Archive for the ‘unique company’ tag
Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff: We Can Actually Make More Money On Mobile Than On Desktop [TCTV]
It’s an interesting time for the real estate industry in the United States. Some places are super hot, while other areas remain down in the dumps. Meanwhile, the traditional property sale and rental market has been dealing with disruption in itself from the web, with information that was previously available to only real estate agents now being accessible to the masses.
So it was good to sit down with Spencer Rascoff, the CEO of leading real estate search website Zillow, while he was visiting San Francisco this past week. Zillow is now a publicly traded company — its next earnings report is slated for tomorrow — so Rascoff couldn’t get too in detail on the specifics of Zillow’s financials. But there was still a lot more for us to discuss.
One very interesting thing we discussed was how the larger move toward mobile is affecting Zillow. Last quarter was the first time that more homes were viewed on Zillow through a mobile device or a tablet than on a desktop. Now, Zillow is not at all a unique company in experiencing this shift, but what is unique is that it is actually has the immediate ability to make more money because of it — web firms such as Facebook and Pandora are notoriously having trouble monetizing their growing mobile user bases. Rascoff explained:
“We’ve tipped toward mobile in usage and that’s really quite startling and new for us, since just last quarter… We have welcomed it with open arms because this is a great boon to the business, and a catalyst that frankly has dramatically propelled our financial results. A user of Zillow on a smartphone for example, or a mobile device, is three times more likely to contact a subscribing premier agent, [which is] one of our advertisers, than a user of Zillow on a dekstop. So, we actually monetize in terms of contacts per visitor quite a bit better on smartphones or on mobile devices than on desktop.
So, this is a great trend for us and we welcome it… most other companies aren’t so lucky.”
Watch the video embedded above to see Rascoff dig in a bit deeper on mobile, talk about Zillow’s increasing focus on the rental real estate market, dish on what the next industries ripe for disruption could be, and more.
Apple’s new Barcelona store features unique logo
A soon-to-open Apple retail store in Barcelona is advertised with a unique company logo that is “custom made” to fit the city neighborhood where the store is located.
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Permission To Fail
I love my job. Seriously.
The skeptical among you may read this as shameless corporate cheer-leading, or a PR ploy (given I work at a PR firm). It’s not. You have to understand that I work for a very unique company—in fact, it’s been the most unique career experience in my life. A sixty year old company—technically family owned (not public) with over four thousand employees globally and the CEO of the company wears the last name of the founder, his father.
Which brings me to the video above. I had the opportunity to interview our CEO, Richard Edelman on the topic of trust as it relates to our annual study (Edelman’s Trust Barometer). We teamed up with the Chicago chapter of Social Media Club and opened up our new floor in the Chicago office.
If you don’t have time to watch the entire video (though I recommend it as it’s a great discussion) I’d encourage you to fast forward to the last five minutes. Richard says what every “employee” wants to hear. As a CEO, he believes that the top can do their part by cultivating a culture where failure is not shunned, but embraced as part of the innovation process.
“…that’s the one thing the top can do”
Amen.