No need navigate to Vidlisting because we are bring our functionality to wherever you and your customers are. We had planned on releasing this feature last week but we pulled it back for a week so that we could add more functionality (we listen to feedback from our beta testers!).
Here is an Active Rain exclusive preview of what we plan to release...look for the full release announcement on 19 May 2009 on http://blog.vidlisting.com
Within the next day or two, you'll be able to manage all of your real estate content directly from your Facebook account. Here is a preview of what you'll see when you add the Vidlisting Facebook app when its released on 19 May:
You'll have almost all of your Vidlisting member content management available right at your fingertips from within facebook. You'll be able to add content (uploading via Vidlisting and adding documents/web links/Real Estate Shows/YouTube videos as well as manage content already in your workspace.
You've made a significant investment in building your facebook community. There's no need to make publishing real estate video or document content hard - simply click the small publish icon to popup the above form, type in your comments, and click "publish". Your content is now in your facebook news feed for all of your friends to see.
The image above shows the video upload form that you'll use from within the Vidlisting Facebook application. Although uploading real estate video right from facebook has never been more simple, you'll have access to all your content regardless of where or how it was entered into the Vidlisting platform (any corporate branded upload form, converted from an email attachment, mobile browser upload form, or the regular Vidlisting real estate video upload form).
If you have content stored on youtube or Real Estate Shows, there is no need to reupload it to Vidlisting. You can simply add it by pasting the full link of the video or real estate show into the media link form field. Within seconds, it will be available to share from within facebook.
We'll also be adding the powerful Vidlisting syndication tools and corporate features in the version that releases after this one. As a result of this work, corporate members (and members of their corporate group) wont have to enter Vidlisting at all. They'll be able to perform 100% of their content management from their own branded tools on their website or from within facebook.
Hopefully, this shows why you won't need to navigate to http://vidlisting.com to take advantage of the Vidlisting platform. the version of our platform on facebook may well be the tool that you need to help you manage and syndicate your real estate content to real estate customers throughout the world.
Thank you to everyone that has been helping to beta test the facebook app. We have lots more functionality coming that will free you from our portal without losing any of the powerful benefits.
Tony
PS - we are available for building facebook apps if your real estate organization is looking for custom functionality in this area.
You have a cell phone or other mobile device that can capture video. You want to visit a property and take video. Imagine having the video automatically be viewable on your own website while you are still onsite after just sending a simple email.
What Vidlisting tools are needed to help you do this?
- Email video processing: This tool is ideal for mobile scenarios. You capture the video on your cell phone and send a simple email from your phone with the video as an attachment to process the video. The video conversion begins immediately and autiomatically when the email is received - there is no human intervention required. We've posted an example of email processing of real estate videos on our blog. Since it's just an email, this approach also works right from your computer as well.
- Custom Video Player Page: This is a optional video page that you design yourself in minutes and can easily add to your own website. You only have to configure the page once and all of your converted videos are automatically sent wherever you've placed it on your site. The converted video will not only automatically be viewable on your website but will also be automatically indexed by Google. Here is an demo video about custom player pages. The video actually plays on a custom video player page and demostrates just how quickly they can be configured.
This has to be the quickest, easiest, and least technical way to process your real estate video content and have it appear on YOUR website without any manual cutting and pasting.
Dont let anyone fool you - real estate video is advertising. As such, success in advertising is measured by a set of fairly concrete metrics - namely some combination of views, leads, and sales.
This post is an overview of the factors that contribute to those advertising metrics. By knowing the factors, you can then make informed choices as to how to best get the successful results that you need with a minimum of effort.
THE MODEL
Most people only think about and judge real estate video in terms of the flash video player. There is much more that should be considered as part of a successful real estate video strategy. I've included a slide that we've been using in our Business Value of Real Estate Video that gives a broad view of those factors. The training goes into far deeper detail than this blog post.
Each of the areas should be considered individually. I'll start from the bottom of the chart (that's you the real estate guru) and work my way to the top (that's the customer).
