Online Real Estate Technology

Most of the attention in the online video space has focused on either media content and consumers or marketers and video advertisements. But companies continue to push further into this realm with non-advertising content.

Recent studies have shown that growing numbers of retailers are adding video capabilities to their sites. Surveys of Fortune 500 companies also indicate a broad-scale increase in the use of video for marketing purposes. In this sense, video has gone from a luxury to a near necessity for companies seeking an edge in marketing their products. From home-goods merchants to automobile manufacturers, companies across a wide spectrum are finding ways to use video in their marketing efforts, and consumers are embracing—sometimes demanding—these changes.

Retail is a sector where online video is becoming more important for driving sales. When asked by Multichannel Merchant to identify rich media features that they used, 46% of US multichannel retailers picked video, making it the highest-ranked category in the survey. Another 42.3% of respondents said they planned to add video capability in the next year.

Several studies point to increased use of video by US companies. According to Forrester Research, the percentage of the top 50 US online retailers that offer videos on their sites skyrocketed to 68% in 2009 from 18% in 2008.

Marketers are on board with more than just ecommerce applications, as well. A study led by the Society for New Communications Research noted 31% of Fortune 500 companies with public-facing blogs used video blogging in 2009, up from 21% in 2008.

Ad-ology asked US marketing executives whether they would increase, decrease or make no changes in their 2010 marketing budgets for social and traditional media. Nearly 27% said they would increase their online video budgets for viral clips and podcasts, while 5.5% would decrease their budgets. Out of the remainder, 41% would leave the budget intact and another 27% said they did not use video. These responses put video ahead of mobile marketing and search optimization as budget priorities for US marketing executives.

As eMarketer’s Tobi Elkin noted in the report “Consumer Packaged Goods Sector Taps into Online Video,” “Creating an online video presence helps marketers facilitate an ongoing dialogue with consumers, boost brand equity, lure prospective customers and solidify support among brand loyalists.”

On the receiving end of these marketing efforts, consumers are accessing increasing amounts of video on multiple platforms, from laptops and home PCs to smartphones and tablets. As these devices continue to penetrate the market, consumers will expect ubiquitous access to video content. Examples might include watching product videos at the point of sale or viewing a portion of a podcast on a PC and resuming the session on a tablet. Marketers are aware of the potential and are upping their game in a variety of sectors.

Athletic equipment company Nike dominated the top 10 viral videos selected by video-content distributor goviral for April 2010, landing three videos on the list.

Two of Nike’s videos were light and entertaining in tone. However, the number two video, “Earl and Tiger,” was much more somber. Recontexting old an audio recording of pro golfer Tiger Woods’ late father Earl Woods describing himself into a questioning of Tiger, the video asks Tiger what he was thinking and feeling, and if he has learned anything (presumably relating to his recent sex scandal). The video itself is a single black-and-white shot of a stone-faced Tiger Woods facing the camera, wearing Nike golf gear.

One public service announcement made the list for April, “Give Earth a Hand” from nonprofit environmental group Greenpeace. The video was released for last month’s Earth Day celebration and suggests that Greenpeace’s work requires participation from many people.

In a repeat of a trend seen in March 2010, many of April’s videos centered on athletes or some type of athletic activity. In addition to the three Nike videos, there was also a video from Coca-Cola highlighting the upcoming 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, a Samsung video featuring possibly staged precision tricks with business cards, and a humorous Old Spice video centering on a heavily muscled man flexing his talking biceps and abdominals.

The top 10 picks for April, with links to view on YouTube:

1. Heineken – Men With Talent, agency: TBWA
2. Nike – Earl and Tiger, agency: Wieden & Kennedy
3. Old Spice – Flex, agency: n/a
4. Samsung – Master of Business Card Throwing, agency: The Viral Factory
5. Coca-Cola – Quest, agency: SANTO
6. Nike – The Secret Behind Nike Air, agency: n/a
7. Sony – Around the World in 80 Seconds, agency: Rapp
8. Nike – Music Shoe, agency: Wieden & Kennedy
9. Greenpeace – Give Earth a Hand, agency: n/a
10. Nestle – I Like Big Butterfingers, agency: n/a

About the Rankings: goviral issues a monthly top-10 list of viral video rankings on its site, including additional commentary about the videos, their approaches and why the firm thinks they are viral or likely to become viral in the future.

Continuing a trend established in January and February 2010, the videos selected by video-content distributor goviral for March 2010 were universally light in tone.

For the first time this year, goviral did not select any public service announcement videos. Four of the 10 videos selected for March centered on some form of athletic performance or achievement. These include the number one video, which demonstrates a possibly staged trick performed on a BMW motorcycle, as well as a Pepsi video featuring famous soccer players, a Nike ad highlighting the connection between athletes (both famous and unknown), and an Adidas ad with numerous athletic and non-athletic celebrities.

