Mike Price at Mike’s Corner posted a fascinating interview with Russ Cofano of Rain City Guide on the subject of real estate weblogging and the ‘bloginars’ Russ and Dustin Luther, also of Rain City Guide, have been running. The interview is extensive, and I’m only going to touch on a piece of it, so you should go read the whole thing.
The meat of the matter for me is Russ going through his ideas on do-s and don’t-s for real estate weblogs. Like this:
Here is a list of 10 posts that make for great blog content:
Stories
Data (Charts, Tables, Maps)
Book Reviews
Current Events
Neighborhood Descriptions
Local Events (Fun Stuff!)
Links
Interviews
Advice for Buyers/Sellers
Advice for other Agents
I don’t hate this stuff, but some of it seems to tread dangerously close to the turf Seth Godin calls a Cat Blog. Couple that with “Advice for other Agents” and we trip on the schizophrenia that seems to afflict many real estate weblogs — and BloodhoundBlog is guiltier than most.
Witness: Most real estate weblogs are run by agents or brokerages, and at least one meta-goal is to scare up business. But what is interesting to potential clients is very different from what is interesting to the weblogger. Data, current events, neighborhoods — all that stuff is great, but news about it is not in short supply, and it’s not always easy to come up with an original take on it. On the other hand, the business of the real estate business is endlessly varied and fascinating — even though it might be boring or even completely off-putting to potential clients. We seem to end up talking two games, client-focused material that can too-easily slip into blatant advertising, and inside-baseball commentary for well-schooled insiders.
(I’ve thought about writing a Wiki-fier in PHP that would pre-process a web posting, tagging delimited terms with Wikipedia look-ups, in case I’m assuming that readers know the jargon I’m using when in fact they don’t.)
(The Latin root of the word discursive, as in discursive prose, is discurro, which literally translates to, “I run this way and that.” Discursive prose is the means by which we tame our scattered minds and focus them to a purpose. One of the huge benefits of weblogging, and of writing generally, is to focus the mind so that we might discover the truth. This is why I write so much about apprehension, which is an active pursuit of knowledge, rather than about comprehension, which is merely a passive if not completely prostrate possession of information. So: What’s wrong with real estate weblogs, including our own? Let’s write about it and see what emerges.)
Back to Cofano:
[T]he following make for less effective blog posts:
Bubble Articles
Attacks
Cut-and-Paste
Automated Content
Obvious Self-Promotion
Questions
Link-less
Listings
“Brochure” Type Information (leave that to the web site)
Incoherent Rambles
I cannot imagine what he means by “Incoherent Rambles”… I agree about the “Cut-and-Paste” theft of articles from other sources. It’s cheesy even if attributed, and, of course, often it’s simple plagiarism. I like the idea of a fairly high wall between weblog content and outright selling.
Mike emailed me to ask my thoughts about posting listings in real estate weblogs. Three words: I’m against it.
A weblog is a relationship — and a very complicated relationship at that. It’s like broadcasting in the sense that the content is simply out there, a one-way feed for whomever happens to find it. And yet it’s like a letter or a phone call in that it is intensely private and often viscerally intimate at the moment the content is transferred. Through commenting, it is social in a way that no broadcast medium before it has been. And yet is ultimately completely individual — you may be talking to no one but yourself. But, then again, at the meta-level, weblog-to-weblog, the whole thing can become a conversation — disjoint but ultimately complete and rigorous, from cacophony to consensus, often in record time. It becomes, serendipitously, a sort of relay of discursive discovery.
For all those reasons, I think every post should be interesting — and if you can’t make it interesting, make it brief. An entry like, “New listing in Oldtown Scottsdale,” with the link to the listing is not a problem. But if I start to feel like you’re selling me — which means that your objective is your own self-interest, not mine and not anything we might share together — I’m for the road. I don’t read half of everything I should read. There’s no way I’m going to continue reading your content once I’ve decided that I shouldn’t.
Mike thought this might spark a debate. I’m inclined to doubt that, but I’d be happy to be proved wrong. As much as I don’t like to see listings in a real estate weblog, I don’t think they’re a deal killer — unless listings are all the content there is. Stolen content chills my blood, but it’s not all that common, at least not where I go. More interesting to me is the issue of schizophrenia I raise above. Can a real estate weblog adequately serve two very different constituencies — potential clients and professional insiders — at the same time?
