Right Time. Right Place. Right Person. Right Content.

Why real estate marketers are uniquely positioned to capitalize on location-based content marketing
Global Luxury Interactive Conference Keynote, New York 2013

Good afternoon everyone,

So today, I'm going to read you series of three short stories. And why's that? 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 digital marketer, especially here in New York, I believe it's in the DNA of what it feels like to own a home.

I'm going to share with you some of the things we've learned from Corcoran's digital journey over the past 5 years, and how we've been able to aggressively grow our brand during one of the worst housing markets in history, inside of one of the most competitive markets in the world. I'm going to describe how we work with the ideas of customer relevance and empathy, through the idea of surfacing the right content, at the right time, for the right person, in the right place.

But before we get to that, we need to talk a little about online customer experience. As everyone here knows, growing and maintaining meaningful relationships is at the heart of the referral business, and when it comes to working with digital platforms, one of the critical questions to answer is how do you connect the customer with the most appropriate, helpful and targeted message?

How do you ensure that what you're sending, sharing, posting, tweeting, pinning, linking, digging, filming or even just saying remains relevant in the moment where the customer is actually experiencing it? It's a challenge increasingly facing by brand marketers, and one that's a strong counter measure to the increasing volume of content noise online.

Is 7am really the best time to be sharing our open house that's happening in 5 day's time? Do those we're connected to want our market reports sent to them on weekends? Do they care what's hit the market this week on their birthday? With more and more content accelerating through email, news feeds, streams, apps and websites, there's no doubt that being able to cut through the noise and rise above everyone else's content is the key to staying top of mind.

For some context on this, half a billion people use Facebook for over 20 minutes every day, over 100 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute, and an average of over 10,000 tweets blast their way through Twitter every second. If that wasn't bad enough, the poor average American office worker enjoys no more than 3 uninterrupted minutes at their desk at any one time, a direct result of the more than 150 billion emails that get sent every day (thankfully not all of them from Corcoran).

So when we think about this climate, we think about how the customer actually behaves, and look at the information that determines and informs their decision making process. We are firm believers that data is the soil in which ideas grow. The key data point we focus on is where our customers are spending time online. We believe that time spent, not visitor volume, is a key driver of digital lead generation. There's a tremendous volume of ineffective real estate marketing approaches which unfortunately assume that the path of the real estate customer is a straight line, gracefully moving from syndicated search to listings, to agent contact, to showings, to closings.

Some call it the conversion funnel, some call it hub and spoke. So beautiful. But so wrong. I believe that the path of the real estate customer, and indeed customers of any product or service, is an inherently non-linear one, and as we know from the highly detailed National Association of Realtors' Annual Customer Surveys, the window for the process of initially being considered 'in the market' to ultimately closing, is on average a two-year process. A window that notably expands in direct relation to markets slowing due to economic factors. Where customers start is a very different place from where they end up.

Now, many of us assume that when we think about real estate search, the role of the portals such as Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com is an essential one. In our case here in New York, it's Streeteasy and The New York Times. And while that's true, what we see is that the use of these platforms is only about the final 6 months of that overall 2 year cycle.

It's also highly loyalty-driven, these customers make choices about their tools and stick with them. There's only a 15% overlap between Zillow and Trulia users for example. So each platform has a different audience, marketable to in different ways. For us, we see Trulia to be much more effective in Brooklyn, especially with rentals, over Zillow, which tends to be more Manhattan and sales centric in terms of click-throughs and overall agent contact effectiveness. So many of us in the real estate industry treat syndication as one big lump of leads, but the reality is that the individual nuances for each platform allow for subtle, but effective differences in marketing to surface.

And there's no doubt that the commoditization of online listing information through the aggressive growth of these platforms has noticeably disintermediated the role of the agent, questioned the value of brokerages, and captured a tremendous volume of online attention.