EXPLANATION OF THE MODEL
Creation/Receipt: This factor is all about the supported content types and codecs as well as ease with which new content can be brought into the system. The most supported types means more usefulness and less work for you. Can content be brought in from a mobile device?
Interaction: This factor is about the mechanics of organizing and manipulating the content within the system. The ability to flexibly organize and group content is key to being able to get in front of prospective buyers.
Collaboration: This factor is about the ease and effectiveness that others in your professional work circle can share content and communication among themselves or from the customer. The ability for other stakeholders to easily gain access to content and collaborate about it can increase the effectiveness of that content once it is public.
This factor is also built around communication back from the buyer. Collaboration in the customer context is key to the leads portion of the views=>leads=>sales cycle. Anyone else see the problem when the collaboration tools around lead generation point to your web developer or videographer rather than you?
Syndication: This factor is about the ease and breadth of making your content available to others. Automatic syndication is key here - the more manual the cutting/pasting, creation of podcast feeds, uploading craigslist ads, or moving of content in group networks is, the less time that you have to engage in your core compentency: finding new customers and selling them properties. Higher quality syndication tools leads to greater discovery of your content by well qualified buyers. Syndication is key to the views portion of the views=>leads=>sales cycle.
Discovery: Discovery is the first real customer facing factor. It isnt just about where customers are finding you online, it's about how they are finding you, absorbing your brand, and being brought into your fold. We believe that real estate agents dilute the investment in their own brand, SEO, and website when prospective customers consume content away from the organization's own website or Google indexes their content on a different site. Discovery is key to the views portion of the views=>leads=>sales cycle.
Presentation: This factor is the most visible representation of real estate video. At Vidlisting, we believe that the presentation of real estate content should be on the agent or brokerage website. You've made the investment there and search engine should be indexing you there as well. That said, the prettiest video player in the world is useless to you from a business perspective if it is never found or discovered by prospective buyers. If you think that features on a video player are important, ask yourself this question: "when was the last time that you DIDNT watch a video because of the player that was used on the site?"
Hopefully, this provides an starting point for thinking about how important your real estate video platform is as part of supporting the views=>leads=>sales cycle. If you or your organization wants a deeper dive into this topic, contact me at tony@vidlisting.com for online or classroom based training.
Tony Grey is a technologist and real estate video buff. His mission is to lower the barrier to real estate video by making deceptively powerful and innovative tools for REALTORS to use in their online marketing. These tools are in each of the above areas in this post. For instance, he just launched a way to upload and convert real estate video using email and has built a online real estate educational website on the Vidlisting platform collaboratively in use by the National Association of REALTORS.
He is available for consulting and speaking engagements on a variety of technology topics.
Before we answer that, let's understand what a platform is and how the popular term has been misused. A platform allows developers to build applications that take adavntage of the functionality built into the platform itself. Basically, if you cant build an application, website, or functionality on top of it, what ever you are using isnt a platform. Many companies start with an application and decide later on to try to turn it into a platform. This approach is hardly ever successful.
Your operating system is a good example of a platform. Internet explorer is a platform that actually provides a good part of the functionality that allows ANY windows application to quickly and easily connect to the internet.
But I digress..
Our platform is capable of supporting delivery of multiple types of content that has been located within any distance on a point on earth. Thats a pretty hefty capability that allows us have a rich multimedia feature set that does things that even youtube cant do.
In addition to real estate, we've been spending a lot of the past 2-3 months using our platform to solve problems outisde of real estate. This means that we now have a set of functionality that we can now find uses for within real estate.
