Content Never Sleeps
Successfully fueling repeat digital business
Coldwell Banker Annual Conference, Chicago, 2015
Good afternoon everyone, and thanks so much to Coldwell Banker for inviting me back to Gen Blue. I hope you're all having a great time and learning a lot from each other this week in Chicago. I know I am. In fact, as a New Yorker, I've learned three things about Chicago itself since I've been here. First, you guys really know your hot dogs. You treat your hot dogs with respect. They're works of art, not disgusting abominations fished out of hot garbage water like they are back home. Second, I’m truly learning that deep dish pizza might just be misunderstood. And finally, your downtown smells like chocolate, which is amazing. Our downtown smells like.. well, that's enough of this list so let's just get started.
As Director of Real Estate products at The New York Times, I head up all initiatives related to Real Estate at The Grey Lady, and the main things I’m accountable for are audience and revenue growth, with a focus on the general health and wellbeing of the section. I work very closely with the real estate desk in the newsroom to shape and grow audience around our stories each week, and to innovate around how our audience of over 2 million monthly readers experience Times content. Not just with articles, but through storytelling with video, interaction with our section on social platforms, and new forms of offsite distribution such as Apple News, Facebook instant articles, Flipboard, Google Cardboard and many more. Real estate readers are some of the most passionate and deeply engaged at The Times, and forming habituation around behavior across all platforms throughout the week is something we focus a lot on as you can imagine. Not just for readership, but also for being able to search for properties with us, which hundreds of thousands of users do each month as well.
As you can imagine, The New York Times is going through a period of seismic change at the moment, unprecedented in its 160 year history as we make the transition from print to digital. While the legacy infrastructure of the printing presses continues to keep our business buoyant and successful, where we just had one of our biggest print editions in decades, literally weighing in at almost 5 pounds and 500 pages, there’s no question that the digital consumption of news is accelerating, especially on mobile. The product group at The Times is responsible for shepherding the organization through this transition, and I’m the Real Estate component of that.
It’s an incredibly exciting time to be there, with some fantastic business problems to work on together with brokerages. In many ways, the issues faced by The Times run parallel to the issues and challenges faced by the Real Estate industry. Aggressive fears of disintermediation fueled by technology, especially in a world that runs on free, significant challenges to our value proposition based on the increasing commoditization of our products elsewhere online, and perhaps most importantly, smarter and smarter users, especially younger users, who are more than willing, and now able, to do a lot of that work on their own. But while the problems are large, I believe the collective solutions are similar as well. Staying strong to the core of one’s value proposition is more important than ever in this kind of environment. Customer service, and creating amazing experiences that truly delight customers and users is paramount to sustaining a healthy, long-term relationship and fueling repeat business. And staying the course in a climate of perpetual change. We live in a period of unprecedented cultural change, where more content is being produced and by extension consumed than ever before. With more and more ‘stuff’, that sense of overload can be very real, especially for agents who’s value is already in question from their customers. But as I hope to demonstrate today, there’s many, many reasons for optimism, especially for the folks in this room.
As some of you may know, I’m a long time advocate of the Coldwell Banker brand, and my prior life in the brokerage world within Realogy allowed me to truly understand how Coldwell Banker walks the walk with not just their marketing, but also their culture. I had the incredible honor of presenting last year at Gen Blue in Los Angeles, and one of the most noticeable things I saw after chatting with hundreds of Coldwell Banker professionals, was that on-one spoke about money. It was so refreshing and really conspicuous by its absence. Everyone I spoke to talked about customer service, tools and technology, and how to solve problems for their customers. I’ve only bought a house once, but it was with a Coldwell Banker agent.
So, I'm thrilled to be here representing The New York Times, and very grateful for the opportunity to share some of our digital real estate product, search and platform perspectives with you all. Being here, in every sense of the word, is very special for me. And I'm actually told that this is the room where speakers are being encouraged to be as geeky as possible, so I'm going to take a deep dive into how we think about technology, strategy and the psychology of our approach to content. I hope you'll enjoy the journey.
Stories about people and their connection to place are at the heart of what we do at The New York Times, no more so than within the real estate section. So today, I'm going to share with you a series of short stories. And why's that? Well, it’s because I believe that storytelling is at the heart of communities, families and cultures. It's also at the heart of memories. It's the most shareable type of content that has ever existed, on or offline.
And as a passionate advocate of real estate brands, products and building things to make the process more enjoyable, especially in New York, I believe it's in the DNA of what it feels like to own a home.
