by minifig

An interesting item in last week’s Wall St. Journal about the online war of words between beer giants Miller and Anheuser-Busch.

Miller has taken the interesting tact of hiring a former Ad-Age reporter and created “Brew” Blog, a daily blog to covers the beer industry from Miller’s vantage point.

Why do this? The answer from WSJ.com.

While the site lets Miller tweak its famously tight-lipped rival, it also gives the company a platform to take a first crack at spinning industry news.

Even with its obvious bias, the blog is actually a fantastic resource for anyone interested in staying on top of the beer wars. Several years ago I worked for Molson, before it became Molson Coors, so the brewing industry is still of interest to me (both professionally and socially).

But I think there is a lesson here for the real estate industry. Often when I speak to brokers, I hear a lot of them complaining about the negative press the real estate industry gets in the mainstream media.

One thing I suggest is for them to create their own blogs to counter this noise. Not fill the space with meaningless marketing platitudes like “Now is Great Time to Buy…” but actually contribute meaningfully to the conversation and to debate the issues.

The big real estate brands would be wise to take a lesson from Miller; create a real estate blog and hire a full time blogger. It could be an agent – but they’re (hopefully) too busy selling real estate. Rather, carve out some dollars from that bloated print marketing budget and hire a social media guru or a cub reporter fresh out of journalism school, then let them off the leash a bit to create stories that are relevant to the conversation but maintain your brand integrity.

A company like Redfin understands this idea implicitly. It’s the impetus behind their Sweet Digs bloggers (see Redfin Unleashes the Listing Critics) – who, granted, can veer out of control every once in a while (see Something I’ve Been Meaning to Say for A Long Time) but still contribute greatly to the real estate conversations in their respective markets.

I’m actually surprised more of the bigger real estate brands haven’t picked up on this idea, and I’d love to see one of them try. Go ahead, your brand will thank you.

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Check out the Blogger’s Connect keynote speech by Curbed.com’s Lockhart Steele.

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ActiveRain, the popular real estate social networking platform, has launched what it’s calling “Outside Blogs” – a new feature that lets AR members take their content outside of the walled-garden of the ActiveRain ecosystem.

From their blog post announcing the sneak preview:

A few of the highlights of our outside blog platform:
* You will be able to host your blog on your own domain. For example, you can have your posts feed to bobisgreat.com if you own that domain.
* You will be able to customize the look and feel of your blog.
* It’s easy to set up your outside blog. You can be up and running in less than 15 minutes.
* You will be able to build your posts in ActiveRain. You won’t have to learn a new platform.
* You will be able to decide where you want your posts to publish. Do you just want your outside blog to be about local content pertinent to your local market? You will be able to decide which posts go where. Send your local market reports to your outside blog. Send your real estate industry related posts to ActiveRain. The choice is yours.
* You will be able to benefit from the SEO knowledge and power of ActiveRain.
* You will be able to brand your own blog while at the same time staying connected with the ActiveRain community. Your comments will be syndicated between your ActiveRain blog and your outside blog.

This makes a lot of sense, as it lets bloggers move beyond the sandbox that ActiveRain currently provides. Until now, many budding real estate bloggers cut their chops on ActiveRain before seeking other alternatives (Wordpress, Typepad etc.) that allow them to move their blogging onto their own domain. Outside Blogs (needs a new name) allows them set out on their own yet retain their pre-existing content and still leverage the feel-good aspects of the ActiveRain community.

ActiveRain has slowly been rolling out features that begin to answer the lingering question of how they intend to monetize their flourishing community. ActiveRain Ads were the first step; Outside Blogs are, presumably, the next step.

Costs for this new feature, as yet, are un-announced.

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Monitoring your web site statistics is an important part of maintaining an online presence and there are many excellent tools you can use to keep track of your raw traffic numbers (see Statistics and Analytics: Tools).

But traffic isn’t everything however. For content producers in niche verticals (like real estate) – numbers alone can’t and don’t tell the whole story. Basically it reduces to the old quantity versus quality argument – does have a lot readers mean more than having the right reader?

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around one for the last couple of weeks. What are the measures of success for a blog and what metrics can be used to keep track of them?

Technorati authority, Alexa rank, Google PageRank (see Signaling A Retreat From Multi-Author Blogs), inbound links, indexed pages are all metrics one can consider – but none offer the definitive answer. For more on this, SEOMoz has a get breakdown on How to Use Search Engines & Web Data to Conduct Competitive Brand Analysis.

One stat I’m personally paying more and more attention to is the number of RSS subscribers a site has. Why? Because it signals the audience’s engagement/loyalty to the blog.

As a publisher, RSS stats are hard to come by, but If you use Feedburner to manage your RSS subscriptions, here’s a great tool from Feedperfume (Feed Analysis v1.0) that will give you some in depth reporting on your numbers.

