Notorious R.O.B.

So I ask an innocent question recently on Twitter: “What’s the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0?”

And I got a number of interesting responses.  So of course I have to blog about it, heh.

Heather Elias (@heatherflynn) wrote: @robhahn interruption marketing versus permission marketing.  Actually, I take that back. More like broadcasting versus engagement.

Stacey Harmon (@staceyharmon): @robhahn I think Realtors should have 1.0 websites, but participate in web 2.0 communities. I don’t advise agents to create web 2.0 site …although there is an element of “dynamicism” that Realtors should use on their 1.0 websites which make them more 2.0 like…

Derek Massey (@derekmassey): @robhahn 1.0 is push, 2.0 is push and pull. 1.0 is presentation, 2.0 is discussion. 1.0 is looking big, 2.0 is acting small

And of course, @matman had the best observation: If my math serves me correctly, Web 2.0 is Web 1.0 x 2!

The profound simplicity of Matman’s formulation aside, all of these quotes suggest something without going so far as defining anything.  What is an observer — and more importantly, a practitioner — to do?

[Now, to be fair, let's be clear that the above people were responding via Twitter with its 140-character limits.  So by necessity they had to be general; therefore, none of what is below should be seen as criticism.  In fact, I rather hope they'd come and participate and expand on these thoughts.]

Imprecision Indecision

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the typical real estate agent who is discovering the wild and woolly world of online real estate.  She goes to a conference, like RE Tech South or Inman Connect or perhaps a RE Barcamp.  She hears everyone talking about Web 2.0, about social media, about leveraging the most powerful form of marketing ever invented.

She’s got herself a website from one o’ dem website vendor fellas, and she figures she needs to get with the program.  She desperately desires to join the Web 2.0 world and the rest of it.

What is she to do?

Her current site is ‘broadcast’ whereas she wants to go to ‘engagement’.  Rather than presenting stuff, she wants to discuss them.

In practical terms, what does this mean for our newbie realestista?

The picture gets cloudier still when she realizes that the sites usually brought up as exemplars of the Web 2.0 movement are sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia.  YouTube is literally broadcast for our newbie — she goes there to watch videos.  Flickr isn’t much different — she goes there to check out photos from other people.

Blogs are said to be the quintessence of “Web 2.0″, but she visits most blogs to read stuff other people have written.  Sure she can see that some folks comment and such, but hasn’t ever done it herself.  How is this different from people coming to her site to read her market reports page?

Her site allows users to search for listings, then returns results to them.  It’s all rather one-to-one in her view.  So what’s so Web 1.0 about her basic search site, and what would she have to change to make it a Web 2.0 site?  Just add a blog, or let users comment on the listing?

What does “dynamicism” mean anyhow for her?

The Disservice of Vagueness

Every time I go to a real estate conference where newcomers are introduced to the heady concepts and la revolucion sweeping their industry, I come away thinking that they all have the somewhat happy-but-dazed look of people who sat under a waterfall for a few hours.

They all go away feeling that they have to do something, and that they have heard the key to future success, but with precious few concrete action items.

The problem, I think, is the very imprecision of the terminology we throw around.  The vagueness performs a disservice to newbies.  Unfortunately, the imprecision and vagueness is built-in to the whole “Web 2.0″ meme/movement.

This seems a good place for a digression of sorts: What is Web 2.0?

In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:

Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick	–>	Google AdSense
Ofoto	–>	Flickr
Akamai	–>	BitTorrent
mp3.com	–>	Napster
Britannica Online	–>	Wikipedia
personal websites	–>	blogging
evite	–>	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	–>	search engine optimization
page views	–>	cost per click
screen scraping	–>	web services
publishing	–>	participation
content management systems	–>	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	–>	tagging (“folksonomy”)
stickiness	–>	syndication

The list went on and on. But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as “Web 1.0″ and another as “Web 2.0″? (The question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means. The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications!)

The post by Tim O’Reilly — I suppose the father of the term “Web 2.0″ — goes on to make claims like “Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core.”  And then O’Reilly supplies us with a helpful “meme map”:

If the “gravitational core” of Web 2.0 is “The Web as Platform” then every single real estate website in existence today — including the original Realtor.com circa 1996 — is Web 2.0.  If the key to Web 2.0 is “You control your own data” then not one real estate website today is Web 2.0.  Because not one real estate website controls its own data — nor does any user of any real estate website.

Look at some of the other “core competencies” like “Harnessing the collective intelligence”.  Whatever this might mean in Web 2.0, I think it’s safe to say that few real estate websites today are Web 2.0 under this scenario.  And the ones that might be able to make that claim are all portals aggregating the “wisdom of the crowds” of thousands of individuals — Trulia Voices, Zillow Advice, ActiveRain, and the like.

In other words, NOT an individual broker or agent website.

Then look at the peripheral concepts, such as “Trust your users” and “Hackability”.  In some ways, real estate web is almost defined by not trusting your users and not being hackable.

You can (and if you’re really interested, you probably should) read the whole article by Tim O’Reilly.  But for those who want to get to the meat, the conclusion brings the juice:

Core Competencies of Web 2.0 Companies

In exploring the seven principles above, we’ve highlighted some of the principal features of Web 2.0. Each of the examples we’ve explored demonstrates one or more of those key principles, but may miss others. Let’s close, therefore, by summarizing what we believe to be the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

The next time a company claims that it’s “Web 2.0,” test their features against the list above. The more points they score, the more they are worthy of the name. Remember, though, that excellence in one area may be more telling than some small steps in all seven.

While Tim O’Reilly is speaking of “Web 2.0 companies” rather than “Web 2.0 websites”, if we apply the same checklist to websites especially in real estate, confusion reigns.

Based on the above list, for a savvy agent to transform her website from “Web 1.0″ to “Web 2.0″, the following would have to occur:

1. Leave the MLS and institute a proprietary listings database, with direct input from users of the website.  How else to get ‘control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer with usage”?
2. Listings without pricing — fully auctionize (is that even a word?) the real estate process.  Let buyers simply bid what they would pay for a particular house, rather than list a price for a home.  How else to “harness collective intelligence” or to “trust your users”?
3. No more “contact me” forms, but a “here’s the password to the lockbox” forms.  How else to enable “customer self-service”?

I am, of course, being just a wee bit facetious.  It would be impossible — or nearly impossible — to do any of the above, nevermind all of them.

It may be that Web 2.0 simply cannot apply to real estate sites that are of interest to the newbie realestista.  They’re not interested in starting a wholly new business model premised upon consumer self-service, wisdom of crowds, and control over proprietary data.  They’re simply interested in marketing themselves and their services (and the listings they are marketing) better.

So how do we do that?

Dispelling the Shadows: Getting Specific

First step, I think, is to get away from vague exhortations and move towards specific action items.

Rather than “engage the consumer”, perhaps the recommendation should be “Have a blog”.

Rather than “push and pull”, perhaps the recommendation should be “Put a RSS feed on your listings”.

Whatever it is, ye legions of web designers, social media experts, and Web 2.0 evangelists need to get much more specific than you have been to date.  There needs to be concrete differences between a “Real Estate 1.0″ site and a “Real Estate 2.0″ site of the sort that can be put into an actionable format.

