Web Site Design and Development

Find Ways to Use These Groaning Resources

It’s time for the Week In Review, so I’ll publish Part III of Twenty-One Easy Real Estate Blog Posts on Monday. 

This week I found a new tool to help me gather my Week In Review links, Awasu (Gesundheit!).  Awasu is a very slick — if, at times, somewhat buggy — RSS feed reader for Windows.  I’ll probably have an in depth review in a future post. 

Pet peeve time:  People who use "Blog" to mean a single post on a Blog.  These are no doubt the same people who say Real-a-tor.

This week’s Web 2.0 "There Must Be Something We Can Do With All These Web Sites" award goes to John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing for his brief Let’s Get More Social article.  Sometimes I think Social Networks should be the butt of the joke we used to tell in college about sociology — that it’s a subject in search of a subject matter.  As John says, "You’ve got to get in there and find ways to use these growing resources." (Right — because it sure ain’t obvious).

On the other extreme, the winner of this week’s "The Heck With That, I’m Growing My Own Resources" award is Elite Properties’ own Sacramento Real Estate Gal, Purva Brown, who graciously calls me a mentor even though most of her success is just from getting in there and learning and making things happen.  Purva just escaped the Google sandbox yesterday and is now appearing on page 2 of Google for a keyword combination with 725,000 competitors.  Not bad for six months!  Go Purva!

In other Web 2.0 news, Bruce Clay’s web site scared the tar out of me when I glanced at an article Why Social Media.  Bruce is a very renowned SEO expert, so if he’s telling you to yank your YouTube [I can't believe he said that], part time luddites like me are in a heap of trouble.  It turns out the article was by a guest author, so it looks like I dodged a bullet for this week.

New reader and fellow Real Estate Marketing author Tim O’Keefe throws a much needed wet blanket on the often lightless fire of ActiveRain. 

Back in the heady world of experimentation, this week social networking for Realtors super-trailblazers Ashley Drake Gephart and Bill Gassett invited me to a new business social network, Konnect.com.  Social network #1,327, please fix your search engine if you want to be taken seriously before the Internet moves on to the next big thing.

You should be reading this guy, if you’re not already.

Do you need a free ratings widget for your blog?  Chances are good that you don’t.  No link for you, Outbrain.  (Doh!)

Meantime for those of you who are not content with these mere seven-day retrospectives, Tamar Weinberg has prepared a list of 2007’s Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts, hat tip to Andy Beard.  Those of you who feel compelled to take on John Jantsch’s challenge to "find ways to use these growing resources", please work your way through the list and report back.  Hey, come to think of it, Ashley and Bill should be guest authors here…

Do you remember the anti-social Internet, where nothing was connected to anything and no one communicated using it?

Neither do I.

From its outset, the Internet has been about people sharing and communicating information and ideas. In the late 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee first conceived of a hypertext project at CERN as a means for researchers information. In August of 1991 the first web site was put online at CERN, and we’ve been all typing up a storm ever since. In addition to web sites and the tools to browse them, the first killer app of the Internet was e-mail.

In addition to email and web sites, electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs) like the ones I frequented on Fidonet in the eighties were, as the Wikipedia article correctly points out, a precursor to the World Wide Web. You could say that we had a social Internet before we had an Internet, and the latter was just a bunch of protocols to run it on.

Enter The Web 2.0 Now Here’s Something We Hope You’ll Really Like Social Internet

For the last few years a lot of people have been spending a great deal of time on various social networking sites. In 2006, Myspace allegedly reached the 100 million user mark — a number that at least one geek has debunked. The popular real estate social networking site, ActiveRain, also launched in 2006, and many agents and brokers including me have invested (squandered?) a great deal of time there. More recently, I’ve been amazed by how many messages I have whenever I log in at Facebook or Cre8Buzz or one of the other social networks I’ve participated in — and I’m not really that popular a guy. Ann Cummings invites me to use FunWall. David Smith pokes me. Oliver Muoto received a can of Whoop Ass.

Poor guy.

For awhile there I was getting email daily updates from Facebook, telling me the most inane things

I turned that off eventually.

