New Marketing Strategies Via Social Networking Optimization for Real Estate and The Big Push for Compensation Reform
November 13th, 2007 Categories: Mortgage News, Real Estate News, Real Estate Technology, Realespace, Social Networking, social networking optimization
New Marketing Strategies Via Social Networking Channels for Real Estate and The Big Push for Compensation Reform.
‘We are the fossils, the relics of our time, we mutilate the meanings till they’re easy to deny…be ashamed of the mess you’ve made.’
- William Corgan
I hear many mortgage and real estate professionals within the industry still spouting off about how no technology will ever replace them…no, technology won’t, but the professional that leverages technology properly will eliminate the agent that doesn’t.
Today, I’m hyper-focused on two issues that are effecting both the mortgage and real estate industry’s:
- New Marketing Strategies via Social Networking Optimization
- The Big Push for Compensation Reformation
Both issues are intimately connected via the advent of progressive Technology (proper).
SEO vs SNO…
SEO is an eyeball catcher that brings potential buyers to your front door, however, what you show them, the level of service you provide, and the subsequent chance for referrals is rooted in proper SNO strategy, a strategy that involves giving a network the ability to spread your seed for you.
As a service provider, there is no higher compliment than a referral from a satisfied client that generates a new client. All the SEO in the world isn’t going to help a company foster satisfied clients. If you think about it, a bad service provider with good SEO is dangerous, it’s very indiscriminate in this way… Proper Social Networking Optimization is where it’s at for the future of real estate and mortgage marketing and will pave the way for future compensation reformation.
Side note: Real estate and mortgage professionals should stay away from technology providers who are in the business of selling you ‘SEO solutions’. Chances are they have no idea WTF real estate and/or mortgage is about, and are solely in the biz to make money off of your ignorance. They’re the type to buy a house on emotion, try and get you to commit fraud in the process, get it financed any way they can, then blame you for paying too much and having an effective interest rate in the 14% range. These are the same people who will tell you blogrolls are bad, although sites with PageRanks of 7 and higher routinely have home pages with hundreds of links on them.
SEO is getting to the point of ‘fire and forget’, and is getting easier for the laymen to implement…here watch, I’ll demonstrate:
I use WordPress for my website and a few free SEO plug-ins (and here too) that automate those ’secret strategies’ that are supposedly the proprietary wares of other so called company’s.
Use this plug-in so Google and Yahoo can crawl your sites ’site map‘.
One-click makes it easy install and activate any of these plug-in’s, with, well, one-click.
Want great SEO and/or blogging advice? Get it straight from the sources, like SEOMoz, Copyblogger, Pro Blogger, and HubSpot.
Want a
cannedproven and ‘packaged’ solution provider? Check out Real Estate Tomato, Incredible Agent, and Realivent.Need ground level, top notch, hands on education and consulting? The fellas at Domus are second to no one…
There, you have 97% of the resources you’ll ever need to maximize your sites potential SEO. Now you just have to write (or aggregate) some compelling content to keep those unique visitors coming back for more…
Please excuse the following ’self-promotion’, I’m going to make a point as to how SNO can serve as a new marketing strategy through compensation reformation in the mortgage industry…
I’m currently working on a few initiatives for the mortgage and real estate industries, one of them is called RateSpeed. If you’re a regular reader of The XBroker, you have heard me talk of this ‘tool’ before (many delays with many reasons that really don’t matter at this point). RateSpeed has absolutely nothing to do with SEO, it’s all about SNO.
For those who haven’t heard of RateSpeed, real quick…It’s akin to a ‘black box’ that aggregates a mortgage professionals wholesale lender interest rate pricing feeds, organizes and redisplays them according to best case results dependent on the consumer end-users credit and financial risk data.
Mortgage professionals will have no ability to manipulate the data between the wholesale lender and the consumer using the application and MUST disclose up front a flat fee (of their discretion) for services…These are the issues at the core of the problem to today’s mortgage mess, IMHO. RateSpeed displays raw rate pricing, showing the exact YSP down to the $.01, and how it can be applied to closing costs, if that is the consumers want, but most importantly it shows this directly to the consumer.