Customers, especially younger customers such as first-time home buyers are willing, and now able to perform extensive research on their own terms, and in their own time, often becoming more knowledgeable than the agents they ultimately reach out to. They're also incredibly fickle when it comes to brand loyalty, which can be eroded in a matter of seconds. Already unable to distinguish between most of the national real estate brokerage brands, one poor experience can preclude them working with that brokerage ever again. So in one sense, these portals are where customers are browsing the shelves independently of brands and real estate professionals when they shop, and in enormous volume. At the last count, over 100 homes per second are being viewed just on Zillow's mobile platforms alone.

But working with this climate is simply table stakes at this point. When we think about the effectiveness of search and syndication, we need to think about what happens in that 18 month research window before someone begins to use these tools. And we need to use a lens of empathy when we do that. What happens prior to someone beginning to focus their search? Before they begin to pick neighborhoods, or enter price, bedrooms and bathrooms into a property aggregator? Before they actively look for a referral? At Corcoran, we work with something called 'The Zero Moment Of Truth' which is named after an Insights white paper published by Jim Lecinski, a brand marketing executive at Google. Lecinski talks about how creating a disproportionate volume of mindshare prior to the search process, with particular regard to mobile and social, can aggressively inform and direct a customer's decision making process.

It describes how marketers have been using a simple three-step customer journey model for a long time, starting with advertising stimulus such as TV, print or online display advertising, and then moving to the shelf or the point of sale, which has historically been called the first moment of truth. And finally experience, where people take the product home and use it. They could have a good experience or a bad one, and most importantly, they share that with their friends, increasingly online via social media, reviews and ratings. The decision making process inside of services such as Amazon or Yelp are almost exclusively predicated upon this kind of customer journey. This period of shared experience is the second moment of truth. Lecinski questions the effectiveness of this traditional approach, and through a process of vast customer data collection across multiple verticals, with the goal of understanding where influence takes place as shoppers move from undecided to decided customers. They found that the average shopper uses over 10 different sources of information for their decision making process, a number that's been steadily rising in recent years as earned and paid media fragments online. When they lined up where the most influential sources of information were, they uncovered a fourth step in the decision making journey, which they call the zero moment of truth. This is when customers do their research, get smart about alternatives, read reviews and comparison shop, all before making a decision and going to the shelf. For us in the real estate industry, our zero moment of truth is 18 months long.

So the notion of remaining relevant in the moment, especially on a mobile device, using the idea of how products and services are shared and recommended by those you're connected to is not only a key customer decision driver, but of course, also in the DNA of how referrals work. Especially online referrals, and as that process becomes increasingly digitized, we as marketers have to work with the idea of remaining relevant and empathetic in the moment as much as possible. When we've worked with this idea at Corcoran, we find that the more aggressive we are in social, particularly across platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and YouTube, the more aggressive our search and syndication results are becoming, because the customer increasingly recalls and recognizes the brand inside the list of results, in a way that they perhaps previously wouldn't have, with all of the local brokerages blurring together. Recall of Zillow or Trulia does not suffer from this brand equity problem however, especially as those brands proactively move into the traditional advertising space of allocating millions of dollars towards nationally syndicated television advertising. Since both going public, their quarterly reports are fascinating reading, and for many brokerages, they're being outspent, and out-innovated.

But locally, Corcoran now means something different, and stands for something in a differentiated way than our competitors. This is the true return on investment for us when it comes to social media. It's essentially always been a search play, because of the inherently irregular path of the customer. If we can surface the Corcoran brand where potential customers are already spending disproportionate amounts of time, prior to performing searches, either in Google or real estate sites, our results 'mean' something different within the list. It allows us to stand for insight, guidance, local knowledge, and perhaps most importantly, fun. It allows us to move from searching, to finding.

And this isn't a climate that's limited exclusively to real estate of course. Brand marketers across the world are now doubling down on real-time relevance, the most notable example of this being what Oreo did during this year's SuperBowl, creating what brand marketers have often called 'The Tweet Heard Around The World'. As many of you will know, there was a 34 minute power outage during the third quarter of this year's game, and during that time there was an enormous surge in content being shared on Twitter. Estimates have the rate at almost a quarter of a million tweets per minute going through Twitter during the break. That's a deafening amount of online noise.

