Pat at Transparent Real Estate wrote today about Google’s new mapping functionality and pointed out how brokerages can take advantage of these tools to create some novel applications. One of the new functions is the ability to add customized markers. This allows site visitors to clearly and instantly understand what is being offered by looking directly at the map. Pat also believes that there should be more functionality in the infowindow itself. For example imagining clicking on the marker and opening a slew of click to action options such as chat, call and email. Pat has a great visual of what this would look like and we’ve annotated the idea with additional linkages to specific click to action pages here.
Why is this important ? Sometimes site visitors just want to talk or chat with a live person immediately after searching around the web for hours for information. Instant communication tools such as Meebo, Plugoo, and JAXTR allow exactly just that – the ability to instantly communicate with someone without having to wait for email or contact form responses.
Does this sound like a lot of work ? Well we’ve made it super easy! All of Realivent’s websites and blogs are now pre-installed with Meebo, Plugoo and JAXTR. All you have to do is copy your widget code into your site’s “CHAT” option page. Like this:
Also, you only have to do this once. For example, if you create 20 single property sites with us, then you only have to configure your page for the first site and we’ll do it for you automatically each time thereafter.
If you are listing your website anywhere where you want to give prospects the ability to instantly talk to you just point them over to your new communications page using this link: MYCHATPAGE
We just installed Google Translator on our sidebar. Now you can read our blog posts in Arabic, Chinese, French, Korean, Portugese, Russian and many more languages by clicking on the country’s flag. This is also available on all of our single property and agent blogs.
Why is this important ? Well first of all when we introduced our product in San Jose, CA the first comment was “this is a great product, do you have your product in Spanish ?” We didn’t have a solution at that time, but with more and more widgets now available for your websites, it was easy to find a solution. I recalled using Babelfish several years ago, but I could not find any widgets (a couple of months ago ) that allowed you to embed the translation tools directly on your site.
Check out your Meebo chat window today. Do you see that new “send file” icon ?
Here’s what it looks like:
This is a much needed addition which has been long overdue. I have been using Yahoo IM for a long time but quickly switched to Meebo after finding that you can have multiple chat windows open from several service providers at the same time. However, I always ran into situations where I had to shut down Meebo and switch back to Yahoo to send files. Now that this function is working with Meebo, there is little reason to switch back to Yahoo. One less thing to worrry about with all these new tools. Kudos to the Meebo team for finally releasing this enabling function.
I recently ran across Animoto, a new ultra hip slide show creation site which was reviewed at Sellsius the Real Estate Blog Lab and GeekeStateBlog. After seeing some of Sellsius's and Dave's creations I set out to mix one myself. Here's what I came up with:
This is an ultrafast and upbeat style tour which I would say would be the perfect tempo for homebuyers who are always on the go. The best places to showcase these tours would be in Facebook or Myspace. I have had a lot of experience with video editing tools such as Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, and Final Cut and I could put together these slideshows myself from scratch, but it would take me hours instead of minutes. This is where Animoto rocks! It took me only 10 minutes to get a slideshow produced and online. I even put it on our Single Property Website demo here. The production flow is simple and the rendering time is decent. Another neat feature is it allows you to upload your own soundtrack for further customization.
Pricing is not that bad either:
This was produced using the 30-sec version, but you can get longer shows for $30/yr.
Since this is so easy to create, you might want to make it anyways even if you already have another virtual tour created for your primary sites. This allows you to segment your market by showing different tours to different customer groups.
I have been playing around with Touchgraph, a cool visual analytics tool that can quickly give you the Big Picture of important sites recognized by Google for certain keywords. It also shows you visually the relationships between sites that link to each other.
The help section explains how this works:
"Searching for a keyword will retrieve the top 10 pages matching that keyword, and the top 10 similar pages for each of those pages"
I ran a series of queries on keywords that I was familiar with and the results are indeed visually accurate.