You need to output your Feedburner stats in CSV format (instructions are on the site) and then upload them to FeedPerfume and it will churn out some graphs and do some of the heavy number crunching automatically for you.

By way of example, I’ve embedded the results from FOREM. As a blogger, I find this fantastic information to measure my site’s growth.

• Monthly Increase Range: -92-495 Average Increase / Month: 156
• Total Increase(Last 3 Months): 591 Monthly Increase(Last 3 Months): 197

Growth Rate

• Growth Rate (Last Month): 12.65%
• Average Subscribers (Current Month): 3,117
• Predicted Subscribers After 3 Months: 4,456
• Predicted Subscribers After 6 Months: 6,369
• Predicted Subscribers After 12 Months: 13,016

• Best Day of A Week: Friday
• Worst Day of A Week: Saturday

What other metrics are you paying attention to these days?

[poll=3]

(h/t) Problogger

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Here’s something that will really “bake your noodle“. I’m blogging about a video blog of bloggers talking about blogging.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jla2jOkA96s[/youtube]

Courtesy of Dan Green, Bring the Blog.

Technorati Tags: real estate bloggers, real estate blog, blogging

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I unwittingly set off a firestorm of comments on my post about the impact of Google’s PageRank shift and my (mumbling) musings how it might affect traffic generating efforts like blog carnivals (see Is the link party over?).

by cromacom

But as I read more and more on the subject – one thing became increasingly clear. PageRank doesn’t really matter any more. Hear hear. I rarely ever checked my blog’s PageRank and care even less about PageRanks of the blogs that I read and link to frequently.

by Murfomurf

But amidst all the navel-gazing (bloggers talking to bloggers about blogging) that Google’s move provoked, a few more sacred cows in blogging have started to be questioned as well. One oft-touted maxim is that posting often is the secret to blogging success.

Marketing Profs wrote a stellar post challenging this widely held view on Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore. To sum up:

What will matter more and more is what you write and how you engage, not how often you write. As the blogosphere matures, the measure of success will shift from traffic to reader loyalty.

The RSS subscriber count has become the new PageRank.

One tactic that’s been used often to build post frequency has been the creation of multi-author blogs. The equation seemed quite simple. More writers = more posts = greater search engine presence = more traffic.

Tech blogging is chock full of examples of multi-author blogs. Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, etc.

The real estate blogosphere is no different, and the multi-author blog seems to have become the trend-de-jour (FOREM is guilty as charged). Perhaps this can all be traced back to Dustin Luther’s ground-breaking work building RainCityGuide.

But as this medium matures, personally I find myself retreating from multi-author blogs – simply because the volume of posts is far too frequent. I can’t keep up.

I surrender.

by fulmini & saette

In many cases, multi-author blogs = more noise. And more noise seems to me to be contrary to building reader loyalty. How many times a day do I find myself J’ing through Google Reader or clicking Shift-A just to make all the new posts on some of these blogs go away?

Looking deeper at my own consumption habits (Google Reader’s Trends can tell you what you’ve reading), I find that more and more I’m being drawn back to the single voices; trying to find the authorities, the personalities, the perspective. In real estate, I’m drawn to the Jeff Corbetts (XBroker), Jonathan Millers (Matrix), Michael Wurzers (FBS Blog) and Jeff Turners (Turner’s Perspective). Outside this space, it’s the Seth Godins (Seth’s Blog), Jeff Jarvises (BuzzMachine) and Greg Sterlings (Screenwerk) that keep me coming back.

And that’s the heart of the problem I’m starting to think comes with multi-author blogs. They bury the individual voices.

That’s not to say there aren’t still some great voices to be found in multi-author blogs. But I sure wish there were a way to filter them out rather than having to sift through all the white noise.

by sonicdoubt

I’d love to be able just to get Mike Arrington’s perspective on TC or Marshall Kirkpatrick’s posts from RWW or Pete Cashmore’s contributions to Mashable for example and cut out all the rest.

To use a (loose) analogy – I’d liken many multi-author blogs right now to my local cable company. They’re bundling an awful lot of channels in my cable package that I don’t want.

One thing that would help if more multi-author blogs feeds aped the a la carte cable model (which is sadly lacking right now too), or like podcast subscriptions in iTunes. These blogs ought to clearly let me pick and choose the authors I want and bundle a unique feed for me based on my selections – not just stuff everything down a pipe at me.

Am I way off in my assessment? Has anyone else felt overwhelmed? I know Disruptive RE Broker does.

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by gill4kleuren

Community events like the Carnival of Real Estate and the Odysseus Medal are, on the surface, great ways to share new blog posts and highlight great writing from within the real estate blogosphere.