And those concrete differences have to be meaningful and measurable in some way.  There has to be a reason to put in a blog on a website, or to incorporate user comments onto listings.  The expert who is recommending a course of action should be prepared to deliver performance metrics.

Newbie Academy

What might be a great step forward is for conference organizers to consider creating a whole separate track for newcomers to the modern real estate web.  This “Newbie Academy” track would eschew broad statements and grand gestures and focus on action items with specific things they can do.

For example, rather than telling real estate agents that they need to make their websites more engaging, the expert instructor might step through different modes of engagement:

• Professional Resume: Since the consumer is seeking a professional to provide services, you will want to engage the consumer with a clear statement of your professional qualifications, track record, and accomplishments.
  • Action Item: About Me section on the website, with a detailed professional resume, including education.
  • Action Item: A link to your LinkedIn profile which duplicates your detailed professional resume.  Do not assume that users will click over, but make it an option.
• Personality: Because real estate is an intensely personal affair, consumers will want to feel comfortable with their agent.  And you will want to feel good about working with a consumer.  Showcase your personality in various ways.
  • Action Item: Make sure that the overall design of your website, from the homepage to the font selection, matches your personality.  Do not settle for a template site you haven’t even looked over much.  Work with a designer if you must to express yourself through the design of your site.
  • Action Item: Put a list of your favorite books, or books you are reading, in the sidebar of your website.  You can use websites like WeRead or Shelfari.
  • Action Item: Put your favorite movies on your site with Flixter.
  • Action Item: Put your favorite musicians and songs on your site with iLike, or create a streaming radio station with blip.fm.
  • Action Item: Create some movies of yourself talking about yourself, your family, your hobbies, or your interests with a webcam or similar and post them on the site.
• Expertise: Consumers expect real estate agents to be experts on the whole home buying and selling process, as well as the local market.
  • Action Item: Put together a detailed market report for your market including inventory, last sold, median listed price, median sold price, price trends, and days on market.  If you can’t put it together yourself, at least get a pre-packaged tool from sites like Altos Research or Zillow.
  • Action Item: Offer consumers a detailed look into your market with both statistical data about population, median income, employment, etc.
  • Action Item: Provide consumers with information about the schools, both public and private, in your market.  [Of course, if it were me doing this Newbie Academy, I would have to mention my employer....]
  • Action item: Etc. and so on, and so forth.
• Whatever Else: Yadda, yadda, and yadda.

And so on.  In this manner, the newbie walks away with a specific action plan to improve her website from its current sad state to a modern Real Estate 2.0 website.  She doesn’t need to get confused with all the vagueries of theory about what principles constitute Web 2.0 vs. Web 1.0, or whether social media encompasses video or not, or what-have-you.

Those topics are for the illuminati who already know the basics.  And typically, we just argue about them and debate them in an effort to boil down the misty wilds of imprecision to a more coherent set of understanding.

For the Illuminati

And those of us who are the Web illuminati… I think we have to get better at our craft.  We have to get better at understanding what the hell we are talking about, so that we  can put things into the sort of precise language and specific courses of action that a newbie can follow.  If we can’t speak of things in precise and specific ways, then we probably don’t understand it well enough to advise anyone else on it.

This is partially why I like to say that I have no answers, only questions.  Because Web 2.0, social media, and the like are so seriously ill-defined at times that I have nothing specific to recommend.  Categories seem arbitrary — e.g., what makes Flickr “Web 2.0″ and Ebay not?  Metrics seem invisible at times.  Evidence is always thin.

Under those circumstances, I suppose being circumspect, hedging bets and statements, and freely admitting ignorance are strategic advantages.  Something for the illuminati to consider…

-rsh

I’ve been meaning to check out The Local — New York Time’s foray into what they’re calling ‘hyperlocal’ media but only got around to it just now.  Imagine my surprise and pleasure to discover that my neighborhood (Millburn, Maplewood, and South Orange) is one of the two trial neighborhoods for The Local.  (The other one is Fort Greene & Clinton Hill area of Brooklyn.)

Of course, I’m not quite sure why the blog address has to be maplewood.blogs.nytimes.com rather than millburn.blogs.nytimes.com but I chalk that bias up to my L-Dub Lower Wyoming hood mentality.

The Local

In any case, it appears that The Local is written primarily by journalists or people who want to become journalists.

The primary poster is Tina Kelley, who is a reporter for the NYTimes and a resident of Maplewood.  There are, as of this writing, three other writers (bloggers?) for The Local including a journalism college student, a grad student in “politics and journalism” which sounds like a particularly horrible combo, and a Columbia Journalism student.  It is not immediately clear that the three student intern-types have any connection to Millburn/Maplewood/South Orange.

And the topics of The Local are a mishmash of police blotter news, cute promotions of local residents, and information about local political or community events.  But it is precisely the sort of thing that I, as a local resident, find interesting and even useful.

For example, I didn’t know that Maplewood is receiving $200,000 of federal money, but that the money can’t save the jobs of three cops who are being laid off due to budget problems.  Interesting info.  That’s actual news.  Maybe now that cops are being laid off in Maplewood, the township might consider promoting greater gun ownership among the residents?  Or maybe not.

In any case, while I find the overly-cutesy tone gratingly condescending, I can see what New York Times is trying to do with this experiment.  If these hyperlocal sites can turn a profit, then that might be the way out for the newspaper industry that is dying off, one by one.

The response from the community has been somewhat mixed.  Tina Kelley posted an initial “Why We’re Here” post and the comments have been a mix of support, brutal criticism, and a wait-and-see attitude.

A “Jay” wrote:

I don’t understand what this is supposed to be. I don’t see any solid mechanism to include content related to news items of pressing interest. Are you tied in with the Times and your wire service to dump stories related to our towns in here as blog entries?

A “MCH” commented:

If this is supposed to be a blog (a new thing), you need to stop modeling it after a newspaper (an old thing.) So, lose the datelines. The bylines. And the take-yourself-too-seriously tone. Surely the old gray lady can learn some new tricks. If not, then it’s buh-bye!

In contrast, people like “John X. Kim” are far more supportive:

I’m glad to hear that the foundation of The Local will be local news, considering every time I pick up the local rag I shake my head in disappointment.

There are tremendous opportunities for stories here in Maplewood/Millburn/South Orange…stories of local significance but also of national resonance. The unique demographics of Maplewood/SO make the towns a bellweather for larger cultural currents on politics, education, race relations, to name a few. (No doubt you and your editors know this already.)

As such, it’s my hope that the site will shy away from fluff and tackle difficult questions that often are NOT asked for the sake of keeping the neighborly peace, community boosterism, and other vagaries of small-town exigency. We can certainly heed Eric Holder’s admonishment about our collective cowardice about race and apply it to other pressing public conversations.

So welcome, and I look forward to joining!

[Now, one sidenote here.  The link address for John Kim's comment above is: http://maplewood.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/why-were-here/#comment-43.  Comment-43, got that?

On the thread, his comment is #10.  Where are the other 33 comments?

It seems that even in the blogosphere, the newspaper folks can't resist picking-and-choosing which "Letters to the Editor" see the light of day and which do not.  So I will be posting on my own blog, rather than trusting my "comment" to the tender mercies of the "editors" of The Local.]