So today I’m going to talk a little about how The Times, and many brands beyond The Times, are creating value based on a truly long game strategy, and really understanding the seismic shift in user behavior as accelerated by technology. And if you’re interested in cultivating long-lasting readership, actual content engagement, and deep, considered, digital relationships, gaining a true understanding of what's meaningful to those who are the future of your business offers insightful focus in a world already driven beyond extreme distraction. I'm going to start with an idea central to the sense of overload many of us feel when using social, mobile, email or news services: the stream.
John Borthwick, in his great post entitled 'Distribution Now' frames the idea of a stream perfectly for us. He says "In the initial design of the web, reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration — yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browsers or sites). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The stream metaphor is fundamentally different. It’s dynamic, it doesn’t live very well within a page and is still very much evolving. A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information - that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow.”
Many believe that what’s beginning to be termed Web 3.0 will be all about filtering the noise, reducing an increasing sense of digital overload, and allowing us to interact with the web in a more meaningful way. A way that doesn’t involve hopping from platform to platform in a futile and exhausting attempt to keep up.
These deeper, longer and more meaningful experiences will still exist in a sea of noise but our experience of them and how we find them will change. We're all producing an ever increasing volume of content creation in accordance with Zuckerberg’s Law, which asserts that people double the amount of information they share every year. So this year we'll share twice as much information as we did last year, and next year, we'll be sharing twice as much as we did the year before. Think about one of the main offenders - email. We get more email, wanted or not, every day than ever before. According to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, there were 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing.
So our experience of the web is simply accelerating, with little opportunity to pause in a world of streams. So let's look at a few ways to stand out in the stream, and rise above the noise.
How can you go beyond simply searching for homes on the endless number of syndication sites available to the public, and create helpful and exciting paths for people?
One way is to use a very product-centric approach, the idea of discovery. What I mean here is deliberately creating environments where your users find things they didn’t expect to see. It’s a way of going not only beyond search, but also a way to go beyond selling. The unexpectedly magical, or helpful, can be incredibly powerful. Most importantly, it keeps people engaged with you and your content in a meaningful way. The unexpected search result or experience in a sea of noise, that creates real value related to what the user was originally looking for, can be a very powerful place to position your services. Internally at The Times it's something we refer to as having stopping power in the feed.
So think of it in terms of something we’re all familiar with, a trip to the grocery store. Even when we have a list, we often end up buying something we want to try, had never thought of, or just something that appeals to us. These unplanned purchases are at the root of discovery — finding things that are of immediate use to you around the existing search experience. For a grocery store it might be promotional in nature — an offer on the end of the aisle for example. Or it could be that new flavor of spaghetti sauce next to the one you usually buy that would make for a little better tasting dinner tonight. Or to take a digital example, how many times have you searched for something with Google but clicked on something unrelated in the search results? This is something we talk a lot about in my group - how do we create value through building helpful utilities outside of just the nuts and bolts of searching for a home? We often solve this by building things that answer questions the user might have - what can I afford? What does it feel like to live there? How much time have I got?
When you deliberately create these kinds of experiences, you not only deepen and broaden the user’s search, but involve them in a more engaged way with the other valuable things you do outside of the misperception of adding listings into databases, or unlocking doors. As I mentioned before, it begins to have your online presence solve real-world problems that clients have. Discovery is much more powerful than just search because it enables the user to feel as if they have determined their own path through search, themselves. It takes them out of search and into something more meaningful and long-lasting. Essentially it takes users from searchers, to finders.
Mobile services such as Foursquare or Google Now are using this idea in their location-based apps. When you look for places to go around where you are, you can use the ‘Explore’ tab to enter into an area of the app that has what they refer to as ‘guided discovery’ in it. What this means is that you’ll get surrounding venues presented to you that your friends have visited, are popular with other locals, or that you’ve never visited before. It’s a fantastic way to go somewhere new and try something different. You can even filter it by the type of venue you’d like to visit — the type of food you like for example. Their vast inventory of user-generated tips is the content that ultimately describes what those experiences are going to be like prior to actually going there. If you’ve never tried it, it’s a powerful form of suggestion-based marketing that often leads to some amazing recommendations.
Many are also exploring the idea of serendipitous discovery, whereby you can discover things through what your friends are doing right now. The notion that what a nearby friend is doing can help you visit somewhere new (or even just knowing that they were nearby), and can allow for all sorts of unexpected experiences to transpire. Many digital coupons are starting to work this way, by trying to bring in not only you, but also your nearby friends into a venue in order to redeem the coupon. For example, bring 5 of your friends to a bar and all check in, and you all get a free drink. It’s exciting, and really gaining some real-world traction.