Two videos featured humor mocking other brands. Sony Playstation directly ridicules the controllers used by rival Microsoft’s Xbox gaming system, and SpecSavers directly parodies the sexist ads from men’s body spray Axe that suggest men who use Axe will have beautiful women in bikinis purse them.

In a return to a trend seen in January 2010, most of last month’s videos were global in theme and featured little or no language. Globally famous celebrities and/or simple yet powerful imagery made these videos easily consumed by viewers anywhere in the world. Most of February 2010’s videos required knowledge of the English language and US or UK popular culture and humor to fully appreciate, which partially reflects the inclusion of several commercials aired during the February 2010 Super Bowl telecast.

The top 10 picks for February, with links to view on YouTube:

1. BMW S1000RR – Dinner Table, agency: n/a
2. Pedigree – Dogs, agency: TBWA
3. Pepsi Max – ‘Oh Africa,’ agency: n/a
4. Nike – The Human Chain, agency: Wieden & Kennedy
5. Adidas Originals – Street Corner, agency: Sid Lee
6. Tropicana – Arctic Sun, agency: BBDO
7. Sprite – Spark, agency: Bartle Bogle Hegarty
8. Sony Playstation – Move, agency: Deutsch
9. Specsavers – ‘The Specs Effect,’ agency: Specsavers Creative
10. Natural Gas Belgium – Soft Heat, agency: TBWA

About the Rankings: goviral issues a monthly top-10 list of viral video rankings on its site, including additional commentary about the videos, their approaches and why the firm thinks they are viral or likely to become viral in the future.

Having just gone through the process of buying and selling our family home, I could relate to this video. The real estate agent who handled both of our transactions did not fall into this category but I had to laugh when I watched it, so please enjoy it before it gets removed.

Over the past 3 months I’ve conducted approximately 50 SEO audits on real estate web sites and I’ve duly sent off to the respective web site owners 25 page reports on what they can do to improve their web site, and with most of the web sites in question, improve their rankings on either Google and/or Bing, for those most commonly searched terms and keywords. While conducting these audits, several  issues have become more than clear to me, (1) most of these web sites have been very badly optimised to start with by the web developer, and (2) some owners do not have access to their web sites header files and have to pay their design company every time they want to change a piece of code.

How about that for being held to ransom, who actually owns the site, well let me tell you, it is not you!

Click here If you’d like to read an article on Who Really Owns Your Real Estate Web Site.

One web company just outright refuses to provide the owners access and insists on charging them every time they want to change information, which makes it very hard to actually optimise the site.

SEO is not set and forget, and sometimes each web page needs to be massaged to get it to rank, well just imagine the cost if you were charged every time changes to content and coding were recommended. Of course this is the point of this exercise, to get as much revenue out of you as possible and given that most of the real estate offices I’ve done the audits for have no idea about web site design or SEO, you are easy pickings .

So how do you avoid being fleeced forever by these companies? Firstly make sure you have total access to all the files on your web site, so that if you need to make changes to your site it can be done via your back-end administration page, that is total control over your HTML title tag and your meta description tag, also make sure that your CMS does not generate dynamic URL’s, these are much harder to rank on search engines, static URL’s are really what you need. Make sure that you can change the wording on all your pages and that you have control over your images including adding alt tags and correct descriptions, these are an important part of on page optimisation.

Make sure when your site is launched you get a search engine submission report and also get what keywords they have optimised your content for, 90% of the sites I’ve audited have been optimised for the clients name, have you ever wondered how many times your brand was searched on Google for instance?  Your web site needs to be optimised for the key searches that relate to the industry and your location. Remember, Google indexes web pages not web sites so the more pages your site has the more chance you have of having your pages rank for different keywords. Try and have at least 300 words on your home page, search engines love text, so image heavy home pages are harder to optimise.

Where ever possible add a blog to your site, better still add a stand alone blog on a different domain and link it to your site, WordPress.org is one of the best blog platforms to use and search engines love it, adding engagement objects such as video is an absolute must, videos produced by you and uploaded on a regular basis will be indexed and ranked very fast, and getting a search engine to visit your site more often because of frequently updated content means higher rankings. Google looks at the freshness factor among other things.

You don’t need to be a web design expert, you just need to  make sure you are in control of your own site and your SEO and don’t have to keep putting your hands in your pocket whenever you want to change something, so take control back from these pirates.

The real estate industry needs to really start to take action on this and fast.

A little while ago I started a series of posts which were based on the worst property videos that have been featured on youtube. Those posts were very popular with the readers of this blog, so I thought I’d give you another 4 minutes and 43 seconds, sorry, 4 minutes and 44 seconds of sheer painful boredom.

This is just one of a few youtube videos that highlights luxury homes available for sale in Sri Lanka. Again, here is a slide show that is pretending to be a video, and there is not one indoor shot included, just a montage of luxury properties and no voice over. The music featured on the video reflects the country which is in context, but the addition of a voice over, in my mind, would have improved the soundtrack. Remember, some of these properties are for sale at a price range over a million dollars US.

Well, I’ll leave it to you to make up your own mind on how you think this video could have been improved.

