Happy New Year! Tomorrow there is a Virtual Real Estate Bar Camp produced by our friends at Real Estate Tomato. It’s a series of webinars that run throughout the day, I’ll be on at 3:00pm CA time. Register here. I’ll be discussing innovative community engagement strategies:

1) Community Engagement will become the Driver of Local Media

Local news used to be the province of the local newspapers, radio stations and TV. It’s become clear consumers will digest local news online as newspapers shut down, and on the Internet, all media are equal – TV, radio and print websites compete for the same eyeballs. A swelter of recent big media portal deals – for example, MSN/NBCU/Hearst,  to cover local news threatens local media institutions through sheer size and scale. Curatorial portals – Huffington Post’s local editions and Outside.in (with investment from CNN among others to support content development for CNN Local editions) will aggregate the news, and local reporter infrastructure will be nurtured at citizen journalist engines like Examiner.com or AOL’s Seed.

Here’s the problem: local is local. Media portals need to figure out how to engage the community at a grass roots level so they have drivers and participants pushing the conversations and attracting their peers.  Portals believe they can scale and develop the website traffic required to support a local advertisement model. However, communities may develop their own home grown commercial systems for the same reasons why “buy local” is becoming a mantra; and the portals aren’t entitling ownership of their local media systems to the community. For that reason, a community may rather spend its local advertising dollars with an on-the-ground local publisher like Minnpost or OaklandLocal, or even a Chamber of Commerce sponsored local media resource than CNN Local.

2) Mobile + Local advertising = Penny Saver 2.0

The first local advertising and search media are starting to emerge: Postabon facilitates the broadcast of local discounts and coupon offers and Milo searches for specific products at the large chains like the neighborhood Best Buy by accessing the store’s inventory database. Expect popular geotagging applications like FourSquare and Gowalla to integrate local coupons and product search. These coupons are not perceived as advertisements. If they save you money, they are called “unexpected cash”.

These systems help solve the consumer impulse buy decision (“I’m shopping at the mall tomorrow, what stores are having sales?”). Traditional search engines haven’t been able to answer these temporal questions down to the local level (try querying Google to find a snowboard sale in your town this weekend).

Related: Examples of Twitter hyperlocal advertising models

3) Mobile + Advertising + Pubsubhubbub = Alert systems

The real time web is pushing business society into a new value paradigm that rewards those who can react instantly and systematically to opportunities. A concept not unlike Wall Street program trading, these new systems work on alerts that ping users for decisions. Mobile devices eventually won’t need “refreshes” to alert; they are always on and by extension, almost coerce its owner to be “always on”.

For consumers, marketing companies like Local Thunder will connect merchants with their community through rich media content development and RSS feeds for alerts. Google’s Pubsubhubbub essentially deploys RSS feed data in real time so alerts can be time and location targeted.

We start getting into Augmented Reality / Minority Report territory when coupon alerts popup as one walks by a store, but some company will make this real time location based alert system a reality, if not a hit, by the end of 2010.

4) Advertising as Content

Infomercials got it right; advertising as content engages customers at the story telling level. And the content may be ridiculous:

new ad from the California Milk Board

Today’s business can no longer resort to trite marketing, and say “buy from me because I’m honest… high touch… lower priced… give great service” with a straight face any more. It now comes off as, well, an advertisement.

Advertisements used to be crafted to lead into the “call to action”. In 1960′s Madison Avenue’s ideal world, consumers would make the purchase decision based on the facts presented in the ad or by the incessant aggregate impressions made in what has always been called “branding”.  In the fuzzy world of social media marketing, where is the call to action?

5) Everybody becomes a marketer, and some will become sales closers

The call to action still originates from consumer need. A call to action may simply be an attractive price, but in many circumstances, the transaction close is facilitated by a personal sales pitch or a referral. As advertising becomes content driven, the combined testimonials for a product or service become far more persuasive to support the call to purchase. Testimonials and ratings of local services (like the current standards  Yelp.com and Citysearch) will be built into every local media resource (see Postabon‘s rating system). In fact, Yelp has elevated the standard so that the 5-star review is becoming the minimum parsing criteria for real estate agents because so many have this grade.

Bad, or even 4 star reviews are now potential disqualifiers

So how can somebody profit from providing testimonials and otherwise supporting the marketing efforts of others around them? Locals will do the same things they did pre-Internet with their Chambers, Lion’s Clubs and networking groups – support each other. New social media – enabled referral systems will be built out locally through Facebook and LinkedIn groups, and through the new local ad applications.

The bigger trend will be the development of local affiliate marketing systems that compensate referrals. Think of websites that have an Amazon affiliate widget or link that compensate owners if their users go through the widget to buy Amazon stuff. Companies will provide applications to build local merchant guides for use by other local business websites to create networks of affiliated services. And local affiliate marketing systems is only a start; affiliate marketing programs extend sales forces without adding overhead, and we’ll start seeing mainstream adoption by enterprises developing strategic partnership programs.

