Notorious R.O.B.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

- Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charge of the Light Brigade

Todd Carpenter (@tcar on Twitter) has been named as the first ever Social Media Manager for the National Association of Realtors.

After an extensive search, we hired Todd Carpenter, a founder of RE Blogworld and of mariah.com, a network of real estate and mortgage web sites including lenderama, REMBEX, and Denver Modern Homes. Many qualified candidates, both inside and outside of the real estate industry, applied for the position, and I asked a small set of finalists to prepare assignments detailing what they would do during their first 90 days in the role and how they would handle a challenging issue leveraging the power of the RE.net and the blogosphere.

We loved Todd’s ideas, his easygoing manner, his reputation and how knowledgeable he is about social media. We also really valued his relationships with so many REALTORS® who are using blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media channels to connect effectively with one another and with potential clients and customers.

As I have recommended Todd for this job way back when — albeit layered with concerns — I am of course thrilled for Todd, and wish him the best of luck.  I have also been privileged to be invited to converse with NAR leadership about their social media strategy, with an emphasis on what the NAR Social Media Manager’s role ought to be, and have given them further thoughts on that.

Here, I want to expand with three further thoughts.

1.  Yours Not to Do and Die / Yours But to Reason Why

With due apologies to Alfred Lord Tennyson, I’d like to stress what this role cannot become: the voice of NAR for “social media”.

Becoming the “voice of NAR for social media” does two disservices: one to NAR, and one to you.

For NAR, it ghettoizes social media as “just another marketing channel” just like print, TV, radio, or email.  What is needed is not another “marketing channel” but a wholesale change in approach to how NAR connects with its members, with the public, and with policymakers.

For you, the disservice is that rather than becoming a change agent able to drive cultural change from within NAR, you become yet another communication channel — of which NAR has plenty.  I likened the proper role of the Social Media Manager to be something like a “cluetrain conductor“.  And I think that remains the case.

Yours is to reason why NAR does or does not speak to its constituents and the public on a particular topic, in a particular way.  And to force the organization itself to ask “Why?” or “Why not?”

2.  It is the Valley of Death

Well, perhaps “Valley of Death” is a bit dramatic — but it fit with the whole poetry theme!  Let’s rather call it the “Valley of Slowly Getting Co-Opted”.

What you know already is that the people at NAR are delightful.  They’re smart, dedicated, professional, and truly cares about the industry, about their members, about consumers.  Contrary to some of the portrayals of NAR in the media and RE.net, I have found that everyone I’ve met at NAR is just wonderful.  There isn’t a person who works at NAR that I’ve met personally who I wouldn’t want to go have a beer with, or talk policy with, or even just talk about our favorite movies with.

This is a danger to you.

Because it is far too easy to become “one of them”.  JeffX’s twitter joke is actually profound:

@JeffX: Hey TNar, i mean @tcar will the NAR allow you to maintain your Ninja rights?

It isn’t simply NAR allowing you to be the person they hired; it is also you staying the person they hired, instead of slowly transforming into “one of them”.  You can’t stop the blipstreams, now that you have this “important position” in the real estate world.  You can’t stop blogging, can’t stop Twittering as @tcar, and can’t suddenly become “respectable”.

Of course, NAR can’t try to stop you — that plainly defeats the purpose of bringing you inside the fold.

3.  Be the Virus

The remedy, then, is to internalize that one of the biggest values you are bringing to NAR is to be the “virus from without”.  Your task is to make NAR more like you: open, authentic, honest, and constantly in touch.

Just as you have been transparent to the RE community over the years, so you must “infect” the rest of NAR to become transparent.  Just as you have always been one of the most authentic human beings on RE.net over the years, so you must infect the rest of NAR, the state associations, the member organizations, and indeed the NAR members themselves to be more authentic, be more human, and be more connected.

Through those efforts, I know you can bring in the fresh voices, the new perspectives from the RE.net and realestistas everywhere to the mainstream of the industry.  And you know that you have friends and allies who support you in those efforts.

So once again, congratulations to both you and to NAR.  You have my best wishes, and my pledge to support your efforts to become the Cluetrain conductor we so desperately need.

-rsh

(PS: I posted this publicly because many of the thoughts here are applicable to any large organization that is starting up social media initiatives, and to anyone working at those organizations.  And because some of these things are worth discussing.)

So I promised a more serious post about Blip.fm, the social music network that I’m fairly obsessed with these days. It’s taken a few days for the thoughts to gel, and I’m not convinced that they have fully. But in the interests of starting the discussion, I want to get this out there.

Could a blip.fm type of service work in real estate?

On Blip Itself

First, we must talk a little bit about Blip for those who don’t know that the *blip* I’m ranting about.

Blip is basically Twitter + Online Radio. The concept is really cute — every person signs up and can become a “DJ” by “blipping” various tunes. Each tune, with its 140 character message, goes on a blipstream that is identical to Twitter. Your listeners/followers can hear the songs you’ve blipped in turn.

