Real estate brokers and agents are an identifiable categorical group in the social media, everybody recognizes their presence talking shop or chatting up the local community. The industry’s relationship with the Internet has historically been mercenary; the principal reason for online presence, whether with a website in 2001, a blog in 2007 or a Facebook page in 2009, is lead generation.

Examine the broker/agent’s marketing mindset. Their commercial mission is to stay “top of mind” to literally tens of thousands of people in their focus community on the off-chance one of them makes the decision to buy or sell a home. Pre-Internet, they did this with post cards; pre-social media, they drip email marketed their community to death, and always asked for referrals. The business has always been perceived as a numbers game based on how wide that network net was cast.

No wonder the real estate industry leads all other businesses (except tech and porn) in the adoption of new ways to expand online presence. The early adopters in real estate are hyper-practical and they figure out what works long before the social media pundits can see the utility. Every real estate social media conference I’ve attended has much richer content than the talking heads at typical tech conferences. Most of my colleagues in real estate will concur.

The paradox is everybody believes the real estate industry are slow adopters, and always describe it metaphorically as the classic aircraft carrier. This is also true. Most real estate agents are slow adopters (say, 95%) because they believe that their job is selling, not wasting time chatting online. They ask questions like “give me one example where somebody got a lead from Twitter”.

Real estate agents are slow to react because they are conservative, only acting on the fear of losing competitive advantage. With literally hundreds of competitors in a zip code, they need that advantage. So the aircraft carrier analogy is apt because the agent community will all react at once. When agents see their competition on Twitter and Facebook, they are obliged to follow until eventually the tipping point is reached when the paradigm of using social media as a marketing tool becomes the norm.

At today’s REBarCamp Silicon Valley, one of many social media barcamp venues focusing on real estate, the majority of the attendees were new to the BarCamp concept. Previous REBarCamps from even last spring were collegial affairs, with all the early adopters knowing each other intimately. Today, the newcomers were there… and that signals the tipping point has been reached. It also signals a kinder industry who are using (and being trained to use) social media to attract clients as opposed to spamming them with unwanted emails and new listings.

Also here at Aspen, I was amazed and impressed to hear newspaper owner Dean Singleton tell some of us that his Salt Lake City paper has bought a realty agency and will list homes for a flat fee of a few thousand. Yes, the paper undercuts other agencies’ listings businesss. But, hey, the agencies have pretty much abandoned newspapers and newspapers still have readers and the ability to market homes in print and online. In Salt Lake’s case, the paper will send buyers – rather than sellers – to agencies that advertise.

When I worked in the newspaper industry way back at the start of the consumer web, I tried to convince papers to just this: to get into the real estate business to get homes into the listings and to get access to listings data. I thought I was going to be killed. But I believe that this was an inevitability.

Singleton’s move is the ecommerce strategy we presented in our models made substantial and real. We talked with the Telegraph’s Edward Roussel about their sales of wine, hangers, and hats. Selling homes is certainly bigger ticket. It monetizes the relationship papers have with readers in a new and smart way.

With the Breaking News Media Network, real estate brokerages and agents are using the same strategy, only opposite that of the media companies. They are building Breaking News city sites like Chico Breaking News in order to develop their community media presence as a branding vehicle. Note that the real estate participants in the Breaking News Network adhere to the idea that the sites are community services, so with a few exceptions, it’s almost impossible to see that a real estate brokerage or agent is behind them. Yet, their presence is always there because they are communicating with the community through the site. This is the new wave of marketing that real estate is beginning to adopt to attract the community for business rather than spam them to death with drip marketing techniques.

(tx h/t Tom Royce)

1) How different local merchants should use Twitter

2) How to build a local Twitter consumer community around you

3) How to survey for business opportunities

4) How to make your Twitter campaign more efficient

1) Services

Walk in / appointment based services: Barbers, beauticians, spas, nail salons, auto maintenance / lube,

Tweet schedule openings for the day. Offer daily special and coupons.

Examples: @truemassage, @polishednails

Articles: Putting Twitter’s world to use

Medical / health services: Optometrists, dentists, chiropractors, doctors

Create a professional profile befitting your standing in the community. Discuss the tools and trends of your practice. Demystify.

Examples: @scottgreenhalgh (Cosmetic dentistry), @evansclinic

Professional services: Accountants, attorneys, financial planners

The problem with arcane professions like the law and accounting is the “boring” factor. Twitter should be used to connect with the community for branding purposes. Become a “business calendar”; accountants can broadcast changes in tax codes and alert important filing dates.

