Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) really needs no introduction. Web 2.0 guru, brilliant marketer and unabashed self-promoting social media superstar, he is on a mission to help you take advantage of the all the latest web technology to further your goals and monetize your passions.

I first met Gary at his keynote at Real Estate Connect in New York where I had the opportunity to corner him for an video interview (see Leverage the power of social media).

Gary’s book Crush It has been tearing up the best-seller lists and I’m stoked to announce that as of today, Crush it is available as a vook.

I could write a lengthy blog post about the app – but Gary sums it best…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXeeieMBM7Y[/youtube]

The Crush It vook app contains 18 never-before-seen videos and the full content of the book. It is available for immediate purchase on iTunes (App store download) and on the Web.

[Full disclosure: I've been working on this app for the last couple of months. Vook was founded by Inman News publisher Brad Inman.]

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Want to learn how to Crush It?

Web 2.0 guru and now best-selling author Gary Vaynerchuk will be holding court at the Bell House in Brooklyn on October 27th, starting at 9pm, for an exclusive FREE event.

RSVP on the Eventbrite page – and make sure you get their early to secure your spot! The place is filling up quickly.

Gary will be joined by a guest that night for a very special announcement, and the evening will feature an exclusive montage of never-before-seen, behind-the-scenes video footage. An after party with Clabo, who brought you the Crush it! music video, will top off the evening.

It should be quite the night…

UPDATE: Want to hang out and drink champagne with Gary V. backstage before his presentation at the Bell House on October 27th? Just reserve a spot on the Eventbrite page and then get two of your friends to reserve tickets as well. Send all three of your confirmation codes to garyvbellhouse@gmail.com and they’ll draw one email as the winner. The winner and his or her two friends will then get to go backstage before the show and spend time CRUSHING IT! one on one with Gary V!

Photo by affiliatesummit

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Century 21 has really been pushing to move beyond the Gold Jacket lately. First, they announced they were dropping all of their television advertising in favor of an all-Internet play (see Century 21 Ditches TV for Online)

Now they have announced that they’ve launched “C21 Communities” – a social media platform.

Century 21 Real Estate LLC, the franchisor of the world’s largest residential real estate sales organization, today announced the launch of C21 Communities, its new social media platform. C21 Communities is available directly from the company’s Web site, www.century21.com, and this new platform bundles a dynamic set of social media tools designed to enable online conversations between its agents and consumers, including:

* Talks, an online interactive advice forum,
* C21 Talk Radio, an online radio channel for consumers interested in real estate, and
* CENTURY 21® social networking sites on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube.

While I’m not a huge fan of the site design (the tag cloud seems to dominate the page – and is not a navigation element I’ve ever found particularly useful), I love that the brand is seeking to redefine itself with all of these social elements in place.

The interactive forum, specifically, has a lot of interesting possibilities. Especially if C21 were to leverage the interests and passions of their community to highlight and promote “super-users” as authorities on particular subjects.

Much like Apple does within it’s own support forums or like Verizon did to leverage the experience of its customers and let them take the lead on its customer service.

Promoting knowledgable users (read ‘agents’) through a national portal like Century21.com might very well be one more value-add that a large broker brand like C21 could offer to its franchise network.

It also begins to claw back some of the conversation that is currently being siphoned off by third party sites like Trulia and Zillow.

Owning the conversation is something that every broker brand, big or small, should be thinking about doing.

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[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 that lets you, the web site owner, add community and social features to your site with single upload (ok, it’s two uploads but there’s still no programming required).

By doing so, you’ll instantly bring a new social networking aspect to your site. But the best thing is, rather than having people build new identities from scratch, Friend Connect lets people join your site using their pre-existing identities. Effectively countering the growing sense of social networking fatigue.

In short, by enabling Friend Connect on your site, your sites visitors can easily join your community by logging in with their Google account as well as a few others — which, as of today, also includes their Twitter profile.

For example, to join the FOREM community, click on the ‘Join’ button in the right side bar (RSS subscribers, get out of your readers and come to the site to see what I’m talking about). You can use any one of your chosen identities to log in and then begin to connect with the other members of this blog’s community.

For readers, the upside is it means you can see who’s reading a particular site and start to find other people who have similar interests to yours; clicking on their thumbnail reveals their profile and what other sites they are members of.

For publishers and site owners it is a way to build your traffic through word-of mouth recommendations, reader reviews and by adding other functionality to an otherwise static experience.

To add Friend Connect to your Blog

1. Log into your Google Account at http://www.google.com/friendconnect/home/

2. Click on the “Set Up A New Site” button.

3. Upload files - canvas.html and rpc_relay.html to the root directory of your blog. That’s it!

To add any the Gadgets (the community, Wall or Review gadgets) to your blog; just cut and paste the HTML code in your sidebar or use Wordpress’ widgets (if you use Wordpress).

Friend Connect is interesting project but is not totally complete yet. There’s still a few pieces of the puzzle that are missing.