Thought I’d continue to share with you some of these little gems that appear on Youtube, proudly displayed by the listing Real Estate Agent. This one is a right little doosy, the property was listed at $17.5 million US and the agency responsible for this one is Hilton Hyland Realty Brokerage.

One of the owners of this agency just happens to be Paris Hilton’s father. At a price tag of $17.5 million, you would have thought the agent could have at least organised a proper video rather than use a slide show. The background music shows a certain flare, although I’m not quite sure what they were trying to achieve, the video is cheap and the agent looks cheap, to me at least.

It really makes you wonder why they bothered.

Ever wondered how the consumer or real estate searcher when searching on your web site or real estate portal views themselves? Am i a lead? a prospect? a contact or am I a person?

How do you approach social media or Internet marketing in general with your real estate office? do you treat them as a lead or a prospect, a contact or a person? 

From the consumers point of view it’s, All about me!!!

Interesting thought starter isn’t it. How you approach your marketing efforts on the web really is about how you view your consumers, how you talk to them, how you respond to them, how you market to them and the words you use are all very, very important when it comes to on line marketing, WHY? because this is usually the first point of contact a consumer will have with you and your business or product, and how well you treat them or engage themwill depend on whether they come back to your web site, use your services or buy your product.

I often get the response from real estate agents when talking about internet marketing and social media of “all I want are leads” or “How many new prospects will I get” .

The buyer/seller will judge you on lots of criteria, including your knowledge of the area, your expertise in marketing and selling property, your negotiating skills etc, so how do you inform them of all your skills and provide them with the information to make the decision to use you or your business. Most real estate agents market for today, and I don’t for one minute suggest you stop that activity, but give some thought to the future and implement a longer term strategy and start to market effectively to the future.

From the real estate portals comes research that indicates up to 39% of the real estate buyer or seller can be researching up to 9 to 12 months on line before buying or selling, so when they do, have you been the one that constantly updates them, provides them with really helpful information on real estate, sells your expertise in the area and have you treated them as a person.

Here’s a really great video for you to watch on this very subject and after you watch it, you may just be tempted to engage your market.

I for one would like to see you do just that.

Other notable figures, you may be interested in:

• 78.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.
• 98.9 million viewers watched 5.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (59.2 videos per viewer).
• 48.7 million viewers watched 367 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes.
• The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 10.1 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.

Comscore Survey Results

These results are something the real estate industry in Australia needs to monitor, the use of video is now to the point that the industry really can’t continue to ignore it.

Here we are 19 days into 2009, and there are lots of interesting news & blog reports about the growing usage of the net and what tools are becoming popular with on line users.

I’ve been looking at various trends with technology this year and I’ve mentioned Twitter and other social media tools that real estate agents can get on board with to communicate and share information with consumers searching on the web. One of the tools I’ve been pushing for awhile is video, and readers of this blog will know, as I’ve mentioned so many times in the past, I’m a big fan. Not just of property video tours, but video as a tool to provide market updates, create and build an agents profile, share information with other like minded people, training etc and the list goes on.  I’m predicting that 2009 will be the year that more and more of the real estate groups will integrate video into their marketing mix and we’ll start to see more video tours on properties, and once main stream marketers start to utilise this medium more aggressively, that will open the flood gates.

A recent survey conducted by Permission TV revealed that over 400 senior marketers from advertising agencies & the media in the US will significantly increase implementation of their on line video initiatives in 2009.

The Key Findings of the survey were:

Here’s a graph with the findings: 

Some additional Findings:

• More than two thirds (64 percent) of respondents reported that strengthening relationships with existing customers and/or prospects is the primary goal of online video initiatives.
• When focusing on respondents from the traditional and digital/interactive advertising agencies, more than 90 percent are overwhelmingly confidentin their ability to recommend online video initiatives to clients.
• Digital/interactive agencies expressed more confidence in recommending online video to clients compared to traditional agencies; however, traditionalagencies claim more responsibility for driving online video initiatives than digital/interactive agencies.

Video in 2009, should be a high priority along with using social media in your marketing mix, but it won’t be good enough to start a blog and then not target it correctly or post one piece of content and expect it to  generate good quality leads, or make a home made video of very dodgy quality and then expect that to be viewed by the masses. No, all that will happen is you’ll end up on a blog like this one on what not to do. 

Social media including any public communication tool like video, needs a comprehensive strategy attached to it, so that your agency or business can really capitalise on it’s strengths.

Understand the target market you are aiming at, be aware of the way the consumer uses social media and play to it’s strengths, be very aggressive in syndication of your social media communications or projects and make it part of your broader marketing initiatives. 

Social media will not be for everyone and it does take time to work at it, if you are not sure about how to put this strategy together or are not aware of what social media you can use in your business, then contact me. I’ll help you put together a comprehensive communication plan that encompasses all the tools on the web, to drive leads and open up new doors for you and your business. 

Source: Permission TV Survey December 2008