Seven Criticisms of the Social Internet

1. It’s Amateur, in the sense that you don’t get paid for it.
   Andrew Keen has probably written more about this criticism than anyone. As a corollary, I agree with this argument, insofar as I’ve made a decent living off of several web sites I’ve created and maintained, but no money at all off of ActiveRain. Even the referrals I’ve received have not come from ActiveRain, but from people finding my own web sites.
2. Someone’s might be getting paid for it, but it won’t be you.
   One of the most amusing incidents in Move.com’s failed acquisition of ActiveRain was this ActiveRain apologia about who owns the content on ActiveRain. Still, I don’t recall any discussion about how the thirty-million would have been shared if the transaction went through. Oh. See also, this article about remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.
3. It’s Amateur, in the sense of incompetent or unskilled
   Think: Myspace web pages. Pink on purple, anyone?
4. It’s Amateur, in the sense of trivial or unimportant
   OK, this one’s almost built in. In order to socialize, human beings have to lighten up a bit on their seriousness. Still, it does seem to me that one can base an adult friendship on banter a bit more sophisticated than throwing sheep at one another.
5. You Can’t Optimize for Every Web Site There Is
   Every web site has its own rules for getting to a top ranked listing. I prefer to shoot for the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN in that order. These are sites that buyers and sellers use when they’re buying and selling, not socializing. Yes, this means I’ve had to give up my coveted #2 spot on ActiveRain. So far I haven’t noticed a difference.
6. It’s Anonymous
   Having their cake and eating it too, social Internet socialites believing in the absolute sanctity of open information (thou shalt not ever censor me), even if they don’t sign their names or take responsibility for their actions. Human-Powered Search Engine Mahalo goes a step further and recommends that instead of a photo of your human self, you “Be Cool” and use a Wee-Me Avatar instead. Apparently being Human-Powered wasn’t cool enough in its own right.
7. It Confuses Grouchiness with Erudition
   With a hat tip to Quote of the Day and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand (famous consumer of steak), “You Are Not superior just because you see the world in an odious light”. And yes, I do apply that criticism to myself as well, and see this as one of my less useful posts. I can never get enough of the Internet Commenter Business Meeting. To be sure, that’s not new, either. We had the same sort of thing going on in Fidonet. To puree a metaphor, there’s something about sitting behind a keyboard without a real face in front of you that makes it harder to wag your tail.

When I first got into Real Estate, I came from a background in software development (including, most recently, web site development). Because of this background, as soon as I learned that people were meeting real estate clients on-line, it became my goal to create a profitable web site. Soon afterwards, I set out to create and maintain several profitable web sites.

When I first heard about blogging in 2003, I thought of blogging software as a way to do help me do just that. They say if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see everything as a nail. In my case I saw my task as content development, so every type of software I looked to me like a content management system.

With the rise of social networking, I began noticing a shift away from creating your own content on your own site to hanging around with your friends. In the last year or so, I’ve been repeatedly surprised by the extent to which people — including my colleagues, other Realtors® — are content to rent instead of own their online properties. This was driven home today by an outstanding article by CopyBlogger’s Brian Clark, Are You Someone’s User Generated Content? Clark points to many articles by leading bloggers discussing the regrets people have felt when they neglected their own Internet properties — their blogs — to explore social networking.

Clark sums up my own feelings about frittering one’s time on Facebook, (or mismanaging it on MySpace, if you prefer):

For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating “user-generated” content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.

This metaphor should be especially apt to Realtors®, who know first hand the benefits our clients can derive from their own sweat equity.

Is your sweat equity being invested in your own online real estate, or are you remodeling someone else’s kitchen for free?

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I spend quite a bit of time on a few different social networks. Most recently I’ve been reviewing Cre8Buzz here. Yet I don’t spend a lot of time on social networks because I think they’re productive, so as you can guess I think maybe I should be spending less time there. In general I think you get significantly more benefit from writing a blog post or page on a web site you control, as opposed to writing it on a social network. Still, like the proverbial glass of wine with dinner, most non-alcoholics won’t be too harmed by a moderate use of social networks, and may even derive a certain health benefit.

