Kori Covrigaru is a young entrepreneur, currently CEO of PlanOmatic, an online real estate marketing company providing interactive home tours. Kori grew up in Michigan, went to school and Western Michigan University, and currently lives in Colorado, enjoying the mountains in all seasons.

If you can relate to one of the situations listed below, then “RockMelt – Your Browser. Re-Imagined.” is definitely for you. On the other hand, perhaps what I meant to say is exactly the opposite. If you can relate to any of these situations, download Google Chrome J… I guess that’s for you to decide.

• You consider yourself to be a “Social Media Guru”.
• You spend most of your time on the web surfing through facebook, updating your status and posting new tweets.
• Every other click on your computer takes you from one social networking site to another.
• You’ve closed your browser window, only to find yourself opening a new one and subconsciously going directly back to the same social media site you just left (yes, it happens to the best of us).
• You’ve just finished a two-hour couch session with your laptop, and find yourself browsing through facebook and twitter in bed with your smartphone, only to read the same exact posts you read five minutes ago.

RockMelt, available for both Windows and Mac, is a remarkable social networking, news feed and content contributing platform built directly into a desktop web browser. It incorporates facebook, twitter, RSS feeds, sharing solutions and much more while maintaining a clean, easy to navigate user interface. See a snapshot below.

I have RockMelt installed on my Mac, but is RockMelt for me? Probably not.  Without the help of RockMelt, I find myself plenty distracted by news and social networking sites throughout the day as it is. Perhaps if social media is your business, I can see how RockMelt might be right for you.  However, for those of us who don’t use social media to earn a living, I think we’ll pass.  Isn’t social networking easy enough to come across in a standard web browser?  Do we really need facebook, twitter and RSS feeds hovering on the outskirts of our window as we type in a simple search for directions to the closest convenience store?  I think I’ll stick to my bookmarks for now.

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Candy Evans is one of the nation’s leading real estate reporters, bloggers and consultants. She writes for AOL’s Housing Watch, Joel Kotkin’s The New Geography, and is now a guest blogger for Future of Real Estate Marketing (FOREM). She’ll soon be writing for Move.com. Candy holds a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has been a published writer for more than 25 years. She was a longtime contributing editor to Dallas’ D Magazine and sister pubs, and in 2007 founded the wildly successful Dallas real estate blog, DallasDirt, where she broke the news on where former president George W. Bush bought his Dallas home in 2008. She is the founder and creator of SecondShelters.com.

Tag, you’re it! I recently interviewed a Santa Fe agent who told me that, to maximize internet presence, her firm advertises in at least 400 places on the internet. If they advertise through print, which they do rarely, that ad must have a media or internet component.

Besides being Harry Potter, how can you connect a piece of paper to the internet?

Easy. You play tag with a new communication tool:  the Smartphone Tag Reader.  A Tag Reader is a graphic tag printed on a regular print ad that, when scanned by a reader downloaded to your Smart Phone, immediately delivers a full photo gallery of the ad product — home, all property details including room dimensions, current pricing, even neighborhood and school information. Some even feature property videos. It’s almost as if the whole listing pops right out of your cell phone which I have no doubt, someday down the road, will happen.

Here in North Texas, the Ebby Halliday Companies, in conjunction with Luxury Portfolio Fine Property Collection, publish their own glossy, luxury home magazine of the most expensive homes or home sites in the area priced over $750K. The magazine is then mailed to 30,000 high net worth individuals in the north Texas area. The magazine, Grand Vie, satisfies Ebby agents’ demands for a glossy print product where they can showcase their homes without paying the outrageous prices commanded by local print media.  But this year, Ebby took one major technological step further, adding a Smartphone graphic Tag on each Grand Vie listing.  Clients run their Smartphone over that tag, and out pops a full gallery of rooms, going way beyond the capabilities of a one- dimensional ad.

Want to see how Tag technology brings print alive? Three easy-peasy steps:

1. Download the free Tag Reader to your Smartphone at http://gettag.mobi, then follow the    instructions for your phone type.

2. Open the Tag Reader and scan or photograph a Tag on any page in Grand Vie (or the Tag above).

3. Property details, more pictures and agent information will load as a web page where you can explore the property more thoroughly.

Tag technology has been extremely popular in Asia, and is rapidly picking up steam in the U.S. You can also see similar Tags in recent issues of Architectural Digest, and ads from retailers like Pottery Barn and Giorgio Armani. But Tag technology seems to have found the perfect mate, at least on paper, in real estate sales.

“It offers a great way to make print come alive,” says Randall Graham, Vice President and director of Marketing for Ebby.”We’re seeing great results and hope to see even more in the future.”

Have you tried Tag technology yet?

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Guest blogger Jay Thompson is the designated broker and co-owner of Thompson’s Realty in Phoenix, AZ. You can find his award-winning blog at PhoenixRealEstateGuy.com. His latest blogging adventure is RealEstateBlogPro.com.

On September 14, Twitter announced its most ambitious site redesign to date. The rapidly growing “information network” is introducing, “a new, re-engineered Twitter.com that provides an easier, faster, and richer experience.”

The update will roll out to users gradually over the next several weeks and include such features as:

New design: A rich details page that promises a cleaner timeline. “Infinite scroll” means you no longer will need to click “more” to view additional Tweets.

Media: Twitter is partnering with numerous large players in Internet media such as Flickr, YouTube, Vimoe, Ustream, and TwitPic (to name just a few) to embed and integrate photos and video directly on Twitter.

Related content: Click a Tweet, and a related content panel will show additional information on the author or subject.

Mini profiles: Click on a user name and you’ll be presented with on-page access to the user’s bio and related Tweets.

