Vidlisting Blog: Web Real Estate Video

I fell behind in my reading as usual while “heads down” during the current development cycle and missed Joel’s post about ActiveRain’s video platform. Of particular interest is Daniel’s comment asking aboout the value proposition around online video on at least two sites:

“still, for the life of me, figure out why anyone would pay for a video service from Wellcomemat or ActiveRain, for that matter. I am a Wellcomemat user. I love the player, but I’m not sure how much it would be worth to me if I had to pay for it. “

A business with a product or service that people won’t pay for isn’t a business - it’s a hobby

We’ve always maintained that the real estate video player has been commoditized to a price point of zero due to YouTube and other large players in the space. As Daniel’s comment suggests, users simply don’t see an obvious value proposition in the conversion of video into an online digital format and/or inclusion into a feature rich embeddable player. So, assuming some level of validity in the above suggestion, where then is the value proposition of online web real estate video?

 The value is in the ability to reliably and rapidly deliver content in front of prospective paying consumers of that content.  I’d offer that value proposition for business uses of real estate video has been stunted by the limitations of the flash video player itself: 

- The flash video player is designed for a general user to paste content on their own site and not for sites that need to effectively manage the large amounts of content required for high traffic sites

- Video channels are geared for the content creator and have very little value add for the consumer

- You are limited to the strengths of your own contacts as to places that will accept your cut and paste video. (an exercise for the reader would be to think about how many high traffic websites with likely demographics for buyers of the product, property, or service that you have to sell would accept a dozen cut and paste video players today and how much work that would involve for either you or them)

- you are on your own in terms of marketing assistance and support

Wrong Focus Impacts Perception Of Value

Only about 5 blog posts or websites can occupy the valuable positions on any given google search result pages - those that are on page one and “above the fold” with no scrolling necessary.  If the value proposition of real estate video relies solely on the SEO talents of the sites in which they are pasted, only these limited sites will benefit. I’d also argue that given their position perhaps these sites don’t need video at all to be successful especially within highly competitive search keywords.

The sizable market therefore is more likely with websites and bloggers that aren’t on page one of search results. There is an entire group yearning to sell properties or contract their services - they want some tangible value with a clear path to a transaction and some vague and unsubstantiated promise of improving SEO as the main selling point. 

People clearly will pay for things for which they perceive value. The real estate video industry has focused the value of video on the costs of production and having feature rich player rather than the marketing/lead generation (”advertising”) potential. The skew in thinking is as follows:

- The real estate video professional thinks (and often says) that video is expensive because of the costs of equipment, production, and software

- an advertising savvy REALTOR thinks that real estate video is expensive not because of the overall cost but because they divide the price for videos by the anticipated views/leads/sales. (I’ve seen videos that appear to have cost $100 per view after being online for 6 months)

Measuring success by the same metrics as advertising is a great forcing function for making changes in the industry - how many views/leads/sales are videos directly responsible for? Raise each of those areas sufficiently and the perception of vale will naturally follow. If a service reliably brought quality inquiries, sold a few of Daniel’s properties, and brought in new listings, then he (and others) just might see enough value in real estate video to pay for a service even though the same technical conversion  functionality is available elsewhere. If the service brought enough consistent sales, what would people pay then?

Rather than simply copying Youtube or Facebook in order to make videos available to other agents or videographers, shouldn’t the right challenge and focus of our collective efforts be in generating a tangible and measurable real estate video value proposition for the clients’ buyers?

There has been talk about the use of tubemogul over in Wellcomemat’s neighborhood forum.  The discussion is centered on the value of being able to upload real estate videos to a multitude of video sites.  These sites include the biggies like Youtube and Yahoo Video plus some lesser known sites such as StupidVideos.com and Crackle.com. 

How can you know if a site is suitable for real estate video before uploading?  Here are two suggestions:

1) Look at the view results: I usually do a search for “real estate” and then order the results by video views. On stupidvideos.com, I found that the most viewed real estate video was posted on 17 January 2008 (almost 3 months ago) and had a grand total of two video views. Crackle’s best had about 1700 views in a year (the average vidlisting video gets 1700 views in just over a month). Of course, some dedicated real estate video providers wont provide particularly better results than these.

2) Look at the other types of content in your search results:  You may be very surprised at the “related” content that appears in your search. Crackle for instance has videos with the title, “Happy Nude Year” and “Asian in Ripped Shorts” among many such others in the search results for real estate. Stupidvideos.com had tamer but still childish titles such as “Infrared Farts”. 

The lesson here is that just because you can upload a video to a site for free doesnt mean that the site is effective or that your business oriented video content won’t be placed near content that some might find offensive or childish.

Just some real estate video content that are posted on other sites….

Narrated Video Tutorial: How To Share A Vidlisting Media Catalog That Contains Youtube Videos and Real Estate Shows

ActiveRain Blog Post: Why Managing Video Content Online Generally Sucks

Below is a very short video that demonstrates the Shared Media Catalogs in action from a free level user perspective that supplements the hands-on blog post that we wrote earlier. What you’l see is the power of social networking with multimedia content in a far more effective manner for meeting business objectives than cloning Facebook or Youtube.

