Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine is waiting for advertisers and ad agencies to get the Internet. The critical point:
… the lazy, traditional, one-stop-shopping of TV upfront and the big-media lunch circuit is inefficient, wasteful, untargeted, irrelevant, and ultimately damned irritating to your customers.
The point is simple and almost always overlooked: if you want to reach customers, reach them the way they want to be reached.
Internet real estate shoppers find the experience immensely frustrating. Advertisers are making feeble efforts - if any - to make the experience more satisfying to home buyers and renters.
Buying advertising has been a lazy man's game until now. Put your ad in the major media if you want impact; put it in the local media to satisfy a client; buy cheap, be cynical about results.
Spending on traditional media is more and more wasteful. Using the Internet effectively, in today's world and tomorrow's, means investing a lot more effort in advertising. Few advertisers today are willing to invest the effort. Those that do will have a long-term sustainable advantage.
Read your ads out loud. Can you stand the way you sound?
Image from Gaping Void.
Less than 15% of real estate agents who participate in third-party lead generation programs are satisfied with the results.
That's just one of the many not too surprising findings in the 2006 Realtor Technology Survey from the Center for Realtor Technology.
You'd think any industry with that low a consumer satisfaction rating would die quickly. Not likely. Most real estate agents are suckers for a quick fix to growing their business. And most real estate agents, despite all the evidence, think they'll be the exception to the prevailing rules.
So why is this finding not surprising? Any real estate agent who thinks of a person as a "lead" is doomed to fail. Leads are for losers.
I trekked out to the nether boonies yesterday to meet with two completely clueless folks at an ad agency that touts its Web expertise.
Every attempt on my part to talk about and show off the trends and technologies that are reshaping real estate marketing on the Web was met with blank stares, total indifference. and a complete lack of curiosity. I was talking to zombies, as I often find myself doing.
The day ended on a much more positive note, in a meeting with Bob Darrow, who's writing for YoChicago's West Lakeview / Roscoe Village journal.
Bob already has an impressive mastery of a wide set of Web tools. He's developed his skills despite the fact that, by his report, his sellers don't yet attach much value to them, in anticipation of the day when his skills will become the norm. He stopped in to see us to see whether we could help him improve the ways he's using our Wibiti and YoChicago journal Web-based marketing tools.
There's a strong irony in the fact that the ad agencies and media professionals who are supposed to be the leaders in real estate marketing lag well behind the real estate agents they should be leading.
HouseValues has a nearly useless and manipulative value proposition for consumers looking to get a fix on the value of their property: if you’re dumb enough to give us your name, address and other qualifying information, we’ll sell it to the first real estate agent(s) who are willing to pay us for access to the ZIP code of your property. We may also sell it to mortgage brokers and insurance agents. That’s our call. And we won’t guarantee you anything about any of those people. We won’t even guarantee that they’re properly licensed. They may be scum – that’s your problem, not ours.
The HouseValues value proposition is not so bad for some real estate agents, especially those who don’t have a good reputation, or a strong firm to generate leads: access to a stream of leads, some qualified, some not.
Zillow is a much-heralded site that offers home sellers and home buyers easy and free access to detailed property valuation information without their having to register or give up any personal information to get it.
Zillow came in amazingly close on the value of the one property I looked at, a $1.7 million listing in Chicago’s DePaul area.
Zillow vs HouseValues: something for nothing or next to nothing for something. Looks like an easy choice.
Our Yo Chicago site is competing with HouseValues for some of your ad dollars, and may be competing with Zillow when they firm up their revenue model, so our take may be a bit biased.