So how does all of this translate to us in the real estate industry? The idea of helping people discover new experiences around neighborhoods is obviously a familiar one to real estate professionals, with the agent often being the conduit for the guided discovery of an area, but how much of this gets communicated within something like a listing on Zillow? Think of this as what happens with clients before and immediately after they’ve been looking at homes with an agent — they explore the area a little themselves. Working in this space is a way to pre-empt their questions, and provide an amazing, helpful service. I’ve often heard of agents who give their clients (however undecided they may be) a coupon to a local restaurant to have dinner after their day of home tours. I think this is a fantastic thing to do and translating that customer service online would be exciting.
What you choose to present as part of the search experience, especially if it’s unexpected, can be a very powerful way to translate what happens in the real world to the digital one. To use another product development example, it creates delight, which ultimately creates habit, and retention.
Many real estate sites position themselves as providing deep-level neighborhood information, when actually all they're really they’re presenting a database of local amenities and stores on a map next to listing search results. This is neither discovery nor insight. It’s boring. What they’re missing is a point of view. Often this is referred to as curation. There's a huge delta of opportunity between displaying data, and sharing insight. Displaying data is what a portal focuses on. I believe that sharing insight is what a great realtor does.
So what I'm saying here is that anyone can serve up a feed of local stores and present it as a way of understanding a neighborhood. It’s not. I argue that this doesn’t give a sense of really what it feels like to live there. When I go to the restaurant near where I’m going to live, what should I order there? What are other people saying about it? Have my friends ever been there? ‘What’s near here’ on a map is no longer enough. It’s the particular voice of (in our case) the agent, that’s missing from these kinds of online experiences. What if this was part of your customers' digital real estate search experience? It certainly is offline, and often answered by an agent accurately fielding questions from clients. And by online experience I'm not talking about some tricked-out bells and whistles website. I'm talking about an email, a status update, a tweet. Something small, but valuable, and being consistently, relentlessly helpful online every day.
Rich, unexpected content around the search experience deepens not only the user’s understanding of a neighborhood, but also helps them to familiarize themselves with what it’s actually going to be like to live there. Market statistics and data do not do this. Of course the ones and zeros strongly inform a purchase decision, but they provide no insight into what it will be to live in that home. Great if you’re an investor, but most homeowners aren’t though. Over and over in our audience testing at The Times we hear how people buy with their hearts, not their heads. That while yes, it's an incredibly important financial commitment, they would never move to a place if it wasn't right for their children.
What do I mean by ‘unexpected’? Let’s take a simple use case. It’s Sunday, and someone is looking on their phone for open houses near where they physically are right now. The phone recognizes that this user has already done a few searches like this in recent weeks. In addition to the search results, what if an offer came up for a free appetizer at the new hip bar they’ve never been to 3 blocks away but only after they’d visited one of the open houses? The hypothesis here would be that they’d be much more likely to visit that open house, and it incentivizes them to take action. Thinking about these 'triggers' can be really helpful in surfacing above the noise of other realtors working to attract customer attention online. Folks like Foursquare or Yelp users know this all too well. Their badges model is often criticized as being frivolous, but make no mistake that it’s highly effective at driving people to new locations and to do things in places they’ve never been before. Creating incentives around locations is a powerful way to get someone to visit.
Alternately, what if inside those same search results there was a vast video archive of things to do in the immediate area from people that had lived there for a long time? True local insight, while always in the head of the agent, is even more powerful if it actually comes from local people themselves, and blending this experience with real estate search would be a very powerful product offering. Mobile is a perfect way to leverage this kind of content because it puts the discovery experience into people’s hands not only in the right place, but at the right time. As Foursquare know only too well, discovery creates loyalty, and if you can sustain loyalty with your customers, you solidify your competitive advantage. Services like BombBomb allow individual agents to send short, simple video messages via email, and it's always amazing to receive one of these. Having someone send you a note where you can actually watch them talking to you is so simple, but so powerful. High tech, and high touch.
Creating unexpected search experiences for your users will allow them to discover and unlock new things about you, your market, your services and the area they’re looking to move to in a new, fresh and exciting way. They’ll spend more time with you if you facilitate this for them. Taking what Foursquare is doing with restaurants, bars and stores and applying the same idea to how people discover neighborhoods through the lens of agent experience, I believe is something we’ll see a lot more of in mobile real estate in the future.
