Congress will consider legislation shortly to create a national ‘Do Not Track’ registry. I just wanted to remind them, if this goes forward, to call Al Gore and remind him to turn off his internet, and be sure to shut down the dot servers on the way out the door.

Seriously.

As usual, when I start to write something you have to ask yourself - what is this, what is that, and what the hell does it have to do with real estate?

Sorry, but I am a fan of the Noam Chomsky school of thought that there are no easy, 30 second sound byte answers, and hence no easy questions. So allow me to do my usual routine of ‘unpacking’ some of this jargon to lay the table for our mental feast.

There are very many ‘cool’ things about the internet. From the end user perspective the advantages, the benefits, are nearly innumerable. From MY perspective, as an administrator and guardian of my memberships investment in technology, possibly the best part is VISIBILITY. It is this visibility that allows me to attempt to put together the pieces of the puzzle that is any communications strategy.

Think about it. I spend $5k to distribute a cd-rom or other media offering to my members… perhaps (god forbid) a print piece with lots of wonderful information. When the last unit ships, what then? Do I trust that I have done a good job and got the message across? Do I assume that 100% of the recipients received the package, opened the package, read the materials, and properly recycled the paper? Only if I am very gullible.

The point is, there is no real VISIBILITY to ‘traditional’ marketing. If there was, the same coupon book would not need to be recylced at my house every month for the rest of my life. The good folks over at happy nuisance coupons would have realized that I am NOT interested, and stopped marketing to me.

The flip side of course is the connected experience. I get metrics. I get uniques and total visits and stickiness and open/read rates and more. At a minimum this tells me whether my message is getting through. Better yet, if properly interpreted, it allows me to craft my message. In short, it allows me to understand your behavior and adapt to it.

That certainly sounds nice put that way. I can spend less money by modulating my strategy to be increasingly efficient. That savings can be passed on in turn to the consumer of those services.

Privacy advocates, on the other hand, are concerned. I can certainly understand this. There is an undeniable Orwellian aspect to this dilemna. It is a bitter irony that the wonders of the information age often come at the price of, well, information.

I submit that we need to be very cautious not to be too heavy handed in governing the internet. Mark has already written an excellent post on a similar issue as Congress also debates the fate of ‘net neutrality.’

In this case it is not equal rights to traffic that we are safeguarding, but rather the ability for me to know when you have read this blog, or logged into my member website, or opened an email and clicked a link to this resource or that. Obviously, these capabilities can be abused. The solution is not necessarily to eliminate them. In my opinion this will have a very tangible chilling effect on the growth and effectiveness of the internet.

Privacy experts worry about the fact that google has more and more data at their fingertips (there is a good reason why googles motto is ‘Don’t be evil’). Well folks, I hate to say it, but they are a search engine. How are they to perform this function well if they don’t watch and adapt to what people search for?

How are brokers and sales agents to manage their own online resources if they are not able to do the sorts of things that Mark and I have both advocated on this site - namely to maximize their ROI online by making smart choices and then observing whether they work. Use every avenue of feedback you can get, just do it without getting in the way of the consumers access to your content.

So Congress, please consider hard. There is a practical issue here, as a lot of people have invested a lot of money into being able to interact effectively with those who want our services. This gives us the luxury of not spamming those who don’t. Perhaps you should turn your focus inward, and consider the wisdom of throwing stones while living in glass white houses.

In the end, if you decide to create laws that eliminate behavioral feedback on the internet and www, please remember to ask Al Gore to turn it off, because it is done. Feedback, interactivity, is one of the good things about the www. It is one of several factors that come together to realize the massive economies of scale that the internet provides humanity.

If you don’t like google or others looking over your shoulder, perhaps it is just time to turn the channel. Otherwise, you start down a slippery slope that leads to a government maintained web and search engine. Fedoogle. None of us wants that.

business, communications, computing, philosophy, real estate, technology | No Comments »

About 25 years ago I joked to some friends that human bipedal locomotion - walking, was nearly a thing of the past. I went so far as to suggest that legs could largely become vestigial appendages. Now I was 12 at the time, so very few of my friends knew what an appendage was, let alone the concept of ‘vestigial.’