From a search perspective, content on a social network site has an important limitation that content on your own web site does not. This limitation is that your content may appear several links away from the main page. Because of this, even your profile page not be indexed by the search engine for some time after you’ve been active — let alone any brilliantly conceived blog posts you’re letting loose on the world. I’ve yet to see my Cre8Buzz Profile get indexed by either Yahoo or Google, for example.

In addition to being indexed slowly (if at all), although the the community may have collected considerable page rank, being several links away from the home page means that this value is likely to be watered down fairly thoroughly by the time it gets to you.

Let’s take the example of a blog. Let’s see how far away from the home page your blog appears in three different scenarios:

Scenario: Stand alone blog.
Links: 0. (By definition, in this case your home page is your blog).

Scenario: Integrated web site and blog.
Links: 1. (User comes to your home page, clicks on “Blog Link”, and there they are.

Scenario: ActiveRain. Assume you’ve been posting enough there that you’re on page one for your county. Otherwise add links.
Links: 4 Home –> State –> County –> Your Profile –> Your Blog

On the positive side, if you choose a real estate community (as opposed to a general community like Cre8Buzz), you get an advantage from being part of a huge site that has a great deal of “thematic content” about your subject. This would not be the case if you participate in a general community like Facebook or Cre8Buzz. I have also noticed that the search engines don’t seem to index content on the more general social networks as readily as they do the content on more theme-based sites.

The other positive benefit you derive from posting on social networks is the opportunity to provide some link love for your main web site or blog. However, it’s easy to overstate the benefit from this, since traditional wisdom is that the search engines like to see incoming links from a variety of sources. Thus, 10 blog posts on your main site with 10 incoming links from your ActiveRain blog are likely to receive less of a benefit than would 10 blog posts with 10 different sites linking to them. And remember, incoming links only count for reputation — in terms of page rank, a link is a link is a link, and a page on your web site or blog will naturally have a lot more internal links to different pages on your site, and fewer links pointing to the rest of someone else’s site.

This weekend at the bookstore I browsed through Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur with a lot of interest. I also looked into a book that’s probably at the opposite end of the Web 2.0 Hype-o-Meter, Wikinomics.

Keen argues with some justice that with the huge proliferation of blogs, the Internet has become a write-only Darwinian struggle to see who can filibuster the longest, with everyone yapping our heads off and no one really listening.

What?

Wikinomics, on the other hand, left me wondering how I, too, could benefit from this whole massive collaboration thing to become blindingly wealthy and massively collaborated, but I couldn’t come up with anything off the top of my head.

As they say on Ron Popeil Commercials: “But wait, there’s more!”

Now not only can your blog be one of over 50 million blogs in the keyboardosphere, now you can be the first on your block to have your own social network, thanks to Ning.com. In the words of Ning CEO, Gina Bianchini:

“Marc and I founded Ning in October 2004 to give everyone the opportunity to create your own social networks for anything.”

Atta girl, Gina. That’s just what we needed, social networks for anything!

And in the true spirit of Web 2.0, I have decided that if I can, of course that means I should, so I am now the proud owner of not just one, but TWO social networks, with me as the one member each!

That was the whole problem with MySpace, come to think of it — they let YOU in. Now we can each have our own MySpace, which for the sake of clarity we can call MyMySpace, to distinguish it from YourMySpace and ThatOtherGuysMySpace.

No, but seriously, come join me. We can massively collaborate, at least on a small scale. Won’t that be cozy?

The first network I noticed when poking around Ning was the virtual Sangha. Hey great, I thought, I’m a Buddhist, but it turns out that one’s by invitation only.

Well, at least I’m not the only anti-social Buddhist with his own social network.

But I have two of them. So there.

After that, I decided to check out the RightHealth Social network. At the right are some of the forum questions from RightHealth so you can get an idea of the quality of the discourse. (Click to enlarge).

I didn’t wait for it to get this bad, it was the first thing I bumped into.

I wonder if I started a Luddite group if Andrew Keen would join me.