Related: The essence of affiliate marketing

5)a) Everybody can become a traveling sales person

Anybody can become a virtual mobile storefront using the upcoming Square, a secure, simple to use iPhone application with a credit card reader that allows anybody to become a street merchant. Point-of-sale becomes redefined when anybody can potentially sell anything anywhere.

6) Virtual socializing and Webinar ubiquity

Webinars are social media too. They are already changing the landscape on how people meet for business on the cheap, and worry the airlines.

2009 British Airways face-to-face campaign

Current webinar systems like Webex are still too difficult to use. Within 2010, some company will develop a simple to launch, one-click web meeting system that can broadcast live discussions across ad hoc participant groups. Call the concept adhoc webinars. Why will this work? Webinars can become venues like happy hours where groups can meet and share. The key is ease of use, anybody should be able to participate so weekly scheduled meetings can expand as more people know about them. Imagine Robert Scoble producing a one-click webinar party every Friday afternoon to discuss ideas – he would essentially have an interactive TV program that can be produced on the fly without studios and cameras.

Virtual socializing is the natural evolution to social networking because it’s location independent. One example in the real estate world are the virtual REBarCamps that aggregate speakers and audience together in a virtual national conference.

7) The grass roots Web

Website and application development should be simple enough for normal folks who know nada about code, but still want to custom develop a clean, workable application by themselves without hiring tech talent. The ascendance of plug/play blogs and WordPress themes and plug-ins, and Ning based social network applications facilitate the quick building of applications by non-techies. Add in automated features like Facebook Connect, Twitter Lists, Posterous posting, and the latest mini-applications that provide snippets of value to the website, and website development is becoming accessible and experimental to the masses. However, I’m frankly surprised there isn’t more activity to provide simple plug/play applications to individuals and SMEs… will 2010 be the year?

Speaking of websites, the next great media company won’t have a website (h/t Steve Rubel).

Related: How to build a community media resource

8 ) The stream is more important than website

Anybody immersed in the social media already knows this. The content stream constitutes a conversation, and can be perceived as far more “real” than a calculated marketing-focused website presentation. The same new paradigm that makes an advertisement seem  promotional applies to websites. Yes, conversations can happen on websites but there are likely many more occurring on Twitter, Yelp, Facebook and other blogs that are deemed more credible because they are third party commentary.

fr. Fast Company http://bit.ly/5bRTxL

AshtonKutcher.com the website does not exist. He is a Twitter celebrity whose breakthrough social media credential was challenging @CNNBRK to a 1,000,000 follower contest. Media presence isn’t just website traffic, it’s providing value to the readership through new media channels… which leads us to the reason why anybody can now become a media resource, if not a media star:

9) Curation is the new syndication

Mass media used to rule syndication, now anybody can curate and present content across a panoply of social media platforms. Curating breaking news is key to readership – it’s the reason why people follow CNN, Marketwatch or engadget. Twitter has distinguished itself as the forefront application for breaking news, and anybody can use Twitter Lists to curate Twitter feeds by topic, geography and industry. Curation tools, like Outside.in Publisher for hyperlocal news, are being developed for local content publishers.

Curators are the new news editors, and the window is open to create new media properties. Curated local media will be a focus because there’s a media void that both national media and independent journalistic efforts are now trying to fill (see #1 above).

Related:

Hyperlocal curation of real time news

Build a dynamic community media resource on Twitter in one hour

10) A new era of open social media (the adjective “social” will soon be redundant)

Facebook and LinkedIn are closed networks simply because they require confirmation of “friend” status. Frankly, it’s just too much manual clicking to accept a lot of friends. Twitter has distinguished itself as an open network that can amass networks of millions of followers, and is the application closest to a personal broadcast media. Facebook certainly sees the power of massive networks (being the biggest one itself), and in order to compete with Twitter’s broadcast power, will unveil similar broadcast functionality. Simply put, in 2010 Facebook will create an opt-in setting that allows users to open their status updates to anybody who wants to follow them. Becoming a Facebook Fan today is similar but statuses can’t be filtered within the main feed. Once 350+ million Facebook broadcast systems are potentially unleashed, they can be curated categorically like Twitter Lists and conversations more conveniently filtered. Yes, Facebook already has Friendfeed as the model, but it needs to be simpler to use, and will likely cede to a new Facebook open network product.

LinkedIn can open itself up the same way. Since LinkedIn is a more industrial network, value would be derived from curated lists developed by users based on industry or discipline. Although LinkedIn Groups encourages industry conversations, they are generally sparse and hard to follow if one has joined many Groups.