Today I saw some evidence that others are thinking along these lines as well. The human form is highly adapted to long stretches of low impact bipedal locomotion. As scavengers and foragers our bodies are meant to consume small doses of varied proteins seperated by large doses of moderate exertion, aka walking. Our modern existence does not lend itself to maintaining this pattern (read the Paleolithic Prescription for a fascinating look at how badly out of step our diet is compared to what our bodies are built for).

For example, I commute about 3 hours total daily (90 mins both ways). When I do finally get to work, I simply move myself from one seat to the next. Other than a few trips to different offices and the coffee pot, I am sitting at a workstation until I once again migrate my bottom to my car for the commute home. By the time I get home I am sitting down to feed my daughter, and then typically back on the computer.

Certainly the details of everyones daily existence vary; but for more and more of us the daily grind increasingly means spending the day in a chair looking at a display. We have all seen various puns based on this reality; the toilet seat workstation, etc. It was only a matter of time until someone decided to market a real application to try to address this disconnect between what our bodies need and what we typically give them. The ‘walkstation‘ is just such an attempt.

Picture a workstation computer with lcd at eye level as you slowly stroll on a treadmill. Work while you walk, or walk while you work. A great idea, or just one more way to keep us plugged in 24×7? If this gets popular, will there be applications for the real estate industry?

anthropology, business, product review, technology | No Comments »

I think I have been hearing about this moment for almost 20 years now. “What will happen when the baby boomer generation retires?” The question was generally asked within the broader context of social security reform. Today the first baby boomer applied for social security. 60 million more boomers stand behind her approaching retirement. The puzzle of how to reform social security to adapt to the retirement of this generational cohort persists.

Of course, there are even more curious and perhaps more significant puzzles. Broader ramifications that we cannot fathom yet. Certainly this will have an impact on real estate. Exactly what that impact will be remains unclear. Certainly it is not a bad time to dust off that SRES designation and take a hard look at the demographics. There is a reason why there are so many REALTORS® in Arizona.

I am personally curious about a question that you may not have thought of. Namely, what are these people going to do with their time online?
Now I know what you might be thinking - this is not exactly the www generation that we are talking about. Yes they have adapted to and learned to even embrace the www phenomenon (most particularly perhaps as an investment vehicle). But are they really going to spend a significant portion of their retirement years online?

I say yes. I have spent the past few weeks in the pleasure of my fathers company at my home. My father is technophobe, but in the past two weeks I believe I have observed him online nearly as much as I am. Granted he is a ‘civic,’ or a part of the ‘greatest generation’ as Tom Brokaw coined it. That, however, is another part of the equation; we are aging better. All of this combines to tell me that a massive demographic is about to find themselves with much more time on their hands. I am willing to bet that increasingly those hands will be spending time clicking online.

Clicking on what? That remains to be seen. I certainly have some ideas. The retirement services and financial planning industries have done a phenomenal job (and spent a tremendous amount of money) in preparing for this event. There are some lessons to be learned from them and others in preparing for the second childhood of this enormous and influential segment of our population.

Take a hard look at your business model as it relates to this generation. Understand that in the next 18 years (the baby boom was from 1946-1964) you may be helping a lot of people sell their primary residence to move to their retirement dream locale. Becoming expert in those areas, and making that apparent in your online presence, is a win win in my opinion.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

I have made my rounds at the conferences advocating MLS agnostic technology. I still do. I firmly believe that the future will see more and more tools, widgets and technologies developed that interface with MLS(s) but are not dependent on or tied to a particular MLS… they are MLS Agnostic. The advantages for the Association technologist are obvious, as they are for the practitioner. Content can be syndicated between MLS applications, taking the ‘mashup’ to a whole new level.

