The Federal Trade Commission recently (October 12) started a blog. It’s worth a visit to read its coverage of the recent FTC Hearings held last week in Washington, D.C.(Nov. 6-8).
While many in the real estate industry where following NARdiGras (including us), the FTC was throwing their own shindig, the Tech-Ade Hearings, Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-Ade Hearings . The full agenda of panels and speakers here.
The FTC Tech-Ade blog covered the events. For those interested in what regulatory government is interested in, read them all, starting here. Gold Jerry, gold. Interestingly, all the blog posts had this disclaimer:
The topics were the usual suspects, including The Changing Internet (customization, speed & intergrity); the Net Generation (youth more trusting of what’s on the net), Marketing & Advertising Morphing (attempts to harness Coke-Mentos viral power, since a 2005 study showed 69% were interested in blocking, skipping or opting out of ad viewing); New products (car monitors); Privacy (few read the sites’ policy); Trends (free telephony–giddyup); Social Networking; User Generated Content; Globalization.
There were discussions of various consumer studies. One indicated that consumers don’t just want choices, they want choices they can understand. Net user education is still a problem—many do not understand the difference between organic and paid search results because they don’t understand how search engines work. Trust, transparency and integrity were the buzzwords. As a child of the sixties, I was raised to doubt, with the corresponding need, nay obligation, to question everything. It was shocking interesting to read that studies indicate today’s youth actually trust and believe what they read and see on the internet to be true. Oh boy.
On a less scary note, Moo-bella was a big hit. I have to find one of these babies.
And yes, as scheduled, Liam Larvey, Esq., General Counsel for Zillow.com was a guest speaker on “Benefits to Consumers in Living in an Instant Information Culture”. Here is an except from the blog post covering that panel discussion. (read full blog post here):
According to Lavery, the traditional approach to online real estate has been based upon an “elite model” of “taking consumers to professionals,” but he says that not everybody wants to start there right away. Some people just want an overview of the marketplace. Zillow brings together public data about a home–number of bedrooms for instance–and corrects for potential errors in this information by encouraging actual homeowners to correct any bad information. Because Zillow cannot go out and verify all of the information they provide, “we make it really transparent where this information is coming from,” according to Lavery.
Lavery said that Zillow is still trying to figure out how to get advertising revenue, and their model is entirely advertising-based, and follows the Google model “that if you get consumer information right and pure and trusted…then you can sell contextually relevant information on the outside, keep your information pure, and still have a viable business model.”
… Rainie (moderator) wanted to know how the sites deal with the volumes of information and assess its accuracy. “By making this info available to people and letting them interact with it,” Lavery responded, “that’s an environment that people are going to like and get some benefit out of it.”
Liam Lavery Presentation (pdf) here.
Good luck with the blog, FTC. It’s nice to take a peek at what Big Brother is up to.
