Pushing Dirt

Realblogging indicates our residential brethren have been busy micro blogging - sending short tweets to their friends and clients.

I’m generally not a luddite, but I find the format lends itself at best to pure social networking, and not business communication. Not that friends can’t be clients, or vice versa.

At worst, Twitter is pure vanity and arrogance - do I really need 10 updates a day from my friend? Where they are drinking their cup of coffee or what they just read in the paper?

Telling is not selling. Stop and listen for once.

The right answer is to adapt to the communication methods your clients prefer. Some of my clients want email, some want phone. None of my clients are asking me to tweet. I’m sure more residential clients area. It shall be interesting to see what the next few years bring.

And it’s so uncool to be anti-social networking these days. If you’re not in favor of Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. you’re just yesterday’s news. My opinion is social networking is like going to a party: don’t bring your work to it, or make work the focus of your dialog there, or you look like a big tool. If you set out to use Twitter as a business tool, it’s going to blow up in your face. If you have fun, and your friends enjoy it and you don’t force it on them, do it. Don’t try to cram it into business situations.

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Google is quietly building an amazing street view map system. They have already covered every single public street in Washington DC. While some are grasping for practical applications, it’s an amazing application for use by real estate agents and investors.

For an agent: while you’re on the phone with a prospective seller, you can walk the neighborhood and discuss it as if you’re intimately familiar with the property and the market. An investor can save hours driving neighborhoods for first looks at investment opportunities that come along.

People are already experimenting with animating Street View. It won’t be long before a presentation will tie together the animating Google Earth “flyover” and zoom straight down to an animated drive through a neighborhood.

Animated Version Of Google Street View - Click here for more free videos
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I’ve started to teach myself search engine optimization, which I’ve quickly learned is clearly the clearly the key to generating commercial real estate leads from the web. I imagine not many brokers think about this so while I’m a neophyte, I hope I can get a little better doing this than anyone else in my niche field.

It seems random, but I’m working to get an site called http://iceclothing.net to the top of the ranks for the search phrase “ice clothing.” Don’t ask…

If you’re a commercial real estate professional, try this commercial real estate custom search from google. searches 9 sites, including: businessweek.com, forbes.com, wsj.com, realestatejournal.com, propertyline.com

Google Base is in beta. On full launch, and with some minor tweaking, it could be the commercial real estate category killer. Really a three way killer: it has all the functionality of craigslist, ebay, and classified ads in one site.

There’s next to no property in there, but give it some time…it’s only in beta.

You can create your own Google base home page and Google will also make sure whatever you put in there is search able on Google. You can mass-upload your listings. You can sell stuff. You can tag everything. wow.