Once networks open up, conversations become even more multi-channel than they are today. A Tweet that gets syndicated across Facebook, LinkedIn, and other networks will provoke dialogues characteristic of each network. Clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic see this coming and have integrated multi-channel monitoring systems. In the latter part of 2010, evolved versions of Google Wave and the Google OS, and possibly Facebook, will provide the same multi-channel operability integrated into their offering.

Related: Check my 2009 predictions for social media last year.

Friend Dean Guadagni referred me to this 2009 Social Media Marketing Benchmarking Study conducted by Business.com.

Although not really considered a social media tool, webinar training has been lauded as the most useful social media resource for business purposes:

We also asked respondents to describe the MOST useful social media resource they’ve found for business. The value of webinars and podcasts is clearly in the ability to learn new skills and/or research industries, products and services without the time and expense of traveling to conferences or other offline events.

“The most useful social media resource is the webinars. I feel that they offer the most, don’t demand that I travel, spend a lot of money, or even make a huge commitment of time. They are usually well focused on a topic and therefore don’t waste my time with a lot of unrelated topics.”

Webinars are also very convenient for professionals in rapidly changing or evolving industries where ongoing training is essential. For example, an accountant described the value of webinars in this way:

“Webinars from professional sites–Tax law is ever changing so we rely on webinars and other instant media to update us on the latest changes in tax accounting. Social media is critical to our industry.”

Zappos has become iconic as THE enterprise that embraces social media – it occupies a singular position that no other company seems to be able to touch so far. And it’s surprising that we haven’t heard of any other company that hasn’t institutionalized social media as an important facet of their organization. Social media is generally being recognized as innovating business disciplines from marketing to business networking to HR. Why aren’t more companies, particularly in the service industries, getting all their employees to social network with their client bases?

At Domus Consulting, we’re fortunate and honored to work with companies who want to infuse the culture of social media into their organizations. We call it Zappos-izing the company. The process of training every employee in a company on how to use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for networking and communication purposes will yield four results:

1. Internally, it will facilitate online social interaction across the enterprise with no departmental or geographical borders, and transcend the office siloes that naturally inhibit information flow.
2. Externally, it will make the enterprise’s relationships and dealings with their client base more transparent by using the public conversational pipes of social media.
3. It will create more business opportunities by connecting the enterprise “network” with other forming networks within client and partner organizations. As any Twitterer knows, it’s much easier to have a conversation with someone else on Twitter when you don’t need to schedule an appointment with their gatekeeper.
4. It will change the corporate culture because the social media is…well, fun. People in general are at first reluctant to join social networks because it seems scary to open themselves up to the world. Once they dive in, they realize the water is fine, and most enjoy the interaction and the networking opportunities they bring. Many become fanatical. The feeling of belonging elevates company spirit.

Just result #4 is a good reason to implement a management edict to attend training webinar sessions.

Daniel McCarthy, CEO of NCI, a publishing / local advertising company with a business based on nurturing local client relationships, saw the social media opportunity and embarked on Project Massive Network, with the mission of getting NCI employees AND their clients onto the social media. In the spirit of transparency, he has even opened up the webinars we’re doing together with NCI to show the methodology. Dan will be chronicling the Project on his blog Viral Housing Fix; the first installment is up. You’ll also be able to follow the progress with #NCI, the Twitter hashtag system that allows participants to comment and Q&A about the Project.

We’re receiving assignments that help corporations reposition themselves as “Zappos” of their industry. This is the mission we’ve been aiming for with our consulting business. I think we’re reaching a tipping point for the adoption of social media by society where companies and organizations now must understand that reaching the customer through conversational means instead of through a commercial has become the status quo.

In this light, we’ve changed our mission statement on our Domus Consulting Group website. One thing that differentiates us as media consultants is our proven ability to train organizations from top to bottom on strategic social media marketing. Management often has problems with translating this vision when few of their employees are even on Facebook, let alone Twitter.

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Domus Consulting Group’s mission as management consultants is to work with corporations and organizations in developing social media sales and marketing strategies that extend to every employee and business partner. Since 2007, we have been leaders in developing new social media constructs that have been put into practical and successful use by the technology, the real estate and the media industries.

We achieve the following objectives with our clients, the first four steps often within the span of 1-2 months:

1) PLANNING: Strategy development on how best to position company within both traditional industrial media and the new social media worlds.

2) MISSION: Brand client company as the “Zappos ” of its industry by developing a systematic focus on customer support and interaction via the social media.

3) EXECUTION: Develop a massive referral-based networking system within the organization and extend that to the customer base for business development.

4) ADOPTION: Train large teams of employees live and via webinars to systematically and efficiently build their social networks, and learn 2.0 marketing protocols.