(Oh, damn! I ended with a question!)
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
dustin says:
Thanks for the head’s up. I hadn’t seen that interview (it’s funny how much I rely on people linking to RCG to find out what they are saying about me… so that when they don’t link, it doesn’t cross my plate!). The idea of linking has been endlessly debated on RCG, and I’m a huge fan of not including them only because so many agents don’t know how to do it right.
Your idea of “if I start to feel like you’re selling me — which means that your objective is your own self-interest” is a real good place for agents to start thinking about how they want to market themselves online.
August 6, 2006 — 12:50 pm
Todd Tarson says:
I’m fairly new at the whole blogging aspect for my business. I’ve been reading mostly political blogs for news sources for a couple of years now (probably longer).
I didn’t start my own blog thinking I would be the first, but I really didn’t search out ANY real estate blogs before I hit the publish post button for the first time. I had no idea what others were blogging about in the real estate biz.
For the positive business application, I thought my blog would be a fine place to learn more about my community for the people on the outside. Kingman AZ is a small town approaching 50k in population in it’s greater area, with potential for many more. I wanted to give readers a chance to see what was up in the fair town I live in.
I have also been very involved in the local Association of realtors (heck, I’m the president this year). The other Associations of Mohave County (where I derived MOCO from) approached each other this last year to regionalize our MLS. So I wanted to keep other agents up to date and perhaps give some insight to others who may be reading on that project.
Also as it happens, the county government had produced a new set of criteria in order for a landowner to legally split his/her property. This new plan, called a matrix, was something that our Association was against from the moment we started hearing reports on it. I’ve detailed some of the efforts ongoing to defeat this matrix.
Now, through it all, I don’t know who is going to want to read any of it. I’d be a liar if I said I was publishing posts not expecting some interest from potential clients. The goal for now is to offer some content that I don’t think people from the outside have access to. Offering information on this local market that can’t be found anywhere else. Heck, I couldn’t find it… I’ve had to produce my own production reports since our Association simply does not track it.
I was a reluctant leader, at first, of the Association. No one else was stepping up to meet the challenges here locally. The leadership team that serves today is doing a great job, but someone had to take the reigns. In this essence I’m doing the same thing with my blog.
Information, information, information… for now I think that’s the best content to provide. Information to clients (and potential clients), to the folks who may transact unrepresented, to fellow agents locally and across this tiny planet, to the generally curious locals, and to anyone else who might want to read a rant on how bad my favorite baseball team (Phillies) is playing.
Information is the reason I keep coming back to this place… everyday.
August 7, 2006 — 7:57 am
Greg Swann says:
Here are two practical suggestions, take them for what they’re worth:
1. There seems to be no way across the wall from your weblog to your real estate web site. Maybe I missed it. I had to go to your Blogger profile to find your site. I don’t love anything that smells too much like buy-me buy-me buy-me on the weblog side, but I think it’s perfectly fair to make it easy for people to get to you, if they want to be sold.
2. In the same vein, I think you’re best off hosting our own weblog on your own domain. People know that they can whack away at a URI until they get where they want to be, so http://www.toddtarson . com/mocorealblog/ makes your real estate website that much easier to find. If there are hosting issues, you should still be able to do it as a third-level-domain with a redirect: mocorealblog.toddtarson . com/ . If you do something like that, you can put a 301 redirect on your current weblog, so you don’t lose any traffic.
August 7, 2006 — 9:10 am
Todd Tarson says:
Greg
1. you are right, I can’t believe I haven’t done this yet. I’ll add a link on the main page.
2. I’m still way behind the curve on things like 301 redirects, hosting, and URI’s. Doing my best to catch up. I was intrigued by doing my own blog on blogger because it was free. I may bother you for some advice as my knowledge in this blogging things ramps up beyond the ‘idiot’ level I have right now. For now though, we are speaking different languages on the technical stuff (no worries though, blogs like yours are the education I’m looking for).
August 7, 2006 — 10:25 am
Greg Swann says:
I’ll farm out my kid if he’s willing. If you get hm the details for your server, he can set you up in MySQL and WordPress. He’ll expect to be paid, but he doesn’t know what his talents are worth, so please don’t tell him!
August 7, 2006 — 7:08 pm