Localism: Maplewood

Being that I am in the real estate industry, I couldn’t help but compare The Local to Localism, the ActiveRain project that Jonathan Washburn, CEO of ActiveRain, has said will pull more traffic in 24 months from launch that Trulia and Zillow combined.  That was July 28th, 2008.  So I figure we got sixteen months to go to see whether J-Dub was right or not.

So I went to Localism and searched for Maplewood.  And got to this:

It’s probably an unfortunate coincidence that the very first post on Maplewood’s Localism on the day I write this is an ad for a listing.  But then, that’s sort of a feature, not a bug, considering that Localism is written entirely by realtors and sold to realtors as a way to “connect with the community”.

My initial impulse is frankly to click “Back” simply because I am not in the market to buy anything in Maplewood, and being hit with a listing as the first piece of actual ‘journalistic content’ is enough to make me believe I’m at a spamsite.  But in the interest of science — science I tell you! — I soldier on.

If you do scroll down, and give the site a chance, it does appear that the realtors who write (at least for Localism Maplewood) do provide information and news that is not real estate specific.  For example, here’s a post about an artist who will be coming to do a presentation about animation careers at the Maplewood library.  It’s just the kind of info that local residents might care about.

Except… that I see no evidence of any local residents at Localism Maplewood based on the comments.  The place has the feel of a bunch of local brokers talking to each other, and providing market reports to each other, and out-of-market realtors coming to comment on listings and such.  It’s all so… I don’t know the term… artificial?  Like a circus being put on for the benefit of clowns and acrobats.  I just can’t imagine a local resident wanting to spend any time at Localism Maplewood, since the news and info are sporadic at best, and are completely self-serving advertorials at worst.

Localism features lots of content about the local real estate market.  House prices are doing this, house prices are doing that, here are the past X closed transactions, and so on and so forth.  The “community news” stuff seems really like an afterthought add-on, as if to say, “Hey, we uh… we live here too.”  It’s somewhat like the worst possible agent blog possible made that much worse because it’s a sort of forced group-blog.

Which makes sense.  I mean, I assume most of the people writing for Localism have their own blog.  I know Perri Feldman — a contributor to Localism Maplewood — has her own blog, and her own website, and an active social media marketing thingamajig.  (And she’s a member of the Lucky Strike Social Media Club — woohoo!)  I guess in the time that’s left over, sort of as an afterthought (it seems), Perri must recycle a post or two from her blog onto Localism Maplewood.

And everyone else does too.  So no narrative, no coherent flow, no personality, just a bunch of market stats and listings, with little bits of local info thrown in there like raisins in a peculiarly chintzy loaf of raisin bread.

Perhaps other communities’ Localism pages are far better.  I don’t know.  But comparing The Local: Maplewood to Localism: Maplewood feels somewhat like comparing, well, the New York Times with all of its haughtiness and enforced cleverness to AutoShopper.

Apples and Oranges?

To some extent, I suppose you’d have to cry foul at the comparison.  After all, The Local is a venture by the New York frikkin Times, with a professionally-trained reporter who is getting paid to blog about three small towns.  And she has three interns to help her.  And she has nothing to sell you, so she’s free to just do hyperlocal content.

Localism, in contrast, is a hyperlocal blog put together by realtors who have a vested interest in selling someone a home.  The goal isn’t to provide local news and info to local residents; it’s to educate out-of-towners on what it might be like to live in Maplewood.  Right?

Well… not so much:

Localism is the valued point of connection, a place of meaningful interaction. It’s where neighbors and local merchants share what’s happening in their community. It’s people collectively communicating the unique flavor and nuances of where they live, work, eat, and play.

As long as Localism is run mostly by realtors, this vision is pure fantasy.  In reality, the best that Localism can aspire to is to become a place where local realtors give consumers an excellent rundown of the local real estate market, local listings, and service providers.

Because there is no incentive at all for “neighbors” to share anything whatsoever with the folks at Localism.  If you’re not a blogger-realtor, then you have no way to enter content or to participate, except in the comments.

The Local has a better shot at becoming the hyperlocal media channel, but it too has enormous issues to confront and overcome.

One issue is that Maplewood already has a hyperlocal media channel: Maplewood Online.  The notion may be that the New York Times and its talented journalists can do hyperlocal just better than the gimps over at Maplewood Online, but… I got news for ya (get it? I got news… oh nevermind).  There ain’t much skill involved in copying police blotters and posting up cartoons and pictures of local residents.  Sorry.

If Tina Kelley were to post a piece of investigative journalism where she risked life and limb to expose the decisionmaking behind Millburn lawmakers’ screwing of taxpayers with a $10m boondoggle giveaway to the Paper Mill Playhouse, why that might be the kind of news I would find absolutely indispensable.  But copying and pasting police blotter reports requires a graduate degree in politics and journalism?  Right then.

And The Local really has to drop its authoritarian approach and its condescending tone to local news.  Bigtime journos might think that stories about local police layoffs should be filed under “News By the Slice” with photos of a pizza, since it isn’t about war, famine, or national politics.  We get that you think what you’re doing is “cute” and beneath your many years of reportage, and the tragedy of your having to cover local news instead of the latest Supreme Court ruling or the pronunciamentos of Barack Obama is overwhelming us too.

But those of us who live here are deeply impacted by local laws, local policies, and local businesses.  We happen to think it’s pretty damn cool that Maplewood restaurants are having a “Restaurant Week”.  So have a little respect.  Or expect us residents to stay the hell away in droves.

Hyperlocal Media

For what it’s worth, hyperlocal media may very well be the future of media.  Seriously, while the current march towards the worker’s paradise will affect me and (more importantly) my children in a few year’s time, what the Millburn School Board decides to do at the next meeting might affect me this year in a far more personal and immediate way.

It would be great to have a single source that fills the role that newspapers and these journalism degree-havin’ folks like to fill at the national stage.  I would read that site religiously.

Localism ain’t it, unless it undergoes a total transformation of focus away from trying to sell real estate.  The Local ain’t it, unless it too undergoes a transformation and embraces the community on which it is reporting — and in fact, actually does some, you know, reporting.  The answer may be in social media, like MaplewoodOnline and Baristanet, as more and more journalists leave the newspaper business (by choice or not) and end up having to learn whole new skills in web-based, local, community-powered media.

It’ll be interesting to watch.

-rsh

Sometimes I’ll get a really nice comment or praise from various folks who read this little blog of mine.  Like this twitter I got recently:

@robhahn haha, you always have some of the best reads. Will spend the necessary time. Keep up the forward thinking.

In those moments, because I am human and subject to the Seven Deadly Sins, I can almost feel my head swell.  And that’s when I have to go read Mark Steyn.  Or Bill Simmons.  Or Gregg Easterbrook and learn me some humility.

Here’s a passage from Mark Steyn, simply the best writer of the English language of this young century:

If you’re feeling a sudden urge to “invest” in a gallon of tequila and a couple of hookers and wake up with an almighty hangover and no pants in a rusting dumpster on a bit of abandoned scrub round the back of the freight yards, it may be because you’re one of that dwindling band of Americans foolish enough to pursue his living in what we used to call “the private sector.” You were never exactly Giant-Man, more like Average-Sized Man. But you have a vague sense that you’re gonna be a lot closer to Ant-Man by the time all this is through.

