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Know someone that has a Wordpress.com outside blog that wants to be able to embed custom video widgets there without having to upload the videos again to Wordpress?
Did you know that there is now a way to upload real estate videos and podcasts to a site and get access to code that works on Wordpress.com blogs or other blogging systems that block certain types of code without doing anything special? Our example is likely best demonstrated on a Wordpress.com blog: Click the above link to see the widgets in action on a live wordpress.com blog. The new widgets do the full range of things that normal videos widgets do - they report back the location of the widget, the number of times rendered, and the number of clickthroughs. They also autoupdate on the page when you change the title, photo, language of content, or the size of widget. Soon, we'll add all of our different non-branded designs. Let me know if this feature is helpful or not.... See Also: How To Help Your Visitors Preview A Video That You've Uploaded Cutting to the chase: as of today, you can preview any member video uploaded to our real estate video site by simply moving your mouse over the photo in the widget. Below is an example: (just move your mouse so that it hovers over the widget)
Creation of the video preview happens automatically as part of the regular upload process. The member uploading the video doesn't have to do anything special to make it happen. The video uploads and converts just the same as any other. The difference is in the widget that is created. Best of all? No more separate uploads of photos with your video. The example widget also demonstrates how easy it is to show "extra content" with your featured video. Within seconds, you can add PDFs, Microsoft Office files, Youtube videos, and even Real Estate Shows to your video widgets to help your prospective customers have the right information that they need to make a buying decision With membership, Vidlisting widgets also feature the following:
We also have a entire cluster of conversion servers so you never have the day-long (or more) waits that some other real estate video hosting services require. If you haven't tried us in a while, why not see the improvements that we've made at the Vidlisting Video Upload Site - you'll get all of the above plus you dont even have to register to convert videos. Let me know what you think... Tony We finally had time to come back and do more work on our local pages... We always intended for these pages to become a central point for local market reports and links about the community. Best of all, they are geolocated by latitude and longitude, so you don't even have to type in the exact city name or know a zip code to find the information. You can search for your own city or area using the below interface: (it may take a second or two..there's a lot of places represented) - a large number of cities have a local description (included in the RSS feed). Some don't - we'll be working to remedy that in coming development cycles. - We've highlighted local market reports at the top of the page (included in the RSS feed) - If you have members of the Vidlisting social network in the area, you can see their profile information on this page (to be included in the RSS feed next week). Their information will also soon be optimized for searches in other languages as well. Examples with members: (or if there is a bug for some reason in the search tool) http://forsalebylocals.com/localdata/m/english/united+states/ca/beverly+hills http://forsalebylocals.com/localdata/m/english/united+states/va/charlottesville http://forsalebylocals.com/localdata/m/english/united+states/fl/miami+shores - We'll include links to locals blogs and local pages listing sites The basic RSS feeds are live now...we'll be expanding them over the coming days Feel free to leave us feedback especially if you see things on the page that we need to clean up (we've cant look at every page every day). We have lot planned for these pages and every week keep tightening the integration among the various elements of our content platform. Thanks for joining us for the start of the ride, Tony They were out there in Blogosphere...apparently long before us. We were new and hungry...and we asked, "where should I go? What shall I do?" and they answered. And with this newfound knowledge, we did just what we were told, each and every word savored as if we'd never before had our fill of such real estate filled flavor. We began thinking as the thought leaders told us to think. "Try this site, use this technology, read me more", they said...and we gladly did for we knew that there would be rewards for our allegiance - a hat tip, a comment, or a backlink. We did so without knowing a thing about the politics, the blog packs, payola, or even if they had actually tried what they recommended. ..and as more joined them, the recommendations came faster and stronger. "You MUST do or try this", "you MUST be local (so as not to compete with me)" and even "Ignore the old new thing from now on; here, here is the NEXT new thing", they exclaimed. And even though our online choices became greater and the size of the accompanying subscription buttons became larger, we sat in awe as we caught glimpses of them again and again at events, webinars, and listened intently to podcasts and internet radio ...and, as always, we followed. Then, one day, they all raced to be the first to tell us about a new way to consume their wisdom, Twitter and Friendfeed...and how our business would change as a result and how they would have another way to pass us the information that we didnt even know tat we needed... ...and like good soldiers, we again blindly went forward... but there...there amongst the waxen characters typed no more than 140 at a time and against a pearl backdrop of instant response, custom RSS feeds, and friends outside the echo, their wisdom may have only brought us to the point of discovering that we didnt need them so much after all.
