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.

Simply put, the social media rewards value and service, and devalues self promotion and advertising. Up to now, most social media marketing methods simply wrap traditional push marketing methods into a new package. Facebook fan pages and Twitter broadcasting deals replicate websites and coupon advertising. In this new age of social media, push marketing appears obvious and may detract from the marketing intent. We’ve been advocating that entrepreneurial business people focus more on delivering valuable services to their community to attract business opportunities. One way to do this is to create local media resources.

The following slideshow describes how to create a new local media brand that leverages the many channels of the social media. The concept is simple: online media brands no longer reside solely on TV, on a website or as a Facebook page. Media brands now span all the channels of traditional and social media. Any local media property that delivers content across a panoply of channels becomes “ubiquitous” to the community. You’re always found. And if you or your company are behind the media brand, you benefit from association.

Social media reinforces the concept of branding because your brand is judged by what you do and who you are online. This couldn’t happen ten years ago, you would have needed to advertise who you were and what you did.

Twitterfeed’s analytics monitors the clickthrough rate of each tweet’s link (the bit.ly link) from each tweet. @A2BreakingNews has only 180 followers but averages between 200-300 clickthroughs on its bit.ly links daily.

The demand for community breaking news is tangible, and Twitter remains the best source for up to date information. The Breaking News Network’s mission is to provide real time hyperlocal news curated by on-the-ground community leaders.

Related slideshow: Pull marketing and community engagement strategies

from: How Geeks do Holiday Cards

Everybody has noticed how fewer Christmas cards arrive in the mail? and for the obvious reasons:

1. eCards have captured 5-7% of traditional paper and ink trade. eCard makers are sophisticated in their approach to maintaining customer bases by providing galleries for the Christmas cards being sent out by their clients. Example: Ashland University Christmas Cards 2002-2009.
2. Many PDF their own Christmas Card and send by email. The Christmas card photograph can be done instantly now, so people can procrastinate to the point of capitulating with “I’ll PDF and email the card”.
3. PDFs retain links so a business can direct traffic to their websites or blog for promotional purposes. This Online Marketing Blog article has some tips to make holiday cards a marketing piece.
4. Christmas cards were/are used for recapping the year. With social media, recaps are a lot easier when there’s constant contact and the ability to send a real time holiday greeting through Facebook. Check your Facebook timeline to see what everybody is doing on Christmas Eve…

Merry Christmas everybody!

Moreover, TV/cable and Internet are merging towards display across a common TV/monitor display platform. Cable channels pay significant syndication fees to broadcast relevant programming. They are curating content for their audience. However…

Social media facilitates the same content curation done by cable channels. Justin.TV allows anybody to broadcast hit movies (illegally) like a Showtime channel and now, personal broadcasters can get paid for it as a pay-per-view affiliate:

Obviously, copyright issues on Justin.TV seem to fall by the wayside just as they have done on Youtube (Google no longer seems diligent in deleting uploaded copyright content). This tolerance becomes a moral hazard that makes copyright protection unenforceable.

Like other content, video has essentially become free and curatable. For every Hulu, there will be copycat channels. Even Hulu’s exclusive licensed content are easily replicated by screen scraping video software like Camtasia.

Justin.TV’s pay-per-view channels will be the first of a new video revenue model that YouTube (which already announced this intention) and other video channels will follow. Why? Because everybody wants to be a broadcaster.

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.

from: http://bit.ly/4Bv7NE

The chronicles of Tiger continue daily with the Mistress countdowns and porn star exposés that are contributing to the collapsing public opinion of a global sports icon. The financial impact hits whole industries – the PGA, Tiger’s sponsors, and the TV networks all relied on Tiger as the drawing card.

This is a case of tipping point media. Mass media will only jump on sensational stories when they’re credible. Once that happens, the social media takes over with the notorious confessionals by otherwise un-famous people. That’s probably one reason why Tiger practiced tight media control… it’s easy to quash one-off rumors when there isn’t a bandwagon of story pursuers. Tiger’s surprise announcement of “transgressions” after the car crash positioned him as fair game for all media.

Tiger is a defining moment in celebrity reputation management. Celebrities will now have to think very carefully about doing questionable things with other people because they have a media mouthpiece – themselves, and a reason to use it for attracting attention.

Here are three new examples of Twitter based local advertising models:

1) Mashable introduced Postabon yesterday. Simplicity is the key to finding local deals. Postabon, currently operative only in New York City, displays deals on a map and allows the community of users to rate them. Very straightforward.

Users need to log in to Postabon to submit their deals with time frame parameters:

2) Edhat is an independent Santa Barbara news service that has created Twitter-like ad banners for sale to local merchants:

Edhat offers advertisers to “put your Twitter tweets on Edhat” which points to eventually developing a self-service ad banner platform where the message can change based on the tweets the advertiser broadcasts.

Local Twitter ads can be automated AND free

Postabon requires that advertisers login and “post” their deals on site. The deal posting process would be much simpler if advertisers could simply tweet their deals automatically through Postabon, and not bother with the login process and manual input. Edhat has an advertising based business model, so it’s not free.

3) Breaking Seattle News, A2BreakingNews and other Breaking News sites have added Daily Deals and a Daily Blue Plate Specials page that allows local advertisers to tweet their deals automatically and free.

All they need to do is to get added onto the Twitter List for Daily Deals on each Breaking News Network city site simply by tweet request. If the Breaking News site doesn’t have a Daily Deals page, ask for it at #dailydeals.

Twitter Lists simplifies the aggregation of local deals and discount coupons so that any individual or organization can provide helpful information to their community.

Look at another other big media play into hyperlocal – MSNBC’s August 2009 purchase of Every Block. So far, the most prolific content aggregated by the small Every Block team of 6+ people are police calls. Most are public civic data. The content is impersonal.

BIG MEDIA’S NEED TO SCALE VS. LOCAL MEDIA’S NEED TO ENGAGE COMMUNITY

Big media’s play into hyperlocal only scales if the data aggregation and curation of news sources can be automated from a back office team based in one office building. The weakness in this virtual local news strategy is the impersonality of syndicated content. The key to connecting with the community audience is on-the-ground staffing, who will also support the marketing push and civic outreach.

Huffington Post is filling the void for coordinating local journalist outreach by tapping TV producer Willow Bay as Senior Editor for their new LA edition . Examiner.com recruits local writers. Big media will eventually realize they need to create a lot of local networks, and not rely on a backroom tech operation, to become viable local media. The one-size-fits-all model for templating local news may potentially position them as Media McDonalds. Existing local media in every city now have a window of opportunity to fortify their brand in the face of the potential onslaught of big media’s local plays.