Happy Cyber-Monday all! Rather than shop for consumer deals online today as many are, we’re busy helping new partners get up to speed on their video strategy and integrations. As the year winds down, many are stratgeically planning to expand and solidify their video presence for 2012. We are here to help. Every step of the way.

So our team at WellcomeMat is very pleased to announce our new partnership with StudioNow today. Our agreement with StudioNow offers expedited, nationwide video production services to WellcomeMat customers and partners. The agreement enables real estate brokerages, brands and individual professionals to order high quality videos from StudioNow and seamlessly integrate, distribute and measure their content via the WellcomeMat mobile and web video platform. StudioNow is a division of AOL’s Advertising.com Group.

“Every good real estate video strategy answers two questions,” said Christian Sterner, founder of WellcomeMat. “How can every member of our team create quality content and what will we do with our videos to connect with new and existing customers? By featuring StudioNow’s highly qualified and trusted network of professional production talent with full customer support, WellcomeMat has greatly enhanced its capabilities as an all-in-one solution for real estate brands wishing to lead the real estate video revolution.” 

“StudioNow is thrilled to partner with WellcomeMat in this endeavor.  Our customizable platform and network of 5,000 professional filmmakers located across the country are the perfect complement to their best-in-breed video distribution strategy”, said David Mason, Founder and CEO of StudioNow.  “Furthermore, the relationships that WellcomeMat has with high-end real estate brokerages are an excellent outlet for StudioNow to expand its anytime, anywhere production capabilities.” 

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About WellcomeMat:

Founded in July of 2006, WellcomeMat is a profitable, web and mobile video platform best known as the leader of real estate video. Relied upon by more than 15,000 real estate agents and many of the industry’s leading brands nationwide, WellcomeMat connects video pros with its clients and answers all questions related to what to do with quality real estate video content.

About AOL

Having helped millions of Americans to get online, AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL) is on a mission to inform, entertain and connect the world. The home of a growing collection of premium brands, AOL creates original content that engages audiences on a local and global scale. We help marketers connect with these audiences through effective and engaging digital advertising solutions.

There’s a lot to be proud of here at WellcomeMat today. Residential Properties, the largest independent brokerage in Rhode Island, has become WellcomeMat’s newest brand partner.

“Video has become an incredible asset to the real estate industry. Wellcomemat has been a wonderful addition to our website so that we are better able to better show how fabulous our state is, how beautiful our properties are and video frankly is the next stage that we believe is an asset to our marketing program,” - Sally Lapides, President and CEO of Residential Properties

There’s so much about gaining Residential Properties as a partner that makes us happy, but not much we can add to the video that they created announcing our partnership…

View Residential Properties Ltd. video gallery >

“Unlike a floor plan or a virtual tour, video allows us to showcase a lifestyle and a community. We’ve been doing videos for a few years now and wanted to take it to the next level. With the explosion of mobile, we wanted our video content to play back on all devices – iPad, iPhone, Android platform. Youtube is a great social networking site and video gallery but is based on ad revenue. As a brokerage, we understand the importance of developing and refining content and we wanted to be able to index on the search engines. WellcomeMat has made that easy,” - Tom Flanagan, Directory of Technology – Residential Properties.

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Many thanks to Sally, Tom and team for your leadeship and execution of great local real estate video. It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with you. We are thankful.

Lights. Camera. Action!

People are seeing the light; the conversations and topics about real estate video are maturing to a level where we realize that significant progress is being made.

Outside of the real estate industry, it is common place for people know what the downsides of YouTube and free video platforms are:

1) Loss of control (no control over how and where your content shows up). Ads may run…they may not. Ads that do run may not fit with your brand vision, but they might.

2) Loss of leverage (content being indexed by free sites, leaving views to always occur there instead of users’ websites)

3) Lack of traffic being referred by free video sites to users’ sites.

The fact that the real estate industry finally knows that video is powerful is a huge accomplishment. Now it comes down to best possible scenarios. As a refresher…the following chart demonstrates WHERE viewers are actually coming from.

Percent of Referred Traffic by Source

Just recently, in the “All things real estate video” group in Facebook, the conversation moved into the direction of how video sites are doing in getting their videos ranked within search engines (Google alone makes up 65% of all video viewer referrals–to be read, Google creates 65% of video views on the web). The difference is that WellcomeMat links within Google forward directly into our partners’ and users’ websites, automatically! There’s nothing to do…nothing to maintain…it just works!

Facebook thread from All things Real Estate Video

It is a good day in the world of real estate video!

The California Realtor® Expo takes place this week in San Jose, CA and we’ll be there! You can follow the EXPO on twitter here @CAREALTORS_EXPO or via hashtag #carexpo. WellcomeMat Co-Founder Christian Sterner will speaking on the following panel:

ARE YOU TRENDING?
Our tech-savvy panel will share the latest and greatest real estate technology trends that will leave you feeling inspired.

Date: Weds, Sept 9, 2011

Time: 8:30 a.m. – 10 a.m.

Speakers:
+ Christian Sterner, Co-Founder, WellcomeMat.com
+ John Lim, SVP Business Development, Mobile Card Cast
+ Mark Flavin, Director of Information Technology, Bay East Association of REALTORS
+ James Dwiggins, Chief Strategy Officer, Realty World Northern California, Inc.

