It’s been exactly one week since the launch of Trulia Voices so we thought it would be a great time to peak under the hood to give you some insight into what we are seeing.
Since Trulia Voices launched Friday morning, we’ve received 1,474 submissions! Which is a pretty great start if you ask me. And in the blogs there has been some good chatter (Trulia Voices Hyper-ly Cool) and some constructive feedback (Can bigoted bastards flourish), but personally we think we’ve got a great community and a product with legs; with your help and feedback, this (not too) ugly duck may just turn into one hot swan.
Communities are a constantly evolving learning opportunity, and we’re learning fast! Today we released some tweaks based on your feedback:
- Phil let us know that “edit your profile” page was too buried in the site. Today we added an additional “edit your profile link” to the Trulia Voices section to make it more discoverable.
- Brian and a handful of others highlighted possible Fair Housing Violations, and we’ve heard! Take a look at the Trulia footer and see an FHA logo there. We will also be making more additions to the site that we will explain more in a post next week.
- Maureen let us know that all the search boxes on the Voices Home Page made it hard to figure out what to enter where. Hope you like our new search box at the top of every Trulia Voices page.
- Patrick and a few others let us know that they’d like to edit questions and answers. We’re working on this one…
We’ve also noticed that the community is more heavily skewed towards real estate professionals. Don’t worry, we gave agents a head start to get to know Trulia Voices, and we are very focused on driving more users through the door.
And finally, I thought I’d share a Business Week article Pete sent me today with advice on community marketing that might be useful for Real Estate professionals when posting and answering questions.
Keep the feedback coming. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re listening!
Popularity: 2% [?]
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May 18th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
Make no mistake about it, Trulia is the one mash-up realty.bot that is listening to its constituency. I wrote my provocative post on Bloodhound Blog to “bait” them to do better…and they have.
All too often, real estate search engines get caught up in the “we’re out to change the world and the stakeholders be damned!”. They try to change the way business is done because THEY believe it’s what the consumer wants. Mostly, they’re incorrect. Consumers like to see transparency in real estate brokerage but most of them just care to get a good loan and a fair shake when they sell their home.
Trulia is the most pragmatic mash-up tool I’ve seen to date.
May 18th, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Cheers to Phil. It took me about ten minutes to find the edit profile link when i first signed up. I thought it was just me:)
Patrick
May 20th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
I’m liking Trulia Voices! I just wish there were more questions from Phoenix!
Inquiring minds want to know who is the hottie in the picture in the Trulia Voices Alert emails…
May 21st, 2007 at 10:47 am
Hi,
I am an Accredited Land Consultant an member of the Realtors Land Institute http://www.rliland.com. I write articles about Land and see that you do not cover that filed. Let me know if you would like to review some of my articles.
Thank you,
Lou Jewell ALC
May 21st, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Best suggestion I can make … get rid of the scoreboards tracking those with the most answers, the most useful answers, the most best answers. Let those who are answering the questions do so for the sake of helping someone asking.
Also, for the real estate professionals, don’t count the number of questions that are being asked. It’s amazing the softball questions coming through simply for the sake of seeding the voices and, presumably, getting credit for a question asked.
Asking tons of questions doesn’t seem to signify anything other than an excess of time on one’s hands.