Imagine a listing input widget that could push your listing input to virtually any MLS you point it at. Sure, not all the fields and data are standardized, so it does the 90% of the work that it can and then you spend an extra 60 seconds backfilling the deltas for each MLS you push to. In the end, you have saved yourself time and effort, AND you have the original listing input object in your possession. If you want YOUR listing content back, you don’t have to ‘borrow’ it back from the MLS.

I believe in this so much that I put my development efforts where my mouth is, and will continue to do so. In a world of shifting vendors, regionalizations, etc. it just makes good sense not to invest too deeply in a technology which cannot be retooled for future interoperability with an MLS at worst, and is not natively MLS agnostic at best. I will try to continue to follow this path, unless…

Open Source MLS where art thou?

Open source, if you don’t know, is cooler than the other side of the pillow. Open Source is the software movement most commonly identified with its most successful progeny Linux. In essence developers take their work product, often built on the foundation of others, and ‘give’ it back to the community, with the only licensing requirement commonly being that the next person in line do the same. It allows millions of developers all over the world to ‘check out the code’ and work with it, extend it, build plugins or additional features and support, and then ‘check it back in.’

One of my proudest accomplishments in my role has been to develop and deploy an open source RETS ruby client. Other developers have already picked up the application and extended support to other version of the RETS standard than it was originally coded for, in essence giving value back for free and making the application more MLS agnostic (it can support more MLS’s).

This obviously leads to the question - will there be a genuine open source MLS application someday?

Most discussion of this in the industry has focused on open content access standards (free and ubiquitous access to listing content - an open database so to speak). See Michael Wurzer’s excellent blog on this point. This is NOT what I am discussing.

I am referring to the actual application itself. I am referring to the ability for millions of programmers around the world to take a crack at their idea of the perfect CMA module, or property valuation algorithm, or search function, and on.

Now that could be cool - if the MLS itself were agnostic. The advantages for practitioners and in turn consumers seem obvious. Can you think of some of the pro’s and con’s I may have overlooked? There are several I can identify offhand, but I don’t want to rob the reader of the satisfaction of identifying their own.

I do want to thank the folks over at Clareity for bringing my thoughts back to this topic. Gregg Larson, Clareity CEO and Matt Cohen, both thought leaders in the industry, gave everyone something to think about yesterday as they weighed in on the CAR statewide MLS proposal with some thoughts that may have been overlooked, such as “Facilitate statewide open and free data standards for listings and membership data,” “standardize statewide MLS rules and regulations,” and “facilitate the creation of a ‘virtual’ statewide aggregation of MLS active and comparable data that can be accomplished using existing infrastructure and technology by existing entities.”

When I see those thoughts in alignment, for some reason I see the possibility for not just MLS agnostic technologies that sit between MLS applications with more free and open data standards, but the possibility for an Open Source MLS application built on the results of these sort of advances. Others may see something very different (and I should point out that Clareity themselves are not advocating this)… but that is the beauty of the open standard - everyone is allowed to realize their own vision

business, computing, content, open source, technology | No Comments »

So your newish neighber sleeps all day and makes noise at absurd hours in the am. Of course you have shared your frustration with your family and friends, but that still leaves you feeling frustrated and needing some kind of closure. A quick search reveals that there is a user-contributed content website (lets call it ucontrib for short) called rottenneighbor.com. So you create a free account and cyberslap your new neighbor. Only to find out that this sheriffs deputy works the graveyard shift.

This hypothetical illustrates just one of a plethora of scenarios that leap to mind in which this sort of ucontrib resource can be inappropriate and even dangerous. I am not saying that I think it is a bad or unworkable idea, but sites like this, like yelp, and a growing host of others need to be viewed with a jaundiced eye.

To me, ucontrib sites of this nature, where you report against something obviously beg a few questions. The anthropologist in me cannot help but be fascinated at the questions; watching the coalescence of an organic online better business bureau (think yelp) or in this case an organic HOA… and frightened by the potential for mischief. Big brother is shifting. It is mutating into ‘little brothers.’ The most intrusive among us ARE us. And are getting rewarded for that trait.

