Vidlisting Blog: Web Real Estate Video

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.

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.

Adding Real Estate Shows (RES) to your Vidlisting personal media catalog is exceptionally quick and easy.  You’ll also benefit from the new catalog interface that we want to show off and use alternative media sources such as YouTube and RES if you have real estate video content stored there. For those that are interested in reading about how to add YouTube video, we’ve covered that over on our ForSaleByLocals video platform blog since YouTube has applicability beyond just real estate.

Beyond Real Estate Videos: How To Include RES In Your Personal Media Catalog

Once you’ve opened an existing personal media catalog (or create a new personal media catalog), you simply click on the button labelled “Add YouTube and RES”.

This button will bring you to a short form. You simply cut and paste or type the RES URL of the show that you want to add to the catalog. This is the only required step. Note that for RES we “automagically” retrieve Photo #1 from the show so it isnt necessary to upload a photo.

You can also optionally add up to 2 lines of titles and some text that will be shown in your video icon.  You can also geolocate your show which will allow us to potentially include your property oriented show when others search for real estate in the same area.

Now just hit the send button and you’ll see a representation of your real estate show in your catalog:

It’s that easy.  Once included in your catalog, you can just as quickly do interesting things with your icons that include creating group horizontal and vertical media widgets using real estate videos and Real Estate Shows for use in your blog or website. Up to 5 icons can be selected and included.

We’ve included an example of a functioning widget below and will have instructions in a future blog post on how to create them (hint: click on the media that you want to include and use the “Create Horizontal Video Bar” Button - it takes about 10 seconds)

Since the widget above is live, try clicking on any of the properties in the widget and the click will bring you directly to that real estate show.  Note: you can mix video and RES in these video bars without any issues. As always, contact us with any questions…