I’d love for it to integrate into Wordpress’ comments system more deeply (but I suspect it is only a matter of time before someone develops the proper plugin). Moreover, as the site owner, I’d love to be able to message all members of my community (respectfully, of course) — if they did this it could turn Friend Connect into a highly effective permission-based marketing platform like Facebook Pages (see Marketing Real Estate on Facebook (and Other Social Networks)).

Let me know if you add it to your blog! Drop your URL in the comments section.

social networking, friend connect, google friend connect, web 2.0

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Neighborhood boundaries are a fluid thing. My definition what encompasses my neighborhood (Multnomah Village in Portland) may vary greatly from the person across street.

It’s also one of the Holy Grails to online search. The ability to confine a search to a particular neighborhood. Roost does this particularly well, as does Estately and to a lesser degree Zillow.

Zillow also took the step of creating a set of neighborhood boundaries (over 7000 of them) that they released earlier this year in Shapefile format.

Another effort is slowly taking shape (literally) however. The popular photo-sharing site Flickr is also releasing Shapefiles of neighborhoods, using the data it collects from the geotagged photos in its database to accumulate a collective definition of what makes a neighborhood.

The project, which is in early Alpha, can best be viewed on the mashup site Neighborhood Boundaries. Simply punch in your neighborhood name (or city name) and see how the boundaries are being defined in your neck of the woods.

Again, this is early Alpha, so many markets won’t have much coverage. But the possibility of user-defined neighborhood boundaries is intriguing to say the least.

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Properazzi, the international property search portal based in Barcelona, Spain, announced today it has changed its name to Enormo.

They felt “that the new name will reflect our ambitions better and support our continuing growth”.

I actually liked the old name a lot (see Properazzi Takes a Snapshot of Europe’s Real Estate Market) and the new name doesn’t do all that much for me, yet. It feels kind of generic, and unrelated to real estate — but then again, who knew what a Zillow was before they launched.

Enormo claims to be the largest property listings web site in the world. They have over 2 million monthly visitors and lists over 6 million properties in 50 countries worldwide, including the USA.

US brokers and agents wanting to reach their international audience are encouraged by the company to submit their listing feeds.

enormo, properazzi, real estate search, global real estate, web 2.0

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Gentrify is a new site reminiscent of one of the grandaddies of real estate mashups; HousingMaps.com.

Only better. It scrapes San Francisco property listings from craigslist but adds a number of unique filters that will help you find the perfect pad.

And by ‘you’ I mean, yes ‘you’ – the yuppie (see Stuff White People Like).

Gentrify’s goal is to help you pick the perfect neighborhood you can move in to and gentrify. You can filter your searches by whether the homes take dogs and even figure out how close you are to your favorite gluten free restaurants, sushi bars, tea rooms and pilates clinics. Among many others.

Gentrify has dozens of filters you can layer on. I love it.

That’s not all. The individual listing pages rock too. They clearly designed and with a fantastic written description of the neighborhood – check out the ‘what will living here be like?’ section.

Seriously though – I think this is a great trend to watch and one I hope catches on elsewhere. I believe adding ‘Real World’ filters are going to be what helps differentiate your choices in sea of boring me-too search tools.

Also, adding context to a real estate search is going to be key (see Neighborhood Search Comes Back) moving forward in this market; especially as consumers adopt a more measured and drawn out buying decision.

Were a broker web site (especially with it’s IDX feeds for better listing coverage) to give me this many options, it’d be a winner in my books.

And it could be easy to get your hands on too. Gentrify was an entry in Rails Rumble 2008 and was coded by team 734m. Give ‘em a shout.

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In a post over at CNet, Rafe Needleman tagged Zillow as one of “the next Kozmos” (for more on Kozmo check out Wikipedia). Needleman writes:

The real-estate site’s revenue model is advertising. Real estate and bank advertising. Unless the real-estate research site starts charging for foreclosure listings, I don’t see it doing too well in a hunkered-down economy, in which people are trying to hold on to their homes for dear life, not upgrade.

Similarly, Simon Baker at Property Portal Watch says today the portal is “in for tough times“.

Given all this speculation, I thought it would be interesting to revisit a couple posts I wrote last year; specifically one I wrote in September of last year.

I think much of it still holds true.

* * *

Storms Ahead for Real Estate Sites by Joel Burslem on Thursday, September 13, 2007

Tech pundit Om Malik writes that the slowdown in the housing sector, and the greater uncertainty in the U.S. economy as a whole, is likely going to have an impact on advertising spending. I’ve been saying the same thing for a while (see What the Subprime Mess Means for Real Estate 2.0) now.

Om quotes a recent report by TNS Media Intelligence that says:

Total advertising expenditures in the first half of 2007 slipped by 0.3 percent to $72.59 billion versus the same period in 2006…

Strangely, August’s Neilsen Netratings report (PDF) of the top 10 Web advertisers also came out this week and it actually shows that three of the four mortgage/financial advertisers on the list (including Countrywide Financial) have increased their spending over last month (PDF).

But does this mean the gloomy prognostications are off base? I don’t think so.