Here are some examples of the benefits that this "outside work" brings to us:
- Web Developer Program: We've been working with web developers at our customer sites in an increasingly formal way. We've been working to quickly bring them up to speed on how to best interact with our platform. At the same time, their questions have driven many positive changes that now are part of the real estate platform. We'll soon be ready for a formal developer level as part of our paid membership levels at Vidlisting.com
- New "Out of the Box" Features: Our customers outside of real estate have different needs, viewpoints, and ideas for the online space. They've come to us with feature recommendations that frankly we never would have thought of. Example: a customer in the wireless space needed the ability to process video from an email attachment - our platform now supports that and will appear as a real estate feature in the next few days.We get so many changes from outisde of real estate that we often have a hard time keeping up with driving the customer driven features across the broader platform.
Stay tuned as you see more of these positive things transitioned from other industries into real estate use.
Tony Grey is a software developer and online media specialist working for a real estate video site that builds cutting edge real estate video and content solutions in multiple languages for use in real estate websites and operates multimedia-enabled websites for real estate brokers and associations. He just launched an Real Estate Educational Media Library website which is a collaborative online real estate education site between MediaDev, S.A. and the U.S. National Association Of REALTORS®. He also is focused on bringing a set of multimedia programming interfaces (APIs) to website developers through his online multimedia and marketing platform site.
If you had a customers looking for an important video of yours, how much content that they dont want to see would they have to look at?
Somewhere along the line, aggregation of real estate video content has been confused with choice. This was figured out long ago by the listing sites. On a listing site or even your own website, your customer in the market for a 3BR house likely would not have to wade through 1BR condos as part of their search results...and vice versa. So, why do we make customers wade through a giant unorganized pool of video content?
There is a phenomenon going on in these times where everyone wants to have a video strategy - property videos, profile videos, community videos, and the like.
Think of it this way, as the amount of video content grows online, how easy is it to transition from one of your videos to another without seeing everybody else's video content? since most video hosting sites bring Google searches to their own site instead of yours, potential customers that somehow found you via the search engines now have to again search through lots of video content to find more about you or your properties. This approach may well be in the best interest of your video hosting provider...but...is it in your best interest?
As you personally add content beyond a few videos, your customers can start to drown in your own content.
Be that person for a moment that is right on the verge of becoming your customer. You've found the perfect property, now how easy is it to learn about the neighborhood or about you as the agent? Does "choice" now mean that you as your own customer have to search through your other 25 videos in your channel, or worse yet, hundreds or thousands of other people's videos in some sort of network?
There is a set of customers that come to your site looking for the same thing on a regular basis. Figure out what those customers want and then provide it until they tell you that they want something different.
WHY ARE VIDEO PODCASTS TREATED LIKE REGULAR VIDEOS?
Every wondered about makes a video podcast different from a regular uploaded video? Sometimes the answer isn't that obvious.
Individual video podcasts are often thought of as chapters in a video series about a related topic. Podcast are intended to be streamed out as a series that your viewers can watch later. More often than not, the series is syndicated to iTunes or to subscribers using an RSS feed.
Quickly try to think of the podcast features of your favorite hosting provider?Do they even have any? or are they just treated like like a regular video that someone has to search for in a channel or "network"?
LOTS OF THIRD PARTY PROVIDERS TO HELP YOU MANUALLY CONFIGURE FEEDS
There are plenty of companies online that will help you manually identify, organize, and create a RSS stream for video podcasts. but there are two problems with this approach:
- It's a manual approach. Your time has value...and most required you to update with each video that is added to the feed. Never mind creating one, does everyone even know what a feed is? If not, what then?
- The individual video content is only related inside the newly created RSS feed. There is nothing that creates an actual link between the individual videos in the series in a way that doesn't involve RSS syndication.
A BETTER SOLUTION
What if there was a way to upload your video podcast directly into a podcast series that creates a tangible relationship among the videos (beyond just a captered title) and also creates an autoupdating RSS feed for iTunes and your subscribers?
As part of vidlisting's Month Of Code where we are releasing a new feature every business day in April, you'll have the opportunity on the evening of Monday April 20 to be part of the revolution that is changing how people think about online video content. Here is a brief preview:
Create Related Video Series: You'll be able to upload videos right into a new series that you create or have already created.