Here is a video that Twitter released highlighting some of the changes. Less than 24 hours after the video was published, it had been viewed almost 400,000 times…

What does this mean for third-party Twitter clients?

My first thought when I heard about the new Twitter.com was, “I rarely go to Twitter.com now, I doubt I’ll go there in the future.”

Like many Twitter users, I use a third-party Twitter client to monitor and interact on Twitter. TweetDeck is my client of choice, and Seesmic Desktop and HootSuite (a web based application) are other popular clients. Many of these clients already incorporate the functionality of the new Twitter.com. However, according to Twitter founder and CEO Evan Williams, 78% of unique Twitter users are using Twitter.com (seems high to me, but I’m not the CEO of Twitter…).

Why don’t I use Twitter.com? Because – in its current incarnation – it doesn’t offer the same experience as the third-party applications. I find it painful to navigate, and I’m constantly having to go off the site or open other windows to get the information I need. The third-party clients provide a much easier, faster and enriching experience – exactly what the new Twitter is offering.

What Twitter’s redesign may do is cause these third-party applications to review and enrich their products. Competition tends to lead to innovation, and with Twitter stepping up its game the third-party providers are going to have to do the same.

However, one of the things about Twitter that appeals to many is its simplicity. Will the new Twitter, and the push to include more and more information ruin this? I hope Twitter doesn’t lose that simplicity. Many are calling the new features “Facebookish” – and Facebook is already known for having what can be a confusing and cluttered user interface.

I suppose only time will tell. With 90 million Tweets being sent daily, and 370,000 new users getting Twitter accounts every day, Twitter is a force to be reckoned with. Generally speaking though, people are resistant to change. How this change manifests itself will be interesting to watch.

And clearly people are talking about the change. At the time of this writing, there are 31,800 news articles indexed on Google News – less than 24 hours after the announcement.

What do you think about the new Twitter.com

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by maladiets

There’s no doubt it’s a bad time to be in the newspapers classifieds business. They’re probably wishing they could back in time too. Revenues are down – with real estate classifieds advertising being hit especially hard. Mega publisher McClatchy is down 29.4% in real-estate classifieds revenue. Likewise, Gannett’s real estate classifieds revenues are down 13.5%. Not a pretty picture.

Advertising dollars are slowly and surely fleeing print. A recent report from Borrell sums up this flight.

“There are less homes being sold, but at the same time advertisers and real estate brokers are looking for the most effective use of their dollars. And everybody agrees that the most efficient means is online.”

I think the flight is not just a flight from print advertising however. I think it’s symptomatic of a larger move away from the sort of fire-and-forget advertising done so much in the past, that just doesn’t work in a Web 2.0 world.

Carson Coots, writing at agentgenius.com, sums it up this way.

The funny thing is, effective online marketing in real estate doesn’t involve spending money on ads as much as it involves spending valuable time.

Carson is right. And if you look deeper into the report you find that spending on online ad is only 16.7 percent of total Internet marketing budgets. That number is only poised to grow to 17.3 percent in 2009. That’s less than one percent growth! The real bulk of online spending will continue to be in web site design, communications and database services.

So if the future growth isn’t really just more advertising options online, what is it?

At NAR, I sat on a panel in front of a group of newspaper execs who were trying to figure this all out. I suggested that simply adding new ad products into the mix (see Zillow and the Newspapers Sitting in a Tree) won’t solve their woes.

I proposed they needed to radically change their focus away from product-based mentality towards a new platform-based approach.

Real estate professionals these days are looking for marketing partners, not sales people, and the smartest thing for the newspapers to do would be to ape some of the models being pushed forward by the Real Estate 2.0 crowd and give agents a unified local real estate marketing platform. Here’s a few ideas how they could do this:

Providing the Platform

Leverage existing publishing infrastructure to provide agents/brokers with a web presence, but free the database from the design so it is totally customizable (Ubertor) and retain a unique top level URL and easily create single property web sites (RealBird). Agents have complete control of their presentation of these sites but traffic can easily be fed both directions. Make the data exportable so if the agent wants/needs to leave they can.

With control of the source of the listing data, it can then be pulled back to enhance the mothership’s search results. There is an opportunity to up-sell featured listings (Trulia) or even premium placement for the agent’s sites on search results (Zillow). Don’t get greedy either – help agents get these listings elsewhere on the ‘Net too (Point2NLS, vFlyer).

Give the agents a blogging platform (Move.com, ActiveRain) and allow the content to be rolled up into a hyperlocal information source (Outside.In, Localism, YourStreet). Bonus – you can use this approach to find talented writers that can build out into group blogs (RainCityGuide, BloodhoundBlog), e.g. the PI’s Seattle Real Estate Professionals.

Packaging the Right Tools

Give agents the tools they want to get video tours of their properties and connect the agents with the producers (RealEstateShows, WellcomeMat) but don’t confine the distribution to your site – following the listing model, help the agents syndicate those videos out across the web (TubeMogul).

Promoting the Brand

The package should include various levels of self-service advertising network (with CPM, CPC advertising options) – with options to centralize ad buys on other sites as well. The package could also include placement inside an enhanced local service provider directory (MerchantCircle) in the real estate section. And it should give the Realtor the tools they need to manage their online reputations on other local directory destinations (CitySearch, Yelp, etc.) as well.

With this approach, brokers and agents ultimately would benefit from the one-stop-shop for all their marketing needs as well as playing off the paper’s still resilient brand with local real estate consumers.

If they can see this opportunity, the papers are the only ones that (for now) have the local market penetration to pull something like this off. And at each of the step, there are clear and obvious ways that the newspapers could monetize this – far beyond selling simple classifieds ads.

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Or wishful thinking?

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