Marketers Dabbling in Blogs: Real Estate takes a Big Leap

Steve Rubel reports on a Forrester Research report on dabbling in new media marketing.

Marketers and Their Plans:

* 50 percent use or plan to use blogs or social networks
* 47 percent use or plan to use RSS
* 43 percent go or have gone mobile
* 28 percent are doing or plan on doing advergaming or in-game ads

So what does this mean? It means whole new industries are looking at using blogs to connect with their audiences.

The Marketing Pilgrim says it's coming to Real Estate - in a big way.

The National Association of Realtors had several speakers evangelizing blogs as better at describing homes, a great market for hyperlocal information, and the next step for a typically conservative medium.

Speaking at the National Association of Real Estate Editors' annual conference last week, Professor Chris Roush of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill told the attendees, "It's time to embrace new innovations such as blogging and podcasting," according to Inman News. "Blogging is where real estate reporting should be headed," said Roush.

Blogging Systems' Paul Chaney attended and spoke at the event and discussed the use of blogs as a tool to provide hyper-local content to local residents. Roush also discussed this benefit noting that blogs can provide detailed information on specific homes in a way that classified advertising cannot.

The link also has a list of real estate blogs - a mini-community, as it were.

Here is a list from the Inman article of real estate blogs written by journalists, industry professionals and interested observers:

• The Matrix: http://matrix.millersamuel.com/
• The Real Estate: http://therealestate.observer.com/
• SocketSite: http://www.socketsite.com/
• Curbed: http://curbed.com/
• Curbed SF: http://sf.curbed.com/
• The Walk-Through (A New York Times blog): http://walkthrough.nytimes.com
• The Realty Gram: http://therealtygram.typepad.com/
• Property Grunt: http://propertygrunt.blogspot.com/
• Behind the Mortgage: http://www.behindthemortgage.com/
• Inman News blog: http://www.inman.com/blogger/bradinman.aspx

Imagine what happens when retailers, mortgage firms, and car dealers get ahold of this. Local blogging is going to explode.