Breaking news is critical for making time sensitive purchase decisions – nobody should buy GM stock, purchase a home or car, or lock in an interest rate without checking what is happening in the markets and how it impacts their purchase decision.

How Breaking News Real Estate Sites Become a Mass Media Property

The new breaking news websites like Homescopes, a real estate site of blogging Realtors devoted to granularly chronicling the Northern California housing marketing in real time, is a far better resource for analyzing this local market than any journalist writing a weekly real estate column. Homescopes is planning to expand to having 100 real estate “journalists” covering this regional market. Once this happens, Homescopes becomes a bona fide source of professional real estate opinion, and can now leverage their collective knowledge base by teaming up with the traditional mass media for supplemental content delivery. Imagine Homescopes as a part of the San Francisco Chronicle coverage of the real estate market in the Bay Area… Homescopes’ agents benefit from exposure in a mass media publication that is akin to free advertising.

In addition, Homescopes will be able to leverage their portable social graph – readers can log into Homescopes through their Facebook account via Facebook Connect or via similar channels like Google Friend Connect. Like all social media plays, these various Homescopes social networks will build on the trust and credibility that develops among the membership.

Conclusion

Homescopes is singular in the landscape of independent real estate sites by providing breaking news cooperatively and in hyperlocal detail by its participating agents. No other real estate sites – Trulia, Inman News, Realtor.com – can provide this level of local detail in a news feed based format. Simple to build at little cost, all it takes are ringleaders who see the opportunity to replicate Homescopes in their markets.

Related articles:

Homescopes – providing breaking news for the Bay Area housing markets

Entrepreneurial Real Estate Marketing

Incorporate “Breaking News” into the Website and Make Them Compelling Reads

The Portable Social Graph

In June, I published on my sister site a slideshow explaining how MSM is moving from a content generation business (journalism) to a content distribution business (media by definition).How Mass Media is Embracing Social Media

Opening up Twitter Networks

Now, MSM should develop their Twitter network and show their readers which Twitterers are news generators. The NYT is still won’t link out (follow other newsmakers), but the SF Chronicle does:

The expectation of Social Median is to create micro-conversations around news events. It’s a cross between Friendfeed, and the comment streams that accompany news sites like MarketWatch:

Note that Marketwatch has also launched a “beta community” that enables its readers to develop an online presence on Marketwatch. This is the same functionality that SocialMedian is developing for its users; Jason, the founder of Social Median should develop a relationship with Marketwatch to port their user base into Social Median so any comments they make on Marketwatch will also be “clipped” (using SocialMedian lexicon) into SocialMedian’s news networks. My Marketwatch profile is http://community.marketwatch.com/pkitano.

Officially launched July 31, SocialMedian has attracted the usual social media participant suspects and still doesn’t have the critical mass of users to fully develop these news conversations beyond the social media and technology topics like Google Chrome. SocialMedian has the opportunity to develop a horizontal set of communities across a variety of verticals – politics, economy, celebrity, etc. – that will create conversations that complement the mainstream media sources that engage each vertical.

I’d love to see this adoption happen.

Here’s one more journalist – Marketwatch’s David Weidner – who has succumbed to the simple broadcast nature of Twitter in the hopes of producing a distilled soundbyte message as an alternative to that mountainous commentary.

Technology always is bringing us new ways to share ideas. The comments section of MarketWatch is one of those, but let’s be honest: The posts are often too long for readers to sort through, and the conversation can degenerate into a stew of ideas that make interest-rate swaps look easy.
So I’ve decided to follow the lead of some of my colleagues by creating a Twitter account. The great thing about Twitter is that contributors have to be concise. Posts have a 140-character limit, so everyone has a level playing field. There’s a lot of value in keeping it short and sweet, as many readers have told me.
We can also talk about some issues that haven’t been mentioned in the column. It can be a place where anything goes, and I promise to interact by asking questions and responding. That’s the kind of participation I haven’t been able to provide to the comments section — which, of course, is still a great place to leave your thoughts. I will continue to read it.
I’ll also use Twitter to let people know when I’m doing TV on Fox Business or CNBC or making an appearance on another media outlet. Let’s see how it goes, and thanks for giving it a try. Go to David Weidner’s Twitter page.

What’s significant is David’s implicit admission that he has no idea what he is going to do on Twitter (which is ok) – 1/3 broadcast stuff, 1/3 communication and 1/3 PR on his media wherabouts…

What David should do is follow more Twittering market journalists, pundits, economists, and bloggers so his Followers (us) can view a comprehensive lens of David’s sphere of market interpreters. And by us following David’s network, we can vicariously watch the Twitter conversations that would take place among this mainstream media group. This real time commentary would be the equivalent of watching a ticker tape of pundit Twitter feeds below CNBC business news, all in real time… I’d bet many business TV watchers would find that intriguing. The online analogy would be watching David’s Friendfeed, the next application he will have to figure out.