Examples: @cordellparvin, @kanoisandeep (Tax guru)

Articles: Attorney marketing on Twitter. Valuable or waste of time?

Transaction based services: Real estate, mortgages, travel agencies, recruiters

Transaction based service providers suffer from a spammy reputation because it’s easy to incessantly tweet out home listings, job posts or travel deals. The focus should be on providing information and data relevant and interesting to, say a prospective home buyer, by talking about communities or market conditions. Interacting like a “real” person is paramount to establishing a welcome identity as a hub, not a spammer, in the community.

Examples: @mortgagereports, @scottkato

Arts and entertainment services: Night clubs, events organizers, symphonies

Tweet schedule of events and shows, offer quizzes, advertise discounted tickets, create contests – give away two free tickets to a local follower

Examples: @yoshisjazz @sanfransymphony

(note: arts groups should design great backgrounds!)

Articles: Cultural groups tap social networking

Hospitality: Restaurants, hotels, taco trucks, street food vendors

Tweet the day’s lunch menu @ 11am, and dinner menu @ 1 pm, 4pm. Link to recipes. Offer coupon code.

Examples: @divinopiazza, @kogibbq, @nakedpizza

Articles: Naked Pizza erects Twitter billboard, List of street food vendors using Twitter

Retail

Advertise your deals of the day, weekend sales, etc. Your Twitter feed’s timeline chronicles what your store offers so consumers will use this as a consumer and comparison shopping resource. Consumers may use Twitter to ask questions in lieu of a phone call because it’s more efficient. Be sure to intersperse deals tweets with interesting links. @ABC_Carpet twitpics its rugs!

Examples: @brooksrunning, @ABC_Carpet, @wfm_oakland (most Whole Foods Market branches have their own Twitter feed)

Twitter marketing no-no: Abandoning a Twitter feed at @bestbuybayarea

Articles: List of US retailers on Twitter,  Retailer Twitter aggregation

2) How to Build a Local Follower Base:

• Follow the followers of other local Twitter feeds in your city.
• Contests: Offer two free tickets to concert or lunch in a weekly drawing to a local follower. The locals will follow you.
• Quizzes: Post picture of city landmark, or quiz about interesting local facts.
• Give to the community: Support other local Twitterers by retweeting their local interest stories and events.
• Provide links to interesting articles related to your business, market conditions or city. For example, link to reviews of cameras if you’re a camera shop.
• Position your Twitter account as your online point of contact by adding your feed info to business cards and storefront signs. Twitter names are much easier to remember than phone #s. Article: Twitter to replace 800 #s as point of corporate contact.
• Tweet using hashtags at a Breaking News site for your city, and request placement of your feed into the City site.
• Personalize: Of course, make sure you’re not tweeting about business all the time or it may come across as spammy. It’s best to create two accounts – a business account like @yoshisjazz that sticks to the subject, and a personal account to have conversations that reveal your personality.

3) Surveying for Business Opportunities

• Monitor Twitter search terms for your business. Many Twitterers ask for help to their follower base. If you’re a tax accountant in Chicago, monitor the search terms “Chicago tax accountant” by creating an RSS feed at Search.Twitter.com and tracking it in your RSS reader.

• Use the hashtag conventions #ihave and #yourcity occasionally (add them to a tweet once per week or so) to alert others who monitor this hashtag convention for services or goods you provide.
• Register your Twitter feed at Jobaba, the social marketplace for local services. More of these localized service sites will appear.

4) Twitter Efficiency Tools

• Use a Twitter scheduling application like Hootsuite or Tweetlater to schedule your tweets for the week. Especially useful for restaurants that know their menu offering for the week.
• For larger companies or stores, use a collaborative Twitter application like CoTweet so your Twitter account can be monitored and updated by multiple employees. Example: @ocreggie has five monitors.

Although the barriers to entry for developing a web application are low, it’s still difficult for non-technical “normal” people to build their own web application easily.

Most DIY application development solutions like Ning and blog platforms provide templated designs with feature limitations, and they all look the same. The Wordpress platform offers open source application feature sets that allow non-programmers to cobble together working applications.

