Mediaboss Marketing

At every Inman Connect, I learn something in fact, I learn a lot about where the real estate industry is and where its going, what matters to smart agents and brokers, and how to be better at what I do.

And there are always moments where a speaker or panelist says something that just hits me between the eyes an idea, principle or practice that immediately grabs me with its clarity and obvious application.

Focused on marketing (my role in the industry), here are my top gotcha insights from this years Inman Connect San Francisco.

The attention-getting stuff is no good if you get to the real estate part and suck at it. Scott Stratten, UnMarketing

Keynote speaker Scott Stratten has built a highly successful consulting and speaking business around the idea of unmarketing: ditching obnoxious, ineffective and coercive tactics in favor of competence, service and genuine engagement.

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This, Stratten revealed, is how his own un-Realtor won Strattens loyalty.

He was immediately there and immediately killer, Stratten said. In other words, his agent wasnt just a good marketer. He understood the fundamentals of real estate prompt follow up, needs assessment, how to write an offer and executed with substance.

If your marketing isnt getting results, turn it off. Lindsay Listanski, Coldwell Banker

I camped out in Thursdays Marketing Intensive track, where social media expert Lindsay Listanski led off the afternoon with a simple proposition that so many of us fail to follow: if what youre doing isnt working, stop.

Many of todays marketing tools, such as Facebook ads, show results daily or even in real time. So the next time you kick off a campaign, monitor the results closely. You should see results within 24-48 hours. If not, switch gears.

Video is one of the most affordable marketing tools available. Lindsay Listanski, Coldwell Banker

Listanskis second gem was the assertion that high-cost marketing video is a myth.

You may have to pay a bit more for it in absolute terms, but the investment averages out to a measly 1 cent to 5 cents (yes, cents) per view. At those rates, you cant afford not to use video to grow your real estate business.

SEO is a long game. Bob Stewart, ActiveRain

Bob Stewart took the stage at the Marketing Intensive to talk about SEO and the importance of choosing a niche. His pearl of wisdom: different marketing options have different payoff horizons, so mix your methods accordingly.

SEO is a long game. Even if youre following best practices, it can take weeks or months to see any change in your search ranking. And you have to keep at it, year after year, constantly adjusting to fit changing algorithms.

Well-executed digital ads, however, can pay off in just days and are easy to change on the fly. Combine both to maximize your marketing impact.

On a fundamental level, we need to modernize the value proposition we present. Joseph Rand, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate

Consultant Valerie Garcia led one of the conferences smartest panels in analyzing the causes of and possible solutions to our industrys record inventory shortage.

Broker Joseph Rand, always a champion of professionalism and higher standards, recommended that agents weather the storm by bringing value both to prospective clients and to their own businesses.

His recommendation on the marketing front?

Get savvy with predictive analytics and other data-driven technologies to make sure youre targeting the right people before they decide to move.

Reverse-engineer the search process. Alex Wang, Sereno Group

Before Alex Wangs session on social proof, I could have defined the term for you essentially, its the tendency of humans to mimic other peoples actions and attitudes but didnt understand much beyond that.

Wang had a number of useful tips for attracting positive social proof (glowing online reviews) for your business. One was to google the search terms for which you want to rank, see which social-proof sites appear (Yelp) and make sure youre listed on them.

The other trick that caught my attention: see whos ranking for your preferred terms and copy their social-proof strategy. If it aint broke, dont fix it, right?

Dont confuse a homes story with the details. Katie Lance, Katie Lance Consulting

When youre marketing a listing, it can be very easy to fall back on the details: the homes size, price, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and hallmark features such as a pool or custom cabinets.

That, according to Katie Lance, is a dire mistake. Instead, remember that homebuying is a very emotional process. And the way you connect with buyers emotions is by showing what it feels like to walk in the door.

Dont do away with the details altogether, but keep them short and sweet and instead focus your marketing on what makes the house a home.

The digital ad is just the start. Andrew Fogliato, Just Sell Homes Inc.

Andrew Fogliatos session on paid advertising was packed full of usable ideas. Most importantly, he had the wisdom to point out that digital advertising isnt just about the ad.

In fact, the ad is just the most visible piece of a successful campaign the tip of the iceberg, if you will. The rest of the campaign consists of hidden elements that rise to the surface at various stages: a mobile- and conversion-friendly landing page, a signup incentive and automated follow-up emails.

Piggyback off big companies ad spend. Andrew Fogliato, Just Sell Homes Inc.

Fogliato also offered one of the best digital advertising tips Ive ever heard: when targeting ads, piggyback off the cachet and awareness spending of big brands.

