Real Estate Technology Reports
Social Networks for building Real Estate CommunitiesOnline Social Networking refers to online website communities of people who share interests and activities or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Communications between members can be chat, instant messaging, email, video, file sharing, discussion groups, etc. For real estate brokers, online social networking can create online communities for agents to share information with each other, and with prospective buyers and sellers of real estate in a controlled environment. For real estate agents, online social networking is similar to offline networking whereby they may connect with other real estate agents, friends, and buyers and sellers of real estate in a meaningful and transparent way. When we review the elements of broker and agent websites, one key area that lends itself nicely to Social Networks is the company biography page and agent pages. There are 2 ways to manage the creation of a Social Network to replace biography pages - populate agent biography pages on your favorite network like Linkedin, or "white label" social network software and create your own social network. To make this determination, you will need to carefully consider the effects of each choice. Using your favorite social network is an easy path to creating a social network with your agents. These popular social networks are very easy to use, have mass appeal and wide ranging adoption among real estate agents and consumers alike. Because the social network pages connect to your website, you will generate more inbound links to your website, which is a key component to search engine ranking today. Social Networks are effective at search engine optimization. If you google "Victor Lund," you will find that the many social networks I have tested show up on the first page of the results. One social reputation network, Naymz, even purchases pay per click to drive traffic to my profile page on their social network thinking that they can add customers that way. Many consumers are using Social Networks today. According to Ipsos research, about 1 in 5 Americans use social networks and 24% of those people log in every day, and 8% log into their social network every 30 days. As your agents connect with friends and customers participating in their social network, they begin to connect more and more people to your company. Depending on the social network that you choose, you will find that it displays the information that would typically be present on an agent profile page today. These features include Agent Photo, Agent Profile, Agent Contact Information, Link to Agent Listings, e-mail agent, etc. More importantly, social influences may be persuasive in encouraging your agents to keep this information current as they will be able to update it themselves, and they know that the profile is connected to the people that are most important tot them. Agents will also be able to manage the transparency of their profiles. Their favorite real estate resources may be included in their friends group, along with community groups and even family, friends and past customers. By reviewing who an agent is connected to, consumers evaluating their interest in choosing the agent will be exposed to an electronic referral system. Successful real estate agents today are upstanding, active participants in the communities in which they work. Unsuccessful agents who are simply "hanging" their license with a broker will be exposed by social networks, and frankly, perhaps they should be if their interest is not professional and sincere. Where social networks as agent profiles gets really interesting is the way that they will enable someone from within the network to approach the agent comfortable. They can join the agents network, which will notify the agent and they can welcome them, or the consumer might connect with the agent by introducing themselves as a friend of a friend. If an agent chooses to switch offices or brokerages, using social networks as their profile page will allow their profile to remain portable, but will also benefit the brokerage and the consumer because activity history with the past brokerage will remain in tact. Most Popular online social networks These communities are all very vibrant and have many developers providing new functionality every day that enhances the community. Leveraging these free applications will insure that your community technology remains up to date. As each of these networks grow, so does yours. If you want a social network but want to keep it as your own, you can consider "white labeling" a social network form a vendor. You can host these on your servers or select a hosted solution. To see an example of this, you can check out inman.com who built their entire website using drupal The benefit to the pursuit is this strategy would be to build your own social network that you can control.The design of the pages can be customized to match your branding and the display rules for your brand. You can control the page layouts You can control the content Unites all of your agents automatically Builds a portal of information with stronger SEO for your company website. Build unique listing websites as blogs and unite them in the community. One to many publishing that will enable the broker to "post" to every agents profile or blog. List of Social Network White Label software providers If you would like help figuring out to implement a Web 2.0 strategy for your office or you have suggestions to share with other REALTORS® contact us and we'll post your ideas. http://waves.wavgroup.com/002904 438 views | Posted on 2008-03-29 @ 9.25:59 am
Comment from: Michelle Meyers, CNET Staff Writer [Visitor]  · http://softratty.comFrom softratty.com, one story from last week for its potentially lasting implications was the formation of the OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit group to support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year to promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites. In what CNET News.com reporter Caroline McCarthy termed "the Justice League of social media," the OpenSocial Foundation was announced by partners Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.'s MySpace.com and is expected to be formed within 90 days, with more partners from across the Web on board. Its specific goal is "to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the Web." And it's a particularly crucial move for Google, which has been eager to emphasize that OpenSocial is a community standard, not a Mountain View, Calif.-based project. Of course, noticeably absent from the current partner list is Facebook, the site that started the social-networking platform craze in the first place. OpenSocial was a response to that mania, and an attempt to come up with some continuity among the disparate developer strategies. And Facebook won't likely be joining the OpenSocial Foundation, at least in the near term. "As the largest contributor to the memecached system, Facebook has long been a leader and supporter of open-source initiatives but will not join the foundation," a statement from the company read. "The company will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities that will benefit the 300,000 Facebook Platform developers while improving the Facebook user experience." Practically speaking, OpenSocial competes with Facebook's system by letting user data cross-pollinate between sites and services using a single API (application programming interface). A photo-sharing application, for example, could tap into the social graphs of Orkut, Bebo, MySpace, Ning, or other services without any code changes. But News.com's Dan Farber points out that Google is making Facebook's choice regarding OpenSocial more difficult by granting the OpenSocial code to the nonprofit foundation, which will be "independent of any undue influence by any one party," according to the Opensocial.org Web site. "The majority of its users are in a demographic that can change their mind in an instant, leaving Facebook wondering  Permalink 2008-03-30 @ 7.14:01 amComment from: Steven Borsch [Visitor] · http://www.iconnectdots.comFrom http://www.iconnectdots.com If the web is truly going to become a place where we can move about freely -- instead of deciding which social network or hottest-n-latest service to use and then investing in that closed proprietary network -- then open standards all meshed together and portable are what we need...and now. Many people I follow have written extensively about "profile" and participation fatigue" since we users are more and more reluctant to join yet another new service and do what's necessary to maintain it and get all of our friends to join. Mark Canter wrote this: you and I are investing ourselves all over the web in currently non-integrated sets of services that don't talk to one another for the most part. In order to move toward a time when all of these different services allow YOU to coordinate, orchestrate and integrate your online life, there are sets of behind-the-scenes services that have to interoperate seamlessly so YOU can "own" your digital life and parcel pieces out to others with whom you'll allow access to some, most or all of it. As more social networks, services and applications arrive that ask you and I to invest time, energy and effort to participate with them online, they'll fail if an interoperating mesh of services doesn't exist since you and I will begin to resist joining and maintaining without that interoperating just happening seamlessly on the backend. If you're thinking of building out just such a network or community site, you must choose a platform vendor that understands the mesh is needed and is working toward a set of industry standards comprising a mesh of interoperating services. To do otherwise would see you not choosing a strategic vendor and you'll paint yourself into a corner. You'll then have an even bigger mess on your hands when your users realize what you've done and stop joining and participating in favor of those are open and connected or completely abandon your service. Permalink 2008-03-30 @ 10.10:26 amComment on this article This post has no feedback awaiting moderation... |
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