EVOLVING WEB DESIGN

This is the next phase of web design – facilitating non-techies in the building of applications. Wordpress, functional but unslick, is so far the most accessible to the masses. We’re building Breaking News City sites on the Wordpress platform because we can share it easily with non-programmers, and we can efficiently teach them how to build, customize and maintain a site in 4-5 hours.

What happens when anybody can build a web application? VC-funded stealth projects become more risky when anybody can easily clone them. The obsession with keeping traffic on site is threatened. The new paradigm will be for entrepreneurs to build applications that are easily owned, adopted and customized by anybody, and perhaps charge a subscription fee for the privilege. In this world, real estate agents would be able to create a fully functioning real estate listings search site similar to Trulia.com, but host it on their OWN domain. Facebook pages could be spun off onto their own domain.

Owning the domain will become analogous to “owning the house”. Traffic becomes equity, and more important, the houseowner sets the rules. The Domus Breaking News Project is based on creating the new accessible applications that can be shared freely through networks and society. Our business model is to consult with enterprises to adapt and customize these new applications for their business.

The Domus Breaking News Network is a unique “instant” data distribution and marketing platform. Three reasons why the Network is innovative and changing the way web applications are being developed:

1. Breaking News sites like Breaking San Francisco News aggregate the best Twitter feeds in a city. They filter the Twitter experience so you’re not seeing the noise.
2. The Breaking News Network is grass roots application design. We give it away to media/publishing companies and real estate brokerages and agents, and they can build a Breaking News site in 5 hours. And they OWN the sites; it’s on the Wordpress platform so it’s easily accessible to non-programmers and customizable to the market. Once up, that real estate brokerage or media company provides a community service and instantly becomes the hub of their Twitter community in their city.
3. As the Breaking News Network expands to cover every city in America (as well as overseas), the network begins to look like the Craigslist for Twitter feeds. We plan to overlay new business models across this network.

The Breaking News Network Awarded “Most Innovative Media 2009″ by Inman News

Ongoing documentation on the Breaking News Project can be found at Media Transparent.com.

Hyperlocal Breaking News – bringing cities and communities into real time conversation

Breaking Topical News – aggregating the best breaking news on a variety of topics

BreakingSFNews.com, BreakingLANews.com and BreakingNYCNews.com broadcast what is happening in each city in real time through a survey of local Twitter feeds and contributions from Twitterers who add tweets to the scrolling news feed using a specific #hashtag system.

The Advent of the Breaking News websites

We’re just beginning to see the development of “breaking news” sites that chronicle and monitor the Tweets and other conversations on a topical or geographical level. MuckRack, apparently launched yesterday, aggregates the Twitter feeds of prominent mainstream media journalists.

Genesis of Breaking News on a Hyperlocal Level

My company, Domus Consulting Group adopted the mission to provide regular folks who happen to be hubs of their community a way to gather their community into compelling online applications like BreakingSFNews. We were early advocates of Twitter and clearly understood how the micro-blogging (aka micro-networking) platforms can tie communities together in a big virtual neighborhood. We also recognized that Twitter’s unique function to facilitate citizen breaking news was compelling (just listen to the buzz today).

The Transparent Development Process

We don’t develop applications in stealth. We develop in iteration by explaining in this blog our concepts, create prototypes as necessary, listen to feedback, and improve the product or service. The chronology for develop BreakingSFNews is literally detailed from this blog’s timeline:

4/10/2009: Real Time Local Advertising – A New Business Model

4/05/2009: BreakingShoppingNews.com: Twitter for Local Advertising

1/10/2009: The New Web 2.5 Opportunity: Creating Media Hubs

12/10/2008: “Breaking News” is a Mass Media Play

12/04/2008: Incorporating Breaking News into Websites and Make Them Compelling Reads

The Give it Away Business Model

We developed the breaking news template that BreakingSFNews is built upon with the intent of giving it away free. We’ve discussed that sharing website development with the people is a new model for spurring adoption of a new marketing paradigm; Ning for DIY social network creation fits into this paradigm. We believe empowering individuals by providing them with plug and play web applications will become more common because it “shares the wealth” and will somewhat disrupt the old VC-based method of stealth website development (why try to build a “monopoly” web property when it can be replicated and given away free in the future?)

A lot of our consulting work so far has been in real estate and in media/advertising, industries that rely on hyperlocal networking for business. We’ve developed hyperlocal Breaking News sites so companies and individuals can tie their communities together with very little financial risk. We even develop the business model behind Breaking News (in progress) so it minimizes business risk as well. And we’ll fully disclose and share all new business models for the benefit of those who adopt Breaking News sites.