It’s also happens to be a an efficiency and lead generation tool for mortgage pro’s willing to embrace transparent philosophies. RateSpeeds ability to auto-price and sort through the myriad of lenders they’re approved with stands to save a mortgage pro’s inordinate amounts of time and related cost. RateSpeed, at it’s core, stands to alter how mortgages are sold through compensation reformation. By showing consumers exactly how mortgage professionals make money, reform will (is) be(ing) demanded, evidenced by HR 3915. (Nod to Brian Brady for his copious amount of research and opinion on the issue).
I know many mortgage professionals who practice this level of transparency in their day to day business, but there are too many who don’t, and they’ve screwed it up for the rest of us. Some will say it’s too confusing to the consumer, others just want to continue the practice of personally enriching themselves through consumer ignorance. Anyway, how RateSpeed specifically works isn’t what this post is about, so I’ll move on.
RateSpeed will be distributed via a network mortgage professionals as a widget, a chunk of code that is embeddable on current web/blog sites to professionals who embrace transparency and ‘do business’ in such fashion. Real estate professionals can also embed RateSpeed on their sites because it will (must) be directly connected to their selected (and approved) mortgage pro(s) who are ‘in the network’.
From a Social Networking aspect, it will seam together hubs of like real estate agents and mortgage professionals who appreciate, practice and preach a common, open philosophy when it comes to providing mortgage services. To take it a step further, RateSpeed will have the ability to permeate existing social networks like LinkedIn and FaceBook (if think you are reading between the lines here, you are).
*Pause* (Switching Industry’s)
After reading Brian Larsons piece last year and (at about the same time) engaging in a mile long comment thread on Redfin.com(s) former ‘Wall of Shame’ category that involved the ethereal term ‘Procuring Cause’, I was drawn to Greg Swann’s perspective on the issue of divorcing real estate commissions. It is voluminous, the most comprehensive resource and reasoning of it’s kind. I’d be lying if I said I read it all, though I’ve been a proponent of much of the content within the diatribes I’ve speed read. What’s most compelling about the topic for me is two-fold: A. Who is tirelessly arguing for it…a practicing real estate professional, and B. The argument is synonymous to calling for the end of the MLS as it still stands today, a dinosaur of a database that was meant to guarantee inter-broker compensation.
Compensation reformation or divorcing real estate commissions is coming, since inter-broker compensation can be handled outside of the traditional MLS (as Greg and company tirelessly articulate). There have been a plethora (more than I care to link to) of proposed solutions, albeit most of them still require prohibitive adoption methods and maintain confinement to, and within, a defined box. A different version of the same thing isn’t a viable solution and mass adoption of isn’t probable considering the openness of the technology landscape, 2007-08 forward.
Zillow and Trulia aren’t it either, nor are their widgets. Why would an agent want to feature an application on their website that leads a potential client away from their website? Both well funded 3rd party destination real estate information websites business models revolve around advertising. Advertisers pay money to players like Z & T because consumers are carousing their sites, not an agents or brokerage, so it would seem fair to say that both entities would like to keep the consumer there. This isn’t a knock against either company, they do what they do and make no bones about it, however their respective agendas don’t line up with the individual agent. Both company’s (I can hear David G. coming now) will maintain that they exist to improve the consumer experience and send visitors (back) to the individual professionals. This may work in theory, but in the end both are pretty much destined to become Phone Book 2.0…which is fine.
An application (technology, widget, et al.) that allows for a real estate professional to ’share’ their valuable information and market their services to others within similar spheres, while insuring an acceptable assurance of reciprocity has yet to be identified…though it should involve a strategy that implements an open Social Networking Optimization framework that allows birds of a feather to flock and fly together…
More on this later…I wanted to get at least this much out before I left for NAR…*whew*
I’ll be at Incredible Agents Booth #3444 in The Sands on Wed, 11/14 @ 1pm…
Sphere: Related Content
XB,
Very resourceful artcile - so much good stuff. Very interested in the RateSpeed widget… please keep us posted.
