Monday, February 12, 2007

Inman features the bubble bloggers

Inman is running an interesting series on real estate bloggers who have chosen to write about real estate bubbles.

I think these business bloggers have been successful because they are writing at the intersection of the real estate business and the general public's information focus. People have been trained by the mainstream media to accept a real estate bubble as an important issue even though very few are real estate speculators and most have yet to see any negative home price appreciation. If you were writing a blog about capital requirements for mortgage bankers, you wouldn't get this kind of readership.

While this is a good way to use New Media to make a name for yourself, bubble your site to the top of the search engine listings and engage an audience you hope to sell to, it's gotta be tough for a real estate agent to make a lot of money telling people that the market is going to implode.

I like hearing these stories because it helps get the message across to business that these tools can be useful. When we read stories about bloggers attracting huge audiences, it helps marketing executives take blogs more seriously, because they've been trained to look for big numbers when it comes to media impressions.

In truth, it doesn't matter how big your market is if your product has a high enough margin and you can engage that audience effectively. I know mortgage loan origination vendors that can earn millions on a single implementation. Do they need to attract a blog audience big enough to get on the cover of an industry trade publication? Nope. They can be blissfully ignored as they use their blogs to move their customers swiftly through the sales cycle to the close.

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