Why We Believe Hyperlocal Breaking News is Compelling – it’s in Local Advertising

We discussed this one week ago. Simply put, there is now a void in where local merchants can advertise. They are pulling out of print publications, Yellow Pages and Penny Savers, and can’t figure out how to reach their customer base online. With hyperlocal breaking news sites, local merchants can address their community using Twitter to publish their “daily deals”. Yesterday’s NY Times provided anecdotes on how effective this kind of “advertising” can be. As friend Roberta Murphy put it, “in a Breaking News site, the local merchants aren’t pushing obnoxious ads any more, they are sharing their deals and inviting conversation”. And guess what? It’s free!

(Caveat: Of course, local merchants will need to understand the protocols of social media so they don’t spam and generally act uncouth…)

Everybody is looking for a deal these days; the hope is Breaking News sites will connect local merchants with consumers on the watch for deals.

How You Can Participate

As discussed, the Breaking News template is free to use for anybody interested in building a Breaking News site for their city, i.e. OCBreakingNews.com, SantaBarbaraBreakingNews.com, etc. It literally took me only three hours to set up each of the Breaking News sites, and we teach how to do this.

Join us for a free webinar next Wednesday, April 22 at 10:30pdt/1:30edt and we’ll explain the methodology to get a Breaking News city site up and running. Register here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/526096234.

So… I’ve started a Mortgage and Refinance services business. I’ve been involved in the real estate industry for over 6 years as an entrepreneur, business owner and consultant. For the past 2 1/2 years, I’ve authored the Transparent Real Estate blog, and chronicled how the real estate industry should adopt the social media and make the business of real estate less murky and more transparent.

I have five reasons for starting a mortgage business:

1. Make the mortgage and refi procurement process completely transparent. I have always professed that finding and closing on a mortgage should be as transparent as buying any off the shelf product with a fixed price tag. Most consumers have no clue about the various fees (some are junk fees like “doc prep”), even hidden fees that have given the mortgage industry a somewhat treacherous reputation.
2. Provide professional, experienced service. The barriers to entry to become licensed as a mortgage broker or loan officer are fairly low, and timely service is sometimes lacking. Frankly, it’s not that simple to get a loan in this recession, and that’s where expertise and service becomes the key satisfaction determinant.
3. Create a new sales and marketing paradigm. Leveraging the lessons of 2.0, we will strive to educate the consumer about the mortgage procurement process. And we won’t contact the consumer unless they ask us to. We won’t have an email marketing campaign or aggressively spam in any way. We’ll endeavor to change the hard sell culture.
4. Launch of a revolutionary Wholesale Mortgage Rate Engine. Almost all consumers don’t realize there are wholesale loan rates. Through consulting, we advised on the development of RateWindow, a revolutionary Wholesale Mortgage Rate Engine that launched this month. Finally every rate can be fully disclosed to the consumer. We wholeheartedly base our quote system on RateWindow; standard quote engines like Bankrate and Lending Tree don’t provide wholesale quotes and sell your contact info as leads to anybody who wants to buy them.
5. Help consumers purchase a home. I believe the next 24 months will be the best opportunity to purchase a home in America because this recession will eventually bottom out.

If you are researching mortgages and refis, please visit our Wholesale Mortgage Rate Engine at http://mortgagetransparent.com/ratewindow.

News media still needs to cover core breaking news – economy, politics, editorial, disasters, sports, local coverage – for credibility as news organizations. What’s being left behind are the topical news – arts, food, entertainment, real estate, fashion, home, books, travel – which seem more suited to coverage by bloggers or even corporations involved in the topic.

In real estate for example, I see more data being produced by real estate 2.0 companies that were once the province of commissioned media surveys. Louis Cammarosano of HomeGain tells me today that their just released survey of Realtors on the housing market was picked up by USA Today, Boston Globe and Dallas Morning News. Last week, Trulia.com, an RE 2.0 site had their VP of Marketing Heather Fernandez talking about the Mortgage Relief Plan on KTVU television.

Content is still king, but production is no longer a journalistic monopoly. In fact, the old line producers have moved into a new rank and file of citizen producers, all of whom are competing for media attention. Companies like HomeGain and Trulia that provide the most original or compelling content get to showcase it in this new media system.

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.