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Tom Foremski:

We share a common belief that trust is an important currency in today's world especially in the digital realm.

Trust, we are taught, is hard won. It takes a long time to establish trust yet it can be destroyed in minutes.

But is that really true?

I've been looking at the Edelman Trust Barometer reports and it shows that trust in businesses, in media both social and traditional, in NGOs, in governments, jumps up and down by large margins from year to year.

I've been particularly interested in trust in social and traditional media. In the latest report, trust in peers, which represents social media, plunged by 20 points from 47 percent of those surveyed in the prior year, to 27 percent. Trust in other forms of media also fell by large margins.

Fascinating, though not really surprising given the amount of social media "spam" circulating around the internet. Useful, timely content and commentary will always add value. Spam clearly detracts.

Details here: 3MB Edelman PDF, website.

Roland T. Rust, Christine Moorman, and Gaurav Bhalla:

Imagine a brand manager sitting in his office developing a marketing strategy for his company's new sports drink. He identifies which broad market segments to target, sets prices and promotions, and plans mass media communications. The brand's performance will be measured by aggregate sales and profitability, and his pay and future prospects will hinge on those numbers.

What's wrong with this picture? This firm--like too many--is still managed as if it were stuck in the 1960s, an era of mass markets, mass media, and impersonal transactions. Yet never before have companies had such powerful technologies for interacting directly with customers, collecting and mining information about them, and tailoring their offerings accordingly. And never before have customers expected to interact so deeply with companies, and each other, to shape the products and services they use. To be sure, most companies use customer relationship management and other technologies to get a handle on customers, but no amount of technology can really improve the situation as long as companies are set up to market products rather than cultivate customers. To compete in this aggressively interactive environment, companies must shift their focus from driving transactions to maximizing customer lifetime value. That means making products and brands subservient to long-term customer relationships. And that means changing strategy and structure across the organization--and reinventing the marketing department altogether.

Brokers have a great opportunity to build AND own their marketing platform today, via a single entry system, blogs, a branded iPhone app and active cultivation of their clients via a pervasive CRM system, like Main Street.

Morgan Stanley's Latest: The Mobile Internet Report:

Our global technology and telecom analysts set out to do a deep dive into the rapidly changing mobile Internet market. We wanted to create a data-rich, theme-based framework for thinking about how the market may develop. We intend to expand and edit the framework as the market evolves. A lot has changed since we published "The Internet Report" in 1995 on the web.

We decided to create The Mobile Internet Report largely in PowerPoint and publish it on the web, expecting that bits and pieces of it will be cut / pasted / redistributed and debated / dismissed / lauded. Our goal is to get our thoughts and data into the conversation about what may be the biggest technology trend ever, one that may help make us all more informed in ways that are unique to the web circa 2009, and beyond.

Our key takeaways are:

Material wealth creation / destruction should surpass earlier computing cycles. The mobile Internet cycle, the 5th cycle in 50 years, is just starting. Winners in each cycle often create more market capitalization than in the last. New winners emerge, some incumbents survive - or thrive - while many past winners falter.

The mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.

Five IP-based products / services are growing / converging and providing the underpinnings for dramatic growth in mobile Internet usage - 3G adoption + social networking + video + VoIP + impressive mobile devices.

Apple + Facebook platforms serving to raise the bar for how users connect / communicate - their respective ramps in user and developer engagement may be unprecedented.

and, via Fortune:

"Apple has a two or three-year lead" according to Katy Huberty, thanks to an installed base of 57 million handsets, 100,000 apps and 200 million iTunes subscribers with credit card numbers on file. (She will keep her eye, however, on Samsung, Nokia (NOK) and Google's (GOOG) Android.)

But much of the presentation was spent showing, in slides culled from research over the past two and a half years, that the iPhone is not like previous mobile devices, and its owners not like ordinary cell phone users.

For example, although iPhone and iPod touch owners represent only 17% of the global smartphone installed base, they account for 65% of the world's mobile Web browsing and 50% of its mobile app usage (see chart below).

Key Virtual Properties assets to help you take advantage of the mobile explosion:

• Broker/agent branded iPhone app, Version 2 is now available.
• Fast, sophisticated mobile websites via Main Street CRM.
• Fixed price, Unlimited use mapping services for mobile, crm, iPhone app, routing, proximity search, demographics, map search and social networks.
• Professional still and panoramic photography for mobile devices and traditional computers.
• Real time data transformation for mobile services.

Robert Hahn muses on several topics in a recent post, including the possibility that 2010 may (finally) be the year of enterprise, integrated CRM*.

Now completing our 13th year of creating, supporting, implementing and improving our Main Street enterprise CRM [video] cloud software: from leads to closing and beyond, I thought it time to pass along a few decisive observations that separate the pretenders from those who sit forward in their chair and drive change.

First, any investment will only be successful if the organization has

• strong, consistent leadership,
• implementation and training staff who are interested in the business and know it from the agent, broker and consumer perspective (and are not interested in simply playing with technology to no avail) and, lastly,
• the right technology team.

In that order!!!



Main Street was designed from day one as a cloud computing, enterprise CRM platform for brokers and agents. From lead generation, lead management, agent and broker tools and analytics, marketing assets, VOW, websites, forms, closings/transactions and everything in between, Main Street provides a single entry platform to build your business, today and tomorrow.