Tony (a reflection post to mark 200 posts on AR) I've made a blog post out of a response to a comment on another post: The Comment Here's where most people in the industry miss the mark when it comes to video compared to virtual tours:
Video can truely be an investment in advertising rather than an expense if produced right and with maximum and effective use of the portability power. And sorry, but this is kind of sore spot for me right now in this industry.
My response:
BW: I agree with you and disagree with you on several points. Point 1: The REAL power in video is the portability. Completely agree with you that the power is in the portability. We've been preaching that very message consistently since 2006 when the few other real estate video companies seemed more focused on twirling ceiling fans as the main draw of video. I'll even extend your thinking to add that the power is in portability while maintaining branding regardless of medium. That said, the cut and paste model of online video is and has been one of the most limiting factors to developing effective portability solutions. The tools for taking advantage of branded video portability aren't the best - current tools focus on the video rather than the marketing. This is where we are focusing our efforts. Point 2: Video is the preferred media source for internet users. Disagree. Please know that even though I own a real estate video company, I'm neither optimist nor pessimist -just a realist. It'd be pretty hard to legitimately argue that text and images aren't the preferred media sources on the internet. There are plenty of arguments to convince agents to use video in their marketing plan but I'm not sure that any of the ones that mentions would be compelling enough to overcome objections to the costs. My point isnt to tear you down here - it's to say that there are simply more compelling reasons out there. For example, subpoints #2.1 and #2.2 have little to do with home buying behavior - just like in real life, what people do for entertaiment may have little correlation to the things they do when buying a home. Point 2.3 can be used to support any form of media on the internet - tell me again why this is a more compelling reason for video? You wont sell much video simply because it's video....the medium has to be able to stand on its own two legs as a means of cost effective advertising. Point 3: Format and quality are the biggest problems. I agree in concept but disagree with the proposed implentation 3.1: REALTORS have to be in front of the camera. I think that point #3.1 shows one of the bigger problems with the real estate video industry and to some extent with many of the supporting technology providers - many of the video providers look at the real estate space from a technical standpoint and essentially dont understand the home buying process. Why would would we introduce the selling agent as a factor in the house buying decision process when they are a person that likely will have little to no meaningful interaction with the buyer? People naturally judge what they see...thats why TV is filled almost exclusively with "beautiful people". By removing the agent from the property video, you're allowing the viewer to make judgements only on the property rather than the property AND the agent. The potential downside here far outweighs any upside in my view. 3.2: Keep interest by being yourself Wouldnt keeping interest via good editig and tight copy for the property be better? As a friend of mine always says, Coca cola wouldnt be nearly as popular if it was marketed as a brown bubbly liquid. Can you see how that may appear that video providers are using the agent in front of the camera approach as the path of least resistance and an excuse to not have to really work on sound production value? This approach shifts responsibility for the success/failure to the agent who normally isnt the expert in this. 3.3 Slideshows are not videos in other news, a Chevette isnt a Lexus....but both might get you to work and both appeal to market segments for different reasons. Once again, there are plenty of valid reasons why video might be more effective than slideshows but arguing this from a purely technical perspective simply isnt compelling. I'd ask you to rephrase this into "slideshows are not as effective as video because..." Hint: the rationale that follows the "because" should be compelling enough to have folks shell out real dollars as the price of virtual tours gets commoditized to near zero. Once you've done that, then you can build a real business around real estate video. Marketing dollars are attracted by the effective and compelling - the industry in general needs better arguments. 3.4 Blair Witch - With anyone and everyone hanging out their shingle as a real estate video professional after buying an HDV camera, there are plenty of professionals that could use the same advice. 3.5 and 3.6: Competely agree. You can get by with crappy video if you have solid audio. The best camera and tripod in the world wont save a video with poor sound quality. 