If you have a listing near a dog park and want to market it to pet owners, for example, dont just target to people who like dogs. As Fogliato put it, Thats going to get you everyone whos ever liked a puppy video.

Instead, target people whove liked PetSmarts Facebook page. Sly, maybe, but sly like a fox.

Understand that buyers and sellers have experiences outside the industry, and those experiences set expectations. Charlie Young, Coldwell Banker

Whenever possible, I stay at Inman Connect through Friday morning, and speakers like Charlie Young are the reason.

Its easy to think of buyers and sellers as simply that, but Youngs comment was a wake-up call to remember that clients have an identity and a life outside the real estate process.

Theyre parents, husbands, wives, doctors, janitors, hikers, swimmers the list could go on forever.

To market to and serve them effectively, youve got to understand what makes them tick in their day-to-day lives and how those experiences affect the way they want to interact with you and the selling or buying process.

These are my top takeaways from Inman Connect. What are yours? Please share in the comments section below.

Kathryn Royster is the marketing director forHouseLens, Inc.You can follow Kathryn onTwitter@kathrynroyster. HouseLens is onFacebook.

Email Kathryn Royster

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10 ICSF marketing truths that smacked me in the face - Inman.com

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Social Media and Content Marketing Manager - Prolific North

Chinas crackdown on academic freedom has reached the worlds oldest publishing house.

Cambridge University Press (CUP) said it has pulled over 300 articles and book reviews on its China site from the China Quarterly (CQ), one of the most prestigious journals in the China studies field, at the request of the governments General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP). The news came to light after an undated screenshot of an email to CQs editorial board from the journals editor, Tim Pringle, went viral on social media today (Aug. 18).

According to Pringle, CUP complied with the request so as to prevent the shutdown of the entire CUP site. Most of the articles in question relate to topics deemed sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party, such as the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and date back to the 1960s, wrote Pringle, adding that CUP had received a similar request to take down more than a thousand e-books a few months earlier.

Yang Guobin, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is also a CQ editorial board member, wrote on social networking site Weibo (link in Chinese) yesterday (Aug. 17) after he received Pringles email: This is one of the most important international publications in contemporary Chinese studies, yet its subject to such restrictions This is unheard of. Isnt the Chinese government trying to promote contemporary Chinese studies?

James Leibold, an associate professor at Australias La Trobe University whose research focuses on Xinjiang, called CUPs decision shameful in a tweet.

CUP said in an emailed statement:

Freedom of thought and expression underpin what we as publishers believe in, yet Cambridge University Press and all international publishers face the challenge of censorship.

We can confirm that we received an instruction from a Chinese import agency to block individual articles from China Quarterly within China. We complied with this initial request to remove individual articles, to ensure that other academic and educational materials we publish remain available to researchers and educators in this market.

We are aware that other publishers have had entire collections of content blocked in China until they have enabled the import agencies to block access to individual articles. We do not, and will not, proactively censor our content and will only consider blocking individual items (when requested to do so) when the wider availability of content is at risk.

However we are troubled by the recent increase in requests of this nature, and have already planned meetings to discuss our position with the relevant agencies at the Beijing Book Fair next week.

We will not change the nature of our publishing to make content acceptable in China, and we remain committed to ensuring that access to a wide variety of publishing is possible for academics, researchers, students and teachers in this market.

China signed up to the International Publishers Association last year, and one of the bodys guiding principles is that of freedom to publish. The issue of censorship in China and other regions is not a short-term issue and therefore requires a longer-term approach. There are many things we cant control but we will continue to take every opportunity to influence this agenda.

Pringle didnt respond to a request for comment from Quartz. The School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where CQ is based, didnt immediately respond to a request for comment. Chinas GAPP couldnt be reached for comment.

A Chinese academic based in Hong Kong, who asked not to be named for fear of repercussions from speaking publicly, said the academic community was totally shocked by Pringles comments, and noted that there is a broad deterioration in academic freedom in China. What is more worrying, the academic added, is that the long arm of Beijings censorship apparatus is clearly extending beyond its own borders, citing the recent case of the detention of Feng Chongyi in China, a professor working at the University of Technology Sydney.

This story has been updated with comment from Cambridge University Press.

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Forced to comply or shut down, Cambridge University Press's China Quarterly removes 300 articles in China - Quartz

PayPal this week banned at least 34 organizations for promoting hate, violence or racial intolerance, including Richard Spencers group and others apparently involved in the Charlottesville riot. PayPals announcement mentions KKK, white supremacist groups or Nazi groups that have violated its acceptable use policy.

