The Odysseus Medal this week goes to Kris Berg for Zillow news: Upside-down and dumb like a fox:
Transparency is not just a buzz word anymore but expected, even demanded, by the consumer. The consumer wants information, lots of it, and they want honesty and full-disclosure in its delivery.
In Zillow’s case, the consumer is both the real estate agent and the homeowner (which makes for one crazy-big target market), and Zillow needs two things to succeed. They need data, sales and “for-sale”, and they need eyeballs. You can’t have they latter without the former, but rather than build their reputation and their inventory by taking the more-traveled route, courting the big real estate brokerages, they have reached this point primarily by appealing to the individual agent. It is the individual agent who is online and socially connected – and blogging. Appealing to us makes us happy, which in turn inspires us to write nice things about Zillow.
And, instead of pushing the information to the customer, they have given them ownership. What Zillow has done is build a business model designed to work from the ground up, a MySpace for your home. Rather than cling to yesterday’s antiquated marketing practices wherein the customer was slapped silly with a message and expected to respond, they have recognized what so many are resisting. Zillow is recognizing and capitalizing on a new social culture. The conversation is no longer between the guy with something to sell and the guy who might be buying, top down, but between the buyers themselves, upside-down.
The Black Pearl Award this week goes to Krista Baker with Does Your Advertising Ask Prospects To Do Too Much?:
When you decided you may be interested in someone romantically, you don’t jump from first date to marriage. Instead, you take the time to get to know the other person – what are their likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, goals and fears. If both of you value the relationship, you may consider taking the relationship a step further – to engagement and then marriage – but likely, several months (or years) have passed before the relationship progresses to this step.
Like successful romantic relationships, business relationships also require a period of time to get to know the other person – are they trustworthy? Can they do what they say? Are they likable?
People don’t feel comfortable doing business with someone they’ve never met – especially if they have no idea what to expect when they meet with the person. Yet by offering a “free, no obligations consultation” in your promotions and then expecting to close the deal at the meeting, you’re basically asking your prospect to marry you on the first date – you’re expecting them to take on faith that you’re a trustworthy business person. You completely bypass all the “getting to know you” stages of the relationship.
This week’s People’s Choice Award goes to Robbie Paplin with Dear Zillow-meisters – Better start makin’ copies of the Trulia-nator:
What’s this mean for publishers? Well if they are small or medium sized, they just got a much more effective way of associating their brand and increasing real estate related web traffic. Granted, Trulia controls the listings and the technology, but if your core competency isn’t real estate search, getting a co-branded search tool is much more cost effective. And since Trulia has over 2 million listings, the publishers will probably get more traffic & ad revenue too. Seems like an easy decision to me.
If you’re a big publisher, it’s a much harder decision. But since developing technology is expensive and getting listings critical mass is difficult, I suspect the desire to partner w/ Trulia got much stronger unless you’re a direct Trulia competitor. If Trulia gets big web media players to partner with it, things could get very interesting.
If you didn’t check out this week’s nominees for The Odysseus Medal, you should.
We have a brand new tool for promoting the long-list of Odysseus Medal nominees. The long-list will be shown in that little gizmo until the current week’s awards are announced — meaning now — and then I’ll update it with the new week’s nominees. This is link-love back from BloodhoundBlog, but my reason for building the tool is to promote the best ideas in real estate any way I can. To that end, read this post so that you can learn how to echo the long-list on your own site.
And as always, if you catch sight of Clio’s influence, nominate it.
Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon MST. You can nominate your own work or any post you admire here.
Congratulations to the winners — and to everyone who participated.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Kris Berg says:
Thanks, Greg! It figures that the one I write at 4:00 am from my hotel room gets your endorsement. 🙂 Congratulations to Krista and Robbie on great articles.
January 15, 2008 — 7:36 am
Greg Swann says:
When I read all the Zillow coverage on Thursday morning, my thought was that I was first but you were best. Your post held up against 75 very good nominees. It’s hard to win in this crowd, but when you do, it means something.
January 15, 2008 — 7:47 am