5) LEVERAGE: Develop unique applications that distribute and share essential real time information to corporate clients. (Example: Real time local advertising – a new business model)

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Our Management Philosophy ( a slideshow we originally posted summer 2008)

For business purposes, the social graph creates an optimal referral network. As far as I know, no company has gotten into the national business of showing the myriad business networks – chambers of commerces, civic organizations like Lions club, even athletic leagues and churches – how to leverage social media for the business benefit of their members (it’s all still done locally by some social media expert).

Enter my company, Domus Consulting Group. As part of our consulting practice, we’ve been leaders in educating real estate companies and agents on social media. Real estate professionals tend to be hubs of their business communities by virtue of the constant networking they do for business development.

From our work in real estate, we’ve developed a social network referral system that coaches business networks, teams and corporations how to leverage the critical art of the referral. Anybody interested in our methodology is invited to sign up for our free 3-week webinar sessions starting next week. We’ll also be previewing a new media marketing paradigm for business development that I’ve alluded to in the article Web 2.5 Opportunity – Creating Media Hubs.

As some readers may know, my firm has been developing social media strategies for real estate business development. Real estate is an industry whose practitioners require hyperlocal presence. Although real estate professionals have been joining social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to develop that presence, the rest of their community of friends, clients and referral sources have been slower to follow.

We created a free four week webinar program that teaches how to build an online referral network using social media. We developed it for real estate professionals who invite their immediate community to join their social networks and make them relevant.

This is a course that focuses on building massive networks, and the practice and tactics of social media marketing. We’ve received great testimonials on our marketing webinars and want to expand this course to the non-real estate public for feedback. This webinar starts on Tuesday, February 24 @ 8:00am PST (one hour) and runs four weeks each Tuesday.

If you’re not in real estate and interested in joining this webinar series free, please leave your email address and we’ll send you an invitation.

Non-profit and charitable organizations are impacted by the global recession due to their dependence upon donors and strategic partners. Barack Obama proved how he can mobilize a network behind a cause using the social media.

Domus Consulting Group has been a leader in educating the real estate industry on how to use the social media systematically to develop their online community presence for business purposes. The non-profit world has the same mission to reach out to their community.

We call our system the Social Broadcasting System and invite you to attend a free two-part webinar series specifically focused on demonstrating to marketing and outreach managers of non-profit organizations. (There is absolutely no upsell or even hint of it, we want to show you a revolutionary concept for organizational marketing and branding that will augment funding and partnership opportunities). We’re doing this simply because we want to share with non-profits how powerful social media is to your cause.

Session #1: Twitter and Facebook are powerful social networking tools that broadcast your cause effectively. We’ll explain how to cast a wide but focused net thoughtfully and effectively.
Session #2: The new business model: how to connect your network into massive local social media infrastructures… free.
Register for the Free 2-part Webinar Mini-Series for Nonprofits

Dates:

• Session 1:  Wednesday, February 4, 2009 at 9am Pacific time
• Session 2:  Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 9am Pacific time

About Pat Kitano

The Domus Consulting Mini-Series are for educating industries, organizations, companies and individuals who need an efficient and powerful online community presence. We started with the real estate industry, demonstrated how effective social media is in making real estate professionals hubs within their community, and are now offering the same methodology to the news media and to non-profit organizations.

Few news media companies know how to effectively develop their social media resources; they still hide behind their call letters or mastheads and broadcast one way. Citizen journalists – in effect, the masses – are the closest to breaking news events and stories, so tapping into the social media is becoming the key to real time news sourcing. News producers, anchors, reporters and writers should leverage their media celebrity to build their social network standing and position themselves as the “hubs” for all news in their communities. After all, being the hub is the value proposition for any news organization and attracts audiences.

Domus Consulting Group has been a leader in educating the real estate industry on how to use the social media systematically to become hubs within their local community. The mainstream media have the exact same mission to reach out to their community.

We call our system the Social Broadcasting System and invite you to attend a free two-part webinar series specifically focused on demonstrating to producers, journalists and reporters. (And there is absolutely no upsell or even hint of it, we want to show you a revolutionary concept for media business and branding that will increase media market share and thus, revenue opportunities. We’ll show you new business models).

Session #1: Flight 1549, and the Mumbai and Gaza incidents demonstrated how powerful Twitter and citizen reporting has become for breaking news. Tips on the right ways to leverage Facebook and other social networks to reach your audience.
Session #2: How the Social Media and Mainstream Media are converging based on the new “Breaking News” reporting paradigm. Explaining a new business model: how to connect your news network into massive local social media infrastructures… efficiently and free.

Register for the Free 2-part Webinar Mini-Series

Dates:

* Session 1:  Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 9am Pacific time
* Session 2:  Tuesday, February 10, 2009 at 9am Pacific time

About Pat Kitano

The Domus Consulting Mini-Series are for educating industries, organizations, companies and individuals who need an efficient and powerful online community presence. We started with the real estate industry, demonstrated how effective social media is in making real estate professionals hubs within their community, and are now offering the same methodology to the news media and to non-profit organizations.