In an effort to improve your ability to marketing ability to market your services and properties online, we’ve been doing some experimentation with concepts around hyperlocal information.
The driving question is how can we better integrate the set of tools that we have inside and outside the real estate social network (a relatively content agnostic multimedia platform, geolocation engine, SEO capaibilities, Dynamic RSS capabilities, and our social network) to help you gain new business in ways that other tools don’t.
One idea involves a return to our roots. ForSaleByLocals was originally intended to be a hyperlocal online sales platform for products and services. We especially wanted to be able to add structure to relatively unstructured data. We define “relatively unstructured data” as being primarily free text with some textual clues as to location. Being able to automatically add such structure might be a potential way to overcome the “ghost towns” that many hyperlocal sites suffer from. We’d also like to be sure that there is a hyperlocal feed that isnt just based on town name or zip code to help real estate bloggers find hyperlocal information that applies to them.
Also, part of our thinking is to combine all of the existing FSBL online capabilities into a multifaceted online platform that together go beyond the best advantages of each individual capability. We’ve started a demonstration of our thinking but it still needs some database performance optimization (translation: still slow). Below are some examples of what we are thinking:
http://forsalebylocals.com/localdata/M/english/United+States/FL/Orlando
http://forsalebylocals.com/localdata/M/english/United+States/VA/Charlottesville
The demonstration should work for most places in the United States. Part of the demonstration is also looking for ways to test easy ways to access and format results. The link format is easy – URL/localdata/units of measurement (M Or K)/Language/Country/State/City (Note: Any spaces in country names or city names must be replaced with a “+” ). We also can wrap geolocation data (read “add latitudes and longitudes”) around just about any sort of relatively unstructured external data online. In this demonstration, we’ve wrapped it around Twitter posts, Youtube videos, and Craigslist ads. The craigslist ads will be more complete over the next week.
It isnt a perfect system but we could just as easily wrap it around blog posts within a blogging network or many other things. This is the power of maintaining an internal capability to geocode lat and long data.
We’ve also applied it to most of the 83 countries that we have in our Geo database, however, the URL format is different outside the US (we’ll add system wide town level search functionality in the next few days to make it easy to find any location)
If you are a member of our social network at http://social.vidlisting.com and have a public profile or shared media, this information will automatically be syndicated into a number of information distribution channels based on your location.
Let us know what you think.