But the truth is that the battle-lines between the two sides just don’t exist anymore. Some of the most effective marketing is built into products rather than applied after the fact. Just look around:

• Zynga builds games using Facebook, so it’s easy for players to invite their friends.
• Cubeduel asks users to “share the awesomeness,” via contacts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Yelp’s feedback system encourages reviewers with praise like “Funny,” “Useful,” or “Cool,” which encourages more reviews, and better search-engine placement.
• YouTube makes it easy to embed its video anywhere on the web, extending its reach far beyond YouTube.com.
• Urbanspoon automatically links back to blogs that cite Urbanspoon reviews, updating a leader-board of the bloggers who have written the most reviews. This creates more buzz in the blogosphere.
• OkCupid systematically captures stats on people’s dating patterns for use in blog posts that generate massive publicity.
• Every website on the planet is now built to maximize links and keywords for search-engine placement.

Marketing gurus like Rand Fishkin and Dave McClure who violently disagree with Fred are the same ones helping companies re-design their products, not their marketing campaigns. Engineering gurus like Paul Graham and Hadi Partovi are obsessed with customer acquisition, not better algorithms. And the best entrepreneurs are now product-marketing centaurs who develop their products from the start to be viral, to be search-engines friendly, to be social.

This integration of marketing with product development has been a long time in coming. Engineers have become more self-sufficient and entrepreneurial, updating their products every day or every week in a way that brings them closer to the rhythms of the market. Marketeers have become more analytical and product-focused. It is much more likely today that the two took the same math classes for the first few years of college.

All of Fred’s critics who insist that the sizzle is more important than steak have hardly noticed that the steak is increasingly made out of sizzle (a development I’m not entirely comfy with). The modern-day version of “the medium is the message” might be that “the product is the promotion.”

Now of course, there are other forms of marketing which have very little to do with product development, and those are also important. But the folks who are defending marketing as a separate discipline are the ones most likely to approach it in real life as a joint effort.

The post Engineers As Marketeers, Marketeers as Engineers appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

I think she was the one who came up with the “People Love Us on Yelp” stickers that you see in restaurant windows all over town. And she has also the hard-nosed discipline of an old-school marketer from a company like The Gap. She’s funny and smart, so it should be a great talk.

She is speaking on Wednesday, April 28 at noon here in Redfin’s headquarters.  We’ll provide lunch for anyone who signs up, and happily host anyone who drops by. To add your name to the list, just leave a comment on the original brown-bag post…

Thanks to Michelle for pitching in, and hope to see you all soon!

The post Michelle Broderick Comes to Redfin This Wednesday appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

I mean, I’m an amateur when it comes to real estate. I’m like that kid in the back of the classroom who ate paste. And I don’t mean the kid in second grade. I mean the kid in college who sat in the back eating paste.

I’m also, officially, a Redfinnian.

I’m not entirely sure how I got the job as a writer here. I spent the past nine years writing for videogames – none of which were real estate-related, by the way. I’ve been following the market for the past couple of years, but I came to it the same way most people do, I suppose; my wife and I were considering buying a house. We started reading up to educate ourselves. We started checking out Redfin.

Prices started to drop, then plummet, and we decided to wait until the dust settled a bit. But in the meantime, I continued going to the site, checking on my favorites like they were my prized petunias. I kept reading the blogs and the news. I was like some sort of armchair home-buyer. It’s entirely possible that I was a little obsessed with the process.

One day, my wife spotted the job listing on Redfin for a writer. One short whirlwind later, here I am.

Since I got the job, it’s been interesting to read what people say about Redfin, on blogs and discussion boards, or wherever. Because I’ve always loved the site. The data is great. The map is great. I can spend hours just browsing for houses.

But a lot of people love the site. The interesting part is reading the Internet chatter about the people of Redfin. That they’re crazy, or trying to ruin the industry, or that they haven’t thought their business model through, or that they don’t care about their customers. Or that they’re making some Big Mistake that will doom them to failure.

As I was struggling to commit to my blog entry, Glenn Kelman gave me some advice. He told me, above all, to keep it real. So here it is: You’re never going to meet a smarter, more passionate, more customer-focused group of people than you’ll find stepping off our elevator. Believe the hype. This place is the real deal, and it’s intimidating as hell, frankly.

As for the Big Mistake… oftentimes, the chatter was right. The people here have made some Big Mistakes, some of which might really have killed the business. But it’s a funny thing about mistakes – they only kill you when you refuse to acknowledge them. And if there’s one quality the people here seem to hold above all others, it’s this: You admit when you’re wrong, and you learn from it.

So, for what it’s worth, I promise to work my butt off as the new guy here on the site. I promise that I’ll make my mistakes as quickly and entertainingly as possible. And I promise I’ll do my level best to learn from them.

(Photo Credit: b7_banana on Flickr)

The post The New Guy appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Doesn’t It Remind of You That Discovery Channel Ad?
But maybe I’m the first who wonders if it was inspired by The Discovery Channel’s “The World is Just Awesome” ad, which came out just as Microsoft hired Crispin to take on Apple?

Both jump around the world, posing wild animals alongside innovative, nerdy free-spirits, who don’t seem to mind chanting a corporate mantra.

The Ad Is Un-One-Uppable
As soon as I heard that Microsoft was taking on Apple: I thought, 1. “Good! About time!” and 2. “They’ve started a fight they can’t win. Apple will one-up them.” But the ad it turns out is un-one-uppable. (It must have been designed to be that way).

Who wants to go after people saving polar bears, teaching African children, converting cow pies into car fuel? In fact, the ad sort of kills for me the whole Apple campaign, which now seems so precious, insufferable, narrow, white and male. As Crispin folks explained to Danielle Sacks when they first took the Microsoft account, “To try to be cool is not to be cool.” Apple really tries to be cool.

Why Did It Take Us So Long to See That Apple is Kind of Mean?
Why did it take us so long to see that? I remember being shocked on learning years ago that the Apple “I’m a PC” ad couldn’t run in Japan, because consumers there don’t like snarky comparisons; I hadn’t realized until then that the luminescent, post-modern ads were such a dirty shiv to the gut.

And it wasn’t just me: friends who still love unicorn stickers and long walks on the beach loved watching the PC nerd (whom Slate’s Seth Stevenson always maintained was more likable than Apple’s hipster) getting humiliated in ever-more elaborate ways.

Apple is the Marketing Juggernaut, Microsoft is the Software Engineering Company
And why did it take so long for Microsoft to respond? We think of Apple as a products company, and Microsoft as a business behemoth, but Apple is the company that floods the airwaves with ads while Microsoft is mostly a company of software engineers. Every time I’m about to buy an Airbook, I wonder how much of its cost is its carefully constructed image.

That’s why I love it that Bill Gates is cast as the anti-Steve Jobs, wearing dorky clothes and glasses, even though he’s the one who’s really trying to save the world.

So what do you think?  Is “I’m a PC” a take off on the “World is Just Awesome?”Is Microsoft the real product company, while Apple is the marketing juggernaut? And what percentage of a Mac’s price is marketing vs. say, of a Windows Dell? I’ll go with 40% and 20%.

The post Revenge of the Nerds: Microsoft's Ad is Better than Apple's appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.