Step one begins with a conversation to understand your business strategy and see if this proven technology can support those goals.

Lastly, "build to flip/sell/spin" is one of the many reasons brokerage technology is often an oxymoron. Too many technology schemes are simply built to spin/sell, rather than to solve real business problems. Virtual Properties is a family owned firm established in 1995.

If indeed, 2010 is the year of enterprise, integrated CRM, let's talk: (608) 271-9601 or zellmer@virtualproperties.com.

* CRM = "Customer Relationship Management". A system that allows you to manage and interact with all aspects of your customer relationships from leads to marketing/farming, CMA, reports, forms, transactions and concierge.

General Motors Vice Chairman Bob Lutz recently challenged drivers to take on the new Cadillac CTS-V at New York's Monticello racetrack. It was a publicity stunt all around. However, GM, to their credit, used all of the modern, internet marketing tools at their disposal:

• Promotion and commentary via their own blog: fastlane.gmblogs.com.
• Two car enthusiast blogs: Jalopnik and The Truth About Cars participated in the event and, of course blogged it.
• Commentary and links to media via Cadillac's Twitter account and their Facebook page
• Interestingly, on BMW, builder of the CTS-V competitor M5 revealed a one-off high performance M5 CSL.

The event was picked up by many media outlets, including Forbes and National Public Radio.

Props to General Motors for a very successful event and publicity campaign. This event cost far less than a TV or newspaper initiative and was, much, much more effective.

What is a "mashup"? According to this wikipedia entry, "In web development, a mashup is a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service."

Real estate brokers and agents may wish to take advantage of "free" internet api's (application programming interface). Websites such as flickr, facebook, youtube, yelp and many others offer programatic interfaces to their data and media.

What are the benefits of such API's?

• Aggregate local information around properties for sale or rent.
• Enhance your website "experience".
• Avoid the cost of collecting and managing local information.

What are the costs and risks of using such API's?

• Bad data. Automated information aggregators often lack local expertise. Information may be outdated; a long closed restaurant may still have a review on your website.
• Inappropriate content. I created a Facebook demonstration for a client some time ago. The resulting page included an advertisement for Filipino Girls.
• What motivates the data aggregator? Is their strategy aligned with yours?
• Does the data make your site more generic?
• Competitive stealth advertising on your site. Savvy competitors will figure this out and place their content on your site via the API's.

What are the alternatives to "mashups"?

Your agents have a wealth of local market knowledge. Hire or appoint a "blog-o-spondent" or "blogger-in-chief". This person creates and aggregates your own content (text, audio, video, maps) on your blog, around your website(s) and via appropriate social networks. Over time, agents and staff post directly and incorporate your listings, services and our unlimited use maps (for a fixed price). Create your own platform that emphasizes your brand. This approach improves recruiting, retention and internet marketing in ways that you control and at a much lower cost than traditional advertising.

Main Street reliably supports the tools you need, from blogs, dynamic short links, lead management, surveys and multimedia to market reports and live charting tools.

As always, there is no "free lunch".

View imageRichard Jalichandra. Mike Arrington summarizes:

Key points Jalichandra brought up - What's the no. 1 success metric for a professional blogger? What do successful bloggers have in common? The data was taken from a survey of 2,900 bloggers, conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland.

72% of bloggers are hobbyists, says Jalichandra, and blog for fun. They don't make any income from blogging, and only half hope to someday. They blog simply to express themselves. Of professional bloggers, only 10% blog 40 or more hours per week.

2/3 of professional bloggers are male, and 60% are between 18 - 44 years old. 75% have college degrees, and 40% have graduate degrees. Half have household incomes of $75,000 or more. 17% of them say blogging is their primary source of income. A whopping 74% of bloggers use Twitter, v. 14% of the general population. Their no. 1 use of Twitter is to promote their blogs.

Tim Bradshaw:

A boy lies on his back on a boardroom table in a high-rise office block in Toyko. He pulls out his Nokia, takes a photo of the setting sun - upside down - and sends it to his girlfriend in New York, where dawn is breaking. "Now I know we share the same horizon," says the voiceover. "My sunset is your sunrise."

It's a brilliant Nokia ad - the sort of simple, well-executed idea that agencies charge six-figure sums for. Only this one wasn't made by an ad agency - it was made by Hiroki Ono, a 23-year-old film student from Yokohama, Japan, who'd never made an ad before. The film, "Feel the globe", took just two days to make.

Hiroki's 30-second video was the winner of a competition run by Mofilm - a group working with film schools and YouTube addicts to find the best in user-generated content. Mofilm convinced companies such as Visa, HP, Best Buy and AT&T to "put their brands in the hands of consumers", as Nokia's head of brand engagement, Fiona Bosman, put it at yesterday's press conference at the Cannes Lions advertising festival.

Judging this contest was Spike Lee, director of Malcolm X and Inside Man and an enthusiastic supporter of user-generated content and DIY filmmaking.

I gave a version of this 14 minute talk at the 2009 LeadingRE annual conference without slides, in an effort to emphasize the fact that successful technology implementation (and ROI) requires strong, consistent leadership, the right people and technology partner, in that order.

The online version includes a few, simple slides.