Acting in real-time from their Manhattan war room, Oreo's marketing team designed, captioned and approved a graphic, which was posted to Twitter reading 'Power out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark'. Within an hour, it had been retweeted over 15,000 times, and re-shared on Facebook over 7,000 times, in addition to being picked up by social news services such as Digg and Buzzfeed, crossing platform boundaries and creating a wildly disproportionate volume of visibility, especially over other SuperBowl ads, which are notoriously expensive. As Jonah Berger, the author of 'Contagious: Why Things Catch On' suggests:

"The SuperBowl channel is very saturated. I think a retweet is much more engaged, it is suggesting that the audience is not only processing this message but actively engaging with the message, and selecting the message to pass on to their friends. That said, is this going to sell more Oreos at the end of the day? Hard to tell. But it definitely makes the brand seem like a more clever, more interesting, sharp brand. So in terms of brand equity this is as effective, if not more effective, than just showing another SuperBowl ad".

For some context, the first ad to play when the announcers cut to commercial after the power went out was… for a real estate brand. And I challenge you to remember who that was.

By being nimble, responsive, and acting in real-time, Oreo were able to earn, at tremendously low cost, a huge online audience within a very short space of time. They put the right message, in the right place, at the right time, for the right people. This is a holy grail of online marketing, especially when you factor in the location-awareness capabilities of mobile devices. I believe this offers a huge set of opportunities for the real estate industry.

What we've been working towards over the past 5 years is a content marketing process which now allows us to blur those lines between social and search, getting the customer to understand what it feels like to live in a certain neighborhood, at the same time as they're actually drilling down into results. I'll explain how we got there.

Every time we do a customer survey, there's a consistent point of feedback that we always hear. They tell us that while the hard data points of pricing, location and layout are always important, their decision making journey is led much more by their hearts than by their heads.

That they would never choose an apartment if it wasn't right for their family. That what's nearby is a key indicator of happiness.

And they tell us that when they choose an apartment, what's around the building is just as important, if not more important, than what's actually inside the apartment itself. It's something we characterize internally as 'going beyond the four walls', and it's a key point of differentiation for us when it comes to thinking about content marketing. It tells us that, especially driven by an aggressive culture of listing commoditization, that property information is simply the starting point for the customer's decision process. It tells us that being able to communicate the flavor, vibe and culture of a neighborhood is important. And it tells us that sharing the insight, knowledge and guidance that only lives inside an agent's head is a critical driver of digital relevance.

So, with an 18 month window to aggressively communicate what it feels like to live in the dozens of different neighborhoods within Manhattan and Brooklyn, how do you surface that content in a way that will organically grow what happens inside of Google, Zillow or Trulia?

This is the key marketing challenge facing the industry, as it speaks to remaining visible, staying relevant, and ultimately, growing your business. And perhaps most importantly, it's not something you can buy. You have to go out there and earn it, just like you would in building your referral network.

For us, social and mobile platforms solved this problem in a way that's allowed us to also strengthen our own product mix. We'd always been sharing helpful things to do around town inside Twitter and Facebook, and had happily been answering questions as to where to get the best pizza on the west side, or the always viciously contentious who has the best cupcake downtown. We'd also been creating a vast archive of answers as part of our YouTube approach, which tends to be less about listings, and more about answers. But what was missing was the ability to surface these answers in the right place, and at the right time. We'd slowly been building a large database of localized, digitized information, but wanted to make sure that we were applying layer of relevance to it, outside of the Facebook or Twitter news feeds.

In order to do this, we had to partner with someone who truly understood not only social, and not just location, but also, and perhaps most importantly, New Yorkers.

Foursquare, a scrappy young startup from Manhattan's East Village now based on SoHo, with their origins in Dodgeball and Google, had launched their service for sharing your location in 2009, and it was becoming very, very popular in New York. Introducing the idea of 'checking-in' to a venue, initially to earn virtual currency and digital collectables, but later to gain discounts and perpetuate a whole new wave of what it meant to drive real-world loyalty, their founders talked about their product in a way that resonated strongly with us.