So rather than listening to a professional DJ on some online radio station (and I guess that makes the term “professional” somewhat loose here), you can listen to music that all of your friends think is cool.

The mechanism for how one actually goes about doing blips is worth a look. First, the box at top is a search box, rather than a Twitter-style message box. That search then activates an in-screen search of songs/artists that match the keywords:

From right here, you can “Preview” — meaning, you can listen to the song — then you can “Blip” which means you actually publish that song as your choice.

The actual Blip then brings up the message window:

Second, the social aspect of Blip.fm is pretty strong. The basic one is that people listen to you — if you’re blipping the tunes that more people like, then they’re more likely to listen to you. The other one is that you can give and get “Props” to other DJ’s for their selections. The props then lead to little stars on your profile pic. Ego-stroking is a very important thing on the Web.

The whole thing is very addicting, especially if you’re into obscure 80′s new wave songs and old school rap and such.

So… RE Blip?

What I was wondering is whether this mechanism can work in real estate, as a replacement for traditional search.

I don’t mean traditional search as in the search box that exists on a website — I mean the actual process of looking for a house: checking websites, driving around neighborhoods, talking to people, and so on.

Why not crowdsource the whole thing, as Blip does for music?

Imagine a scenario where I can go onto reblip.com, do a basic keyword search, find a bunch of listings, find a bunch of neighborhood info pages, etc. and “blip” it with commentary.  Such commentary could be something positive like “This looks like a great deal” to something critical like “I can’t believe someone actually put this piece of crap up for sale”.

Folks who are actually IN the search process can blip the houses they’ve gone to see with commentary; their friends and followers would pick up on that.

Realtors can continuously blip listings that they really like, or interesting neighborhoods, etc. and see if anyone follows them.  That seems obvious.

The traditional “featured listing” mechanism won’t work here — because if you’re just pimping your highest priced property, or blipping a listing only because you’ve promised the seller that you’d do that — then no one is likely to follow you.  What’s the point?

Furthermore, if you’re good at finding neat houses, or underpriced properties, or whatever, then you can get props propelling your visibility upwards as well.

Now… I understand that all of this can actually be done via Twitter.  Just put a tinyurl link of the listing itself into the tweet, and there you go.

Thing is, I don’t think that’s enough.  To me, what makes Blip compelling is that the entire experience is unified and self-contained.  There are no external links for fetching music.  No external search.  In fact, I can listen to the music directly from within Blip.  Twitter can be used for this sort of crowdsourced search of properties, but that makes the experience disjointed.

A single site, with a unified user experience, that is able to showcase at least the highlights directly in the “blipstream” would work better, I think.  Because that lets me, if I’m a follower of various REBlippers, to quickly scan a bunch of properties that those people think are cool for one reason or another.

The Recommendation Engine

There is one other key to Blip: the recommendation engine.  It’s a very simple one for Blip.  Whenever you blip a song, the system tells you (and shows you) who else has blipped that song.  You can then decide to follow them, seeing as how you have similar tastes in music.

For REBlip, this is going to be a bit more complicated.  Non-realtor users are unlikely to blip anything, as they’re the consumers of information.  But even if they did, it strikes me as unlikely that others who blipped the same house have the same taste as you do.  Plus, the properties themselves do not necessarily share commonalities as music does.

A song by Jay-Z and a song by Public Enemy are both rap songs, a distinct genre of music.  But is a 3BR/2BA Tudor in one city the same “genre” of housing as a different 3BR/2BA ranch in another city?

Taken together, these challenges suggests to me that a relatively sophisticated recommendation engine would need to be developed with something like a “House Genome Project” — patterened after Pandora’s pioneering Music Genome Project.  This way, if I’m a consumer user, I can follow certain folks who have a knack for blipping properties I find interesting for one reason or another.

The Dream Search

It probably has to do with the fact that I am a fairly lazy guy when it comes to things like shopping for stuff, but my dream house search looks very much like my dream shopping experience.  Which I’ve actually had at Emporio Armani.  I walk in, find an associate, tell him in vague and general terms what I’m looking for (“Something appropriate for business, but still casual and hip”), have someone hand me a caffe latte, and I sit around and wait for various well-dressed minions to bring me merchandise.  In most cases, the good salespeople bring me items that I personally would never have looked at twice, but end up buying because their fashion eye is better than mine.

I kinda want to be able to tell my friends and various professionals out there in vague general terms what I’m looking for in a house or in a neighborhood, and have them bring me merchandise.  Maybe my friends know me better than I do and blip me properties they think I’d be happy with.  Perhaps the professionals I follow have a knack for finding stuff that is spot on for needs of a thirtysomething officeworker with a family.

But I think something like a REBlip could be pretty cool to have.  Crowdsourced real estate search.  Somebody get on that please.

-rsh