Using online classifieds for local search, specifically, to rent a home in Utah

A couple of quick things I learned about renting a home in Utah.

1. As KSL lists the most recent ads first, don’t renew your ad after 30 days- take the few minutes to delete it and create a new one.


2. The search engine does not proactively isolate queries to categories. For example, a search for “home rental” includes an ad for carpet whose description says “would be wonderful for your home or your rental property”.


3. In classifieds, especially homes, locality is everything. It seems that this local search uses not only the description text, or even the physical address (which is truncated in the listing) but possibly another hidden field, like the seller’s address. My experiment was to search for “lehi home”. Most listings matched lehi in the location field, but somebody smart included names of surrounding locations in their ad descriptions. One listing didn’t match my location on any visible text. Another possible explanation is that this listing meet the “home” part of the query only.


4. This search engine is smart enough to handle permutations- For example- the query “rental home” does include my listing, although only the word “rent” is found in the title of the listing. Again, list is sorted by recency, not relevance, so my listing trumps those with the word rental.

Seth Godin in Utah -Predictions on Marketing and Advertising

Seth Godin. What a thought-provoker! I recently heard him speak in Salt Lake City, Utah, to a group of 400 professional online marketers, bloggers, internet types, etc. I've enjoyed his books for some time now. His latest, The Dip, uses typical Godin edginess to forward the thesis that we should be quitters, way more often, way earlier. (so that we can not quit what it's most important). If you know someone who went, they just may be able to hook you up with one of the 5 books they bought at the door.

The highlight for me was his ability to engage a live audience with his Q&A riffs. For you who attended, the included notes will probably make sense. My apologies in advance if they don't.

-On Marketing and Advertising

• Advertising is dying, but marketing is more important than ever
• Successful marketers will take the BMW “marketing in design” approach
• A high-school marketing teacher's curriculum should be:
1. No-one cares about you, get over it.
2. Learn to ebay
3. Get good at telling stories
• For JetBlue, marketing and training were the same department
• The “anonymity” of Web 2.0 is going to blow up. Because reputation matters, people will circle the wagons, and only trust sources they know.
• Don’t think “how can I take advantage” but “how can I serve”
  

I'd like to expand the last bullet above. Someone in the Q&A session was talking about all of the Internet viewers of a particular Web content, and began to ask “how can I take advantage of those viewers...” Seth cut him off to make a subtle but compelling point. He emphatically said that this was the wrong question- the wrong frame of mind. He said it would be like Tony's Pizza Parlor saying “how can I take advantage of a sunday school class?” The appropriate question is “how can I serve” that group, or what do I have that is relevant to them. There is so much power in basing our marketing strategies on relevant service. In my opinion, that is the reason that advertising is dying and marketing is more important than ever.