In the 455 posts since I launched ViralHousingFix on January 4, 2009, there hasn’t been a longer gap than the one between Post 454 and this post, number 455: 11 days.
The workbook I use for my professional notes is chock full from the past two weeks, and the program I store interesting snippets in has a long backlog, but there haven’t been any posts.
Being busy with a lot of exciting developments at NCI is part of the explanation. Getting engaged in a personal writing project is another. But there are a couple of other reasons for the fallow spell that I think might be interesting to those of you who follow this blog regularly.
The first is that I’ve stepped back for a bit to see how things are going to turn out. Over the past 16 months, I’ve written and shared a lot of analysis of the economy and the housing market. The two big questions were exactly what the composition of the recession was and what the beginning of the recovery would look like.
Right now, we’re in the recovery and it’s a choppy and uncertain time. The macro trends have been positive, as a fairly random selection of charts picked from the blog Carpe Diem shows. Our business at NCI is hyper-local and consumer-driven, and our experience is showing us that while the recovery has settled people’s nerves, it is neither expansive or extended enough to dramatically shift consumer sentiment to the degree that households are getting reformed and the consumer’s near term outlook is upbeat.
That sense of stasis has diminished my urgency to write about economic trends. I don’t feel like there’s anyway to really project when consumers are going to have a baseline change in outlook. It’s going to happen. When it happens we’ll be happy about it, and a little surprised that we didn’t see it happening at the outset.
In a New York Times column, Jack Stack, CEO of SRC Holdings, Inc., summed up the current zeitgeist:
The funny thing is that despite their recent success, most of these folks seem reluctant to acknowledge that things have gotten better. Why? Well, I have two theories about that: one, people feel so burned by the last few years that they still fear a double dip — and they’re still waiting for another shoe to drop.
I think that’s a pretty good characterization.
A second reason for the dry spell on the blog is that I’ve been digging in on the learnings that we’ve developed around our DigitalSherpa social media marketing service over the past year. It’s been pretty rich and exciting, and part of an overall organization audit and assessment that we’re doing across the service.
I haven’t written about the things I’ve learned because there’s a lot to synthesize: the outcomes and experiences of more than 1000 client engagements. We’ve essentially got thousands and thousands of proof points around the power of content marketing on social platforms, the relative value of different types of engagement, and the impact that a consistent content marketing plan has on search traffic and referrals.
Some of the facts are fun for their sheer scale. For instance, we’ve generated more than 1 million social interactions for our clients in the multi-family space since launching CommunitySherpa last summer. Some of the facts are engaging for their business impact: one client has been able to cut more than $200,000 of search marketing spend because of the impact of the content marketing program that we’ve executed. (That $200,000+ savings is net of the cost of the program, by the way.)
When you man a blog single-handedly, you’re going to experience ebbs and flows. What you were writing about isn’t always what you are going to be writing about, and when you get to a juncture where you see a new avenue to explore, sometimes you just need to set back and sift through facts for a while.
The last three weeks have been partly busy and partly sifting time. Thanks for your patience. The one thing that has really impressed me is how strong the traffic to the blog has stayed. That’s because of the way that all of you have used the content — the sharing, the commenting and the reading. I appreciate it.
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The devastation in the real estate industry over the past three years has had a huge personal toll on the tens of thousands of people who had built businesses, and personal wealth, during the real estate boom. Real estate agents, brokers, mortgage professionals, appraisers, builders…all have seen their income plummet along with home prices and the pace of transactions in the market.
Over the past year, we’ve done a lot of work to be certain that we understand EXACTLY what value we offer our customers and how they can best use our products and services to be more successful. We’ve conducted controlled tests to determine how many leads — property-specific phone calls, e-mails and web visits — we drive for our advertisers. We’ve done research of past and current customers to understand what is working and what isn’t. We’ve done research of home buyers and home sellers in order to understand how they acquire information during the home purchase process, and why they pick one realtor over another.
A light bulb went off: A real estate agent should start by stating how much money they want to make, calculate how many homes they need to sell to make that amount and then decide how many buyer and seller leads they need to sell that many homes. THEN they should make decisions about how to market.
This week at the National Association of Realtors convention in San Diego, Scott and Todd are rolling out the work of their efforts.They ‘ve created a workbook with worksheets real estate agents can fill out in order to build a concrete and fact-based marketing plan.