So to switch gears a little here, we can't ignore one of the most important barriers to making all of this happen, attention. As we know all too well at The Times, people are reading less and less online, and consumption of information is becoming smaller and smaller, but there’s an important content organization and distribution shift that’s fueling those patterns. We ultimately believe that paying for accurate insight, actual news, and real utility are where users will shake out. But how things find us online has undoubtedly changed. As Betaworks’ John Borthwick continues, this things we consume online now exist inside of streams of information, and we’ll elect to dip into them at certain points in time, of our choosing. In many ways we’re already doing this with social platforms such as Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. A stream that’s a constant flow of data, and of which we have no real sense of the whole, but that has the capacity to completely change the way information on the web gets distributed. Passive or active, the future of the web is in the stream. And with a pun that's completely intentional, let's dive into what we mean here.
Social sites are often built on the idea of the stream, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr or Instagram. They reflect an increasingly mobile-centric, powerful idea of how people primarily interact with the web, where they spend most of their time, and where organizations create relationships, grow businesses and brands, and capture data already proving invaluable to marketers. The stream is an exciting place to be, and a great place to hang out, so it's no surprise that most users are using those small moments of 'in-between' time while they wait for their latte, or in line at the grocery store, to 'snack' on the internet. It’s where news breaks and conversations happen in their thousands each second, and you can get caught up in a heartbeat. It visualizes the pulse of the real-time web in a way that commands immediate response, and large investment.
However, the idea of the constant, dynamic, ever evolving flow of information in the stream has problematic implications for services built on the idea of being destinations, especially those built using the notion of a flow of assembled pages — think of the traditional format of homepage, search, results and pages — millions of sites were built using this book-centric format over the previous 15 years. The web is no longer modeled after books — introduction screens, tables of contents, and the biggest change, pages.
The shift away from this approach is having a wide-reaching impact upon reading in general. If the main way we experience the web is now through the flow of information in a streamed format, just like we used to with television (but no longer do in a time-shifted era of DVRs, HBO GO, Netflix or YouTube), but this time on our own schedules, and with our own content, then the idea of visiting a web page becomes a lot less valuable, especially in aggregate when we begin to look at the stream in its wider context. Sites predicated on slow-moving, rarely updated web pages, despite their content, are usually invisible in the stream, and give rise to fueling more and more noise in the streams themselves when they’re linked to — does this sound familiar? It should — most real estate websites use this model. Sites built as destinations are now competing with sites built as streams, with some large consequences for industries built on filtering and aggregating information, such as news, and of course, our own.
John Borthwick, again quoted in Erik Schonfeld’s excellent post ‘Mining the thought stream’ characterizes these differences in a wonderful way, suggesting that pages don’t contain the key pieces of information so critical to the real-time web, and illustrates this using the example of the Hudson River plane crash in New York, also known as ‘The Miracle on The Hudson’. On that frigid afternoon, there was nothing about that story on Google, and barely any coverage on most of the major online news outlets, save a page or two, and perhaps a link from the homepage, hours later. However, it was a massive event on Twitter, with thousands of real-time conversations, pictures posted from the passengers and nearby ferries themselves, and the incredible capacity to watch the news as it unfolded before you online. The 'disaster selfie' is, for good or bad, now a thing. Like most events on Twitter, the story was ‘alive’ there, but was invisible on Google. Only later did it get archived, indexed and categorized, and much longer after that did it appear in articles, assembled by journalists and cut down by editors.
Pages archive the web, but they’re not the true essence of the living, breathing, real-time web where most people are spending their time and deriving the most value from their dwindling online attention span. As I opened our session mentioning, this idea of storytelling as being in the DNA of the most shareable content is a key idea behind how streams work. Storytelling is at the heart of communities, families and relationships. For those in the real estate industry, remember it’s also at the heart of what it feels like to own a home. As Borthwick continues:
“. . . How is real time search different? History isn’t that relevant — relevancy is driven mostly by time. . . . This reformulation of search as navigation is, I think, a step into a very new and different future. Google.com has suddenly become the source for pages — not conversations, not the real time web. What comes next? I think context is the next hurdle. Social context and page based context. . . .
Twitter search today is crude — but so was Google.com once upon a not so long time ago.”