At a more practical level, I have to ask what this will mean for real estate? Will consumers start requiring their REALTORS® to patrol resources like this prior to buying? Will practitioners find themselves forced to do so proactively to limit their liability? Will I find myself someday having to engineer a content feed to a site of this nature so that neighborhood ucontrib can be molded around MLS content? Will I and others have to someday invest as much in protecting our ‘edentity’ as we currently do protecting our ‘identity?’ Maybe. It is an interesting thought. And as the phrase goes, it is a curse to live in interesting times.

FYI you may not be able to check the site at this time, because the links from the abc news story has apparently overwhelmed their infrastructure. Perhaps I should report them on badwebsites.com.

anthropology, blogging, business, communications, content, philosophy, product review, real estate, technology | No Comments »

During my ‘digital life’ as I have worked and grown with technology I have seen a number of interesting things happen, ‘quantum leaps’ in thought and implementation. Yet certain puzzles within technology, certain ‘debates’ still rage and always will. My personal favorite is local vs central, or thick vs thin client, or centralized or distributed processing.

Ok, I know that sounds like a jumble of catchphrases, and it is. But let me spend a moment unpacking those terms, and then I will explain why I think this has something very practical to do with the real estate industry.

The question began sort of like this… if you had to crunch some massive number problems, stressing the pure computational power of a computing system, is it better to have one very powerful ‘brain’ (think CRAY computer) or many smaller ‘workers’ tied to one or several brains in a farm or cluster (think of the SETI and similar projects harnessing the horsepower of millions of client pcs spread across the global network).

Now understand that as computing applications have grown and diversified, this same local/central push and pull has been identified… is it best to process that web request on the server side for an optimal but costly to produce and maintain experience, or ship that processing off to each of potentially many more users?

Next understand that this ‘riddle’ is in reality a very fundamental question that impacts many things beyond computing. Reproductive strategy, for instance, employs a similar cost/benefit analysis as creatures emply either r or K reproductrive strategies. ‘Little r’ strategies mean that parent(s) invest a tremendous amount of resources in their very few offspring, whereas K strategies, fish for example, emphasize massive broods of short lived but numerous young. Both strategies make sense, in their way.

Now understand that at different points in time, one side or another usually has the edge. Manufacturing has grown cheap fueled by inexpensive labor and shipping and hardware engineering is in a good phase right now, with few sensible applications challenging the kind of hardware I am writing on (I will leave the question of whether Vista is sensible to after the first service release). As such, local processing has been king for some time. The tide may be turning, however, as we inch closer to an ‘internet operating system or webOS.’

Google has clearly been heading in a trajectory to become much more than just the center of your search experience. They have email that is increasingly sophisticated. Group collaboration, an exceptionally useful document authoring and sharing system, online/offline technologies and more. As internet applications deliver richer content more rapidly using server side processing the computer that you are working on can be thinner and thinner.

What, if anything, does any of this have to do with real estate?

Well, in my opinion at least, we are in the same never ending cycle there. Only now the tradeoffs are ‘local service and control’ vs ‘regional service or control.’

Now what is really interesting is that this particular ‘local vs central’ cycle ebbs and flows with the market conditions. When market conditions are good and revenue is encouraging focus is shifted to local resources and services, as convenience and service level are at a premium. When market conditions are less than ideal, inevitably the examination of ‘economies of scale’ begin. Think of an office space…by having one central workhorse printer they save money in the long run than by investing in a desktop printer for each desk.

The same applies in real estate. It is expensive to maintain distinct entities with overlap and outright replication of services, often in close proximity to each other. This has been referred to jokingly (in this poor market) as ‘mls overlap syndrome.’ There are over 1000 REALTOR Associations in the nation, many of them built to service a unique area.

