Tag Archives: Social Media & Web

Curious Things Are Afoot, Part 2: Commodities, Power, and Change

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In Part One, we congratulated Ernie Graham and his team at SocialBios for getting acquired. I hope he picked out a nice Lamborghini Reventon in taxicab yellow.

The second Curious Thing that came about just as Move was announcing its acquisition of SocialBios was the confluence of two seemingly unrelated things. Making sense out of unrelated things — that’s what we do here.

First, over on Notorious ROB, I wrote about the terrible June jobs report, and the statement by Lawrence Yun, Chief Economist of NAR, that because of “shrinkage” in the real estate industry, most REALTORS would see a bump in their personal income. That is, pie might be shrinking, but the number of people who want to eat pie is shrinking even faster.

Second, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it would not enforce MARS (Mortgage Assistance Relief Services) regulations against licensed real estate brokers and agents. From the statement:

In recent months, a number of real estate brokers and agents (“real estate professionals”) and their representatives have contacted the Commission to question the applicability of certain provisions of the MARS Rule to real estate professionals who assist consumers in obtaining short sales. In particular, these persons have raised concerns about the accuracy and comprehensibility of the disclosures mandated by the Rule, and the unintended consequences that might result from application of the advance fee ban, in the context of a real estate professional assisting a consumer in negotiating or obtaining a short sale. [Emphasis mine.]

As a result, except for certain provisions having to do with misrepresentation, real estate agents are not subject to MARS rules as long as they are licensed and in good standing, and working on a short sale. Behold the power of NAR.

What the hell do these two things have to do with each other, nevermind with social and real estate? Has Rob finally gone over the edge? Read on, but as always, caveat lector.

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Curious Things Are Afoot, Part 1: Move Acquires SocialBios

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This is the first part of what I think will be a three-part examination of some rather curious things I’ve been seeing.

First of all, I’m sure other sites will be announcing the news that MOVE has acquired the startup SocialBios. From the press release:

Move, Inc. (Nasdaq: MOVE), the leader in online real estate, today announced its acquisition of SocialBios, an award-winning social search platform. SocialBios allows individuals and companies to create one social hub for their online profiles through interactive ‘About Us’ pages that simplify the discovery of shared connections on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Foursquare and Google without sacrificing their privacy.

The acquisition of SocialBios points to Move’s acceleration into the area of social and its integration into the real estate search experience throughout Move’s online real estate network. As a result, Move will leverage the SocialBios platform and talent to develop products that connect people with real estate professionals based on the commonalities of their on- and offline social networks..

…

As part of the acquisition, SocialBios founder Ernie Graham and co-founders Ira McMahon and Andrew Van Tassel have joined the product development team at Move, Inc. Graham, who will head up Move’s social product strategy and development team, will work with the Move’s franchise and broker customers to develop social graphing strategies that help them facilitate more connections between their agents and brokers with consumers.

I wrote about SocialBios a few months ago when I met Ernie Graham, and the events of that evening are sealed under a blood oath of secrecy. But suffice to say I thought he is a smart guy, and what’s better, a great fella to boot. SocialBios won the ‘Best Tech Startup’ award at Inman NY earlier this year, and now the founders have gotten fabulously rich (or so one hopes).

So congratulations to Ernie and his team, as they now move into the tightly-controlled PR environment of the publicly traded company. Henceforth, he and his whole staff are going to have to learn how to keep their mouths shut lest they make forward looking statements of some sort. <grin>

But that news alone is not worthy of a post. So what makes this interesting? Read on, but caveat lector.

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The Challenge of Apple to Social Marketers Everywhere

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Try looking for blog.apple.com...

The other day, at the as-yet-unnamed Houston Social Media Club dinner, we got to talking about (what else) using social media for marketing purposes. I was reminded of that discussion checking out the new InmanNext post on Engagement by Michael McClure (that’s Mr. ProfessionalOne to you). [By the way, kudos to Chris Smith for getting InmanNext launched with its slate of writers, thinkers, and doers. Great job, Chris. I'll give you all the negativity over cocktails in San Francisco.]

Michael lays out generally solid advice, as he usually does. If you’re looking for guidance on how to use social networks generally, you could do a whole lot worse than his post. Now, Michael gives the following sage advice:

First, because success IRL is predicated heavily on the quality of the relationships you build. I won’t attempt to explain or justify this point, because I think most people know it to be true.

Second, because this same principle – the idea of success hinging on the quality of the relationships you build – is equally true in Social Media. Remember that people are people, whether online or offline.

Third, because there is a direct correlation between the quality of the relationships you have and the degree to which you successfully engage within those relationships.

For those of us who have been in or around this whole social media marketing thing over the past few years, all three points are rock solid. But on this blog, we don’t rest with rock solid conclusions — we push on into the frail forsaken frontier of foolish questions.

The foolish question of the day, then, is: What assumptions must we make in order to accept these three as rock-solid principles?

Put another way, those marketers who strongly advocate social media as the future of marketing must wrestle with, and answer, the challenge of Apple, Inc.

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Passion and Technique: A Response to Matthew Shadbolt

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Ready to write blogposts, you are not, young padawan.

I started writing a response to this amazing comment by Matthew Shadbolt of Corcoran, and thought… it’s too long to go into the comments. It deserves a post of its own.

Basically, Matthew’s challenge poses the question of passion on the one hand and technique on the other:

So, just as we disagreed yesterday with the advice of ‘post great content that people will want to share’, ‘be passionate’ isn’t an endgame in itself either. I feel like passionate content exists in real estate, pretty much only within social at the moment (I wouldn’t characterize any type of online home search as ‘passionate’ although I would love it to be), but my criticism of such content is that it is very often poorly executed. There is a very important quality issue missing from the content creation discussion. If it looks like crap, is tough to hear, or unreadable, people will not use it, no matter how ‘passionate’ the intent behind it – as a result your work becomes invisible. This is why I disagree with Rob’s point that you can’t strategize around creative – I think you have to. This is what ad agencies do, and why some in the real estate industry hear the call to think of themselves more as media companies, especially around their marketing. [Emphasis mine]

It’s an excellent point. Who cares how passionate you are about whatever topic, or how committed you are… if you just suck? No one will care about your passion if you can’t put it into a form that audiences can consume. Right?

Well, sort of.

I’ve actually written on this topic before, in the context of video. Back in 2009, I wrote in The Price of Artifice:

Because the audience expectation is so high when it comes to professional work, in order to avoid looking like an idiot, your execution must be extraordinary. This is both prohibitively expensive and incredibly difficult.

Turns out, the theme and the idea are both applicable to all content of any kind. You need both passion and technique, and perhaps my error in the first post was assuming/taking it for granted that anyone who would write a blogpost about his town with passion is at least in possession of above-average writing ability. At the same time, I don’t believe that professional marketers are always aware of the tradeoff between passion/authenticity and technique/skill.

Let us explore further.