The September CoRE will be hosted by Kris Berg, at her San Diego Home Blog. Submit your best September article here before the submission deadline of September 26th Midnight Pacific time!

With that said, please please make sure to submit your best blog post from the past month by August 25th. You can submit HERE.

The 1st monthly CoRE will be published August 31st at the Virtual Results blog – make sure to tune in and check it out!

Social search or a social search engine is a type of web search that takes into account the Social Graph of the person initiating the Search Query. When applied to web search thisSocial Graph approach to relevance is in contrast to established algorithmic or machine-based approaches where relevance is determined by analyzing the text of each document or the link structure of the documents.^[1] Search results produced by social search engine give more visibility to content created or touched by users in the Social Graph.

Social search takes many forms, ranging from simple shared bookmarks or tagging of content with descriptive labels to more sophisticated approaches that combine human intelligence with computer algorithms.^[2][3]

The search experience takes into account varying sources of metadata, such as collaborative discovery of web pages, tags, social ranking, commenting on bookmarks, news, images, videos, knowledge sharing, podcasts and other web pages. Example forms of user input include social bookmarking or direct interaction with the search results such as promoting or demoting results the user feels are more or less relevant to their query.^[4]

Everyone has been thinking about the concept of social search for quite some time. But no one has really done it yet, unless you call Tweeting out questions to your followers “social search”. To be fair, I guess that is social search — but no one has done it in an automated way that revolutionizes the search game the same way Google’s Page Rank revolutionized search a decade ago. I believe it’s only a matter of time before we see it in action on a massive scale. Facebook is working on a Q&A product, Google already tipped their hand in a huge way with the purchase of Aardvark for $50 million. The two most dominant tech companies on the web are working on it (and I bet Twitter is too), so it’s clear social search is coming in a big big way. And that means someone is going to finally nail it. My bet is Facebook because of the social graph they have built up.

Social search has serious SEO implications, because, as I mentioned in my post on YouReach Media, “‘Likes’ and retweets are rapidly becoming the new “links” (votes) of the web”. That’s a scary thing for someone who has no concept of what those retweets and “likes” are, and how other social sites may possibly factor into whatever social search ends up emerging. It’s scary for a person who has focused strictly on SEO the old fashioned way (by paying for links) and spent zero time on their social media strategy. It’s scary for someone with no social media strategy whatsoever. If and when social search goes mainstream, it’s clear professionals with a comprehensive social media strategy and understanding about how to attract “votes” on the web in a variety of fashions will have the leg up on someone with a website from 2000 and organic ranking only due to paid SEO.

What do you think — is social search going to change the way real estate professionals focus their time online? Or the extreme case scenario (which I don’t believe) — are websites going to become obsolete in favor or Facebook pages or some other more social destination?

PS – I should note link building is not dead yet. Jay Thompson deserves credit for prompting this discussion with his comment here. Jay – you now have 70kish + 1 backlinks…

Those who have done online ad sales, and those who have been pitched by online ad salesmen, know it’s powerful tool to be able to say “We’re the largest site in [category X]” when speaking to a potential advertiser or partner. The Zillow/YRE combo now completely dwarfs the size of Realtor.com in overall audience. Realtor.com is rumored to have somewhere in the range of 12 million uniques, while Zillow was at 10.7 last month and, without knowing anything other than that they are the number 2 site, I’m guessing Yahoo Real Estate was around 10 million as well. That means the Zillow Ad Network now includes 20+ million uniques a month. That fact alone means that more money is going to shift towards Z/YRE and away from Realtor.com.

The CNNMoney deal was a nice win for Trulia, but this Yahoo! deal completely blows that out of the water in my opinion. CNNMoney is certainly a massive site, but Traffic on CNNMoney is not really specifically looking for real estate — traffic on Yahoo! Real Estate certainly is.

As for Realtor.com, I hope they have a few massive innovations or strategic deals up their sleeve or else it’s going to be a rocky road ahead for their sales team. I’m guessing there will be a fair amount of chatter about this deal at Inman next week…

PS: I’m obviously biased on this issue since I worked at Zillow for 4 1/2 years and as a stockholder am certainly thrilled this deal (which was in the works prior to me leaving in January) got completed. But now that I don’t work for Zillow I can actually comment on big announcements like this

Within real estate vertical, here are my top 5 (in no particular order):

• Jay Thompson – Phoenix Real Estate Guy
• Kris Berg – San Diego Home Blog
• Marc Davison – 1000Watt Consulting
• Ardell DellaLoggia – Ardell’s Seattle Real Estate Blog (and RainCityGuide)
• Diane Tuman – Zillow Blog

Outside of real estate, here are my top 2:

• Fred Wilson – AVC
• Sloane Berrent – TheCausmopolitan

Who are your favorites – both inside and outside of real estate – and why?

