Google’s OpenSocial and What it Means for Real Estate

After railing about multi-author blogs earlier this week (see Signaling A Retreat From Multi-Author Blogs) I’ve decided to be a total hypocrite and accept another voice on FOREM. Pot, meet kettle.

Steven Groves approached me today and asked me if I would like to publish a piece he’d written on Google’s OpenSocial initiative and I agreed, thinking it would be timely and of interest to our readers.

- Joel Burslem

OpenSocial was announced yesterday by Google and is supposed to be live tomorrow. OpenSocial will provide a platform for developers who create applications & widgets for social network (SocNets) like FaceBook, LinkedIn, SalesForce.com, Plaxo, Orkut and few more. It will allow them to develop the application once and then deploy it across a number of SocNets without change. This is manna from heaven for companies like Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide who already have some of the most popular apps in FaceBook.

This is relevant to real estate due to the way real estate and social media naturally connect.

I’ve said before that real estate is one of the best fits for social media because it provides a personal, human connection to a real estate professional via the web, prior to actual off-web engagement. The impact can be dramatic; Jay Thompson, Teresa Boardman and other real estate bloggers all comment on how very different the interaction is once the consumer has found them via their blog or other social media technology - the response is warmer and it required much less selling; the consumer is already connected to them emotionally when they finally call.

That is also a key here - the consumers contact them - a marketing pull effect vs. a push. With real estate still being a large investment for the average consumer and with the market the way it is, every edge you can get, you should get.

Enter social networks like FaceBook where current and future real estate consumers do hang out, and I mean hang out - average time on FaceBook per user is around 186 minutes per user / month. How do you reach them though? Well, by being a part of their online community, by adopting connecting behaviors and understanding their needs.

One example of a solid real estate connection to a SocNet that comes to mind is the Neighborhoods application by Point2 Technologies; it will already feed your listings (those posted on the Point2NLS) right into FaceBook on a Neighborhoods community page. I recently posted on this as perhaps one of the best answers to the local neighborhood wiki question - they are already built and real estate professionals can informally adopt one or more of the 50,000 local pages and support the contributions by the local neighborhoods community users, which is now at over 550,000 users.

That is just on FaceBook though - assuming the other SocNets have a geo-mapping capability to them (and even better if they do not!) the sharp people at Point2 will likely see a value in extending their app to OpenSocial and like magic - every SocNet can have a Neighborhoods structure that real estate people can work themselves into.

Are there other real estate particular apps that the SocNets want - you can bet on it and sharp developers will quickly adopt the OpenSocial standard - to their benefit and to the benefit of social media savvy real estate professionals everywhere.

Steven Groves is an author, public speaker, blogger, podcaster, Vblogger at www.ExecutiveConversationsInRealEstate.com. He is the developer of Agent2.0™ - a model he’s developed to help real estate agents implement and use social media and Web2.0 technologies in their business.

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