I could write for a solid week without rest and never come up with that passage.  I’m a fair writer, but not in the same class as these gents.

There is a craft to writing.  There is a different craft to blogging, I think, but that there is artistry and skill involved in putting one word next to another is indisputable.

When folks are kind to me, and tell me what a great writer I am, I go and read the really great writers and get back down to earth.

A while back, I read On Writing by Stephen King, who is a truly underappreciated talent by the East Coast Intellectual Illuminati.  I maintain that when my grandkids learn about American Literature in High School, they will be studying the works of Stephen King.  Anyhow, I found this blog with some excerpts that are worth considering.  Check them out.  For example:

Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading, or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic.

Writing for Blogs

At the same time, I also believe that the craft of blogging is different from the craft of writing.  As I am trying to get more people around me to blog, I’ve found myself repeating some things.  This is not a “how to blog” type of thing here; more of a, “just some things to think about” type of thing.  And do keep in mind that your scribe may actually know nothing about writing, or blogging.  You have been warned.

Read, Read, and Read Some More

James Kilpatrick, the longtime columnist who penned The Writer’s Art, once wrote that to learn how to write, one should “read everything. Read matchbox covers, read labels on cans of cleaner; read the graffiti on lavatory walls. Read for information, read for style, read for instruction, read for the sheer love of reading.”

More and more, I believe this to be true.  Reading naturally leads to an improvement in writing.  We somehow absorb cadence, style, phrasings, imagery, and language itself from others.  While it’s best to read as many great writers as possible, it is also instructive to read not-so-great writers.  At least you learn what you don’t like, and what to avoid.

I believe any serious blogger should read books, columnists, and other bloggers — in that order.

Read books, because these are the finely honed examples of the writer’s craft.  They’ve also gone through the most rigorous editing for content, pace, and style.  For what it’s worth, I average about a book a week.  (Don’t be impressed — most of them are trashy paperback novels I read on the train.)

Read opinion columnists, because blogs by their very nature lend themselves to editorializing.  The best editorial columnists are tight with language, and know how to construct a narrative that drives their point home.  That these have been edited for clarity, content, and style also helps to keep the writing tight.

And read other bloggers, especially the stronger writers.  I’m a big fan of reading Kris Berg because of her natural voice and general narrative flow.  But there are others — particularly not in real estate space — whose writings are always a pleasure to read.  Read them, and often.  The blogs are usually unedited, but that gives you a sense of how blog writing differs from other types of writing.

Don’t Censor Yourself

The most important lesson for blog writing, I think, is to avoid the temptation to censor oneself.  The biggest obstacle I see new bloggers struggle with is how long it takes for them to write something.  I have to constantly remind them, “You’re not writing for the Economist; just get it out there.”

The best feature of blog writing is the spontaneous openness of the voice.  Mistakes will be made; some sentences won’t be as elegant as possible.  Grammar mistakes may abound.  But done well, there’s a freshness to the voice and an openness that conveys authenticity.  The art is, if you will, to be artless.

Plus, the nature of the medium is that corrections are always possible, and retractions and clarifications are not only possible, but perhaps desirable.  If you write something stupid, then hopefully the audience will point that out in the comments.  Which lets you respond in the comments, clarifying things, or admitting you got it wrong.  Then you can go back and edit the original post, appending the correction right there on the original post.

Again, blogging is part of conversation — not an oratorical holding forth.  Don’t censor yourself too much; don’t edit yourself while writing.  You’ll find it easier to write, and eventually settle into a routine and a voice you are comfortable with.  Just shut up that little editorial voice inside your head.

Write A Story

While there are certainly exceptions in blogging — for example, if your post is simply a compilation of interesting posts you’ve read that week — I do believe that if you are creating original content, you need to be telling a story.

Tell a story! It’s fun!

There needs to be a beginning, a middle, and an end.  There needs to be a plot of some sort that moves the narrative along.  Character exposes are fine, but I think the best blogposts have a narrative flow that is naturalistic and effective at exposing the ideas and the voice of the blogger.

Advice blogs (like this one) usually suck because they lack that flow of narrative and often read like a bullet list of rules.  Since realtors are writing a lot of advice blogs — “How to stage a home!” or “What to look for in a REO sale” or some such — I think it’s particularly important to realestistas that they give a thought to the narrative they are presenting.

Link, Link, and Link

The advantage of the Interwebs is in its reference-ability.  If I say “unemployment is X”, you don’t have to take my word for it — you can go check the source yourself.  But only if I provide the link.

This is, in a sense, the counter-balance to the open and freewheeling nature of the Web and blogs.  We don’t have editors and factcheckers; what we have, instead, is the ability for our readers to check the source for themselves.

As a general rule of thumb, if you think it’s something you reader might want to check for himself, then provide a link.  Every single time you quote someone else, you should be providing a link.  The goal is to provide the context, the framework, around your blogpost’s own narrative.

Hit “Publish”

The final piece of advice, and perhaps the most important, is to actually publish the damn thing.  I know I have had dozens of nascent blogposts just sitting in my queue waiting to see the light of day.  Some of them never will.

All of the narrating, the writing, the linking, and all of that won’t mean a thing if you don’t actually publish it.

Keeping in mind that all blogposts can be revised, and any mistakes corrected via the comments or by editing the post, go ahead and publish that post no matter how nervous you are about it.

Chances are, you are your worst critic, and your audience will love it.  (And when they don’t, they’ll let you know, and that’s how conversations start.)

Happy blogging!

-rsh

Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ve heard of this “social media” thing. But if pressed to define it, you — like the rest of us — would stammer out a few words about Twitter, Facebook, and blogs and then… realize that the term is more or less undefined.

Well, here’s the Wikipedia definition of “social media”:

Social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences. (Emphasis mine)

And the entry goes on to note things like World of Warcraft is social media. Okay, then so is internet gambling.

Furthermore, the highlighted portion suggests that email is also social media. So is a fax machine. Or that cutting-edge (for the 19th century) device, the telegraph. They all “integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction.” In theory, so do messenger pigeons and smoke signals. In other words, “social media” doesn’t actually mean anything.

And yet, it does. The real meaning of “social media” may be difficult to define, but everyone knows what it is — and more importantly, knows what it is not. Stories in the New York Times is not “social media” despite being an activity that integrates technology (the printing press), telecommunications (the Associated Press wire service), and social interaction (the reporters write, the audience reads).

Some might say that “two-way communication” is the essence of social media. This too is wrong. There are blogs that don’t allow comments — yet they are very much “social media”. YouTube is considered “social media” but it’s hard to call what goes on in the comments section to be “two-way communication” in any meaningful way.

The Internet is not “social media” since mobile applications can entirely bypass the Internet and still become social media. Meetups and Tweetups often fall into “social media” categories, but it’s hard to see how people sitting in a room together talking can be conceived of as web-based simply because they arranged to meet via the Web.

So what the hell is “social media” in its essence?

Social Media Defined

My personal definition of social media is this:

Communication channels that enable the authentic and personal engagement of one human being to another.