Its a private company (thats not yet regulated as a utility) so it can do as it pleases, and the Nazi/Klan creeps certainly arent going to evoke any sympathy. But as someone whos been at the receiving end of hate group smears, it would be good to know how such decisions are made. PayPals announcement notes that our highly trained team of experts addresses each case individually highly trained in what? Sniffing out heresy? (No one expects the PayPal Inquisition!) When PayPal goes beyond the objective standard of banning activity prohibited by law to banning those it simply doesnt like (however loathsome they might be), all dissenters are vulnerable.

PayPals highly trained experts havent yet targeted my organization, but Twitter has, albeit in a small way so far. You can pay them to promote a tweet thats already been posted, as a form of advertising, and here are three that we submitted for promotion that were rejected:

All three were rejected on the grounds of Hate:

They contain nothing hateful, obviously, but the common thread appears to be that all three refer to the costs to society of illegal immigration, and all three contain the word illegal two refer to illegal immigrants and one to illegal aliens.

When you look at Twitters Hateful content in advertising page, it looks like the very word illegal is indeed prohibited with regard to immigrants (as opposed to the U.S. Code, where its common). It mentions Hate speech or advocacy against a protected group or an individual or organization based on, but not limited to, the following including Status as a refugee and Status as an immigrant.

This is merely a nuisance for me, so far, but it does point to the broader issue addressed by Jeremy Carl in his piece on the homepage this week about regulating the big internet firmsas public utilities. Carl writes What is needed is not regulation to restrict speech but regulation specifically to allow speech regulation put on monopolist and market-dominant companies that have abused their positions repeatedly.

One internet company this week abused its position but at the same time practically begged for the government to step in. Cloudflare is a sort of middleman facilitator between users and the web sites theyre visiting. Because of the companys position in the infrastructure of the internet, its CEO, Matthew Prince, was able to simply shut down the Daily Stormer neo-Nazi website: Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldnt be allowed on the Internet. He explained his decision by noting that the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes, which they no doubt are.

But to Princes credit, he continued: No one should have that power:

We need to have a discussion around this, with clear rules and clear frameworks. My whims and those of Jeff [Bezos] and Larry [Page] and Satya [Nadella] and Mark [Zuckerberg], that shouldnt be what determines what should be online, he said. I think the people who run The Daily Stormer are abhorrent. But again I dont think my political decisions should determine who should and shouldnt be on the internet.

As Prince wrote in a blog post on the incident, Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.

The internet is now a utility more important than phones or cable TV. If people can be denied access to it based on the content of their ideas and speech (rather than specific, illegal acts), why not make phone service contingent on your political views? Or mail delivery? Garbage pickup? Electric power? Water and sewer? (I hope Im not giving the SPLCs brownshirts any ideas.)

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More Internet Censorship - National Review

Zhao Bandi's Night View includes the words China Dream, president Xi Jinpings signature propaganda slogan

On 21 July, the UCCA's director Philip Tinari posted on Twitter: While we're on the topic of the Beijing Culture Bureau (Bieber), see these #ZhaoBandi paintings they banned for import for our upcoming show, along with the original images depicting surveillance cameras and a neon sign saying China Dream. Part of the Uli Sigg collection, the works were not authorised to re-enter the mainland.

Surveillance is a popular subject matter for Chinese artists, from dissident Ai Weiwei to establishment yet incisively observant artists like Xu Bing and Song Dong. The China Dreampresident Xi Jinpings signature propaganda slogan for the first few years of his administrationremains as unavoidable yet unmentionable as Beijings smog.

Zhao Bandi's Scenery with Cameras was also censored

UCCA at least kept the party going by finding a creative workaround, and reproducing the offending works. They joined works from Zhaos early career including Nursery Rhyme, a 1994 and 2017 sculpture of a flower made of 10 RMB notes immersed in a vase of blood, and 1990s Butterfly of a woman posing for a photograph at Tiananmen, a year after that iconic location took on a heavy new meaning.

Zhao Bandi is best-known though for his incorporation of pandas, the beloved and adorable national animal providing cover for Zhaos social commentary. China Party includes his 2005 video One Mans Olympics, in which a toy panda toting Zhao runs as a torchbearer during a performance of an imaginary opening ceremony in Bern, Switzerland. Like the China Dream, the 2008 Beijing Olympics were ubiquitous in the state media but taboo to comment upon.

Though projects like his panda fashion shows are usually more playful than provocative, Zhao has been a bellwether before. His early series of public service posters, featuring him talking to his toy panda about locally delicate issues such as environmental protection, AIDS prevention, unemployment, and the dangers of smoking, signaled a new era of openness when they were allowed to be publicly displayed on Shanghai streets and its airport in 2000.

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Zhao Bandi's party crashed by censorship at the Ullens Center in Beijing - Art Newspaper