It’s Milk the Realtors week on the RE.net — with the shilling appeals for useless new “solutions” getting pretty close to actual sleaze — so I wanted to revisit a couple of themes we’ve hit before. Inherent in the Web 2.0 idea is a de-verticalization of real estate marketing. Big-budget interruption marketing doesn’t work, but intimate viral marketing does. Because of the Web 2.0 revolution, Realtors are free — at last — to control their own marketing — and their own costs.
“So,” say the shills and wannabe shills, “how can we cash in on that?” And the result is the Web 2.0 industry for Realtors: Vertical-market weblog vendors and vertical-market social marketing schemes.
Here’s a hint: You don’t need to pay someone money to “network” for referrals and agents to refer business to. All you need to do is network. If you’re paying attention to the RE.net, you already know three agents in every town in North America.
Here’s another hint: There is no such thing as an interesting amalgamation of hyper-local real estate weblogs. A hyper-local weblog is interesting because it’s hyper-local. Combining eight hyper-local weblogs is seven-eighths boring to every possible reader — as boring as the “Neighborhoods” section of the local newspaper, but harder to slog through.
You don’t need vendors to control your marketing, and getting in bed with vendors is potentially disastrous. These are my three simple rules for dealing with technology vendors:
- Avoid hosted software systems
For dedicated web site vendors, dedicated weblog vendors, dedicated virtual or video tour vendors, dedicated customer relationship management vendors, the money is in the blades — the monthly hosting fees — not the razor, the ostensible product. The initial outlay might be steep enough, but the gravy comes from taking money from you month after month for “services” for which the added incremental costs are almost nothing. Okayfine. Everybody’s gotta eat. The trouble with hosted software systems is not the pricing but, rather, who owns the data and what happens to it when you elect to take your business elsewhere. Is your data yours to take with you? Worse, is your confidential information truly Read more
One of the true pioneers of what is referred to in marketing as “positioning” is Al Ries. Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote the groundbreaking book, “
It was Dr. Glenn who showed up at Guy Kawasaki’s weblog, posting the winning entry, 