Create auto-updating RSS feeds: The series will "automagically" update two RSS feed for that series (FLV and itunes ready H.264) as well as a general feed that spans all of your series. You wont need to manually create a feed at a third party website. Just upload your video as a podcast. Once your video is finished converting, the Vildisting platform will blast the new video content out to subscribers. It's really that simple.
Display Related Videos In The Series on Website(s): you'll be able to group related videos even outside of your RSS feed. on Monday, you'll see how the vidlisting site and any of of your websites can automatically display the related video podcasts as part of the video being watched. The videos autoupdate as soon as a new video in the series becomes available without a feed being required. As a side note, Vidlisting members at te Developer and Corporate level will also have access to a developer application programming interface (API) that can work with the related videos as well.
OK...the title of this post talks about "enterprise" and "organizational". So far, we haven't talked about anything that is specifically organizational in nature. So, what is the organizational twist on Video Podcasting?
Other Org Members Can Contribute To A Podcast Series As Part Of Their Upload: This is an amazing powerful enterprise level collaboration feature. Now, you'll be able to make all, some, or none of your video podcast series available for video contributions by other members of your organization. They'll upload a video podcast as normal at our real estate video upload page or from within the Vidlisting member page. Using a simple dropdown box, they'll be able to add their video podcast content to any previously created podcast series across their organization for which they have permissions will be available for them. Just like regular members, they can create their own series as well. This feature will be available to all Vidlisting members of any membership level that are part of an organization created by a corporate level Vidlisting member.
Think of the possibilities here with collaboration on video podcasts uploaded from anywhere in the world. You'll avoid all of the manual issues with assembling, reconverting, and/or reuploading content in order to have it be part of the podcast series. These are just some of the ideas that immediately come to mind:
- Brokerages can have different agents in different offices relating video content about communities
- Local associations and real estate boards can have staff or members contributing their expertise to build podcast series
- Real estate portals can associate members in online groups with series and build group based podcasts or even build podcast series in multiple languages using local contractors to translate anywhere in the world.
I'm really looking forward to seeing your comments and thoughts on the concept both now and when the video podcasting platform features go live on monday evening. It's great to be in the Rain...
"Enterprise" is the one of the current buzzwords du jour in the internet space. Every online vendor and their brother is touting their enterprise features. But what does "Enterprise" really mean?
- Has An Output That Meets The Needs of Customers And The Organization: The outcome or results of interacting with enterprise software should help meet the information needs of Customers as well as the information needs/productivity needs of the organization and its partners.
- Is Organizationally Focused: Enterprise features should allow sharing and branding of content as part of simply using the system. When members of an organization interact with the feature, they shouldnt have to worry about changing the branding or implementing sharing. A set of business rules should cover the needs of most of the branding and sharing needs for the organization's membership. Ideally, an organization can license or self host a private version of the functionality on their own servers, if required.
- Remains Simple When Used In Volume: Enterprise functionality should be focused on delivering only content that is contextually relevant to what the customer needs. Many features that work well for individuals simply fall apart when used in a situation where more than a few people are sharing content.
A good example of functionality that doesn't work for customers but is often touted as an "enterprise feature" is sharing video content in a single channel or network. Imagine a real estate office that creates a channel or network and starts to upload 20-30 new videos per week. Unfiltered dumping of content into a channel quickly can become a mess for customers.
- Shouldn't Require Working With Website Code: After the initial implementation, enterprise software should handle all required code changes as part of using the system. When you only have a few people working in a business, everyone can have access to the blog or website code without issues. However, when many people potentially have to make even small changes to website code, the risk of a problem rises geometrically.
Imagine a large brokerage that implements a video strategy and then finds that they need to cut and paste an iframe or cut and paste HTML code into craigslist for for every property that they have. Yikes, there isnt anything enterprise about that.
- Simplifies Business Processes Instead Of Creating More Work: The costs of identifying and implementing enterprise software are ideally offset by the benefits that the organization receives. The use of the software shouldnt create more manpower requirement or continually distract employees from their core business because of the need for manual intervention. Content should just "show up" whereever and whenever it is required.