4. Plan where you are putting your video: Put videos where buyers are. This is likely the second biggest problem with the real estate video industry - there is a fundamental lack of understanding around advertising and the metrics that your customers are using to measure success. Look at it this way, the most known player in the US real estate video industry as of today STILL doesn't have any sort of real statistics reporting after 3 or more years in the business. That's just crazy. How can real estate video be viewed as an effective advertising vehicle when the metrics and, more importantly, the results from using it arent analyzed? I still read comments from providers that believe that 200 video views is effective despite a several hundred dollar price tag. Property videos are advertising and therefore need to be evaluated on their effectiveness as such. The problem here may be that many providers know this and perhaps dont like what they see. We like what we see enough to routinely publish our customer results with using real estate video. 5. About Me Video: Agreed. It resolves the honesty and integrity issues that you mention above but in a forum separate from the property video itself. We have long been proponents of this approach. We at Vidlisting have added a way that you can include profile videos on the same widget as a property video - those that use it seem to like the feature. 6. Tips - about video? home buying? Is this something that the agent should do themselves?
Most online forums in the real estate video space focus on hardware, editing, and the technical side of video. Our Facebook group is shifting the focus of the real estate video discussion to marketing and discussing many of the points that I've brought up above. If you are a Facebook member, please consider adding your thoughts to the conversation at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=35098378273 on a longer term basis than just this blog post.
Tony
See Also: - Video Views: A Measurement of Correct Content In Front Of Interested Buyers - Understanding The Real Estate Video Space - Why Arent Video Channels More Like...Well..Channels? - Why Are We So Attached To The Youtube Model To Distribute Real Estate Video?
Did you know that real estate video companies occupy different market segments and actually involved in helping you in different ways? We've sat down and segmented the real estate video market below. While not definitive, it does provide a beginning framework so you can better understand the types of services that different companies provide and understand the general real estate video space a bit better:
- Video Content Producers: These are the people that actually film, edit, and/or produce real estate video. Content producers can be companies or people that work independently on a full or part time basis. Their services can involve manual or automated conversion to online formats. Content producers can be video professionals or producers of virtual tour/slideshow content that is later converted to video format. Content producers are increasingly involved with simple manual distribution to free video portals or aggregators but their standard services may also end with the production of the video content itself leaving the customer responsible for conversion to an online format and/or online marketing of the content. Examples: http://nashuavideotours.com or http://mlbroadcast.com - Video Portals: Video portals exist for mass consumption of video. The intent of the video portal is to drive traffic to a given site and keep those visitors there. They almost always have an automated infrastructure to convert and widgetize videos. Widgets from these services are normally branded for the service itself to drive visitors back to the content site or the user's channel. Portals generally provide no direct assistance in the marketing of video content beyond the capability to organize content into user channels, embed portal branded widgets in other sites, highlight certain videos on the portal, or provide some SEO benefits for video content directly hosted on the portal. Examples: http://youtube.com or http://vimeo.com - Real Estate Video Content Aggregators: Content aggregators are similar to portals in that they exist to drive traffic to their own site that consists of groupings of real estate video content. Like portals, content aggregators often manage content using a channel model and have an online conversion capability. We should note that our best informed guess is that at least one aggregators in the real estate space might be actually converting videos manually based on published complaints indicating waits of up to three days for video conversions. One difference from portals is that content aggregators tend to focus far more on providing information, community, and tools for content producers rather than the general consumer. Content aggregators may also provide a more personalized value added syndication for highlighted content using email, blog posts, press releases, etc. Aggregators generally have little or no responsibility/control over the production values, schedule, or work of the contributing content producers. In some cases, this can lead to a great variance in quality from video to video. Examples: http://wellcomemat.com or http://mixpo.com - Real Estate Video Agencies: Agencies represent groups of content producers on a regional or national level. Agencies may subcontract none, part, or all of their content production. Like portals and aggregators, the agency may have an internal capability to convert and manage video content or may leverage outside portals/platforms. The key difference between agencies and aggregators is that agencies generally have a common production value regardless of location and