Admittedly, my definition is heavily influenced by Cluetrain principles. While each and every one of you needs to go read the whole thing (free, online!), this passage from the Introduction speaks most eloquently to how I define social media:

The Internet became a place where people could talk to other people without constraint. Without filters or censorship or official sanction — and perhaps most significantly, without advertising. Another, noncommercial culture began forming across this out-of-the-way collection of computer networks. Long before graphical user interfaces made the scene, the scene was populated by plain old boring ASCII: green phosphor text scrolling up screens at the glacial pace afforded by early modems. So where was the attraction in that?

The attraction was in speech, however mediated. In people talking, however slowly. And mostly, the attraction lay in the kinds of things they were saying. Never in history had so many had the chance to know what so many others were thinking on such a wide range of subjects. Slowly at first, a new kind of conversation was beginning to emerge, but it would achieve global reach with astonishing speed.

For those of us grizzled old dinosaurs who got onto the pre-Netscape Internet, and were absolutely floored upon discovering IRC know the feeling. The strange combination of utter freedom and complete anonymity brought out levels of authenticity in many people — while others invented online personas with a wild variety of roleplaying.

What makes a blog a blog and not an online magazine is the authenticity of the voice, and the personal engagement of the blogger. I’m a big fan of Instapundit, where Prof. Glenn Reynolds holds court on a variety of political, kitchenware, photography, and nanotechnology topics. There are no comments on Instapundit. Yet, it is social media because Prof. Reynolds never fails to speak in his voice. He never fails to be personal.

Another great example is contrasting the National Review Online (an online magazine) with The Corner on National Review Online (a group blog). [So sue me, I read conservative websites. The point is on social media, and these came to mind.] These are two sections of the same website, yet the flavor, the tone, the feel is very different. The NRO proper has articles that have been edited, written to professional standards. What it lacks in personality and authenticity, it makes up with authority and seriousness. The Corner, in contrast, is full of the authentic voices of the bloggers — many of whom are also writers and editors of the National Review — and a personal human engagement exists there that is lacking in NRO itself.

I believe, therefore, that social media is not defined by the tools or the technology, but by the authenticity and the personalness of the engagement.

The Corruption

Trouble is, marketing departments worldwide in every major and minor corporation could not see (and in some cases, have never seen) what the big deal with the Internet was, and what is so important about Cluetrain, and about social media. To far too many marketers, “social media” was just like “any other media”, but “more social” — whatever that means.

The same strategies and the same models for putting ads on magazines were used to put ‘banner ads’ on this newfangled World Wide Web thingamajig back in the late 90′s. When Facebook became the flavor du jour, companies regarded it as just another place to have a branch office. And as Twitter starts to take off, we are finding more and more companies regarding it as something like a streaming billboard:

@XXXXXX You kin’ buy DD coffee online: http://bit.ly/4lwB65 … see drop down menu for whole bean options. Cheers!

That tweet is from @DunkinDonuts. Cheers! Sounds just like a micro-ad! Gee, thanks!

Is this social media? Or it is just a variant of email spam, TV spam, mailbox spam, and billboard spam we have to live with in our commercialized world?

And now, we apparently have a “directory of brands” on Twitter: TrackingTwitter.com. First, the Yellow Pages, then the Web (and Google), and now Twitter. Cheers?

The Fundamental Misconception: Social Media = Media, Social

The fundamental misconception about social media — held mostly by marketers — is due to that word “media”. We understand “media”. Many of us have frikkin graduate degrees in media management, public relations, and communications. We come out of advertising agencies where dealing with various forms of “media” was a settled practice. So we apply those same principles to “social media”.

“Hey, we really need to get a corporate Twitter account!” likely passes for innovative thinking inside many corporations today. “That way, we can really engage the audience with our brand message!”

Trouble is, the audience doesn’t really want some faceless, identity-less brand to ‘engage them’ with their brand message. What the audience really wants is for a human being that works at your brand to engage them in an authentic, personal way.

Once again, Cluetrain:

In the market, language grew. Became bolder, more sophisticated. Leaped and sparked from mind to mind. Incited by curiosity and rapt attention, it took astounding risks that none had ever dared to contemplate, built whole civilizations from the ground up.

Markets are conversations. Trade routes pave the storylines. Across the millennia in between, the human voice is the music we have always listened for, and still best understand.

So what went wrong? From the perspective of corporations, many of which by the twentieth century had become bigger and far more powerful than ancient city-states, nothing went wrong. But things did change.

Commerce is a natural part of human life, but it has become increasingly unnatural over the intervening centuries, incrementally divorcing itself from the people on whom it most depends, whether workers or customers. While this change is in many ways understandable — huge factories took the place of village shops; the marketplace moved from the center of the town and came to depend on far-flung mercantile trade — the result has been to interpose a vast chasm between buyers and sellers.

I don’t want to twitter with @DunkinDonuts. I want to twitter with Amy, who works in marketing or customer service or sales or whatever for Dunkin’ Donuts, and is allowed to communicate openly, honestly, authentically, in a human voice with me.

Social media is not media; it is conversation. Theses 62 to 65 of the 95 Theses of Cluetrain Manifesto read as follows:

62. Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.

63. De-cloaking, getting personal: We are those markets. We want to talk to you.

64. We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.

65. We’re also the workers who make your companies go. We want to talk to customers directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script.

I have learned so much more about what the real estate community thinks, what its needs are, its pains and joys, and so on simply by being myself on this blog, on Twitter, and in personal conversations. They are all the same to me. In some cases, individuals who have decision-making authority at clients or prospects for my employer share their issues with me, not because I’m trying to sell them something, but precisely because I’m not. I think I do a better job of marketing Onboard simply by being myself, speaking in an authentic voice, and engaging in a personal way.

Could I really do that hiding behind a @onboard persona? No, not really.

The fundamental misconception about social media is that it is media, just more “social”.

The Beginning of the End

If companies and marketers continue to treat social media as just another variant of media, then it spells the beginning of the end for social media.

What makes Twitter interesting is not that I can get bombarded with offers from Dunkin’ Donuts, but that I can have real conversations with real people thousands of miles away.

Once misguided marketers and brand chieftains start to corrupt Twitter with fake-personas, with brand twittering, and so on, it will become just like blog comment spam. People will begin to retreat further and further into smaller and smaller niches where they can be left alone to have the conversations they are craving.

And companies who do not understand social media as authentic human engagement will lose out on the opportunity to empower their people to converse with those consumers.

There lies the beginning of the end.

Real Estate & Social Media

For whatever reason, social media has been a buzzword in real estate for years. Blogs, blog networks, twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and all these social media tools have been enthusiastically embraced by our industry with varying degrees of success.

The first wave of pioneers — people like Todd Carpenter — did social media as individuals. They blogged, they emailed each other, they linked up, they facebooked, and they twittered and so on. People got to know each other as people, as authentic human beings first and foremost. This early adopter group used (and still uses) social media primarily as a platform for socializing and making connections.

The second wave saw how much fun that first wave was having, and was starting to hear various ideas being floated about how these new communication technologies might be used to drive more business, sell more homes, do more transactions, and the like — and jumped on the bandwagon. Most of these people are also having a blast networking with people, meeting new and interesting folks, and having great conversations… but they’re a little concerned that all this social media stuff isn’t throwing off much cash. Because this group looks at social media as some newfangled innovative way of marketing — predictably, for realtors, that means marketing homes, listings, and themselves.