With mobile, we now take these streams with us everywhere, and we can choose to dip into them or not. We can choose to participate, or not. But with destination sites, we still have to visit and navigate, and this is the key idea that’s being undermined and eroded by real-time services. ‘Visiting’ the homepage of a news site simply does not have the value it once held, now that we’re in the era of Twitter or the personalized Facebook news feed. Most users are what we call 'sideways' entrants to a site such as ours at The Times, where they'll arrive at an article, often shared through social, email, or another site. As people begin to make their own streams, as well as participate in the streams of others, this is where the creation of lifestreams has also become popular.
Lifestreams contain the idea of digital storytelling that will finally come to life for brands and marketers this year. Lifestreams are the daily record, aggregated across all platforms, of what you’re doing throughout the day. Who you’re chatting to on Twitter, who you’re checking in with on Foursquare, who you’re sharing with on Facebook, who you’re watching with on YouTube. Path is probably the closest service to implement this holistic idea in a beautiful, shareable way so far.
Facebook’s implementation of Timeline and their popular 'On This Day' service should give you some sense of where we’re headed here. We’re already seeing a greater emphasis on the linear, historical, searchable presentation of the minutiae of our collective everyday. Brands will certainly become more humanized when timelines force them to remember their past and where they’ve come from. For many of them, especially in the real estate industry, it might be a humbling experience. But it will make brand presences, especially inside Facebook, more structured and searchable, something Facebook has struggled with immensely as they’ve grown.
Time posted and the date stamp are now a much more prominent search filters, especially combined with other social criteria such as who amongst your friends has read the same piece of content. The analytics of the everyday, especially those influenced by designers like Nicholas Felton, who inspired much of the early work on Foursquare before becoming the lead experience designer for Facebook’s Timeline, will become a much sought after commodity for advertisers, as they attempt to own social search. If you own all the social data about your potential target audience, you can spend your dollars wiser, and most importantly, finally put your ad in the right place at the right time, regardless of platform or device. This level of precise placement will become a true holy grail moment for the advertising industry, and in many ways might save it.
I’m going to take a slight right turn for a moment here, and talk about what the stream is awful at doing - finding things. Ever try to look for an old post in Twitter or Facebook? It’s notoriously tough.
The modern web is almost exclusively predicated on algorithmic search. It’s a vast archive of everything that has ever been, or will ever be in the world, and knowledge increasingly lives and breathes on the web. As a result, the web is really good at remembering things. The process of perpetual recollection is in many ways, what the web is built upon, to the point where many of us now use Google as an outboard brain. We no longer have to remember things, we just need to remember how to find them. The recent launch of Google’s knowledge graph, an ambitious attempt to document the interwoven relationships between all ‘things’ in the world (not just information about them), is an interesting competitive play against Facebook’s social graph, which similarly plots the relationships between people.
Why are graphs important? Because they are of specific interest to advertisers — those who fund the web. Graph-driven software development is already a multi-billion dollar industry, because it allows advertisers to reach their intended audiences in more powerful, targeted, and potentially effective ways. Owning the data on the relationships between things in the world is an incredibly powerful position to monetize.
But what if there was a memory graph?
While it’s true that our brains already serve as our built-in memory graphs, the power of memory is ultimately in remembering, or being reminded of things long gone in our lives. In some respects this reflects the faux-nostalgia that an app such as Instagram taps into. In an era where documentation and data is everything, forgetting (or opting-out of remembering) is becoming a powerful proposition, and building products that are deliberately ephemeral, which force us to forget, then remind us later (as in the case of the beautiful Timehop service), are fast becoming a way to circumvent the need to document everything. If the ability to forget on the web is becoming scarcer, then it begins to move towards becoming more of a sought-after, luxury item, and more reflective of how we actually interact as people, rather than conforming to the unnatural behavior often imposed upon us by the web. As the internet grows up, it’s starting to behave more like us.
We’re already starting to see some embryonic, if trivial versions of this idea surface in the app store. Snapchat, a lightweight photo-sharing app, applies a time limit to what you can share with friends. Think Instagram with a built-in viewing expiration of 2 seconds.
Writing in The Atlantic, Megan Garber describes how the ‘Save All’ feature is a defining characteristic of the modern web, where the archive is now simply assumed. Almost all web-related products built so far are predicated upon harnessing the power of the database, of memory, instead of forgetting. She describes how the internet is often characterized as a dynamic, fast-moving stream, with no containers, and the beautiful, free-flow of ideas and information, but contrasts it with how we actually behave as humans. We wake, we sleep, and have defined beginnings and endings. The conflict between these two ideas creates an increasingly obvious cognitive dissonance, and leads to the pressure that many of us feel, especially with social media, that we’re somehow ‘missing out’ on something when untethered from our digital umbilical. Importantly, Garber proposes that the web’s capacities and our own abilities are misaligned — we are defined by selective memories, the web never forgets. We sleep, the web never rests.