customer support for content production, hosting, and distribution is usually centralized. Agencies generally provide a wealth of value-added real estate video services and packages. Examples: http://agentcasts.com or http://rexnet.tv - Real Estate Video Syndicators: Syndicators are generally focused on providing lightly branded and white label video platform and distribution services to organizations and web developers. These services are most often focused on providing tools that help companies enhace their own capability to manage, brand, and distribute their multimedia content. Syndicators may also consult or train on the best methods for organizations to develop a real estate video strategy. Examples: http://Vidlisting.com or http://forsalebylocals.com (online multimedia tools for web developers) -------------- Hopefully, this article helps you think about and understand the real estate video space a bit better. We'll likely update this article at some point in the future based on feedback that we receive about the space. Tony You've done all of the SEO stuff that the gurus talk about. Lots of people talk about the "help search engines find you" part of interaction with website visitors. Far less people talk about what to do once the visitors arrive. It only makes sense that visitors come to your site looking for something since they are using search engines to find new content. That visit may be the first and only time that they visit your site and that "something" they are looking for may still be posted but now resides on a different page or mixed in with other content that isnt necessarily relevant to what the average impatient usrs is willing to search through. Additionally, all of us only have a fixed amount of real estate on our website's home page. We have to make the most of that page without having to worry about a dozen other anding pages that also can grow stale if not managed actively. Imagine being able to filter from all of your content in order to be able to suggest content to that visitor using a simple and easily maintainable set of tools. We've written before about being able to change automatically select real estate content when we already have an idea of what they want.. These previous posts may help provide more understanding for this article. Visitors want to see the things that they search for. In order to present the right things for the visitor to see, you have to be able to guess the contextual needs of the visitor. Search engine results are one of the more authoritative ways to establish a visitor's context because you know exactly what they are looking for so we are taking the searches and presenting things that likely match what they want. An Example From The Visitor's Perspective
Let's play the visitor for a second. We'll use Google to look for real estate information on Marietta, GA. So, for the purposes of this demonstration, we'll enter "Vidlisting Marietta" without the quotes. You'll see the normal set of search engine results (you can see them live here so you try this demonstration yourself)
To make things easy, we'll click the search engine result that goes directly to the vidlisting portal main page as shown in the image above.
Above is what the visitor will see when they land on the Vidlisting main page. It's already different from what the visitor would see on the normal real estate video home page. A special interface is shown to the visitor that highlights two property videos and a PDF file which has the title of Market Report. What?!? There aren't any PDF files on our video portal and the word "Marietta" isnt even in the title of the Market Report...but it shows up because it is content that is contextually relevant to the visitor's search. You can get a wider range of search result values using other terms such as "Vidlisting Panama" for comparison. Where Is The Other Content Coming From? We view our role as the providing the best and easiest content syndication and dstribution tools anywhere. Our real estate social network has become a sort of online workspace for managing and syndicating marketing materials. We've set up the vidlisting portal to show any shared content within the social network that matches search criteria. Making content shared is as easy as a single drag and drop. Once shared, your video content and documents are instantly syndicated to a variety of online places based on its context....all with a single drag and drop. Web Savvy REALTORS and Videographers Can Put This On Their Own Site You may be thinking right now that this is moderately interesting except you'd prefer to have your own content showing on your own website. To meet the needs of those wanting this capability on their own site as well, we've just released a web developer API (GetContentFromWebSearch) that can give you the data you need to put your own documents and videos on your own web site or choose from the body of content available across the platform. The API also saves a full report of all web searches made that is acessible via the real estate social network's control panel. The result of this is that in just minutes, you can have content from your own site searchable on other websites and make the content that visitors want instantly available to them wthout having to crete a series of special landing pages. Give the demonstration a try yourself and let us know what you think...we have lots more coming in this area.
