Notorious R.O.B.

Conversations about the real estate industry, marketing, technology, and public policy

Community Generated Marketing?

Okay, so with the comic book discussion sure to be going on (who knew there were so many comics geeks in the RE.net?), let me turn to something I think could be very interesting.  First, view this video:

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This is a music video by the trance dance group OceanLab.  But it was edited from videos submitted by OceanLab’s fans.  From the YouTube description:

In November last year Above & Beyond launched a competition offering fans the chance to create the next OceanLab music video for “On A Good Day”. Jono, Tony & Paavo were overwhelmed with the quality and creativity of the entries and the official video has been made using the highlights from the best entries.

The resulting video is beguiling.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the track itself is haunting and beautiful.

Where my mind goes wandering is… is this sort of community-created marketing possible, especially in real estate?

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Getting On the Cluetrain, No. 2: Value of Expertise

In part one of this series, exploring the implications of the Cluetrain Manifesto on the real estate industry, I focused on the basic concept behind the Cluetrain: that markets are conversations, and in the Internet age, authenticity and honesty is absolutely indispensable.

In this part, I’d like to muse on what the value of expertise is in a fully networked conversation/market. In particular, the question of ‘wisdom of crowds‘ must be addressed, as “Web 2.0″ tends towards a tendency of valuing the many over the one.

My hope is to spur some thought on what the real estate industry might look like after the transformative power of the empowered community is fully unleashed.

I know that anecdote is not the plural of evidence, but stories are fun! So I begin with a story.

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