Airbnb, according to Techcrunch and others, is planning a mega-round raise at a $1 billion+ valuation, and validated social travel in one swoop. It redefines what a “hotel room” is, even one year ago the only viable short term rental space for the masses. Airbnb allows anybody to rent out living space – a refurbished basement, an in-law, or even a guest room – and relies on a social reputation system of references, reviews and personal connections to ensure both renter and host are reliable and trustworthy. It opens up a brand new segment of the hospitality industry that will inevitably grow and expand the supply of short term (and eventually long term) rental inventory.

Before Airbnb, the owner of a rentable space could realistically only offer monthly leases, and deal with the contractual legalities and problems of landlord tenant issues that may come with it. Airbnb creates a branded exchange for property rental that solves the arduous process of finding reliable tenants, up to now the province of Craigslist and classifieds. Now rental can be accomplished piecemeal, almost always at a better daily rate than what could potentially be received from monthly tenancy. Rental inventory increases because any space, even a guest room in an apartment, can become a virtual hotel room.

AirBnB opens up revenue opportunities for commercial property owners/managers that have rentable property but up to now did not have the distribution opportunities of an exchange to attract short term tenancy. Vacant properties and developments in overbuilt tourist areas in, say, Florida and California can be converted to rental property, even ad hoc bed and breakfasts quickly. For example, I’ve proven that I can easily rent out my previously difficult to rent no-kitchen in-law space in San Francisco for $70 per night, for potential monthly revenues of $2,000. At $70, it’s half the price of a three-star hotel room, and next to Golden Gate Park, where there are few hotels. This changes “cap rates” by augmenting revenue streams, particularly in cities and areas with high tourist or traveler demand, like resorts and college towns. Property managers can source more revenue for their clients simply by managing rental inventory on Airbnb, and charging commissions to do so. Expect new affiliate businesses – property management applications, Airbnb profile designers, local cleaning and other hospitality services – to serve a new virtual hotel room industry.

Finally, Airbnb socializes travel. The attraction and comfort of staying in the homes of friends and acquaintances becomes easier to accomplish when applied across Facebook’s social graph. Last month, Airbnb introduced Social Connections, a social discovery application that basically identifies friends of friends for rental and home stay. Airbnb is an aiming for the tipping point of adoption when travelers, both business and pleasure, can find like-minded people through their social networks at every “port of call”.

Related:  Quora – is Airbnb’s valuation ridiculous?

Another societal sea change is evolving. People now trust in online profiles enough to invite complete strangers into their homes. AirBnB is proof.

AirBnB is a service that allows people to post their homes and extra space as rental properties:

AirBnB is a tipping point indication of the credibility of the social media as reputation system. No longer is a personal reference or a hefty security deposit required to vouch for good character, the collective voice of approval based on a social media profile becomes the criteria.

AirBnB opens society to a new tide of social media utility by evoking a different mission in travel – the socialized experience. Before AirBnB, travel was generally a solitary experience of booking a plane and a hotel. With AirBnB, part of the mission is to connect with others who have shared interests in different cities. The chance to build new friendships is compelling, and frankly has always been the addictive part of the travel experience. With AirBnB, people have more control over their social destiny, but the new relationships still retain the charm of being based on luck or serendipity (simply because the discovery was made online).

A new movement to creating serendipitous relationship opportunities by social profiling

LetsLunch and Lunchtree fulfills a need every Silicon Valley person has – one on one networking based on mutual business interest. Social profiling is nothing new; before social graphs, matches were made eHarmony style with detailed questionnaires. The new process efficiently does away with questionnaires by importing relevant profile data from the social networks:

(from Lunchtree)

I’ve done four LetsLunches and the resulting connections made are far more substantive than a distracting chat in a conference hallway. Connecting people to develop useful, even winning relationships is the new social Groupon. The efficient delivery of what people want, whether it’s a product, a relationship, a job, or other opportunities, will be the inspiration for the next set of compelling social applications.

Get ready for the commercial social media...

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The latest Facebook metrics are powerful: 400 million active users (7% of the world), 50% of them logging on each day and spending more than 55 minutes daily on Facebook.

The sudden concentration of traffic on the social media led by Facebook has caught business by surprise. In particular, small and local businesses don’t quite realize their consumer is now spending a majority of their time on the social media, but they continue to rely on the old online standard: their website. Websites and blogs are critical as marketing collateral, but local businesses need to develop an online marketing presence that spans across the social media ubiquitously.

With all the buzz around Foursquare and Gowalla, why is hyperlocal media suddenly hot? Geolocation is changing the social media by providing nothing more than the tagging mechanism to define social networks by localities. Geolocation facilitates the development of a new, more practical, more intimate Twitter/Foursquare network of friends who just happen to be living down the street. It’s far more compelling to build a social network of folks you can have coffee with than the national networks than generally evolve in Twitter and Linkedin. I myself see this… I am starting to socialize with San Franciscans…

The Hyperlocal Marketing Opportunity

So we’re seeing social apps like Twitter and Yelp quickly adopting location “check-in” functionality, with Facebook in the wings. And this presents a huge opportunity. It’s a no-brainer for local retailers and businesses to see that they need to provide the most effective online venue for their local customers to “check-in” to. The new local “websites” are the Facebook business page, the new local advertising vehicle is the Twitter coupon, and the new reviews column is Yelp.