A example of a system that saves time and effort is Vidlisting's ability to upload a video right into a branded widget and/or right into a listing on the organization's website without any cutting and pasting in either case. The video content simply shows up with the right branding and in the right location.
- Allows Easy Setting Of Rules For Access Control: Enterprise content management system should not be public by default or accessible in any way if in a private state. The methid for changing access to content should have the capability to apply broad rules across thousands of pieces of content or focused down to one or two pieces of content. Ideally, the organization can also apply restrictions in specal cases that lower levels can't overturn.
- Allows Collaboration In A Way That Makes The Whole More Than The Parts: Enterprise content management systems add value to the content and allow organization's members to add additional value through colaboration. Vidlisting has released a virtual folder feature for instance that lets members share and collaborate on content (see the demo video ).
Hopefully, this post provides some things to think about the next time you read about enterprise features. If you dont have a large organization, enterprise features likely wont benefit you much. That said, enterprise features online do provide a powerful value-add and cost savings for organizations with enterprise needs. if you recognize any of the above as a unfilled need, that's likely you.
Tony Grey is a software developer and online media specialist working for a real estate video site that builds cutting edge real estate video and content solutions in multiple languages for use in real estate websites and operates multimedia-enabled websites for real estate brokers and associations. He just launched an Real Estate Educational Media Library website which is a collaborative online real estate education site between MediaDev, S.A. and the U.S. National Association Of REALTORS®. He also is focused on bringing a set of multimedia programming interfaces (APIs) to website developers through his online multimedia and marketing platform site.
So, you want have a listing on your website, blog posts about your listings, photos hosted on an online hosting service, video of the property and some documents on your hard drive that describe the property. How can you integrate these into your marketing startegy without having to hire or become your own web designer?
Click to watch the video
Vidlisting has rapidly become the most full featured real estate video site and has created a new tool that connects a very simple online folder in your Vidlisting member area with a video. Using only a few clicks, you can drag and drop all kinds of content into this folder and have it "automagically" made available to your video viewers. It works with many different types of content:
- PDF documents
- most Microsoft office files
- Videos hosted on Youtube
- Real Estate Shows
- Any URL web links (such as for hyperlocal blog posts, listings, or community descriptions)
- Vidlisting hosted videos
You can watch the 4 minute video demo of this amazing functionality to see just how simple the functionality is to use. Anyone can do it. Here is a quick summary:
- Add the content to be displayed to your member workspace (if not already there)
- Create and name a folder (if the folder you want dont exist)
- Enter the video configuration area for that video (by clicking on the small red circle on your video icon)
- Click on "Connect A Folder"
- Select the folder with the contents that you want tosyndicate or display
- Click the "Connect" button
That particular folder's contents will now be displayed with your video. It's that easy!
No more cutting, pasting, or adjusting HTML/CSS code. your content just appears where it is most needed by your buyers. Want to eliminate content - just drag it out of the folder.
Think of the marketing possibilities with a completely personalized set of documents, videos, and links for your buyers. You'll completely differentiate yourself from your competition - this features will work on your own website as well.
Everyone loves special occasion themes for various holidays. Did you know that you can design and create custom embeddable video widgets and apply them to all, some, or just one of your videos?
Since many people are celebrating Easter today, we've created a short 4 minute demo video that shows just how quickly and easily you can make a one-off Easter themed design for a video widget. The video isnt edited at all and is captured in real time. The possibilities are endless for you and your business as there is no limit to the types of designs that you can make using our system.
(Click To Watch The 4 Minute Video)
The custom widget design process is simple:
- Upload a video using http://upload.vidlisting.com.