One quick question: I noticed that you had coupled the Real Estate Tomato with the term ‘canned solution’. What about the service we provide to our clients makes us a canned solution?
Hey Jim!
What I meant by ‘canned’ was a ‘packaged solution’ (which sounds much better than canned)…in the spirit of:
A blog-site service provider who has a proven, packaged solution for real estate and mortgage professionals…instead of going it alone from scratch…
Blog-site…There has to be a better term/name for what these ‘evolved websites’ really are and can do. The term blog almost has a neg. stigma to it…kinda like canned
Will certainly keep you posted on RateSpeed…
Hey Jeff,
WOW, what’s next for RateSpeed; world hunger?
I think RateSpeed’s a cool concept but positioning it against using RE media properties is a real stretch.
This idea of “keeping consumers” on site is a non-issue; all real estate transactions are consummated off-line (without the involvement of the media companies) and so all RE consumers leave the websites at some point and engage with professionals. In fact, directing consumers to RE Pro’s websites is a critical feature of the Zillow experience.
RE Pro’s should not have to make google-like investments in their websites to attract customers. That’s where sites like Zillow come in to play; we can direct consumers to RE Pro’s at a fraction of the cost of building the content and tools that consumers are looking for.
I hope to bump into you in Vegas and continue this discussion over a beer.
David, now how did I know you’d stop by?
Nah…I thought I’d leave world hunger, peace, and global warming to you guys, whats a few more minor initiatives for the big Z to tackle…
There was supposed to be a break (pause) in the post between RateSpeed (Mortgage) and divorcing real estate commissions (real estate)…Ill have to fix that…
Intent wasn’t to position RateSpeed against RE media properties, rather to opine that the next big step in real estate information search and share is likely to evolve out of a few killer and shareable apps that center around social networking, as opposed to an advertising giant with deep pockets and full time spin doctors
BTW, whats up with that mortgage initiative?
All in fun…first round is on me.
Jeff,
Here is my two cents:
I agree to extent that SEO has become, in some instances a plug and play situation, but even your site is not fully optimized. Your post URL’s are less than optimal. I am not being critical and this is a perfect example of a plug and play fix. Also, outbound links, in my experience add no value to your page other than to give another person link love.
With regards to the Ratespeed. Giving the consumer full visibility into rates and pricing is a good idea. This is being done with many websites today with the mash up of a company websites and pricing engines like NYLX. The difference with Ratespeed is the creation of a widget, which is a great idea, unless I am missing something. I have heard that mortgagebot currently has some sort of widget pricing solution. Have you heard about this?
Great idea and I look forward to hearing about its progression.
LeadCritic…Help a brother out then! Show me the plug-ins!
“Giving the consumer full visibility into rates and pricing is a good idea. This is being done with many websites today with the mash up of a company websites and pricing engines like NYLX.”
‘Full visibility’ is unfortunately still defined/controlled by the broker/banker running the application. Better? Yes. 100% transparent? Nope.
Haven’t heard of mortgagebot’s widgetized solution, it’s hard to keep up with all the ’solutions’ being pimped out there.
I’ll keep you updated for sure…
no plugin here, but a very simple fix that search engines will like better than thexbroker.com/?p=315. In the admin of your wordpress blog simply go to Options > Permalinks and choose “Custom, specify below” and in the Custom structure field put /
oh and here is the link to the Mortgagebot widgets http://widgets.yahoo.com/gallery/?author=12758
this is from last year, I think.
Only prob is see, is that I have copious linkbacks under the current format
and changing would screw that up, no?
Thx for the link…ahhh, yes I have seen these…They’re really not much different than a Bankrate.com…Brokers/bankers get to advertise what they want…
I do like what Yahoo offers developers in the way of UI’s though. Pretty slick stuff
IMHO, the information chain between wholesalers and consumers needs to be closed to be considered transparent…otherwise, the ability to manipulate is still there…and translucency in what you get.
The change will be on all new posts, not old urls.
Ill try this out, maybe it was a prob w/ an older version of WP…Last time I remember changing permalink structure, I received emails about dead links to previous posts… Thx!
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