The Vidlisting 2008 Real Estate Video Year End Wrapup
Year End Summary
2008 was a good year for Vidlisting.
During 2008, Vidlisting started the year as a real estate video production company with an in-house online capability to a full fledged video platform and enterprise service provider for real estate brokers and associations. We also made some key decisions and investments that helped to give us future growth opportunities in the space.
Focused on functionality for organizations: While most of the other online video platforms either continued to copy features from Youtube and Facebook, we invested much of the year with a focus on specific online functionality that can help organizations such as real estate brokers and local real estate associations manage their online content.
Made Real Estate Video Truly Local: Lots of online video providers talk about local video but dont have any real way to know the geographic relationships of their content especially if that content lies near the edge of a town border or a zip code. At Vidlisting, we really focused on expanding the capability of the geolocation functionality that we built into our platform in 2007 to be able to geotarget content and make the platform aware of what exists around a given property.
Consolidated And Simplified Our Online Content Management Tools: We had a lot of online that were scattered throughout different sites. We’ll consolidated all of our online real estate content management tools in the Vidlisting members area. We also simplified our online real estate video upload process.
Spun Off Our Video Platform: We knew that mixing general platform features and real estate oriented was confusing. We also have known that our platform is a platform in the truest sense in that you can build apps on top of it and has many there are many potential uses of the platform outside of real estate. For these reasons, we worked to remove all real estate dependencies of our platform and make it a stand alone online multimedia and marketing developer platform. Vidlisting is just another application that runs on top of the platform.
Expanded Beyond Video: Our platform became truly content agnostic this year meaning that the same cool and useful things that we were able to do with videos, we can now do the same things with PDFs, images, Microsoft office files, Youtube videos, Real Estate Shows, and web links.
Ended Our Branding Schizophrenia: We had too many brands that were basically doing the same thing. We finally settled on Vidlisting as the real estate video and content provider. Anything real estate related now falls under Vidlisting.
Real Estate Video Faltered Somewhat In 2008
While 2008 was a successful year for Vidlisting, it wasn’t such a successful year for real estate video in general. Real estate video started the year as a the big promise for 2008. In my opinion, the major virtual tour providers did a wonderful job of becoming the voice of video at major conferences and on social networks, co-opting the message, and diluting the benefits of a true video solution. The most visible video providers did little to provide a coherent counter message as to the benefits of video. We only have ourselves to blame for this.
Whats On Tap For 2009?
Continue To Improve Online Tools To Drive Traffic To Customer Sites: We dont view our job as driving traffic to the Vidlisting portal but rather to drive prospective buyers to our customer sites. Your brand and your leads will continue to dominate our thinking in 2009.
Bring Pay-Per-View Online Education Into The Real Estate Video Space: Vidlisting has partnered with the Educational Media Library which is a collaborative effort between the U.S. National Association of REALTORS (NAR) and Vidlisting’s parent company, MediaDev S.A. Vidlisting will be a partner site for carrying Educational Media Library content.
Offer Additional Marketing Research For Organizations And World Class SEO Capabilities: Real estate video should be part of an overall marketing plan. We’re bringing on additional capabilities to help brokers and local real estate associations evaluate existing marketing and develop/reshape future marketing initiatives. We’ll embark on a campaign to highlight the true benefits of real estate video within the context of an overall online marketing approach.
Expand And Simplify Local Content Tools: We are prototyping new online tools that will allow local REALTORS, community sites, businesses, and civic organizations to pool local content and even monetize that content in a way that is a win for everyone.
Grow Our Social Networking And Community Presence: We’ve started gaining a community presence in 2008 and we’ll expand that effort in 2009. One big step was consolidating our 4 english language blogs on the Vidlisting site. You can also follow me on Twitter (@Vidlisting) or Facebook. This blog hasn’t been as active as we would have liked in 2008…that will change in 2009.
Consider Select Acquisitions: We think that there are some growth opportunities for us through acquisition in the online space. We continue to consider acquiring select companies for either their technology or their membership to help achieve our goals.
See everyone in January.
Tags: , associations, real estate videos