Wishing all FOREM readers a very happy holiday season.
2008 was one of the busiest years on this blog. Traffic keeps growing month by month and RSS readership recently cracked the 5K mark. Thank you to all visitors for your feedback, comments and questions. Heck I’ll even take the occasional insult every once and a while [...]
Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers. – Voltaire
I’m a big fan of engaging consumers online and answering their questions as a marketing strategy (see Impart your Wisdom with Answers). It’s not a new strategy, not particularly inventive, but it is effective.
Really, it’s win-win all around. For consumers they get what [...]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N94s7ix0JPo[/youtube]
Late last week I added Google Friend Connect to this blog (if you followed @jburslem on Twitter you would have seen my tweet asking for people to help me test it out). I did so after Google made the service widely available to all web site owners.
Friend Connect is part of the Open Social movement [...]
Agents can now change the linked web site of their listings on Trulia to their own web site.
A common request from agents on Trulia.com is to change the linked web site for their listings, so the listing points to their own web sites. When we receive multiple listing submissions for a property, we aggregate the [...]
In an announcement on the Redfin Corporate Blog, the Seattle-based venture has abandoned Microsoft’s Virtual Earth maps in favor of Google’s offering. The reason? According to Redfin:
In the end, it was speed, speed, speed that convinced us to switch. In our worst case scenario of 500 pushpins on the map in IE6, GMaps is 385% [...]
Yahoo Real Estate, the nation’s #2 real estate search portal, launched a redesign today.
The site, which has adopted a much more muted color palette (lots of earth tones), offers up a new dynamic search results page and much larger photos in its listing pages (see Inman News story). It’s a decent catchup effort but still [...]
Word today from the Official Google Mobile Blog, Adwords advertisers can now target their ads to searchers using iPhones, G1 or other mobile devices.
Now, advertisers will be able to display ads exclusively on these mobile devices, create campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting. If you prefer not to show your desktop ads on [...]
I’m a pretty heavy iPhone user, the thing is pretty much attached to my hand at all times… but one thing I didn’t expect was how much I’ve come to depend on it while on the road; to get directions, to find a particular store or get restaurant reviews. It’s a fantastically powerful device to [...]
Century 21 released the results of a recent market research study today (see Inman News) that shows that they are “the best-known name in the business”.
Full results below:
“Please tell me which real estate agencies you have ever seen or heard of?”
CENTURY 21: 97%
RE/MAX: 93%
Coldwell Banker: 89%
Prudential: 75%
ERA: 51%
GMAC: 38%
Keller Williams: 33%
Weichert : 18%
Realty Executives: 14%
The [...]
The situation for the local real estate section looks grim. AdAge is reporting newspaper ad revenue fell nearly $2 billion in Q3 of 2008.
Even online ad sales are looking miserable.
Newspapers’ online ad sales, where everyone is hoping some part of the future business model resides, accelerated their decline with a 3% drop. Online ad sales [...]