[via Zengy]

You can download it HERE if you want to take it for a spin.

My strategy does not entail adding as many people as possible to my sphere and hope they send me business opportunities down the line. Sure, maybe friending everyone on the planet and following everyone and their mother on Twitter will produce some revenue for me down the line; it’s just not genuine. It’s not my cup of tea. To me, that approach is SPAM and taking the easy way out. Email spammers make a living contacting as many people as physically possible and hoping some of them are stupid enough to take them up on their offer, but that doesn’t justify the wasted time we all spend ignoring and deleting SPAM from our inboxes. Making money that way doesn’t appeal to me in the least. Instead, I focus on enhancing existing relationships and letting my network grow organically. The early stages of your sphere building may be tough using this approach, but it’ll get easier as you go as people seek you out instead of vice versa.

Here are some of the specifics of my ongoing sphere building activities that I engage in (some online, some offline):

1. Travel – I know not everyone has the money or opportunity to travel constantly, but when you do travel, make he most of it. While traveling, I constantly try to connect with interesting people in other cities. For instance, I made a point of meeting Nathan Richardson, a fellow fan of microfinance and volunteer for Vittana, while I was in Los Angeles a couple months ago and had an awesome discussion with him about a range of issues. Wherever I go, I’m always asking myself “who is passionate and doing great stuff” that I can go meet. Once I answer that, I figure out a way to reach out to that person, whether it be on Twitter, through a friend that knows them, or just emailing them directly. If I tried to name everyone I’ve met and interacted with in the real estate vertical using this tactic, this post would never end.

2. Go to networking events – While I resided in Seattle, I made a point to go to as many microfinance events as possible. It was at through those events that I got to know Ryan Calkins and Melisa Samuelson at SeaMO, Dylan Higgins at SaveTogether, Scott Everett at Grameen Foundation, Kushal Chakrabarti at Vittana, Samantha Rayner at Lumana, and Elisa Murray and Beth Castleberry at Global Partnerships.

3. Read other blogs and comment – You should read blogs that touch on topics or hobbies you are passionate about, or are written by individuals who you respect and can relate to. But don’t just read them, COMMENT on them and engage in the discussion by providing your thoughts on the given subject. Here are some blog commenting tips for those interested. This is essentially how I started my friendship with Sloane (among other people) after discovering her writing on the Kiva Fellows Blog when she was a Kiva Fellow.

4. Pick some social objects - Microfinance and travel are two social objects for me. For Ines, it’s mojitos. For you, it could be something else. Just pick things you are passionate about that others might relate to and make a point to talk about your social objects online.

5. Make a point to “catch up” with people - I wrote a blog post about this one on my personal blog a few months ago, but I can’t underestimate the importance of it. Chat with people on IM, Twitter, Facebook, and make a point to call people on the phone every now and then (what a concept)!

6. Blog about your passions – I know blogging is not for everyone, but for me, my personal blog has been immeasurably valuable as a networking tool over the past few years — both to give me a place for people to learn about what makes me tick and for highlighting things friends of mine are doing online.

7. Volunteer your time – Helping others improve their business or raise money is a great way to strengthen relationships. But again, volunteer your time to causes that you’re passionate about and do it because you want to help the organization succeed, not in order to build a better relationship.

8. Use Twitter – I was skeptical about the value of Twitter for quite awhile, but no longer. It’s an incredibly powerful tool to remain top of mind with a large group of people in an efficient manner.

9. Use Tweetdeck to monitor your social objects – I have columns in Tweetdeck for the search terms “microfinance”, “backpacking”, and “mariners”. Those are all topics that I can identify with, so if I see someone continually tweeting about that topic, I’ll often start following them and occasionally start engaging with them to get to know them better.

10. Use Foursquare – I already wrote a post on my reasons for using FourSquare on Virtual Results, so won’t repeat that post here in detail. At a high level, it provides a means to drive additional offline conversations with my network. You should constantly be thinking about how you can have more offline conversations with your network, as that’s the single best way to strengthen relationships.