You haven’t seen them yet, but Facebook is primed to evolve into a massive Sunday advertising circular for local businesses:

And why not? It’s free. Enterprising local media publishers (for example, Breaking News sites) will curate and compile these merchants into local online directories.

Twitter will develop hyperlocal couponing systems that will be online equivalents of PennySaver coupons and Valpak:

And why not? It’s free. Couponing is effective because it is perceived by consumers as “found money” while straight advertising may now be considered “spammy”. You’ll see the advent of new local social media based advertising agencies that will create turnkey Twitter / Facebook / Foursquare couponing campaigns for merchants. And these campaigns will be accepted because online data is more efficient for tracking and analysis than traditional advertising channels like radio / TV or inefficient direct mail offerings like PennySaver. There is a defined ROI.

Conclusion

2009 was the year when the masses found Twitter and Facebook. 2010 will be the year when local business begins to recognize the power of leveraging Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and Foursquare et al to achieve a level of community engagement that standard “one-way message” advertising can’t achieve. It’s about being ubiquitous across the social media so your community of customers can find your services via their preferred channels – Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Related slideshow: Ubiquity marketing (Jan. 2010)

Related webinar: I’ll be discussing “The Impact of Geolocational Media” on the Virtual Bar Camp April 6 at 2:15pm, Room #4. Register and join our discussion.

Entrepreneurs and web designers launched a slew of social real estate applications over the past two years – literally hundreds of social networks devoted to real estate, multi-author real estate blog/magazines, and a variety of listings sites. Most of these sites still plod along with plateau traffic volume.

Even a year ago, it may have seemed like a great idea to build a social application for the real estate niche, but today’s reality is a niche application can’t build any critical mass versus an established “elephant” competitor. Today, my good friend Deb Madey gave me the idea for this article in a discussion of various real estate agent review sites. Yelp, by virtue of the sheer numbers of reviews of real estate agents eclipses any smaller niche review site that have little traffic, few reviews,  and are hard to find. Social media user bases are consolidating to the biggest player in each space, simply because everybody is there. Facebook reportedly has an overwhelming 25% page view share and a hardy few can remember the names of Twitter’s early competitors.

This trend is one more strike against startups. Fast growing apps like Foursquare and Gowalla can hit a wall when (not if!) Yelp copies its features, like it did with Foursquare’s location “Check-in” feature. Twitter have implied that their strategy is to add geolocation features that may also rival Yelp and Foursquare.

It’s now harder to be a game changer when the rules of the game called social media are solidifying / consolidating. Two years ago, no social network really dominated its niche… now lines are being drawn.

We have had success providing our social media training platform to a number of REALTOR Boards (an example in far flung Oklahoma City) and are extending the platform to any associations or enterprises who can use a social media training resource free.

We’re developing social media training systems together with association / corporate marketing groups and consultants who add their training content to the platform. For example, we’re working with a wine consultancy developing a national social media marketing business using the platform for “basic training” and reference for their client base.

Register for a peek at http://domusu.com/admin/first-time-users. We welcome discussion on this unique idea.

From Craig Newmark’s blog, Gavin Newsom is introducing social media to San Francisco civics, and creating a Zappos-like Twitter channel @SF311 to support non-emergency city nuisances like potholes and trash.

RecoverySF.org is set up for citizens to discuss the local issues related to the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA) passed by Congress, also known as the Stimulus Plan. It’s positioned as a bulletin board to solicit citizen opinion.

@SF311 is simply representative of the Twitter feed that we believe will soon replace telephone support for local community services. It’s a great example of using Twitter for asynchronous / real time support and a testament to the utility of Cotweet, an enterprise application that allows multiple city support personnel to reply to requests into @SF311.

Gavin Newsom is taking a page from Barack’s playbook in adopting new social media ideas that could eventually build him a following for his run for California governor.

We’ve been experimentally marketing Breaking San Francisco News, and have discovered many ways to attract local traffic to the site.

1. Since Breaking News City sites aggregate the best local Twitter feeds, the best viral marketing is through Twitter. So create a new Twitter account as the voice for Breaking SF News.

2. Find and follow the most interesting local Twitter feeds:

3. Follow their followers, most of them will also be local. For efficiency, use one of the mass follow tools you can find at Twitter Fan Wiki.

4. Retweet interesting local tweets and events. Make yourself the local “columnist”.

5. “Feature” local Twitterers. They will love it!

6. Feature live-tweets of local events.

7. Start conversations.

UPDATE:

Our special coverage of San Francisco’s famous Bay to Breakers run gave BreakingSFNews.com a traffic spike and introduced Breaking SF News to the community of San Francisco (we’ve only been up for a couple of weeks…). Breaking SF News is the only real time site that aggregates all the Twitter commentary on Bay to Breakers.

Yes, we know how easy it is to build a web application today. WeFollow.com, launched by digg’s Kevin Rose, became a hit and got cloned quickly by Twitr.org:

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.

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.

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.