Just over a month ago we launched a new business from our incubator, Classified Ad Ventures, called ListGlobally.  ListGlobally allows any realtor, agent, broker or developer around the world to advertise their listings to a global audience. All they do is upload the listing to www.listglobally.com and we then syndicate that listing to the market leading sites in 23 countries. We make money by charging US$90 to advertise the listing for 90 days and then pay our distribution network a percentage of what we charge. Overall a simple, but effective, model.

We were fortunate to have a great write up of the business in The Australian newspaper last week. Here is the article.

Nerd goes global in real estate listings: Simon Baker’s attraction to the net has paid off

FORMER REA Group chief executive Simon Baker is a self-confessed “closet nerd”.

From a young age, the 43-year-old says, he has been fascinated with computers.

Baker previously ran REA Group, the owner of realestate. com.au, before starting his latest venture, Classified ADventures.

He studied computer science at Monash University, and his first job was a “tour of duty” at IBM in the sales division.

“I started off life as a programmer in sales and marketing,” Baker says.

“As such, you can’t help but get attracted to the internet and the opportunities it provides.”

He loves the fact that the online real estate market is not fully defined yet, and that new products and possibilities are arising on a daily basis.

That fascination has brought him to where he is today — running his own show as founder of online classifieds company Classified ADventures.

The company provides operators of online classifieds sites with consulting services and helps them get the most out of the internet to advertise their listings.

Among the websites in the stable are smartagentsites; Sobox (Social Media in a Box) and listglobally.

The last, launched a couple of months ago, aims to help real estate agents get global advertising exposure for their listings.

After talking to real estate agents around the world, Baker discovered there were people buying properties across borders.

When you look at the way the online advertising space is set up, he says, each country has its own realestate.com.au, but no one is seriously asking how to market a property across a number of countries to attract an overseas buyer.

Out of that idea, listglobally was born.

From there, Baker says, his team approached the real estate.com.au equivalents in 20 markets around the world to see if they could put listings on their sites.

In each market, the website has become one of the most popular.

For example, if you are in Britain and want to buy property in Australia, he says, your first port of call may be rightmove.co.uk (the equivalent of realestate.com.au).

Each month, 1.6 million searches are carried out on that site’s international section, he says.

“What’s funny is that the fifth most searched country is Australia and there are only 200 listings there,” he says.

“It’s all about saying how do I put Australian listings in front of English buyers or South African buyers or Hong Kong buyers.”

Essentially, with one click and a fee of $90, a real estate agent can put their listing on the equivalent of realestate.com.au in 20 markets.

By the end of the year, he hopes to be in 23 countries.

If all goes to plan, listglobally will be a $10-20 million-a-year business.

Baker’s fascination with computers started early, but the property link was accidental, and only developed several years ago, while he was working at realestate.com.au.

Not long after joining News Limited (publisher of The Australian), Baker says, he was asked to undertake a review the realestate.com.au business.

Not long after that, he joined the board of realestate.com.au and asked for a shot at the top job.

In 2001, he got his shot.

For the next eight years, he says, he spent morning, noon and night turning the online property portal around from a loss-making business to what he describes as a very profitable, dominant market player. In 2008, he departed as chief executive of REA Group and a week later started his own venture with some of his former colleagues.

He had two aims. One was to invest in companies through an investment fund known as CAV Investment Holdings, and the other was to build companies.

With the money he earned from his shareholding in REA Group, Baker invested in a number of businesses. But the main focus for him is Classified ADventures.

He identified about four or five ideas and created an incubator in which those new businesses could be formed, he says.

Three of those ideas have become reality: Sobox, smartagent sites and listglobally.

Baker says his team has very clear goals it wants to achieve, given its financial projections.

With distribution partners lined up, he says, the next goal is to increase the number of listings going through the system. “Our first goal is to get to 1000 listings a month, then we want to get to 5000 listings a month,” he says.

“We are the only ones doing this,” Baker says of his new online property classified website.

“We are the first one to go out and line up all these market leaders, link them all together, and provide them with a feed of properties.

“Either it’s going to be an incredibly good idea or I just wasted two years of my life.”

