As you may already know LinkedIn has a “signature” way to visualize your network statistics. I have never paid any attention to those until recently. According to LinkedIn, I can reach out to well over one million professionals:

Realistically only 52 professionals I can contact directly. I can see potential of reaching out to 10,500 people through your immediate connections. But not over one million. Still even reaching out to 5,000 for a particular cause can be extremely valuable. Are the network statistics there to show the potential of your immediate connections? In the past I have never used LinkedIn actively besides just having an account there. With most of my contacts on LinkeIn I am connected in other ways.

How are you using your LinkedIn connections? This is not a rhetorical question. I am contemplating upgrading my free account and your feedback will be greatly appreciated.

The RealBird Blog just announced new feature called RealBird Virtual Tour. I have written in the pas about RealBirds nifty widget that allows real estate agents create a “mini-showcase” of their listings while offering an opportunity for viral marketing, and allowing bloggers or any webmasters to grab the code and feature the listings on their websites or blogs.

The new feature ads Google Maps Street view to the lower par of the widget and comes at $9.99 per listing or $14.99 when purchased with a property domain name:

The Google Maps of this version is unique in itself as it offers map view, satellite view, hybrid view, terrain view as well as Google Earth.

Just taking a look at few of the featured listings, they need to be more optimized. The images are downloading rather slow even though I have a cable connection. The slow load may be caused by the scripts as well.

Overall it is a nice addition to their product. The “branded virtual tours” offer users an opportunity to share the tours on variety of social networking websites as well as easy way to publish information to their blogs. Personally I would prefer to grab the code via “copy and paste” as it was the case with their former widget, since I do not like to give away the user name and the password to my blog.

Hope to hear from some of my readers what they think about this new feature.

When I came across RealBird Listing Widget on Wallingford Wired Blog, it immediately grabbed my attention. It is not a secrete that many real estate gents can be very protective of their listing. If you don’t believe me, read the blog post by Greg Swann about a listing that was not his own.

I can’t blame Realtors for being overprotective about their listings. You don’t want your inventory to be misrepresented. However, at the same time many real estate websites have their local Multiple Listing System integrated into their websites so when visitor searches for the property, he can browse through hundreds of listings without leaving the website. Of course this can result in a lead where you can work as a seller’s agent on a property that you did not list.

But what about offering an opportunity just to any webmaster to “advertise” for you for free? Going back to Wayne and Pat, below is an example of a listing served via Realird.com Listing Widget I was able to grab right from their blog:

Why would you consider RealBrid.com? Simple. Viral marketing. There are many bloggers like myself that are on the constant lookout for good content for their blog. This can create an exponential exposure for you listing.