Under pressure from a struggling market they examining ways that they can continue to provide for their members, and regionalized services is one such way. As a result, many are considering plans to regionalize, with the added advantages of erasing artificial boundaries to the flow of listing content and providing the consumer with the access they are increasingly demanding. Many state boards, including California, are considering state wide data aggregation, syndication, and potentially even providing a statewide MLS platform.

This is a good thing. There is a small and frustrating element of redundancy in some of what boards and MLS’s do. There are economies of scale to seek out and benefit from.

But we must also understand that all real estate is local. This is a truism, but an important one. Economies of scale often erase some of the benefits of ‘local’.

We must also recognize that this is a cycle, and that if we get to where the grass is greener, inevitably we turn around and see it now looks greener on the other side, all too often forgetting we were just there.

anthropology, business, economics, market conditions, real estate, technology | No Comments »

Imaging IS king. There are plenty of audiophiles out there who will argue with me, and certainly humans have a remarkable reaction to coordinated sounds, and an even stronger reaction to smells (nothing can evoke powerful memories of a place and time quite like an odor).

At the end of the day, however, we are primarily visual creatures. The human brain didn’t just happen to develop in step with our bilateral visual acuity - it was of course a causal relationship. Our natural pattern and movement recognition capabilities fed the development and shape of our cerebral cortex, especially over the past 120k years.

Only the development of modern languages may have had a more profound impact on our brains development than our relationship with sight, and in many ways they complement each other (how often do you ‘visualize’ a word in your brain when you cannot remember how to spell it? virtual imaging in your brain uses the same neural nets as real imaging).

So what happened in the last 120k years that helped to drive this relationship between our brains evolution and sight? Tools, or more precisely the manufacturing of tools.

Hominids have probably always used tools, and even modified the raw tools that they picked up (chimpanzees do this today fashioning ‘fishing sticks’ for ant fishing and a host of other ’simple’ tool applications). But as our range of use for tools grew, so did our need to manufacture them. This required a precise relationship between our hands and our eyes that never existed before, and of course a thumb that conveniently opposes our other digits.

The fashioning of tools, whether Acheulian hand axes or later more complex weaponry and ’stitched’ shelter, tool use, and more importantly the visual acuity and feedback loop between vision and tool modification has been widely attributed with much of the reorganization that led to the fully modern brain.

In fact, imagery is so important to us that one of the first things we started doing with our new tool manufacturing and use capabilities was to begin recording a vision of our world on the only canvas available. Gorgeous, multi-hued cave wall paintings have been discovered dated back well beyond 50k years ago. While expressing the images of our world wasn’t the first thing we did with tools, it has been perhaps the most enduring. Imaging, after all, is king.

So what does this have to do with real estate and technology? Prepare for the surface revolution. I am not only referring to Microsoft’s ‘Surface’ gesture enabled system (picture an iphone with a 3×2 foot screen and immense image manipulation capabilities and you have the basic idea).
.

I am referring to the convergence of this and tablet technology and software/browsing experiences which are all focused on more ‘natural and intuitive’ interactions between human and machine. Using a keyboard and especially a mouse are not intuitive - there is an inherent disconnect between the movements of your hand on one plane and the cursor/pointer on another. Being able to interact directly, naturally with the interface using that acute visual acuity and the coordination with our immensely agile hands is clearly the next step.

Think about writing with a pen compared with keyboard typing. I can type at least twice as fast as most people can cursively write or print text. I have 8 fingers and two thumbs that I can employ, compared to the one handed single character at a time pen method. Add predictive text completion and I am faster even than most people can speak intelligibly. Next add intuitive ‘gestures’ for functions and we will have a whole new ‘language’ for interacting with computers.

Now imagine that every surface you interact with during your day could become a connected, computing surface. Forget the centrally located ‘kiosk’ and think of all the places you currently see poster advertisements or lifeless two dimensional terminals. At the airport instead of squinting and scanning for your flight you will be able to rapidly interact and drill down on the information you want and a whole lot more (which you might not want - see my article on WiMAX and we can start to imagine the degree of advertising intrusion we are headed towards).

