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Usually, advertisers try to appeal not to actual people, but to the people those potential customers would like to be. Whether the product is a car, a tube of toothpaste, or a new home, marketers want to convince people that their lives will be better once they've invested in a product or service. But in a relatively new trend, thousands of people are using virtual online worlds like Second Life to live their own ideal lives through avatars, effectively creating the alter-egos that advertisers want to target. "Although some people create avatars that look and act like their real selves, many people use the chance to be what they always wanted to be or at least want to try for awhile," says an article in today's Boston Globe.
Second Life and other virtual worlds can be incredibly vast, with communities that often mirror the real world. The content is created by the online residents, and includes a wide variety of virtual businesses and services (even real estate brokerage). Inevitably, real-world companies have taken notice, and have started sponsoring virtual events, setting up virtual storefronts, and so on. "...[A]s eyeballs migrate away from traditional forms of media -- television, radio, print -- virtual worlds offer a new way for businesses to inject their brands. And the interactivity is almost unlimited," says David Fleck, vice president of marketing for the company that operates Second Life. The possibilities of marketing to avatars and their real-world creators has even attracted the attention of the Harvard Business Review, which recently explored the topic in a lengthy article and a podcast. "Given the potential, marketers need to acquaint themselves with the phenomenon of avatars and to consider whether it requires a rethinking of marketing messages and channels," writes Harvard Business Review senior editor Paul Hemp. "...[C]onceiving of avatars and other online personae as a new set of potential customers, one that can be analyzed and segmented, provides a useful way to think about new marketing opportunities."
Zillow.com, Domania.com, and a host of other websites provide market value estimates and comparable sales for residential properties around the nation. The accuracy of the information they provide is a matter for debate, but now an academic researcher has weighed in with his opinion. Writing in the latest issue of the Journal of Real Estate Literature, University of Illinois at Chicago's John F. McDonald ran Zillow.com and four other sites through a series of experiments, looking up properties, changing various features, and so on. These experiments, says McDonald, "led me to some very tentative conclusions."
He found that Zillow can be good for getting basic price estimates, but "when you experiment by changing such factors as the age of the house, roofing composition, etc, some of those estimates seemed out of whack," according to a summary of his findings in the Chicago Tribune. "And Zillow clearly has a long way to go before it matches up with time-honored appraisal methods...." But taken together, McDonald wrote in his report, "these five sites can provide the user with a great deal of information quickly, and best of all, at no charge." Just be aware of what it is that you're getting. "It's only an estimate," he told the Tribune.
How does a large real estate firm ensure that all of its agents and brokers have equal access to necessary MLS databases, forms and documents ? With 70 offices and over 3,300 agents, Prudential Fox & Roach wanted to give its sales force a better way to find and use the tools needed to buy and sell properties.
They met their goal with a Web-based suite of applications that anyone in the office or in the field could use, according to a case study in the latest issue of the Journal of Cases on Information Technology. "The initial results are more than just 'promising,'" says the report: the new system made the transaction process more efficient, provided a simple system that even less technically-skilled agents found easy to use, and reduced agent turnover by 80%.
A few years ago, the growth of online shopping was a worrisome trend for many in the retail industry. With products easy to buy on the Web, the predictions went, there'd be no need for people to venture out to actual bricks-and-mortar stores. With fewer consumers patronizing the stores, there would be less need for retailers to lease or own retail space. The predictions, for the most part, haven't come true.
"Instead of killing stores, technology is reshaping how people shop, and merchants are luring customers online and offline," reports the San Jose Mercury News. "Customers don't just buy online, but also research products, compare prices, look for gift ideas and even map how to get to a nearby store...." According to the National Retail Federation, about 22% of in-store sales come from customers who first went online to comparison shop and research products. And the opposite also happens, says the Mercury News article: some people visit stores first to comparison shop before buying online. By adapting to their customers' needs, retailers have been able to make both their physical and virtual spaces essential stopping points.
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Power Tools on Technology, from NAR's Information Central, provides information on research studies, websites, books, news, tips, and other resources on technology's use and impacts on the real estate industry.
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