popular and when you have no ideas, you turn to 3rd party advertisers.

Biz, I am sure advertising will bring in some revenue, but you have missed a golden opportunity here to take a different approach, it is a crazy idea, but people might actually be prepared to pay for software that makes their lives better. Here is the model I would have approached.

Premium Accounts

I know a premium account is just a stupid name for making more money than a normal account. Usually companies (think realestate.com.au and domain.com.au) create a popular site and then cut the throat of their core by making them look less important than premium companies. In real estate it is a joke, but with Twitter it would be different as it makes sense on top of a free model. Myhome.com.au do it with premium style listings on top of basic free listings. I don’t mind this approach as long as the user (the person looking for properties) is not getting search results compromised.

Basic
With Twitter nothing changes, you get all of the same features as you currently do, you are treated the same and all new updates are afforded to you. In other words – in other words we still love you and we understand without you – we could not operate successfully!

Premium – Multiple Accounts
You can create multiple accounts all under the one account. As an example. I have Agentpoint, Business2, Ginga and Zooproperty.com. Currently I have 4 Twitter accounts to manage. So I can now have a master account and merge others accounts under this one account – nothing changes for my followers.

When a user wants to follow me they can select what account(s) to follow or ‘follow all’. My default account is my master account – so if they do not choose any accounts, it then defaults to my master account.

Nothing changes when I Tweet as I have separate accounts to Tweet under and no-one gets annoyed.

Premium – Customise Theme
My “Twemium” account allows us to customise our Twitter theme some more. Better sidebar control, better backgrounds etc. All of my accounts now become a part of a left sidebar and can be click-able. I can also customise my background with a few extra features.

Fees

So what would a user pay as a premium price for these features? I would say $55 USD per annum is a fair price that most can afford for what essentially is a great service. Not everyone would need to upgrade and there is no penalty for not upgrading.

Revenue

Let’s say 20% of users upgrade to premium. Current estimates put twitter at about 5 million active users. So that would bring in around $55 million per annum. I would consider this a good return on what is essentially a 100 person company. How many companies could boast $550,00 in revenue per employee? This could easily grow to 100 million per annum.

If they get selfish and stupid they will fail. Twitter is no flash in the pan, but it we may get a little bored with it and if we are not careful only business will be interested and that will kill the platform.

Biz Stone tells us he is in no rush, well, he is in no rush to fail and everything they were doing up until now made sense. If advertiser revenue is their only idea with this software then they seriously need to take more time before making announcements.

RE/MAX claims:

“While many of the real estate industry’s biggest players are scaling back their TV buys due to economic realities, the RE/MAX share of voice for national TV advertising jumped from 50% in 2008 to 99.9% in the first quarter of 2009.”

RE/MAX have done a good job with their new straight talking  TV ads, but I can’t help but think that they could increase their audience by leveraging their video content across the internet via their huge network of agents/staff, databases of clients and via social media.

Whilst it was great to see that RE/MAX have taken the initiative & leveraged their video content by uploading the commercials onto YouTube, unfortunately that’s where their effective use of the internet for these videos seems to grind to a halt.

The collective online marketing power of a franchise like RE/MAX is enormous.

They have something like 100,000 Associates working within their company & their LeadStreet campaign successfully created a database of a Million More Leads in Six Months for US Agents, yet upon writing this post the Kick – 2009 RE/MAX Commercial is the video that appears to be their most popular out of their 2009 commercials uploaded onto YouTube so far, but it’s had less than 10,000 views over the past 4 months.

How to Promote Your Real Estate Videos Online

Here’s just a few ways that real estate franchises & independent offices could use the power of their existing network to help promote their brand, generate lots of Free traffic to their videos & enhance their online marketing presence.

• Share the videos on Facebook, MySpace, forums, etc.

• Embed the YouTube video within a short blog post.

• Include a link to the video within email marketing campaigns.

• Tweet about the video on Twitter.

Imagine the power of marketing that 100,000 RE/MAX Associates could have if they used some of these strategies to promote these professionally created TV Commercials out to their network of clients & associates via the internet.

If each Associate only got 10 people in a month to view the commercial, that would equate to approx. 1 million viewers per month for FREE.

In fact, if RE/MAX franchise really wanted to, they could get 10′s of millions of viewers to their videos each month at almost no cost. Now that’s what I’d call a powerful message.

Finally, there are over 100 alternative video sites other than YouTube. Real estate franchises should be uploading their videos/TV commercials onto some of these other sites as well to help generate even more FREE traffic & exposure of their brand.

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?