Overall this is a great example of using PR and email to directly get to those customers that really matter, the frequent flyer.  More companies should use this approach more often.  Overall, well done … not just fix the maintenance issues.

Here is the email in full …

Qantas has recently experienced major disruptions to our international network. You may have been affected directly or indirectly by the disruptions, or seen the media coverage and speculation about Qantas safety and maintenance standards.

As one of our valued customers, I wanted to be in touch with you directly about this. I want to apologise if you were affected personally by the disruptions. I know that Easter is a special opportunity to unite family and friends, and I sincerely regret any frustration and anxiety you may have experienced due to the delays.

We hate disappointing our customers and we do all we can to rectify matters when things go wrong.

I also want to give you my personal assurance that you can continue to fly Qantas with confidence. Despite some sensational coverage recently, safety was never an issue. There were mechanical issues, but they did not represent safety threats. We always respond conservatively to any mechanical or performance issue, and we always put safety before schedule.

Every year the Qantas Group carries 38 million passengers to their destinations safely and home again. We continue to invest in the best fleet, product and service and in being a great Australian company. All of us at Qantas want to thank you for your loyalty and we look forward to giving you a warm welcome when next you fly.

The premise of the show is simple – you get to see a real airline in action and follow what happens to their customers.  Now in the UK, this show, with EasyJet, does well and EasyJet comes off looking great.   For them, it is a form of publicity that does well.

Tiger Airways is Australia’s #4 carrier (after Qantas, Virgin Blue and Jetstar) and a relatively new player on the scene.  They probably saw the Airways show as a way in which they could rapidly build their brand in the Australian market and differentiate themselves from the other played.

However, this seems to have backfired and backfired badly.  Tiger does not come off well in this show.  For 30 min we saw passenger after passenger stranded at Melbourne airport as flights were cancelled or delayed.  Families were not compensated and the Tiger staff came across as condescending and arrogant.  In once case, a group of people who needed to get from Melbourne to Brisbane resorted to driving … 20+ hours door to door.  Any which way you cut it, this is not good PR for the fledgling airline.

The bottom line is if you are going to use PR, make sure you control the complete process (as best as you can) and that the down side is minimised as much as possible.  In addition, you want to make sure that you control who from your company is in front of the camera.  They are the face of your business to the world.  PR can be very powerful and very cost effective (just ask Richard Branson) however, the downside can be equally damaging.  Tread carefully.

The initial posting by Jason Roe was innocent enough.  He is a web developer in Ireland who seemed to found a relative harmless bug within the Ryan Air online booking site.  The bug meant that after going to the voucher page and then returning to a booking page, a zero cost for the flight was being displayed rather than the proper price.  Evidently completing the transfaction would not have given away a free ticket. 

After writing about the bug, he received a number of posts from people within Ryan Air (evidently confirmed by their IP address) slamming him.  Under the names of Ryanair Staff #1, #2 and #3, there were a series of comments posted that were less than complementory. 

Initially it made for fun reading, however after a while the volume of other comments and then the links to other sites meant that Ryanair had a PR problem on its hands. At last count there were over 500 comments and nearly 1000 links to that blog entry from other sites.

Ryanair could have done a couple of things – say nothing, issue a press release being humble or attacked the blogger.  Surprisingly someone appears to have chosen the 3rd approach.  A Stephen McNamara, evidently from Ryanair, was quoted as saying “Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. … It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again. … Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel“.

Assuming this is not an elaborate hoax, we can learn some interesting lessons from this.

Firstly, companies can not stop their people from commenting what is happening around the world.  Some companies block IP addresses etc, but this is just a temporary measure and those that want to comment will find a way.

Secondly, companies should be on the front foot and clearly admit when there is a problem, thank the person who brought it to their attention and get on with fixing it.  Avoidance or shooting the messenger are not real options.

Thirdly, official spokespeople should be carefully selected for their clarity in communication and being  cool head in an crisis. 

Finally, they should not engage in the debate.  It never works out how they think it will work out and companies never come out on top.

The internet is hear to stay and one man media companies are the norm, not the exception.  Understanding this and working with them will make a company stronger.  A thousand little voices do make a difference!