Rather, I suspect that online ad spends in real estate are reaching the top of the curve, with perhaps just a minor boost in spending to counter the bad news last month. According to Internet Outsider, the month-to-month growth in spending by Countrywide, for example, is slowing; from $30 million in June to $35 million in July to $35.4 million in August.

It’s really too early to tell how this trend will play out – but if there is to be any large scale slowdown in spending I’m guessing we’re only at the beginning.

There’s one more factor to consider in all of this.

Malik goes even further in his post to suggest that this impact will be felt most severely at the large portal destinations, whose margins may be being squeezed by growing inventory levels at other destinations.

Social networks and social media sites are creating inventory at a rapid clip, and are one of the main reasons why the CPMs (cost per 1000 impressions) have stalled.

Hypertargeted advertising is the holy grail of online advertising; and social networks and social media can deliver that more accurately than a portal or destination site. Social networks like Facebook deliver authentic consumers, rather than faceless “uniques” and can do so in specific niches. Likewise, blogs can deliver passionated readers rather than random “surfers” – just look at the passionate communities Blown Mortgage, SocketSite and Curbed have built. The final link in this chain are the vertical ad networks like Blogads or Federated Media that are making it easier for big brand advertisers to reach out to these readers.

Finally, as advertisers start to shop around, a glut of inventory means only one thing – lower prices and less profit. Sound familiar? This hardly news to anyone trying to sell a home right now.

So, in a way, the prospects of the big ad-driven Real Estate 2.0 plays (Zillow, Trulia, et al.) could very well mirror what’s happening in the housing market. Money’s coming off the table (buyers are holding back) and profits are getting pushed down (too much inventory on the market). Bad news all around.

I could be wrong in this assessment. Part of me hopes I am.

zillow, real estate 2.0, web 2.0

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Don’t call it a comeback
I been here for years
Rockin’ my peers
Puttin’ suckers in fear
- LL COOL J, Momma Said Knock You Out

Neighborhood research sites come and go. But none of them have seemed to stick around for very long.

Word that Homethinking has added some very cool neighborhood matching tools excites me as a technology watcher, but I have to wonder, sadly, if it will ever get used.

On the surface neighborhood research seems to make perfect sense. People should want to learn more about the neighborhood they want to live in. What are the schools in the area? How do they perform? How close is the nearest Starbucks? How walkable is the neighborhood (see Measuring Walkability with Walk Score)?

But the graveyard of neighborhood research tools is also littered with recent attempts to make this work.

The ghosts of Neighboroo (see Neighboroo Adds New Data To Neighborhood Research) and Neighborhoodmatch (see Finding the Perfect Location with Neighborhoodmatch.com) still haunt us. High profile plays like YourStreet that are still with us have radically shifted gears (see Yourstreet is Now Empty) – and even Terabitz switched its focus to becoming an enterprise web site provider.

Still, that doesn’t stop others from trying:

Homezilla

Homezilla is a new site north of the border that takes on neighbourhood (Canadian spelling, natch) search. The overall experience is pretty usable – results are dynamically generated and plotted on a Google Map. I really liked how you can layer in different data sources and that there were several ‘unique’ choices I could pick; the availability of liquor stores and bars were especially appreciated.

Problem is – the data was poor to terrible. A search in my old neighborhood in Vancouver revealed neither the elementary school I went to nor any of the pubs that I frequented later in life.

Nevertheless, I liked the experience. Largely because Homezilla continues the encouraging trend of search tools adding ‘real world’ filters that people can actually use in their searches; like proximity to transit options (see Estately Comes to Portland).

(Speaking of which, would one of the search portals please layer in access to FIOS and/or 3G cellular coverage as a search criteria. Geeks like me who are looking for a new home demand it.)

UpMyStreet

UpMyStreet is a British web site that tries a slightly different approach – rather than a fancy map mashup, UpMyStreet parses all of its neighborhood data into paragraph form. It creates a much more academic experience but one that is frankly, a bit muddled. I found it a bit confusing to navigate and the advertising very distracting.

That said, it was a tool that I could see myself using – at least tangentially alongside another search site.

The problem with any of these sites, may very well be that neighborhood research is only a small and limited part of the real estate search process for some (if at all) and one that is quickly overtaken by the hunt for a specific home.

And so I suspect that without having listing data attached to the site, a dedicated neighborhood search tool simply can not go very far.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for this type of information. I just think it means it’s up to the property search sites to do a better job of helping consumers decide which neighborhoods fit their needs.

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The guys at 1000Watt have redrawn the Real Estate Web 2.0 mindmap. Make sure you go and check it out.

What’s impressive is that despite the gruesome economic news and horrific market conditions many in the industry are facing there is still so much innovation happening on the technology side.

I think this is going to be the big story of the latter half of 2008. It’s make it or break it time for many of the players on the list and those who haven’t raised a few rounds for a decent war chest to wait it out (see Trulia Gets Beaucoup Bucks) are going to struggle and probably fail.

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