The user quickly finds and selects two distinct shared media catalogs from the available list. they are both public so the content may be immediately consumed by the user. One of the shared catalogs is a mix of Youtube videos, Real Estate Shows, and Vidlisting videos. The other is the shared catalog for RAMB and their video interviews filmed at SIMA 2008 in Madrid, Spain.

Within seconds, the user is able to add two shared catalogs and build a video bar widget that includes content from both catalogs as well a mix of real estate shows, youtube, and vidlisting videos.

Here is the actual video bar widget made in the video:

Cool stuff (and the video is in real time by the way - it is that quick and easy)

What Is A Vidlisting Shared Media Catalog?

 A Vidlisting shared media catalog is virtual workspace for REALTORs to work with real estate video in almost any format and be able to easily share that content with customers or other REALTORS using social networking. Unlike other forms of video channels which require you to cut and paste HTML code or input endless emails every time that you want to share a video, you’ll be able to easily share content with 3-4 clicks. 

Content can be pushed or pulled using Vidlisting shared media catalog. Customers or others in your organization can “pull” Youtube videos, virtual tours from Real Estate Shows, or uploaded Vidlisting real estate video content that you’ve selected to be shareable and move that content directly to their own media catalogs. This catalog can be real estate video property tours, agent introductions, video interviews, promotional video spots for your organization, or even real estate video podcasts. Once in their their catalog, they can make individual widgets, group content together into media bars (even with different content types such as real estate shows, Youtube, and Vidlisting content),  and otherwise use it as their own.  If the consumers of your shared catalog are using the Vidlisting Wordpress Plugin, they’ll be able to directly insert content that you share directly into Wordpress blogs.

How Do I Know What Content In My Media Catalog Is Shared?

We’ve built a comprehensive yet extremely simple catalog system so that you’ll immediately know if your media catalog is in a public, permissive, or private state and specifically what content, if any, is shared.  If the below information is too complex or not understandable, we’ve put together a short video that demonstrates the functionality as well.

Users at any paid level of membership with the Vidlisting can share their media catalogs with others. We have a view of an actual shared catalog that is available to you to test with that we’ve simply named, “Miami Homes”. It consists of a public catalog of a number of videos that vidlisting filmed in the Miami, FL area. The catalog header clearly states the current status of the catalog when the member is at a paid level. The sharing state can quickly be changed with a click of the Configuration button.

As shown above, although the Miami Homes catalog itself is in a public sharing state, none of the content in the working area of catalog is currently marked as shared. Below, you’ll see that not all of the content in a shared media catalog has to be shared - we’re choosing to only share one video in the example here. The content in the working area comes from videos that you may have previously uploaded, YouTube videos or Real Estate Shows that you have referenced, or may even be content from another shared catalog that you are consuming. Sharing media from any these media sources only requires four mouse clicks.

The first click is to select the media that you want to share from the working area of the media catalog. The second click is on the button labelled, “Modify Selected Icon(s)”.

This brings you to the interface where you can modify attributes of the media icon (titles, etc.) The third click is in the checkbox labelled “Share This Media” (sorry, the image is from a pre-release version of the interface) and the last click is on the Modify button.

The result is a shared media image that is clearly labelled and difficult to miss.

What Does The User See When They Want To Consume My Catalog?

We’ll work through an example of what the consumer actually sees.

The initial state of the consumer’s catalog only contain the default content that each user for that organization will have. In this case, we are looking at a Vidlisting catalog which has mandatory property and interview content - different organizations can have different default content.

The first step is to browse the available shared in order to find Miami Homes. Althouh a direct link will be available shortly, for the moment, we click on the configuration button and then click on the “Browse Available Shared Catalogs” button

Now you click the first letter of the desired catalog which in this case is “M” and you’ll see Miami Homes listed with the identifier (Public) which means that no approval is required to consume the content. Catalogs marked (Shared) require approval from the catalog owner before you can consume content from that catalog. Now you click the desired catalog’s checkbox and the Add button.

Once you have completed the above steps, only the shareable content from the selected catalog will automagically appear in your partner video tab. UPDATE: I’ve just added a Real Estate Show from the Miami area and a YouTubeVideo as well to play with.

How Can I Get My Own Shared Media Catalog?

Anyone can consume an available public catalog without permission and shared catalogs with the owner’s approval. Sharing your own media catalog is normally a paid level of functionality. You must first open your own media catalog. Free level members and above can consume available shared media catalogs.  However, only paid members can actually share out their catalogs - you’ll need to upgrade your membership to do so.

We are however inviting selected media content providers the opportunity to offer their own content during the shared catalog beta period (approx. the next 30 days). Participation in the beta means that you’ll have a year’s free use of the functionality if approved. Please contact me at tony@vidlisting.com to request participation.

Participation In The SIMA 2008 Show:

- The show itself had noticeably less participation than last year.  This was due in part to the global decline in real estate but also the cold, rainy April weather in Madrid likely played a role as well.  The last few days had much more normal foot traffic compared to last year than the first few days of SIMA 2008.