At the coffee shop you frequent you don’t need the local newspaper, your table is the local newspaper, and every other paper from around the world for that matter.

Looking for a home? Data syndication and normalization will have made it possible to search across artificial data boundaries, and ubiquitous connectivity has met a sublimely interactive computing experience right where you sit or stand, wherever that might be! If you are a consumer (buyer/seller) you will have a vastly improved ability to find information about properties or have others find you.

This puts Marks post about wireless MLS access in perspective. The ROI for that experience is questionable, but it is paving the way for a much richer, fuller interactive experience that allows the power of our vision to drive the way we interact with computers, with housing, with everything.

After all, imaging is king.

advertising, anthropology, business, communications, computing, content, product review, real estate, technology | No Comments »

Why MAX, or more precisely, WiMAX? Well, in brief, because WiFi seems to be dying out faster than the dodo, at least at the city level. In reality, while there has been a wave of bad news, there is positive news on some fronts according to CNET. But when the title of their article is ‘Wifi isn’t dead yet,’ we are certainly begging the question ‘Has this technology window closed?’

Before we talk about WiMAX, lets talk about Wi. Wireless. Floating from location to location on an interconnected series of wifi clouds - with your connection meter all the way to 11. The dream is getting closer to reality, with major strides in wireless devices, interfaces, and technology in general. But that is on the client side. The server side has become bogged down in questions of dollars and sense.

Mark just posted an excellent article that itself was really a question: was wireless MLS as big a deal for the practitioner as we made of it. This is a salient question for both Mark and I from an administrative/management perspective, but it is also of course a serious consideration for a practitioner trying to maximize their ROI. Data plans, and the devices to run them on, get expensive. So the complete dream means that all those little hotspots blend together so that you get ‘free’ connectivity anywhere. That is the dream that has been turned into a reality in some places, and a nightmare in others. San Francisco itself just experienced a critical setback in its planned peninsula wide wifi project. But despite this setback the city has indicated that this is just a speedbump and will work with other business suitors to create the network.

So, speed bumps and bad implementations aside, the dream of ‘ubiquitous access’ persists. Now for the MAX part.

Basically, the idea is to turn your city into a giant microwave. Now before we panic, lets understand that these microwaves won’t hurt you. But they may provide a more cost effective, functional way to remain on the happy path towards the dream of go anywhere access.

The question of whether something is useful should of course begin with its cost. Only then can you calculate your return on that investment. Is wireless MLS access fro the cell phone useful? Sure, if it is easy and free! If connectivity is spotty, slow or expensive, perhaps not.

Now, at this point you should know me well enough to know that I was just about to say ‘nothing is really free.’ As consumers we need to prepare for the next level of media marketing saturation. I have already written about the ways that technology is infusing itself into every aspect of our lives. And of course, the more ’screens’ into the digital world that we are exposed to the more marketing materials we can expect to see. That is, unless you are willing to upgrade to the ‘unbranded version,’ at which you are back to square one in the cycle

I think that many communities who have started down the path towards wireless via wifi have taken a hard look at the dollars and sense, and are realizing that the wifi window has in fact closed. It may be time for WiMAX… but I am heading out of my house now. I won’t know the answer until I get to another connected location. Yet.

Next Up? RESurface… what ubiquitous wireless will mean for Real Estate with the surface revolution on the horizon.

advertising, business, communications, computing, product review, real estate, technology | No Comments »

Just a quick tip and question here.  CAR (California Association of REALTORS) has launched a new ‘legal blog.’     You can access this fledgling resource <a href=”http://www.car.org/blogs/category.php?cid=5″>here</a>:

My question is whether blogging in this fashion, where you are clearly looking for and depending on the target audience to help make your content timely and relevant is really feasible.  We can call this ‘Diablogging.’  If so, it could well become a new support tool for front line technicians in real estate and elsewhere.  In essence the modern interactive blog site seems on the verge of entering the traditional ’support knowledgebase’ space.  My concern of course is that as we start to blend elements of blogging with bulleting board style conversations, expertise and aesthetics can be lost in the process.  Who QA’s this information (and if no one, what is its real value?).  This is the central question behind user contributed content, and the reason for some of the recent woes of the major user contributed content sites like wikipedia.