- Register as a member and enter the Vidlisting member area
- Click on the workspace link and find your video there after it is done processing
- follow the instructions in the video
You can alternatively apply a design and your logo to youtube videos, Real Estate Shows, or documents that you have added to your member workspace. Be sure to choose "this widget only" for the scope of your design changes or all of your widgets will have the same design. Although we think that it works properly, please note that this functionality is beta - there may still be a bug or two in it.
Once created, you can embed the video player into blogs or websites. Have fun creating new designs and enjoy your Easter holiday!
EDIT: Just for fun, I'll change the design of the widget every time I answer in comments... :)
Tony
Have content on your hard drive that buyers need? Want a sneak peek at what we are releasing on Monday? see the 4 minute preview video of how you make documents available along with your property videos. You'll be able to syndicate your non-video content anywhere on the web just by dragging and dropping items into and out of a workspace folder...coming soon...
Tony Grey is a software developer and online media specialist working for a real estate video site that builds cutting edge real estate video and content solutions in multiple languages for use in real estate websites and operates multimedia-enabled websites for real estate brokers and associations. He just launched an Real Estate Educational Media Library website which is a collaborative online real estate education site between MediaDev, S.A. and the U.S. National Association Of REALTORS®. He also is focused on bringing a set of multimedia programming interfaces (APIs) to website developers through his online multimedia and marketing platform site.
All of us often wonder what the future holds for various technologies. Those that morph and adapt can survive - the rest will fall by the wayside. Real estate video in particular has unique needs that aren't being realized and forms the future of this niche medium.
Real Estate Video Needs To Expand Outside Of The Flash Video Player
Think about how you are receiving information today from a real estate video. The message is only contained in the video itself. If a site visitor chooses not to watch the video, you gain zero value from the player itself.
The future of real estate video lies in the ability of the flash video container to become of the overall message delivery. A video could then serve as the means of delivering a variety of content about the listing, about the community, or about local services that an agent ("YOU!") can provide. All of this can be delivered to a distant site and made available to the visitor whether or not they choose to view the video.
Real Estate Video Will Become Aware Geographically
If all real estate is local, the future of real estate videos means that a video has to not only know where the content is that is being viewed but also what is geographically close to the video. real estate video can easily become a true aggregator of local content because it knows what's around it (other listings, community information, local businesses, etc.).
The real estate video of the future will have common upload mechanisms that hared be shared by a given community. The content will then be syndicated and have value added by other local neighbors, businesses, local leagues, and civic organizations.
Real Estate Video Will Become Contextually Relevant Once Discovered
Your real estate video widgets will also become aware of how the site visitor discovered the widget. The widget then will become an way for brokers and agents to provide contextually relevant information based on the context of what the viewer is looking for. A properly built widget system of the future will even be able to recommend content that might be more correct for a given user.
Real Estate Video Will Become Far More Personalized And At The Same Time More Organizational
The design and branding of widgets will increase in importance. Widgets branded for a video upload site or a videographer will no longer meet the needs of organizations.
As the number of videos within a real estate organization grows, the tools to manage video content will become more enterprise oriented. Today, most sites upload videos into a very public video channel which when packed with more than a few videos is difficult to manage. Organizations will increase their demand for videos that remain accessible only when the organization decides to make them public or accessible to only a subset of people.
The example links are only what is happening in each of these areas. There is still much more work to do and a lot of companies are trying to add to the collective body of future progress. Please share any thoughts that you may have as to the future of real estate video in the comments.
Tony Grey is a software developer and online media specialist working for a real estate video site that builds cutting edge real estate video and content solutions in multiple languages for use in real estate websites and operates multimedia-enabled websites for real estate brokers and associations. He just launched an Real Estate Educational Media Library website which is a collaborative online real estate education site between MediaDev, S.A. and the U.S. National Association Of REALTORS®. He also is focused on bringing a set of multimedia programming interfaces (APIs) to website developers through his online multimedia and marketing platform site.
The blog and thinkpad of a real estate video professional. Topics include property tours, software development, advice about technology, consulting, and discussion of conceptual topics. All videos produced by vidlisting.com are produced with professional narration in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
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