The third wave either has arrived, or is coming. This is the “professional marketer” brigade, and the future of social media in our industry depends on what happens with this group.

If the numerous newly-minted social media directors, and the VP’s of Marketing who oversee them, overcome the fundamental misconception about social media, then we may be the industry to drive change in how people who work for companies relate to other people who want to buy from those companies. If the social media directors become, in my formulation, “Cluetrain conductors“, then we have a chance to alter the relationship between consumer and service provider in a profound way.

If, on the other hand, the third wave consists of folks who think that Twitter is just another marketing channel, that blogs are just a new way of publishing listing brochures, and that branded corporate identities (which are both opaque, and speaking in that stilted “corporatespeak” we all have learned to detect) online are the answers to the challenge of “social media”… then it’s just a matter of time until these communication technologies also become just another spam-filled cesspool of fakery.

And we all, consumers and professionals alike, will move on to our next fix.

I know which way I’d like things to come out.

Markets are conversations.

Commerce is a natural part of human life.

Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.

-rsh

(Part 1, Part 2)

Petraeus on Unity

Another major lesson from counterinsurgency is the importance of coordination and synchronization:

It is also essential that we achieve unity of effort, that we coordinate and synchronize the actions of all ISAF and Afghan forces — and those of our Pakistani partners across the border — and that we do the same with the actions of our embassy and international partners, our Afghan counterparts, local governmental leaders, and international and non-governmental organizations. Working to a common purpose is essential in the conduct of counterinsurgency operations.

For the military, counterinsurgency brings all instruments of power to bear on the conflict, from the guns and bombers to diplomats to financial incentives, civil engineers, teachers and nonprofits, and everything else that could help the mission.

The obvious implication for real estate — and one that Big Brokerage already does very well — is to offer the full range of services either under the same roof or by strategic relationships.

For example, as a consumer, I may go see some properties with a real estate agent, then walk down the hall to a mortgage broker and apply, then have the agent find me the home inspector, the real estate attorney, title insurer, and escrow services.  Without my having to go research each of those and shop around.  So it’s convenient for the consumer.

There are, however, two further implications of the unity of effort doctrine for real estate that go beyond this easy, surface lesson of “full service”.

Read the rest of this entry »

“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.)

In part 1 of this series, we discussed Information Operations and the importance of integrity in counterinsurgency strategy.  I took lessons from the U.S. Military, and the author of those doctrines Gen. David Petraeus, and applied them to the real estate industry.  In this installment, I’d like to take a look at another key principle of counterinsurgency and how those lessons apply to Big Real Estate: Importance of Local.

Petraeus On Local

Counterinsurgency is intensely local, and reflects lessons of Fourth Generation Warfare. Digression follows!

First generation warfare is all about formations, line and column, and massed infantry.  It is what Napoleon was a master of, and conquered half of Europe with, until he ran into better-trained British infantrymen.  [Making this digression even more of one, for a really entertaining look into first generation warfare and what that looked like, check out the Richard Sharpe series from the British historical novelist Bernard Cornwell.]

Second generation warfare emphasized massed firepower (aka, “massed artillery” and machine guns ) instead of massed manpower.  The idea was that artillery would bombard the enemy into submission, while the rifleman simply mops up the mess.  World War I was mostly a second-gen affair.

Third generation warfare emphasized speed and maneuverability (“blitzkrieg”) to neutralize the advantage of massed artillery.

All of these approaches concerned themselves with taking on an established, uniformed opposing army.  When the enemy disperses and become guerrilla forces or insurgents, then these strategies are of limited utility.

Fourth generation warfare is precisely this sort of war — insurgents, terrorism, propaganda, information operations, where the line between combatants and civilians is intentionally blurred, etc.

With all that said… here’s Gen. Petraeus:

Securing and serving the people requires that our forces be good neighbors. While it may be less culturally acceptable to live among the people in certain parts of Afghanistan than it was in Iraq, it is necessary to locate Afghan and ISAF forces where they can establish a persistent security presence. You can’t commute to work in the conduct of counterinsurgency operations. Positioning outposts and patrol bases, then, requires careful thought, consultation with local leaders, and the establishment of good local relationships to be effective.

Positioning near those we and our Afghan partners are helping to secure also enables us to understand the neighborhood. A nuanced appreciation of the local situation is essential. (Emphasis added)

Conducting counterinsurgency means getting close to the local situation, having boots on the ground in the local community, providing security to the local area, and truly understanding the local neighborhood.

He may as well have been talking about real estate. Read the rest of this entry »

It may be completely inappropriate to compare the life-and-death work of our military in Afghanistan to the buying and selling of real estate ensconced in our safety… but I could not help but read this with interest:

We also must strive to be first with the truth. We need to beat the insurgents and extremists to the headlines and to pre-empt rumors. We can do that by getting accurate information to the chain of command, to our Afghan partners, and to the press as soon as is possible.Integrity is critical to this fight. Thus, when situations are bad, we should freely acknowledge that fact and avoid temptations to spin. Rather, we should describe the setbacks and failures we suffer and then state what we’ve learned from them and how we’ll adjust to reduce the chances of similar events in the future. (Emphasis added)

That is from a recent speech that General David Petraeus gave at the Munich Security Conference talking about the very real, very serious problems of fighting Al Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan.

But if he were speaking at just about any real estate industry conference, I don’t know that those words would be any different.

How often have we heard condemnations of NAR, and specifically of David Lereah, former Chief Economist for NAR?  There are even whole websites set up to rant at Mr. Lereah.

And according to at least one real estate professional, David Lereah and the whole ‘head-in-sand’ approach to the RE market hurt her directly by undermining the credibility of the profession, forcing her to un-educate then re-educate consumers, and establish her own credibility as a realtor.

What’s more, not one big brokerage or big brand in real estate was sounding the alarm back in 2005 or so, while individual realtors were starting to get real skeptical of home values, and blogs like Patrick.net were in full bubble-warning mode in 2005.

What has that done to the brand image of all Realtors?  What has the failure to freely acknowledge that situations are bad, the failure of so-called ‘real estate experts’ to warn about the housing bubble, the failure of so-called ‘mortgage experts’ to warn about the credit bubble, and the failure of so-called ‘ethical professionals with fiduciary duty to clients’ to properly advise buyers during what was obviously a bubble done to the industry?

Post-bubble, has there been any major statement by NAR or by a major brokerage acknowledging the “setbacks and failures” and stating “what they’ve learned from them and how they’ll adjust to reduce the chances of similar events in the future”?  If so, I missed it. Read the rest of this entry »

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

Twitter, some say, is a useless waste of time.  That’s often true.  But then, sometimes, it’s really kinda fun and useful to boot.

Case in point:  Earlier today, I had  brief Twitter exchange with a few people starting with a question I asked.

“Why do you have a ‘website’ and a ‘blog’?  Why not one site that does it all?”

A number of people responded that they were struggling with that very question.  Still others provided even more in-depth thoughts.  Kelley Kohler (@housechick) had some very interesting insights on the blogpost linked to above:

It’s an interesting line to walk, and it’s taken a bit of doing to stop thinking about the blog like it’s a blog, because it isn’t a blog, it’s a framework (can I get that printed on a t-shirt?).  Having started originally with AR and Blogger, it was a difficult mindset to break – two blog services where blogs really ARE just blogs.  But for WordPress and Drupal, they aren’t blogs, they’re just platforms, a framework.

