Newser founder Michael Wolff, in a video interview earlier this year, said, "Frankly, the New York Times is a bore," and media companies like Newser, the Huffington Post, OnSwipe — and the New York Times, too — are reacting to the departure from "old-world" media consumption, and blazing forward.
The real estate industry is taking note of the changed media environment, too, and some speakers and sessions at Inman’s Real Estate Connect New York City 2012 will highlight new and emerging media trends.
"People have a need," said Wolff in the same video, "for shorter information — shorter, faster, quicker."
Newser CEO Elisabeth DeMarse, in her keynote speech at NYC Connect 2012, will explore what’s behind consumers’ appetite for bite-sized refurbished news, and how the new media trends are affecting the business world.
According to 2011 Pew Research Center data, 83 percent of U.S. adults have a mobile phone (about one-third have smartphones), two-thirds connect wirelessly to the Internet, and about two-thirds access data over "the cloud," or via remote servers.
Also, ownership of tablet computers has grown to 10 percent among U.S. adults, representing a 300 percent growth in about a year and a half since the media-gazing technology’s release.
"It’s a story about changing platforms," said Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project — and it’s also reflective of a rapidly expandingm online universe that is increasingly interactive.
"The world is changing from point-and-click to a touch-and-swipe," said Jason Baptiste, CEO of 2011 startup OnSwipe, developer of a popular tablet publishing and advertising platform, who also will be a keynote speaker at NYC Connect 2012.
Tablets and smartphones are part of the big desktop-to-mobile shift, said Matthew Shadbolt, a NYC Connect 2012 keynote speaker, director of interactive product and marketing for the Corcoran Group, and a regular contributor to agent-focused resource InmanNext.
"App users stay six to seven times longer than users of our website," he said, which has prompted Corcoran to focus on building out its apps. In general, he said, apps will get "richer, deeper and more neighborhood-centric."
"Filtering is becoming very, very key," added Shadbolt. There will be a lot of niche, group-based products that settle into subcategories of services we already use, like Oink does in FourSquare, he said.
Google Plus’ Hangouts and Facebook’s Groups are showing the beginnings of how social filtering will help people hone in on the information that’s most interesting and relevant to them.
And services that aggregate a certain area’s most popular content — like Zite, which organizes items by topic, and Flipboard, which organizes items by source — will become more powerful and popular, he said.
In an information-glutted age, reaching overstimulated, cyber-weary consumers can be a challenge, but NYC Connect 2012 panelist Bill Lublin, who heads the Social Media Marketing Institute, stresses real estate still all comes down to what it always has: building meaningful relationships.
The key, he said, is keeping the perspective that Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus are just tools — be wary of being too tool-centered.
"The key is not the tool," he said, "it’s the connection you have with the person." How to do it ethically and well, while avoiding some of the new technologies’ attendant pitfalls, is part of the insight Lublin will bring to NYC Connect 2012.
Breakout sessions at NYC Connect 2012, like those in the "Innovation Track," will give agents and brokers the perspective and awareness to hit the ground running in 2012 via forums like: "How to (Effectively) Integrate Social Media into Property Search," "The Future of Real Estate Search: What’s Next?," and "Developing Your Brokerage’s Mobile Strategy."
Other sessions include: "Friends with Benefits: Proven, Leading-edge Strategies for Getting Leads and Selling on Facebook," "Social SEO: How Social is Affecting the Way Agents are Ranked Online."
For more information about Real Estate Connect New York City 2012, visit www.realestateconnect.com.