11. Keep Your Network on Linkedin – I constantly make it a focus of mine to add the people I do business with or interact with to my Linkedin network of connections as a means to keeping them all in one place.

Building strong relationships (and hence a large sphere of influence) takes time and effort. It’s not easy, but I’m confident you’ll find it well worth the effort in the long run. But remember, you have to genuinely care about the people you are interacting with, or you’re likely to fail at sphere building. If you have other sphere building activities I’ve missed or thoughts on the ones I’ve listed, leave them in the comments!

Now, go network away (or leave a comment here and start the process)!

As a connector, I often have talked to people about my methods in networking. The first place to start might sound obvious, but it’s often overlooked. It’s all about the PEOPLE! I truly care about people, their stories and what makes them tick, so for me “networking” is a hobby to me like playing an instrument. I keep up with people in my spare time.

I’m like Sloane — I enjoy people and don’t think of networking as “work” like most people do. Interacting with smart and passionate people is a hobby of mine; I do it in my spare time because I love the interactions that come as a result. Sure, Sloane will probably help me in my professional life down the road and I’ll help her, so one could argue that we’ve built a friendship with each other for the long term business value that will come with it. But even if I knew Sloane would never benefit my professional life whatsoever, she’s still the type of person I enjoy interacting with. Our friendship was built on the fact that we are both passionate about life, microfinance, helping others, and take an active interest in interacting with other passionate people. Further, Sloane is by far one of the most passionate people I know — and for me, passion trumps all. And that’s why she’s a great networker. Jay Thompson is another example of a great networker with a extremely large sphere of influence — he’s as passionate and caring as they come and it results in being able to easily identify with and like him. He engages in more conversations than pretty much any real estate agent I know. It seems wherever the hot discussion is online, he’s there as a part of the discussion. It’s 100% obvious he genuinely cares about and enjoys people.

If you want to build a large sphere, be passionate. Don’t network to make money, network because you care about those you are interacting with. If you don’t genuinely care about those you are interacting with, you are going to fail at building strong relationships — which is what a sphere of influence is all about. It’s as simple as that. Good networkers care about others. The business and/or money that comes from building a large sphere will come later as a by product — but don’t let it be the driving force behind your daily interactions.

Note: My third & final post (I promise) on this topic will revolve around what kind of networking/sphere building activities I engage in regularly and how I use online tools in that process.

honestly, if friending someone on FB or adding them to Linkedin and they don’t know you…LEAVE a personal message or else get ignored #fail

That conversation continued on with a few Tweets back and forth with Linsey Planeta and Amanda Wernick. And now I’m turning the conversation into a blog post because, as I told Linsey, no concept is too simple to repeat. And particularly one as important as sphere building. I think we all know that building a larger sphere comes down to forming relationships with as many people as possible. Relationship building is one of those concepts that seems like common sense to me, yet many still do not understand proper etiquette when it comes to building relationships online — at least in my opinion they don’t. The message I wanted to repeat is pretty much exactly what Linsey Tweeted yesterday:

@drewmeyers @funomenalrealtr W/ all the social media hype, people have forgotten same rules apply as always- trust is built by relationships

Business is not likely to come from having a “friend” on Facebook who you’ve never exchanged a word with. Nor will it come from a connection on Linkedin who doesn’t know the first thing about you. Business is likely to come from real people who you genuinely know and TRUST. Do you think I’ll send you business if I don’t know a single thing about you? Think again, because I can tell you right now that won’t happen – so please stop friending random people (and me) on Facebook unless you are going to take the time to build a REAL relationship (read this post for more background on my thoughts on this topic). I’m not opposed to meeting and engaging with more people, far from it actually — but show me you care enough to build a real relationship.

To recap, I’ll repeat the core message again. When it comes to relationship building, the same rules apply that have always applied — trust is built by forming relationships with real substance. Those are the relationships that are likely to result in business for you down the line; the ones built on trust and providing value to the other person. Build trust and you’ll increase your sphere.

Note: My next post will explain my personal approach to sphere and relationship building. I was originally going to make this one post, but it was getting way too long so I’ll split it in two in the hopes that I don’t lose everyone with a massive essay. Look for part 2 soon (I’m actually almost done with that post now).