As blogging, bulletin boards and knowledgebases in some ways converge around ‘user contributed content’ it will be interesting to see the way that they intersect, and if they can in fact remain distinct.

blogging, business, communications, real estate, technology | No Comments »

SEM - Search Engine Marketing. SEM can be viewed as an extension to or as an alternative to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In brief, SEO means you put only ’sweat equity’ into your efforts to perform better on search engines like google. SEM means that you pay for clicks. SEM and SEO are part of your strategy for a ‘Return On Technology Investment’ or ROTI in the online world.

Mark has written an excellent post on the fact that ‘ads are out, content is in,’ identifying that increasingly people are ‘learning’ to ignore advertisements while casually browsing. This is true. There is even technology to assist with this in certain web browsers (think of Tivos ability to skip the commercials ;-). However, pay-per-click advertising still has an interesting and important place in the online search game. Sometimes, it is the very best way to find the ‘official’ version of what you are looking for, as opposed to the growing number of online knock offs and squatters. As website registrations have exploded, finding quality content is harder than ever. Sometimes you have to pay to help people to find you.

But just because you are ‘paying for clicks’ doesn’t mean that it is effortless. More to the point, it shouldn’t be effortless, assuming that you care about your ROTI. If you are going to pay to help people find you, you might as well invest that money wisely, and see if we can learn from Marks article to try to distinguish the performance of your ads versus the competition.

Search engine marketing is both an art and a science. In the past year I have spent many hours working on SEM tactics for the HOT- or HomesOpenToday.com website. I am happy to share some hard earned insight from that process.

Lets start with the goal. The goal is of course to get as many high quality visitors to your site as you can manage. This is somewhat different from my experiences with HOT (as I am simply referring consumers to contact the REALTOR holding the open house), but the same basic principles apply. You don’t just want traffic, you want quality traffic. These are visitors who are actually interested in your content - they are a genuine potential consumer of your services, or a ‘lead.’ But even for quality visitors or leads, there is a threshold to what you can manage.

The number one complaint from REALTORS regarding traffic to their websites: “the leads are really quite low quality - they just aren’t that interested or suited to my services (e.g. they are in Michigan and I am in Calfornia). The number one complaint from consumers regarding REALTORS they contact through online channels: “the response time is horrible - I have moved on well before they bother to get back to me.” Clearly there is a disconnect here, and that means a real potential opportunity.

The important lesson here is don’t attract them to your website if you cannot promptly provide them with service when they are ready. The amount of clients that you want to try to service in a given period (effected by your investment in SEM and SEO) will determine how much effort and resources you need to put into whatever channels you have available to service these clients. If you offer a phone number, email, or chat ‘channel’ of communication, what is your response time if I pop in at random? Does it make sense to have an assistant or a service triage these communications so that response time is rapid and your time can be better spent dealing with the next step in the communication/transaction?

Once you have a sense of your business goals in this regard, you can start trying to attract the right number and type of consumers. We have already discussed the SEO aspects of this process. Now lets delve into SEM.

You have a number of choices when you engage in SEM. Some are general (e.g. specific to no particular industry), and some are industry specific (e.g. paying for extra photos on your REALTOR.com property listing). I will address what I am most familiar with, and that is adwords, which is a general SEM marketing tool attached to the google search but also allowing for a range of other advertising channels.

The fun thing about SEM is that you can see what is happening, almost in real time. This is the most significant difference between traditional and online media - feedback. We discussed at length how to approach the metrics available to you in the SEO portion of this article. Pay-per-click solutions typically offer some great tools to give you feedback and even to project what ‘will happen’ if you launch a certain ad. Adwords is no exception. I am able to throttle my bid for clicks in a variety of ways, including time specific, content specific, geography specific and other variables.