The power of remembering, especially for advertisers and marketers, is incredibly important, and already a multi-billion dollar industry. Nostalgia and memories are at the core of what it feels like to own a home. As these two processes not only converge, but become malleable based on the use of targeted data, what it means to reach the home-buying customer in new and interesting ways will begin to mean something very different. With advertising visibility at an all-time low, understanding recall, and how those recollections are shared, is going to separate the marketers who remain visible, from those who don’t.
But from a slightly higher level, what we’re seeing here is a tipping point in the evolution of social media and online information in general. A moment where the platforms will grow up, move away from pages, and the importance of maintaining and growing a rich ecosystem of amazing content will be the way to grow a lifestream into a life business. So I ask of all of you here, what does your business’ lifestream look like right now?
If the idea becomes about having a stronger presence in the stream itself, especially given the speed at which it’s flowing, and considering that what you share is going to show up inside of many different types of streams based on the recipient’s personal network, how do you go about working with that? Om Malik characterizes the problem as ‘sharing better’ as a way of overcoming the ‘problem of plenty’ inherent in an incredibly noisy, fast-moving stream, but I think it’s more than that. It’s a fundamental shift away from the hub and spoke model of ‘conversion’ so rampant within online marketing in the real estate industry, where now, instead of social platforms being viewed as spokes ultimately driving people back into your site itself, the spokes are now hubs. Indeed, if the page format is questionable, there’s no more spokes at all.
Opportunities to bring users into your ecosystem and provide them incredible, contextually-specific experiences around the kind of content, and what they’re doing right now are blossoming online, and in many ways this is separating digitally-savvy brokerages from those losing online business. In the stream there’s no more hub and spoke, there’s just context specific hubs, that introduce and nimbly optimize the journey ‘through’ your information, rather than an approach with a defined ‘conversion’ destination. The longer that journey, the more powerful it can become, and the more we think of our current series of spokes more like inter-related, non-linear hubs, the more powerful they’ll become too.
If you buy into the idea that the customer, wherever they are in the real estate process, really just seeks magical, helpful, stress-free experiences, especially online, then the idea of creating these relevant paths through your content, starting with the stream becomes a critical approach (especially to being found or remaining visible), and the longer we can make that experience relevant, fun and meaningful for them during their time with us in the stream, the better. The destination (or hub) really just becomes how long they choose to spend with us in the stream of information being pushed at them throughout the day.
The more meaningful the content you choose to share, the longer they will spend with you, and the more you can begin the slow process of ‘owning’ content areas within the stream.
There are a few bright spots within the online real estate community where this is happening, but they are very much in their minority right now, and the hub and spoke / destination model is still too prevalent for this to have fully taken hold… yet. There’s some that are exclusively owning content about their markets for example, but I think it needs to be wider than just a strategy of ‘going local’. Take my discussion here as a call to arms to adopt the stream, and move away from thinking that the only way you can ‘convert’ is by having people on your own site at the bottom of the funnel. You now have hundreds of different opportunities to convert all over the web, depending on the streams you wish to dip in to. If everything simply becomes a hub that leads to other hubs in a more linear, contextually appropriate fashion than ‘hub and spoke’, then each time they interact with you, wherever that is, there’s a multitude of ways you can help.
Importantly, it’s key to give up on the idea of mastering the stream. There’s simply too much and it flows too fast. We’ll never really be able to get a clear sense of the whole platform, for example with Twitter, although data visualizations, as I described above in reference to lifestreams, are becoming incredibly valuable to marketers as they give a concrete sense of intent, and allow us to create predictive modeling on what will happen in both the short and long term future (this is why the rise of the infographic is happening — they aggregate data into visual forms that make complex ‘big data’ ideas digestible and fun). It’s more than just search data, it’s capturing real-time conversations at scale, the insight from which tells us far more about what people really react to than ever before. It’s an incredibly exciting time in which to live.
So what does this mean for the real estate industry?
It means that the idea that conversion can only happen on your own site is a myth. It means that putting the customer in the center of a hub-based experience and providing them with magical experiences along paths into other things you do, is a technique for circumventing the destination problem of page-driven sites. It means storytelling is the most shareable, visible thing you can do.
It means that your presence within the stream has never been more important.
I hope you enjoyed my stories. Thank you.