- SIMA is the perfect type of show for the Vidlisting trade show representation services. This year, we had a dedicated representation for the American-owned KoKo Resort located in Bocas del Toro, Panama.  Vidlisting (branded as our spanish language real estate video website) provided a complete real estate video package for the stand’s plasma as well as for 10,000 dedicated Koko Resort DVDs that we handed out at the show.  All Vidlisting materials were available in Spanish, English, and Portuguese and we manned the stand with people fluent in each language.

- The real estate video DVDs generated far more interest at the show than the printed material. I lost count of the people that said, “oh wow, a DVD” after initially declining to accept what they thought was just another printed brochure.

- The REALTOR Association of Greater Miami and the Beaches (RAMB) constructed a beautiful video interview area where we filmed english language video interviews for them under a prearranged agreement. We also filmed a number of video interviews on our own in English, Spanish, and Portuguese that we’ll edit and post as soon as possible.

Unfiltered Observations On Our Online Efforts:

- The special vidlisting home page idea worked fairly well. During the dates of the SIMA 2008, we used a special SIMA oriented home page on our english, spanish, and portuguese real estate video sites.  We got some great feedback and even opened some business opportunities as a result.  It took a few days to get three article filters correctly adjusted as we actually had nine filters (three for each language). Next time, we’ll have this right on day one.

- Internet connectivity was surprisingly a challenge given that the show was in Europe. Internet connectivity was being offered for the entire show at 1000 euros (more than US$1500 in total or US$500 per day) which was too rich for our startup blood. We settle for 2 hours of connectivity from the stand per day for about US$50.  This option limited the amount of online and supporting activity that we were able to do directly from the stand.

- We’ll followup the show with a post-SIMA 2008 newsletter to our subscriber base.

The REALTOR Association of Greater Miami and the Beaches (RAMB) has engaged the Vidlisting video team to film a series of video interviews while at the SIMA conference in Madrid, Spain.  While we wont be able to edit and post all of the interviews on a daily basis, we are converting the first batch that were edited yesterday. They will be posted online later today. Links will be posted as they become available.

John Truccillo, Former NAR Chief Economist

I’ll also cover the fabulous interview facilities that RAMB has constructed at the SIMA show as part of their stand showing off Miami in a separate post.

We’ll have a special home page this week on each of our real estate video sites in celebration of SIMA 2008.  SIMA is billed as the world’s largest real estate fair and is held each year in Madrid, Spain. This year’s dates are 8-12 April 2008.  Our special homepage will be up during those dates and will migrate to http://vidlisting.com/sima2008/indexsima.asp thereafter. 

The page auto-updates blog posts, video podcasts, and photos from Flickr that are tagged “SIMA2008″. If you are attending the show, you can also upload your SIMA 2008 themed videos directly to the page.

This page also represents the first commercial usage of our contextual video functionality to find, aggregate, and organize different types of video and multimedia content from a given event. We’ve even used our upcoming developer API to put the page together so that everything is contextually correct. It still needs a lot of work but we are at the point where we are demonstrating it publically with live commercial examples. This will give us a chance to make improvements to the programming interfaces this week.  

You’ll see much more of this in the coming months as version two of the ForSaleByLocals multimedia platform comes online.

More later….

 We released version 0.95 of the Vidlisting Real Estate Video Wordpress Plugin. The only difference is that it is language focused in preparation for international markets. If you have already downloaded version 0.90, the assumption is that your language of choice is English. This is anticipated to be the final beta release of the wordpress plugin.

 A few months back, we made some fundamental changes to the way that we handle and process media files.  The downside to these changes were that they broke our filtering functionality.  We knew it at the time but, with the small team that we have, we had to prioritize some work over others as well as keep to our schedule for new functionality.  This week, we finally were able to get to some of those sniggly fixes that are annoyances for our users.

Result: You can now once again click on the property type, city, or country within the Vidlisting icons to find matching properties. 

Feel free to report any other bugs or functionality that you feel doesnt work quite right at support@vidlisting.com

Vidlisting will be the first site to use the ForSaleByLocals Multimedia Wordpress plugin starting today. This marks a huge step forward for us in terms of finding new ways for users to discover and easily apply new real estate video content.  The plugin integrates the content from Vidlisting Personal Media Catalogs and makes vidlisting branded video widgets instantly insertable into any self hosted wordpress blog.  An additional benefit is that the multimedia plugin also can process and insert youtube video and Real Estate Shows widgets using the same system whether the video content has to do with real estate or not.

We chose this approach because many users prefer to insert via a user interface in Wordpress rather than have to be bogged down in the details of cutting and pasting HTML.  The standard we used was the ease of use in inserting images into wordpress blogs.

We’ve created a special page to download our real estate video version of the wordpress plugin. ForSaleByLocals have provided a set of installation instructions for the plugin. Configuration of the video and multimedia plugin is super easy.  We are available at support@vidlisting.com if you have questions, comments, or issues with the plugin.

Here is what is next. Within a few weeks, you´ll also be able to directly insert video into blog posts from other people´s shared or public catalogs for which you have access. So, imagine the speed of viral videos, when you not only share media content with friends but also have it available to be directly insertable in all blogs that you share content with.  Nice.