In the end, it’s not about what is website and what is blog, it’s about where in the framework some piece of information should live.  And that’s a liberating place to be, conceptually, while in the midst of designing a new web presence. (emphasis added)

While I agree with Kelley wholeheartedly from a certain perspective, I do think she discounts a bit the psychological and marketing imperatives that may be driving realestistas to divide their web operations between a “website” and a “blog”.

Crass Commercialism vs. Authentic Engagement

I think the hint of the underlying issue came from Fran Bailey (@franbailey) who wrote:

My site is my blog which focuses on helpful info 4 buyers. They can search listings on my broker’s site which promotes listings.

The mantra of Web 2.0 — borrowed from the good people of Cluetrain — is authentic engagement.  People don’t want to be sold.  They don’t want to be marketed to.  They don’t want to be a lead.  And so on.  Hence, the listings — which is the basis of the commercial engagement — are over there on the broker’s site.  My site here is where I’m simply helpful.  I understand the instinctive pull.

There’s something to this perspective that says that anything which smacks of crass commercialism is bad in social media/blogging/whatever-you-call-it and that blogs have to do more to educate, to engage, to brand the writer as a local expert, and so on.  To surround a post on the local neighborhood with listings, or to have a “Ten things to consider about mortgages” with a “Featured Listing” does seem somewhat… in bad taste in the world of bloggery.

Even Kelley Kohler’s own website (which, I guess is under revision) shows that the blog lives in a top nav link and lives in its own url (www.mytucsonblog.com).  In addition, her blog has no listings search, even though her “website” features a listing search prominently in the top left position:

So I do think there’s something to the division between the “storefront” and the “fireside chats” in the real estate world.

False Dichotomy

And yet, is there a notion that such a dichotomy is just a bunch of hooey?  Mike Simonsen of Altos Research (@mikesimonsen) pointed out to me via Twitter:

@robhahn riiight. as if there’s a hard line between the personal and professional. The functional difference is one of tone

As a matter of fact, a blog is — in a way — a gigantic extended ad.  [Granted, I thought (and said to Mike) that Notorious ROB was my personal blog written primarily to entertain myself, while the corporate blog of Onboard Informatics, my employer, is where I write to promote Onboard and its products and services.  But Mike may be right.  Perhaps with social media, we are entering an age where the Personal is the Political Commercial.]

For a realtor blog — one written to help drive business, as opposed to satisfy the blogger’s need to put words on virtual paper — the distinction disappears completely.  The Personal is the Commercial.

All the advice-giving, all the helpful hints, all the videos of mojito-making, and so on continually brand the realtor as an expert, as a good person, as a fun-lovin’ master of the mystic liquors.  Since real estate appears to be an intensely personal business, it simply pays to be personable and personal.

And if the advice-giving, helpful hints, and videos and twitstreams and such are actually not bringing you any business… then don’t you have to ask yourself why you even bother with the blog?

Just sayin’.

One Site to Rule Them All

But having established the business importance of being personable… why leave a “website” hanging out there ruining all of that goodwill?  What’s the point of a brochureware site that has a bunch of boilerplate about how great an agent you are, or how much you care about your clients and all that when you have a whole other website dedicated to showing, rather than saying, precisely those things?

The ideal realestista site to me is one where you have the fusion of content: listings, statistics, and dynamic content.  For larger organizations, listings and statistics will take precedence, but they too need dynamic content that showcases their brand promises and lets consumers form authentic relationships with their people.  For individual realestistas, I think the dynamic content drives the site, but listings and statistics must also be present.  Again, see Kelley Kohler’s site for a great example.  She already has her latest blogpost there; why not just merge the thing together and create the ash gwî (One Web…site)?

The consumer knows — or should know — that he is on a realtor’s website, reading a realtor’s opinions and professional advice, and learning more about that particular realtor.  Either the site visitor is in the market or is not; if he is not, then he may turn into one at some point or refer you someone who is.  If he is in the market, then he’s not only looking for a fun person who knows a lot about real estate and the local communities — he’s looking for someone who can help him.

Authenticity does not mean pretending to be a disinterested commentator — hell, I’m as close as such things come, and even I’m not 100% disinterested in everything.  So in that, Mike Simonsen may be right.  Authenticity simply means trying not to bullshit someone, spin bad news, get into marketingspeak (“this house is doubleplusgood” is a bad sign), or such.  It means letting your personality come through while at the same time maintaining the commercial nature of the desired relationship.

The dichotomy is false.  Ash gwî durbatulûk!

-rsh

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.  But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

- Sir Winston Churchill

.

One of the true pioneers of the new generation of real estate companies, Redfin, has launched a new partner program:

Redfin released a sprawling, glorious update to our website last night that changes Redfin in two fundamental ways:

1. We built data-driven agent profiles, showing every deal our own agents have done and every customer review, even on deals that failed.
2. We opened up our business to partner agents and we published all their deals too, surveying old customers for reviews.

How does this change Redfin as a company? Well, when we upgraded our own service last November to offer unlimited home tours and a choice of agents, everyone said we were becoming less virtual. And now that we’re connecting consumers with partner agents, folks will say we’ve become more virtual.

Actually, I think the change to Redfin as a company is far deeper and far more subtle than what folks will say.

The Peanut Gallery

A hint of what’s changed comes from Gregg Swann of the Bloodhound Blog:

If Redfin can make five figures a day on what may not even amount to a single full-time staff line, that’s a killer business.

Maybe even such a killer business that it will replace client-representation altogether. Implausible? One of Redfin’s planned expansion cities is Phoenix — where our numbers are worse than Kitsap’s. Of the RE 2.0 players, only Estately.com does anything like this, but Redfin could go into the referral business virtually anywhere, virtually overnight.

And Louis Cammarosano of HomeGain said with maximum succinctness, over Twitter: “It means they are becoming like Homegain.”

John Cook at TechFlash took Redfin to task:

The concept is not new. In fact, Seattle area companies such as Estately and HouseValues.com also earn money through agent referrals. But the program is a big switch for Redfin, which has always touted the customer service focus of its agents. Kelman said he was “terrified” that the partner program “could screw up the brand.” That’s why the company interviewed all of the partner agents and implemented an agent review system on the Redfin Web site. It also reserves the right to remove partner agents that are not living up to customer service requirements.

Kelman downplayed the possibility that Redfin would move entirely to a partner model. “There is something in Redfin’s blood that we like having direct relationships with the customer,” he said.

This change is a fundamental one.  This is not a mere extension of the Redfin model and philosophy.  It’s something else.

What Was Actually Done

TechFlash post above actually has a pretty good brief description of what Redfin actually launched:

Starting today, the company has aligned itself with 35 real estate agents from 13 different brokerage firms in nine counties. The agents, which receive a profle page on Redfin and must have completed 15 transactions, pay Redfin a 30 percent referral fee on any completed deals. Redfin then refunds 15 percent of that fee to home buyers, keeping the other 15 percent.