Video Case Study: Analysis Of Video Views To Sales Data Over A 6 Month Period For A Typical Real Estate Customer Overview A real estate customer contracted Vidlisting to produce, host, and distribute up to 13 real estate videos in English, Spanish, and Portuguese highlighting different real estate developments for sale to buyers and investors. The customer wanted to have these videos be available on their own site and accessible via both the home page and the listing description page for the property. Prospective buyers that clicked on videos within the client site were redirected to a customer branded player page within the customer's online domain. The visitor never had to leave the customer domain. Vidlisting handled all of the configuration, administration, and bandwidth for content shown on this page. The customer also wanted to take advantage of the Vidlisting distribution engine to send the video content instantly to real estate listing portals throughout the world. At the customer's request, certain properties were distributed only to a subset of the available distribution list of portals that in some cases did not include the Vidlisting site. Distributed video selected by a visitor on another portal played on the portal's own branded player with contact information back to the original broker. (we've since released a better way to ensure communication back to the agent) The customer agreed to ask buyers where possible whether or not they had viewed the videos online. Setup Vidlisting prepared the branded widgets to the customer's specification within two days of project start. Setup of the custom widgets took approximately 2 hours to install and configure three sets of widgets on the customer's website and prepare the content for distribution. These widgets were as follows: • Home Page Widget With A Rotating Set of 5 Properties : This widget randomly selected 5 properties to highlight right on the customer's own home page. • Listing Description Widget : This widget was for a given property and had a link for the three languages in which the property videos were professionally narrated. • Player Page Widget : This widget provided both the video and related video choices from the same brokerage. It also kept track of the total number of video views for the respective listing regardless of source or video language. No other preparation was needed. Results Video Views : In the first 6 months, the entire set of development videos generated 74,584 total video views across all languages, sites, and properties. Of the total, 2032 video views occurred on the customer's site . We know from our internal data for this customer that approximately, 1 in 5 property video widgets displayed resulted in a video being watched on the customer's own site. Between 50% and 55% of the video views resulted in a video being watched through the end of the video. Sales: 24 units across the various developments that were sold during the period indicated that they had watched at least one video online before visiting. Over half of those purchases involving video were to buyers that did not speak the broker's first language as their own first language. Note: The total number of units sold during the period or comparison data from other years would have been helpful but was not provided to us. Analysis • Approx. 1 in every 3000 video views may have played some role in closing a sale . We are still collecting data on an ongoing basis but my "spidey-senses" are telling me that this is probably around the right number. Here's a thought: If you aren't getting 3000 views from your current video service, then chances are high that your video isn't generating sales either. The vast majority of views were generated on real estate listings sites and more likely to be prospective buyers. None of the videos were further uploaded to Youtube or any other video hosting sites. • Cost per video view ranged as low as 6 cents for one particular develoment to a high of just over 12 cents per view depending on the property for the 6 month period . This included all costs for a given development plus a % of the common costs for the project (including a bit of custom programming work). Had the customer only depended on their own site to generate video views, the cost per video view would have been between $3 and $4 per video view. Given the average of 500 video views or worse for properties posted on Youtube and competing real estate video providers, the cost per video view may well have exceeded $15 per view. • The broker's original plan was to start with 8 developments. They added more when other area developers asked to be included. Disclaimer: Except for the video view data, the above information is provided on an "AS-IS" basis for comparison purposes only. It is presented to you as it was provided to us from the customer. It may or may not be accurate and your video performance totals on ours or other video hosting providers may be differ upwards or downwards. Why Don't More Organizations Self Host Their Videos? If you think about it, there are a number of things that real estate video upload companies like Youtube or others dont do well. It seems that you always have to deal with their branding and their requirement to cut and paste content. This works for a few videos...but is this really an efficient method for organizations to manage content? Let's say that your brokerage or local REALTOR Board wants to host property videos on their own web server for their agents that have flip cameras, video capable iPhone, or other traditional video cameras. The agents can be located anywhere and the board doesn't want to have to hire a full time video professional to manage conversions or cut/paste video embed codes. What now? Using a Automated Video Conversion Widget
Vidlisting (via the platform provider ForSaleByLocals) has just released two possible solutions. One is a small, personalizable web form widget that you can place on any page and will let your team of REALTORS upload a video, convert it into any or all of 6 video formats (swf Flash, flv Flash, wmv, iPhone ready MP4, Quicktime MOV, or mobile 3GP) and automatically send the converted video files to a directory on your organization's web server.
