I was reading The Real Estate Tomato’s inteview with ActiveRain CEO Matt Heaton over the weekend and it reminded me that I should probably take another look at the real estate social networking site. I wrote about Active Rain back in June when it launched and, at the time, the site failed to impress me.
Since then however, ActiveRain has enjoyed significant growth – there are now over 3500 individual profiles on the network and it’s growing at a good pace (60-75 new members a day, according to the Tomato). Since its launch, ActiveRain has morphed away from it’s social networking roots and grown into more of a proprietary blogging ecosystem and now enjoys many active bloggers posting on a wide range of interesting topics. It’s great to see such a lively community developing, creating somewhere where new ideas can be shared amongst all members.
If you’re in the business of providing new technology or services to the real estate industry, you’d be wise to start exploring the Active Rain network. Here you have the perfect group of tech-savvy influencers. By engaging the community in the proper fashion (no spam) and by initiating a dialogue with them, you’ll be potentially tapping into the perfect pool of future customer evangelists.
Where ActiveRain continues to fail though, is providing any meaningful information to consumers. But, I suppose that’s ultimately not the point. If ActiveRain can continue building out its product and services to support the Realtors and can provide advertisers with a unobtrusive way to reach them, they’ll have a hit on their hands regardless.