Lets look in depth at a pay-per-click campaign. You setup an account, define your campaign parameters (what to call it for your own reference, what the ’subject line’ of the ad is, write about 3 short lines of copy as the ‘body’ of the ad, and then define about 20 ‘keywords or phrases.’) These ‘ad objects’ become the ’sponsored ads’ or ‘paid advertisments’ that you see on pages of websites that have partnered with SEM providers like google. For google’s search engine these ads appear at the top of the search with special highlighting distinguishing them from the genuine search results, and/or on the right hand side.

You can then add additional ad objects to try different approaches or add some variety, and define ‘bids’ for these ad variations. The bids are ‘how much you are willing to pay for a click.’ The bid is ‘attached’ to the ad, so to speak, and then when someone enters a search word or phrase that matches the keywords that you have associated, your ad object ends up in a ‘bidding contest’ with any other ads that also match. Your placement on the results page, whether at the coveted top spot, or further down the page or on secondary pages, is determined in that contest. The more you bid, the higher that you are likely to appear. You can throttle your bid for an ad object for all of its keywords globally, or for each keyword within an ad campaign individually.

For example, if I know that there are a great number of open homes in Concord one weekend in the HOT system, I can adjust my bid for my ad object(s) keyphrase ‘Concord Open Home’ from perhaps .99c per click to perhaps 2.00 per click. That does NOT meant that I will pay 2.00 for each click on that ad object served on google searches for the keyword search ‘Concord Open Home.’ It means that is as high as I am willing to go to try to get great placement. On average the actual cost usually ends up around 60-70% of that total. For instance, when I do have an ad objects keywor(s) set to .99, I usually end up paying around .72/click. At that bid level I get a clickthrough ratio of around 3-5% on the weekends from an ad that is typically placed 4.2 on the page (meaning it is on average the 4th ad down, served on the first page typically). During the week, when people are less interested in searching for open homes, that of course all goes down…. I pay less, for better placement, but get less clicks because there is less searching.

An average of 4% clickthrough ratio (CTR) is phenomenal. It is so good it is actually an aberration. It means that for ever 100 people that see an advertisement served for HOT on a websearch, 4 people click the ad. I have no good way of confirming this, but I believe that this is in part due to the fact that I have a dedicated population of over 10,000 members (between Marks Bayeast Association and my CCAR membership) who are accessing the HOT website. Sometimes they themselves search for the site if they have just learned of it through the grapevine. I can spot this through the keywords that they use to access the site.

But a lot of work has also gone into trying to make that CTR percentage that high. I have written a number of ad variations, with keywords based both off of my research and off of googles suggestions for my business. Google knows what people search for, and depending on your description to them of what you have for people to find, can do a very good job of telling you what to key on in order to get served on a search results page.

I allow the ads to compete with each other, and modify based on performance in an evolutionary process. I vary between serving the ads as fast as possible (on the weekends when most traffic is in the morning for my consumers, who typically search early in the am and make plans for an open house tour) and rotating them evenly over time (on early weekdays when I want to make sure that if someone is searching for open houses even later at night they can find me). I have a geographic range of around 60 miles identified so that I don’t spend dollars on consumers who are not likely to take advantage of my service (HOT currently serves the greater east bay). And finally, I throttle my bids throughout the week. Some weekends I am spending 25 times as much on attracting consumers as I am on a Monday when there are far fewer open homes scheduled to view.
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There are a great many more fine details and techniques to both the SEO and SEM game. If the topic merits it, I will write about some of these in more detail in the future. In the meantime, thank you for reading my perspective on this part of maximizing your ROTI in the online world. I hope your online footprint is serving you well, and look forward to discussing more aspects of calculating and maximizing your investment. Remember that content is king, but even with great content you need to optimize your relationship with the search engines one way or another.

And as always, I prepare to do it again. SEO and SEM are both ongoing, evolutionary processes. You cannot just ’set it and forget it’ if you want to maximize your ROTI.

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