Just Your Friendly Neighborhood Robots

This week, we had the opportunity to take a look at a hip company that's doing exciting things with neighborhood search: Robot Workshop. Their product is beautifully simple, so buckle up for a fast review.

Neighborhood Search for Facebook or Website
The Robot Workshop neighborhood search technology can live on an agent or broker's Facebook page or website. Let's look at http://www.facebook.com/AlvaradoGroup as an example. Here's how the functionality works:

1. From the sidebar, select "Neighborhoods"

2. Observe the nifty gadget.

3. Drag and drop the neighborhood attributes that describe your ideal neighborhood. This is a real lifestyle search first, and a property search tool second.

4. Rearrange the attributes so that they are in order of importance.

5. Click "OK I'm done" and see what the robots have returned for you. You can view results either by zip code or neighborhood. You can cycle through your matches using the "previous match" and "next match" buttons.

6. Select "Search for Homes in This Area" and you'll be sent directly to the broker/agent's property search on their website. The results returned will be in your chosen neighborhood or zip code. This makes the Facebook integrated search compliant with MLS model IDX rules and regulations. In this example, you see tight integration with the Wolfnet IDX Map Search solution.

7. Select "Request Info About This Area" and a lead will be sent to the agent/broker.

What We Liked Best
There's plenty to like about Robot Workshop, but there are 2 key features that we liked best.

1. Leads from Facebook are credible leads. Because the leads from the Facebook widget are from Facebook users, you'll get a real person's real name and contact information. It's a lot better than Mickey Mouse leads.

2. The Facebook widget generates traffic to the property search on your website. One of the primary goals of Internet marketing is to generate traffic to your website. The Robot Workshop neighborhood search can accomplish this.

Getting It
Getting started with Robot Workshop's neighborhood search sounds pretty easy. In fact, for Facebook, they'll even set it up for you. Implementation for your website is also relatively simple. Copy and paste a few lines of code and you're done. If you run into trouble, contact the folks at Robot Workshop and they'll help.

Seth Siegler, founder of Robot Workshop, points out that this is only the beginning. "We're going to have additional options in the future. We'll go even simpler, or we'll have a beefed-up option with more in-depth info," he says.

Learn More
You have several options to learn more about Robot Workshop:

• Visit our product directory.
• View their website: http://robot-workshop.com/.
• Find them on Facebook or Twitter.