They spoke about making cities more fun. They spoke about using check-ins to aid serendipity, and how their service would unlock the world around you, recommending places that you and your friends had never visited before. It was then that we realized that what they were talking about, was the same thing we were talking about. It was the perfect fit for what we'd been looking to do. Foursquare complimented what we'd already developed across Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, perfectly, and offered a set of tools for us to be able to wrap our insight and guidance around a location service with a highly engaged audience of New Yorkers.

4 years later, and we have almost 3,000 different venue tips across Manhattan and Brooklyn, and over 20,000 followers (we're almost twice as big on Foursquare as we are on Twitter).

Our tips get used in their thousands every month by people all across the city, and our work on the platform has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Mashable, Crains, and most recently, The Huffington Post. There's even been an award-winning business book written about the platform entitled 'The Power Of Foursquare'. Corcoran is case study number one in chapter one. In many ways, it has allowed us to own mobile expertise about living in New York, and truly answer the question 'what does it feel like to live here?'

As Foursquare grew, a tip-centric product presence (under the guise of mobile marketing, but importantly, without pushing properties at users), scaled well with their own growth. As they added more features, such as recommendation engines, and venue suggestions, it was the tip, especially popular tips with photographs attached (tips are used much more if there is a visual associated with it, especially food), that began to surface the most. Interestingly, we also saw heavy tip use at venues with long wait times. In many ways, it's no surprise that our most popular tip is at Madison Square Park's Shake Shack, infamous for its hour-long wait times for their incredible burgers and ice cream (believe me, they're worth it). But as a result of this insight, we were then able to focus tip creation towards other venues where the user would potentially be held captive and be waiting for prolonged periods of time. Airports, music venues, theaters, train stations all soon followed. We used our own data to create better tips.

As Foursquare's tip presence grew, they also launched the ability to curate groups of tips into what they call 'Lists'. A Foursquare List can be themed around an idea, such as 'Manhattan's Best Lobster Rolls' or 'Best Views in Brooklyn', but what it allowed us to do was group together our best tips by neighborhood, and begin surfacing the most popular types of tips elsewhere within our online presence. With Lists, we began to curate tips into more meaningful and easier to understand experiences for our followers. For example, we began to be able to see which were the most popular tips by neighborhood, and then group them all together into what we called 'The Manhattan Mega To-Do List', which contained all of our most popular venue information, as chosen by our own followers. This content was then recycled back into Facebook, Twitter and a number of other social venues for us.

These tips were then also inserted back into our iPhone, iPad and Android apps, so that when people were looking for listings in a neighborhood, they would also see a small banner at the foot of the screen, showing them something to do nearby, as chosen by our own Foursquare community. This notion of recycling content across the platform is key. We've also included YouTube video clips into our apps, so that during the search process, users can watch clips of advice regarding the real estate process, as well as get video testimonials of great things to do and eat in that same area. It's been an incredibly useful thing to include back into the core mobile services, and as such our average time spent using our apps has increased significantly. For example, our customers spend 6 times longer using our iPad app that then do our website.

So working with these insights, we also integrated the entire process back into our website, so that now when you search for apartments in SoHo for example, you'll also simultaneously see recommendations for things to do nearby, surfaced through the insight and experience of those at Corcoran. It might be where to order off the menu, or how to cut a long line, or even those secret spots that only true locals would know about. It allows us to own local information through the lens of agent insight and guidance, and it's a key point of differentiation for a brokerage's product over a syndication portal. It's insight, not data. And if data beats opinion, then insight clarifies and crystallizes data.

This approach helps keep people with us longer, enables them to be more engaged with us as a brand, and helps to reinforce why working with us offers a deeper, richer experience than our competitors.