Using An Video Conversion API in Your Web Pages or Custom Apps The other solution is a web based automated video conversion application programming interface (API) ideal for real estate web developers. Using the very simple API, you can now convert video programatically just by using a simple URL. You can even override your own preconfigured defaults when needed. The complete technical documentation for the video conversion API is available as well...note that the documentation is for technical users that have a basic knowledge of programming or scripting languages.Conversion Is Fast And Safe Unlike some real estate video companies that often have waits of several days to process their video, Vidlisting has a cluster of dedicated video conversion servers. Files are sent to the first open server and processing of multiple video files can happen in parallel. Best of all, we take care of of inspecting the uploaded video files as part of the upload process so that only valid video file are processed. We also maintain a wide range of video codecs that often make video conversions from different sources difficult. Preconfiguration for the FTP process takes seconds and can be accessed via the FTP Configuration menu item on the Configuration menu at http://social.vidlisting.com What Are Some Other Possible Uses Of These Features? - Use the widget to collect video from participants of a special event or conference in a standardized format for inclusion on a blog or webpage - Include the widget in the sidebar of a hyperlocal website for a given neighborhood or area. Allow the neighbors and local businesses to upload video content that ends up on your webserver in a common format and known location (no more trying to keep up with different youtube channels) (h/t to Jim Duncan) - Build a web app or iPhone application that lets users convert video, FTP it to your own server, and display it on your own webserver after conversion. Let me know any thoughts you may have about this service. Tony Summary of Recent Changes To The Social Network The speed of geolocating members and properties has been a source of complaints for some amount of time. Based on feedback from our customers, we've made major speed improvements on the interface where you can geolocate your member profile or your video content at over 80 countries over at http://catalog.vidlisting.com. The geodata that we have is extensive. Before the performance improvements, you had to wait as long as 30 seconds (which is an eternity in internet time) for our system to return town level data and latitudes/longitudes. Now, with the improvements, we are generally under one second from both our offices in the US and in South America. Of course, the network speed is a big influence on how fast your data is returned as well. If you've been and our site before and were disappointed with the wait, go ahead and try itagain ... What you dont see is that data point for every contry has an associated lat/long that the system can easily associate with you video or with you. This means that others looking for your content dont have to exactly match the town name or zip code in order to discover your content. We are still working to improve both performance and quality of the data - the state of California returns over 5000 datapoints and still takes just about two seconds which is far better than before but still not good enough. Let us know if any countries or states dont meet your need for speed. Keep giving us feedback - your functionality will keep improving at http://catalog.vidlisting.com as a result. Tony |
A. Grey | Vidlisting.com| Real Estate Video Mentor Bremerton, WA More about me… Vidlisting.com Office Phone: (360) 362-1032 Email Me
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.
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The widget can be completely personalized including the ability to choose beween a standard size and a "sidebar" size that fits in the sidebar of wordpress blogs. You can also choose colors and even input a custom background color for the widget. You can also password protect uploads if you like so only those users with the password can upload files via the widget.
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