Online Real Estate Technology

Great story today out of the UK, with an academic claiming that social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo and Twitter shorten the attention span, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self centred.

The comments come from Baroness Susan Greenfield an Oxford University based neuro-scientist. She said the sites as well as fast paced computer games and TV shows can effectively “rewire” the brain. She states that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of  small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights and who have a small attention span.

More than 150 million people worldwide use Facebook, and Twitter now has over 6 million users. In a report to Britain’s highest court, she indicated that a teacher of over 30 years experience had noticed a sharp decline in the ability of her students to understand others. It seems that real converstation may eventually give way to sanitised and on line dialogues.    

I  notice she hasn’t mentioned us baby boomers out there that use social networking sites, but then again this is something that I’ve known for a long time, I have a short attention span and I’m attracted to buzzing noises and bright lights. So now I know who to blame for this.

Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, you have a lot to answer for!!!

Well the Oscars are over for another year and it seems amongst the winners of the night of nights, were social media sites, blogs and our friend Twitter. People chatted or tweeted about their favourite movie or actors and shared information and their opinions on who would or should win.

So which  movies or actors got the most buzz out of the night? Well a Washington DC based company called New Media Strategies tracked the night across blogs and Twitter to find out who got the most buzz.

So who were the big winners last night? here’s the list for you:

Most tweeted about films:

Slumdog Millionaire: 6,369
Milk: 3,617
Wall-e: 1,284
Benjamin Button: 1,110
The Wrestler: 1,070
Dark Knight: 893 (add in Heath Ledger mentions and you get 3,503)
The Reader: 814
Frost/Nixon: 543
Kung Fu Panda: 139

Most tweeted about individuals

Sean Penn: 3,040
Heath Ledger: 2,612
Mickey Rourke: 2,040
Penélope Cruz: 1,843
Hugh Jackman: 1,827
Kate Winslet: 1,250
Angelina Jolie: 912
Brad Pitt: 592
Jennifer Aniston: 422

Sean Penn’s acceptance speech for his Oscar got the most activity on Youtube along with Ben Stiller’s Joaquin Phoenix imitation running a close second.

If you’d like to read the full story and get all the results here’s the link for you, happy reading!

Strange title I know, and I had to think a little bit about this post, but sometimes you just have to have a little bit of fun, and with that in mind, here’s something that is not really technology based but I’m sure you will enjoy. With all the talk about economic stimulus packages and the various governments giving out money, I thought I might as well get in on the act.

So whilst I wait for Kevin Rudds cheque to arrive in the mail just for me, I checked out the Bank Of Obama. Yes, you heard right. There is an on line Bank Obama, now it’s just for fun of course, but you can create your own hand out or help a Friend and send them a virtual or paper cheque.

In this one I’ve decided that I need a hand out to cover my gambling debts, only $200,000,000 of course.

Now if only this was real!!!

Mike Andrew's Hand Out from Obama

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.

As a follow up to my post on Google Analytics, I thought I’d take a look at what were the top searches conducted in 2008 on Google by Australians. Interesting to note that searches for technology and internet terms increased in 2008 and the top rating TV show Underbelly also scored highly in the most searched words or terms on Google. The financial crisis and Olympians such as Stephanie Rice scored very highly as well. So here are the top 10 most searched terms of 2008.

Questions that come out of my seminar series often centre around the search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and how to measure your office’s web site traffic, and where do readers come from? Well I thought I’d share a video with you on a great tool called Google Analytics.

The video is produced by Google and shows you how to use Analytics effectively, it takes you on a tour on how people find your site, how they navigate through it and how they become customers.

Personally I’m a big supporter of business’s taking more control over this side of being on the web. I mentioned in an earlier post How Important is An Effective SEO Strategy to Your Real Estate Business  that the real estate industry had neglected SEO and handed it to the major real estate portals on a silver platter. 

If you’re not using this tool in your office then this will be a great start, if you are, this video will show you some nice techniques to understand your on line audience more thoroughly. Once you start to understand them better, you’ll then be able to communicate with them and convert more of your web site visitors to customers.

Really important in a very cluttered market.

Hello all, just a reminder that my seminar series sponsored by Domain.com.au is on again tomorrow Thursday and again Friday Morning. 

In the seminar series I’ll cover On Line Reputation Management, Integrating Social Media into your marketing strategy and Emerging Technology for Real Estate agents.

The locations for both Thursday and Friday sessions are as follows:

Thursday & Friday 19th & 20th February

Victoria Park Golf Complex, Herston Road, Herston

9:00am for a 9:30am start

If you’d like to attend or bring your agency along please contact Ben Tankey, at Domain.com.au
Telephone: 07 3031 6226
Email: BTankey@fairfaxdigital.com.au
(if RSVP by email please include your name, agency and contact number)

I’ll look forward to seeing everyone there.

Have you ever wondered how far we have come with technology? Do you think that today we can communicate faster than we did 100 years ago? well this little gem may get you thinking about how far we really have come. 

Please enjoy

So you think the real estate advertising market in Australia is tough at the moment, news coming out of the UAE’s is that the real estate advertising market has almost come to a complete stop. The real estate sector in the UAE slashed it’s advertising budgets by more than 69% in the last quarter of 2008.

The total real estate advertising spend in the UAE fell from $81 million (Dh297.2m) in October 2008 to $46m in November and $25m in December, according data from Pan Arab Research Centre in Dubai (Parc).

Real Estate advertising spend in the UAE in the first 3 months of 2009 is expected to almost come to a halt.

The Australian real estate advertising market is reportedly worth A$1.1billion a year and online sites generate only 12% of that spend per year. With 9 out of 10 real estate researchers going on line you’d have to wonder why more dollars are not invested on line.

If the advertising spend does drop off this year, it will be a case of having to work smarter, rather than harder, and on line does provide lots of ways that businesses can advertise without investing lots of hard earned cash, so maybe this year we’ll see an increase in on line spending.

If you would like to know how to make the web work harder for you, just come to one of my seminars or send me an email and I’d be happy to show you how to do it!

I’ve spoken a lot over the past 7 months this blog has been running about social media and why you should start to integrate it into your business plan for the future. Well a recent survey by Deloitte US has predicted that 2009 will be a breakout year for social media networks. Globally, social network sites have experienced a 25% growth in unique visitors in the last 12 months and research is indicating that around 40% of the users of these sites are over the age of 35.

Social networks, according to Deloitte, are a powerful tool for any organisation, and a way of tapping into the wisdom of crowds.

The graphic below shows the multi faceted nature of Enterprise social networking (ESN):

ESN Networking Graphic