Welcome to ViralHousingFix.
Let’s start with the title. It’s a little random, it’s personal and it’s ultimately on topic — to some degree a reflection of how I imagine this series of postings will take shape.
My business is focused on a very specific area of the housing market: marketing. Specifically, how marketers in the real estate, rental, remodeling and home design markets generate demand among consumers for the services and products that they offer. You can learn more about my company at our web site, www.nci.com. We produce local guides to homes for sale (The Real Estate Book), apartments for rent (ApartmentFinder) and remodeling and design resources (New England Home, Atlanta Home & Lifestyles and more than a dozen other titles). We’re a local media company: all of our titles are distributed to consumers and are largely supported by our advertising customers.
Over the past year, in the midst of the greatest downturn in the housing market in the history of our country, I’ve been amazed by the innovation and resourcefulness I’ve encountered. Aggressive and smart marketers are looking for new ways to find business. They don’t have as much money, there aren’t as many prospects, and they are confronted with all kinds of challenges within their own business. But they are finding new ways to use old resources and new resources to protect their business.
As the year came to a close, I realized that I could make a contribution to my market by trying to capture and describe some of the best thinking that I was seeing as I travelled around our company, into large and small towns around the country. At the core, that is the motivation for ViralHousingFix.
The name, frankly, was settled on at the end of a fun dinner with my wife, after a few martinis. She thought we should reconsider it the next morning. The more I thought about it, the more it captures what I think about:
Viral–something that by its pure organic force inserts itself into organisms and drives forward;
Housing–the market that we develop media to serve;
Fix–something that you need, and need on a regular basis, to satisfy a deep, inner craving.
I’ll try to supply that, a fix for your curiosity, if your curiosity tends toward the way marketers use media, new and old, to build their business.
So, welcome to my blog. Please feel free to comment, and to offer up your thoughts about engaging and effective innovation in local media and marketing.