But Redfin has more info on this front:

Every single one of these partners committed to our consumer-friendly values as a prerequisite to joining the program:

1. Technology: the partner refunds part of his commission to the client because the client asks for service online using our tools.
2. Service: the partner is not allowed to do any of the funny-business around forcing someone to use him when buying a house; the partner earns more when the client is satisfied.
3. Transparency: the partner publishes information about all his deals, and all his reviews; the partner provides the service requested by the consumer and nothing more unless asked.

Furthermore, rather than sending the “leads” to the agent (or multiple agents), the Redfin model places that power in the consumer’s hands.  The consumer sees the deals, failed deals, activities, etc. of the partner agent, then actively chooses to contact that particular agent.

So, the major differences between Redfin and other models are:

• Power to choose in the hands of consumer
• Transparency on agent quality metrics
• Refund back to the consumer

But all of that, still, fails to address the central, subtle, and fundamental change.

The Change

Basically, by going to a ‘partner’ model, Redfin is no longer responsible for the consumer service experience.

Now, Glenn Kelman and others at Redfin vigorously dispute this:

The story said that we had been “terrified” about potential problems in our partners’ customer service without explaining that we said that to introduce the steps we took to avoid those problems. (emphasis added)

And

We planned for Redfin’s partner program in a financial model built in 2007. We experimented with it earlier than that, canceling the program in 2006 after it became clear that we had no way of being accountable for good service to the client.

…

We could have offered a year ago the referral programs typical in the industry, selling the client out to multiple unnamed agents for a fee. There was ample financial pressure to do so. We stuck to our guns to create something much better, building an entire accountability system and a set of tools for a client to ask a particular agent to perform a particular service, interviewing every partner agent in person, and checking each agent’s references over a year back, so we could offer a partner program consistent with our values. These values are why we radically cut the profitability of the program by offering half our fee back to the consumer. (Emphasis added)

For what it’s worth, I completely believe Redfin.  And furthermore, Redfin might very well be successful.

However, there is a large gap between “building an entire accountability system” and actually being accountable.

Redfin is a brokerage in the markets in which it is active.  The agents who work for Redfin are employees of Redfin, and Redfin as an entity is accountable to the actual consumer for the service experience.  In fact, while I don’t know for sure, I’m going to guess that Redfin has a certain “Redfin Way” of “Redfin Service Standards” or whatever that it enforces on its agents.

If I’m a Redfin agent, and I don’t live up to Redfin’s performance standards, then Redfin has a variety of tools and methods at its disposal to enforce standards.  With these partner agents, no matter how well Redfin screens ‘em, Redfin only has one way to enforce standards: remove them from the program.

If I pick a partner agent, and have a terrible experience, who do I get to blame?

The Liability Question

A way to crystallize the issue is to consider legal liability.

Suppose that some unhappy consumer sues the partner agent after a deal goes south.  (Not saying this would happen, but thinking about lawsuits help clarify some issues.)

The agent’s actual broker would be named in the lawsuit, since legally, the agent is just representing the broker.  The broker’s E&O insurance would come into play, and the lawsuit would then focus on whether the agent’s acts/omissions rose to the level of professional malpractice.  The broker’s processes, standards, training, screening, etc. would all become relevant as to establishing liability under respondeat superior theory.

Where does Redfin fit into this?

On the one hand, the consumer would absolutely sue Redfin.  After all, Redfin supposedly screened all of its partners, and built an “entire accountability system”.  That a crappy agent slipped through resulting in a big loss for the consumer means that the consumer has a reason to sue Redfin.  After all, he went to Redfin to find an agent, and relied upon Redfin’s representation as to quality, professionalism, and ethics.

On the other hand, Redfin’s defense would presumably be along the lines of, “We ain’t the boss”.  They would presumably assert that respondeat superior does not apply in their case, because the agent doesn’t work for them.  They don’t control the agent’s actions.  All they’ve done is made an introduction between the consumer and the partner agent, and the consumer chose to work with that particular agent.

(I suppose, in theory, Redfin could choose NOT to fight liability and embrace it wholeheartedly in order to preserve their ideal of customer service… but I doubt that very much.  Lawsuits focus the mind in interesting ways.  Plus, does Redfin’s E&O insurance even cover these ‘partner agents’?  Would Redfin’s insurer really agree to that without a substantial hike in premiums?)

If the agent’s broker — the actual “boss” in theory — is held liable, would they not consider bringing Redfin in as a third party defendant?  Or bring an indemnity claim that goes something like, “Your program caused our otherwise ethical agent to do bad things, so now you owe us money”?  I know I would advise the broker to bring such a suit, were I representing them.

With the other lead-gen sites, like Homegain or HouseValues, these issues never arise.  All that those sites promise to consumers is that someone will be in touch, and they pass the lead on.  They’re merely a marketing conduit.

Redfin’s program goes far, far beyond that… but they’re not ultimately accountable to the consumer client from what I can tell.

The Brand and Ideals Question

That Redfin would disavow responsibility for a poor consumer experience through Redfin is, to say the least, a sea change.  As Glenn says quite passionately:

We will always, always fight for the consumer: exposing information about agent performance the world has never seen, offering the best value we can, paying our agents based on customer satisfaction, negotiating with Realtor associations to publish more data.

This is an emotional issue for us. We are less interested in proving TechFlash wrong, or even in convincing you that Redfin will succeed or fail — which is still an open question — than we are in establishing what this company stands for: making the real estate industry better for the consumer. Maybe nobody else cares that this company actually stands for something. But we do. We always will.

Does that include accepting legal liablity for the actions of your ‘partner agents’?  If it does, then in what way are those ‘partner agents’ different from your own employees — except that they’re not really subject to discipline/training/enforcement by you?

If it does not, if Redfin’s program stops short of accepting legal liability for the misconduct or negligence by partner agents, then that is a fundamental change in the Redfin brand.  And I daresay it represents a change of the Redfin ideals in a subtle, yet profound, way.  Sure, Redfin can still work to make the real estate industry better for the consumer.  But it won’t do it directly, by training its agents, by implementing its policies and procedures, and by serving the consumer.

That might be fine; might even be great.  Maybe Redfin overcomes some of the acrimony built up over the years this way.

But it is a fundamental change.  He who pays you is your customer.

The End of the Beginning

For the industry, I think Redfin’s move represents the end of the first wave of Real Estate 2.0.  The implication appears to be that new companies cannot implement new business models for real estate.  Trulia and Zillow are not real estate companies; they are media companies in the real estate space.  They make money from advertising.

Homegain, HouseValues, Estately and so on are also pseudo-media companies, but with a pay-for-performance type of ad model.

Redfin was the pioneer of a new model, centered around a fantastic website, direct consumer engagement, and a novel refund concept.  Their obsession with transparency, truly excellent user experience online, and “freakish depth” was the precursor to what the brokerage of the future might look like.

That chapter, I think, now comes to a close.  The new real estate companies have found that they cannot make money directly from consumers.  Okay, fine.  What does the next chapter look like?

No one knows of course.  But it does seem to me that the battle lines are getting drawn as follows:

On the one hand, the new entrants must find ways to derive revenues from real estate agents; on the other hand, the existing brokerages must find ways to make consumers happier and provide more value to its agents.  The midgame, then, represents a struggle on the one hand over consumer service/experience coupled to value delivery to agents, and a struggle on the other hand over getting money out of agents.

We are living through interesting times in real estate.

-rsh