And as I mentioned before, time spent with our content online creates a disproportionate volume of customer affiliation and identification with our content elsewhere online, especially within search results, and this Foursquare-centric approach has been a critical platform in helping us to surface this localized information. It also allows us to solve content problems across other social platforms with growing audiences, such as how we resolve a potential presence on Instagram. We've partnered with a game development company to help create dynamic visuals on top of which our local insight and guidance can sit. It all gets packaged up every day and posted to Instagram and then syndicated to Pinterest and Google+. Perhaps most importantly for us as we move towards more mobilized agent productivity, this all gets created on an iPad. We never have the problem of asking ourselves what we should post today.

However, there was still something missing. We had a bug.

Our bug was an important one - we simply weren't empathizing strongly enough with the customer. What we were finding was that a lot of the information we'd been sharing was surfacing at the wrong times.

And our wonderful hot chocolate lists were surfacing in August.

Foursquare themselves had begun to solve this problem with the launch of their 'Explore' feature, which displays recommendations for what's around you right now, based on popularity, proximity, and the social proof of places your friends have already visited. What the customer sees is still the localized venue tip, but if this tip can change throughout the day, what this does is actually multiply your content strategy, to the point where you could potentially be writing several different tips based on environmental factors such as the weather, or time of day.

The tip you'd write for The Shake Shack at lunchtime is very different from the one you'd write at 10 in the evening. Or the issue that Times Square is a very different place in the summer than it is in the winter, and it's important that any content wraps around these kinds of ideas when the customer sees it. Too often we think about neighborhood information as a fixed thing, but the reality is that neighborhoods change throughout the day or throughout the year, and are always much more fluid than they're presented to be. If we're going to answer the question of what it feels like to live in a neighborhood, that information has to be timely, based on what the customer is doing right now.

So, we'd created this vast library of answers and localized pieces of information, but the challenge was to surface it at the right time, in the right place, for the right person. That's a lot of rights.

The first platform we chose to help solve this problem for us, was our most engaged and fastest, Twitter. We use a service called 'If This Then That' to help us ensure that the right information is being triggered at the right times and in the right places. What this allows us to do is connect services together using what they refer to as recipes, in order to help your productivity and short cut some of the things you'd previously have had to do manually. For example, if you upload a photo to Instagram, you can also have it saved to your Dropbox. It's a very powerful set of tools, and has a vibrant community of people who even share their own productivity recipes with each other.

What this now allowed us to do was solve the problem of surfacing the right content at the right time, and weather was a key driver of this. So now, when it rains in Manhattan, we automatically push a video of a Corcoran agent talking about what they like to do on a rainy day. For example, this strapping lad here.

Or when it snows in Brooklyn we surface Park Slope and Williamsburg hot chocolate recommendations. Or, as it's been doing lately, if it hits a certain temperature in New York, to surface Foursquare recommendations for places to keep cool. It sounds amazingly simple, but it's highly dependent upon having enough pre-assembled inventory of content to pull from, and establishing an environment whereby that's being triggered automatically, rather than by a person manually reacting and curating the experience. We still curate around these environmental triggers, for example we'll post coffee or breakfast recommendations, often gathered from services such as Zite or Flipboard, between 8 and 10 in the morning. Or we'll be posting late-night pizza stories on a Friday after midnight. And when we do this, we find that we're more relevant to what the audience is doing in the moment, and as a result, we're able to rise above the noise of the news feed in ways that allow our content to be more shareable, more engaged with, and used for longer.

Most importantly, we've again been using these same insights back on our own website, with particular regard to property photography. What happens now is that the properties and content inside of our own search experiences move with the customer throughout the day as well. So in the morning you'll see more bedroom photos appearing. Around dinner time there's an aggressive push to surface kitchens. After midnight we're showing evening shots, especially of skyline views.

This way, we can go beyond the basic display of listing information, and make our site much more dynamic in ways that differentiate it from the user experience of a syndication portal, a key play for brokerages going forward.

So as the web doubles down on visuals, we've created a system which surfaces the right thing, at the right time, in the right place, for the right person.

What we find when we win the zero moment of truth, add a relevance and empathy layer to what we do, and implement everything back into our products across the board, is that our content gets used longer, our lead generation gets disproportionately stronger, and our business can grow in exciting, dynamic and digital-first ways.