But let’s be honest for a second, the real value to all of these efforts is that they are great linkbait and help generate inbound links to your blog. Here’s how it goes… Publisher sends links out with the posts of the week, authors link back announcing the link post is live, and around and around it goes every week. Everybody boosts their Technorati authority, everybody gets to sip on the Google Juice.

I’ve participated in these to a small degree in the past, but haven’t spent much effort recently. Mostly because I’m lazy and it’s usually late on Sunday night (and past the submission deadlines) before I remember to submit anything.

But I wonder how effective these link parties will be now that Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms. From Techcrunch:

A major Google page rank update has punished large scale blog link farms and similar sites indulging in heavy cross linking by dramatically cutting their Google page rank scores.

Some pretty major blogs were penalized in this latest adjustment of the PageRank algorithm, sites like Engadget and Autoblog. And while this go round was primarily targeting the big blog networks, I wonder how long it is till Google shifts its sights to traffic boosting efforts like the carnivals.

At the very least, it seems to me that bloggers are going to have to be a bit more judicious in their linking behavior moving forward. It seems like Big Brother really is watching.

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Inman News released it’s annual report on the 100 most influential real estate leaders (PDF Version) today. (Disclosure: I work for Inman News). As usual, it’s a pretty comprehensive look at some of the key players who make this industry tick.

Two folks that didn’t make that list (at least not this year anyway) but who I expect to become very influential around these parts however, are two new contributors to FOREM.

Erik Hersman

You probably know Erik from his past work at eppraisal.com and his blogging at Realty Thoughts. He now works as an independent blogging and social media consultant, operating out of Florida. He practices what he preaches on an Orlando-focused real estate blog called Roofable, and in addition to FOREM he is blogging at AfriGadget and White African.

Kelly Roark

Kelly has more than 17 years in real estate, and was formerly Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Inman News. Now she is VP of Industry Development with Trulia and is responsible for outreach to Trulia’s broker partners. She definitely understands how to connect the online and offline worlds in real estate.

I’ve asked each of them to share their thoughts here because I respect their opinions greatly and I think their perspectives will add a lot of value to our readers.

So as not to re-invent the wheel, I’ve asked them both to follow the Rules for Rain City Guide Contributors (once again Dustin has laid down the canon) – as well as asked them to refrain from commenting on any direct competitors and to continue to disclose any obvious conflicts of interest in their posts.

That said, please join me in welcoming them both to FOREM.

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[Ed. Note] Erik Hersman, formerly of Realty Thoughts, joins FOREM as a contributing author today. Erik been blogging about technology in the real estate space for a couple years and he now works as an independent blogging and social media consultant, operating out of Florida.  You can also find him on an Orlando-focused real estate blog called Roofable. 

Widgets and third-party tools on your blog can be useful to your readers. However, anyone who has been blogging for any time realizes that they are a tricky thing to deal with. Limited space means that we all have to balance usefulness, value, fun and quantity in that ever-so-small sidebar.

There’s definitely no “right” answer for which tools you should use, but I submit that there are some guidelines you should follow:

Relevance
Whether you are a broker, agent, vendor, pundit or real estate blogger of some other type, you will each have different angles and need. Make sure that the tools you put in that precious space are relevant to your site.

Value
Every time you see a shiny new widget that you covet for your blog, first ask yourself how useful it is for your readers and yourself. If it will be rarely used, then you should probably think twice about adding it. Your most valuable website real estate should have your most valuable information and/or tools.

Let’s run through the items that you are likely have in your sidebar buy default:

• Blogroll
• RSS feed
• Categories
• Archive
• Recent comments
• Recent posts
• Search

(can you feel that screen real estate shrinking?)

A couple that you might consider using, though this is highly relative depending upon why you blog – and PLEASE don’t use them all…

• Chat – Plugoo or Meebo
• Listings – vFlyer or Postlets
• Market stats – Altos Research, Trulia or Bankrate.com
• Community – MyBlogLog, Flickr or Technorati Links
• Feed Subscription by Email – Feedburner
• Of course, you might also have ads, or your own widget if you’re a vendor.

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by Scott Ableman

Looking forward to Labor Day, I thought I’d leave you with these links:

How blogging is like selling a house…tips from the ProBlogger. 9 Lessons You Can Learn about Blogging By Watching Me Sell My House.

Need help customizing your Wordpress blog? 300+ Tools for Running Your WordPress Blog from Mashable!

Plus, my new favorite plugin. Mocking community into compliance.

Your blog needs a tagline. The Best Website Taglines Around the Internet. So what about one for FoREM?

How big is your blog? ShowoffRankings. Does it matter? Measuring Sticks for Blogs: Do They Matter?

Also, if you haven’t done so already, please fill out the FoREM reader survey. Lots of responses so far – but the more the merrier! $100 Amazon gift certificate could be heading your way too.

Have a great long weekend everyone!

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