Location: Room A7

Complete schedule here: http://expo.car.org/wednesdayschedule.html

The CALIFORNIA REALTOR® EXPO is the state’s largest real estate trade show, drawing thousands of California’s key franchise execs, top producers, and movers and shakers for educational, networking, and professional development opportunities. In addition, hundreds of top industry vendors and service providers will showcase their latest products and information in nearly 300 booths in the exhibit hall.

Agent Genius recently posted a sampling of the results from our 2011 “Video’s Declaration of Independence from Virtual Tours” survey. One of the key questions posed is the following…

“Has video ever demonstrated itself as a competitive advantage for you, a client or someone on your team? Has anything unique happened to you because of your use of video as a marketing tool?”

A few responses included…

Look for a full report from WellcomeMat over the next few weeks. In the meantime, you can see a few more responses here on Agent Genius – Does real estate video actually give agents a competitive advantage?

Co-Founder Phil Thomas Di Giulio (@holaphil) ran into the Better Homes & Gardens (@BHGRealEstate) film crew last year (Jan 2010) at the Real Estate Connect Conference in New York. Here’s s short video where he was asked to talk about the importance of video marketing for real estate.

I was counting each person on the train when the conductor interrupted me over the intercom, “Next Stop, Borough Hall, Brooklyn”.

Having lost my focus, I started again, “46, 47, 48…”

At the end of the exercise I had counted 15 subway riders with their mobile devices out and engaged with the “third screen”. Think about that number and then for a moment ask yourself how many strangers, friends or clients have you seen engaged in similar behaviors? It’s been reported that most people will not place their mobile phones more than three feet from themselves. Another study by MeFeedia found that mobile device users watch web video up to 2.5 times longer than desktop users.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Platform agnostic video experiences (video everywhere on any device) are becoming the rule as opposed to the exception for the American consumer. Ask any cable or TV network and you’ll find most are actively planning for this paradigm shift. Matt Strauss, Senior Vice President & General Manager Comcast Interactive Media was recently quoted saying…

With that said,  here are a couple suggestions for publishing video for mobile:

1. Find the Right Partner - Find a service that hosts and offers mobile and iPad support for your videos.

2. Become a Destination - When people search for your videos, are they landing on your web pages or a third party? For example, the classic argument is, “I post my videos to YouTube for the ‘Google Juice’. The question you need to ask yourself is this, “If a potential customer finds my video on YouTube [via a Google search], are they going to find my website or listing without being distracted by ‘related’ videos by some other user? Why am I making them connect the dots when I can just as easily drive traffic to my brokerage website or listings?”

3. Engage with Your Customer - Share your videos via email, your blog/website and even Twitter. If you follow suggestions #1 and #2 above, you’re giving people multiple opportunities to find and watch your video anywhere on any device — on your terms. See anecdote below.

I’ll leave you with this anecdote…

A little over a week ago, a friend asked me to protect his parking space (i.e. avoid a ticket) while he quickly ran an errand. Sitting there in his car I decided to kill some time by checking email. Just as I opened my iPhone a message titled, “PROPERTV RELEASE: Closing Time with Richard Grossman” arrived to my inbox (see images above). Ordinarily I’m quick to delete these types of marketing messages, however the message/imagery grabbed my attention and so I couldn’t help but click. A few minutes later my friend approaches the car and I’m caught watching a Halstead video right from my mobile phone. Was I focused on helping a friend avoid a parking ticket? Probably not. Was I engaged with Halstead’s brand? Absolutely.

In the Summer of 2009, our team playfully (but seriously) said, “video is the new photo in real estate marketing.” From that post within The Hood (WellcomeMat’s community forum):

“Don’t frustrate yourself into believing that video is just an incremental improvement to virtual tours just because you are having a hard time getting people to “get it.” Here at WellcomeMat, our competition is photos. That’s right all, our team has our sites on making sure that we get to a point where the majority of listings have videos.”

We later asked the question, “when searching for real estate information, consumers value which of the following the most?” within a 2009 survey. The responses–published here in our real estate video report–were as follows:

48% Photos
41% Video(s)
  9% Virtual Tours/Slideshows
  2% Floorplan(s)

Video will be a standard form of real estate marketing…

What is interesting is when people view video as “extra” or something that will remain optional for the foreseeable future. 

Unlike virtual tours–whom deliver rich media via proprietary interfaces that search companies link users into because there is no standard way of displaying virtual tour companies’ magic shows within their sites–video players are a standard (like JPEGs are for images) means by which to play a video. Users click play > watch the video > click on chapters within the video if the video is hosted by WellcomeMat > done. See how easy that was? 

Web and mobile video is not ancillary: it is a critical portion of any/all web and mobile experiences. We kiddingly state that photos are WellcomeMat’s competition, knowing full well that photos and video are both critical forms of marketing materials.

We simply believe that videos and photos will be equally important in the future of real estate.

Full motion video is at last making it into the limelight as a mainstream way for agents, brokerages and brands to better market themselves and their properties. One of the last major hurdles between video and mass adoption in the real estate industry is proper distribution online — where real videos cease to be called “Virtual Tours” within real estate search sites.