I would say that the Zillow.com’s response to recent events has been pretty lame — a vast silence punctuated by a gavotte with The Bubblette. But as clueless as they have been, I think the comment we got from one Brad Thompson takes the prize. Brad apparently works for realPING, although we can only conjecture about this because he doesn’t link back to anything.
His point is to take exception to my detailing of the reverse-engineered version I made of the realPING product. Have at it, Brad:
Even with the “Update” and “Further Notice” comments added, I believe you have grossly mis-represented both our product and the ability to reverse engineer the technology.
I do believe I misrepresented your product in my original post, which I amended when I realized my mistake. As to “the ability to reverse engineer the technology”, I think you should hold your tongue. It took me two hours to duplicate the best 90% of what you’re selling. The other ten percent doesn’t matter to me, but my son and I could get it all in a weekend, a totally clean-room reverse-engineered clone. Your “technology” is impressive only to people who don’t know any better.
RealPing is a Voice Over IP (VOIP) telephany system, not a simple e-mail-to-cell phone SMS capability as you represented. Immediately connecting a prospect (web visitor, email recipient, virtual tour viewer, etc.) with an agent (person to person live conversation)…
Check. You’re safe from me, because I think this is stoopid. I don’t take calls when I’m with clients. My entire attention is focused on their needs. This is why an SMS message, echoed to all team members, made better sense to me.
…is 100 times more powerful and valuable businesswise than an email that may or may not be answered.
Did you Zillow that stat, Brad? I can’t believe you did. Zillow would have had “100.47 times more powerful and valuable businesswise.” That shows that it’s science and not hyperbole. In any case, I don’t think it’s that big a difference, but your mileage may vary. We push our form responses out by SMS, too, so that we can jump quickly. That was another different dopey product promoted at Inman, also using voice — suggesting, perhaps, that Realtors can’t read.
Additionally, RealPing’s unique Page Push feature provides the ability (while speaking with the prospect) to press a couple keys on your cell phone and open new web content on the caller’s computer – taking them directly to conversion/action pages.
This is CheezWhiz to me, Brad. I’m sure it seems impressive when you demo it to the easily impressed, but we know that, in general, people shopping for real estate on the internet are much more internet-savvy than Realtors, so my expectation is that it would look like CheezWhiz to the prospects, too — assuming the fumble-fingered Realtor could remember which buttons to push. And, yes, I know you have training and documentation. I email all of my clients, but I fax every Realtor, lender and title company I work with. Do the math.
Here’s an idea though, something I’ve thought about doing with our ‘Get Tracking!’ clone of realPING, and something that might be a nice added value to your product: At the time that I send the SMS ping, I want to Google the prospect’s name, phone number and email address and send all that out by SMS as well. The purpose? To arm the agent on the ground with all available facts and to red flag prospects who may be trolls or whatever.
I would be more than happy to explain the technology in greater detail to help you understand its true capabilities.
Here’s my offer: I will promise not to duplicate everything you have for sale, giving it away for free, if you will promise to read The Cluetrain Manifesto.
What should you have done in this circumstance, Brad? The opposite of what Zillow.com should be doing. You should have let it slide, Clyde. No one was paying attention. It was old business, off the radar. We’re using the software I built, but no one else is. But now you’ve got me talking about realPING again, highlighting what I think are its defects and griping about its outrageous price — $17 (ouch!) a month. You risk putting my remarks at the top of the Google results for any keyword a potential client of yours might use to find you — which is where we already are with Zillow.com. At some point, you just have to let sleeping Bloodhounds be…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
