Web 1.0 Is Text, Web 2.0 Is Multimedia
During web 1.0, internet bandwidth, computer storage and other computer and technology resources were relatively expensive, so web 1.0 was largely text based web pages with low resolution pictures and not much else. But as the price of computing resources has precipitously fallen over the years, it’s opened the door for mainstream usage of more sophisticated ways of communicating. With internet bandwidth now relatively cheap, video streaming is wildly popular with sites like YouTube becoming a global phenomenon in the past 3 years. Internet audio capabilities have developed correspondingly with podcasts, internet radio and webinars becoming increasingly common. The more levels a medium can engage us on, the more popular it tends to be. For example, when television came along, engaging people on both visual and auditory levels, it quickly surpassed radio as the predominant form of home entertainment and radio entertainment became passé. The same happened to web 1.0 when web 2.0 came along.
In the same way, you need to have a website engaging people via writing, video and audio in a variety of ways. It makes your site more appealing to prospects because it allows them to choose the medium in which they receive information. Some people don’t like reading and would far rather receive the same message in a podcast than a blog article. This goes back to the basic idea of interactivity: the idea of understanding your client’s wants and needs and giving them information when they want and in the way they want it.
Web 1.0 Is Your Company’s Brand, Web 2.0 Is Your Brand
During and prior to web 1.0, your real estate company’s brand was paramount. People would look to real estate companies for the quality of their the market research and knowledge as reflected in the sales reps who worked for them. But as the internet has opened the floodgates to real estate information, any one real estate company’s proprietary market knowledge no longer holds nearly as much importance as it once did. Consequently, your company’s name means less and less to consumers today. So with web 2.0, the ante has been upped a whole lot. You must now possess absolutely top notch real estate knowledge to stand out as a brand as your company or brokerage once did.
Hopefully, you will find this fact very liberating because it means you can re-invent your business in your own image rather than have to follow your company’s branding which may or may not agree with your own personal style and ways of doing business. It may even mean you need to break ranks with the company you’re with and join a more progressive one because you’ve still got brokers and lots of colleagues who have only ever lukewarmly embraced the internet and still remain somewhat bewildered by it.
There’s absolutely no reason to be afraid of change and web 2.0. In fact, most of my education courses are designed to bring people up to speed with current web 2.0 technology, thereby keeping them far ahead of their competition. All of my courses have been approved by the Registrar, REBBA 2002 as continuing education credit courses. You can see a list of upcoming courses and dates here.
