Websites were the most popular source of news and gossip from last week’s MIPIM, beating magazines into second place, according to a survey of industry professionals.
During MIPIM 2009, the industry was bombarded with blogs, twitters, podcasts and frequent web updates on the convention’s events and gossip.
A survey of more than 110 property professionals carried out by management consultancy Remit Consulting in conjunction with Estates Gazette, found that conventional methods rule with the website the most popular source of news.
The survey found 50% turned to websites for information from MIPIM, followed by the magazine at 43%.
Blogs were the most popular “new” source of news at 23%, with RSS (Really Simple Syndication) at 18% just edging Twitter (15%).
Nearly 80% used blogs “regularly” or “sometimes”, and this dropped to 58% for RSS feeds and 23% for Twitter.
Twitter attracted the biggest negative sentiment with 66% “never” using it, despite a 90% recognition that it existed.
Andrew Waller, a partner at Remit, said: “The property industry might be slow in adopting new ways of working, but they often have a good grasp of what might be of long-term use.
“They do not appear to be that keen on Twitter, which is interesting.
“The property industry tends to be very traditional. As recently as 10 years ago we were being told that the use of websites for information was a step too far for a group of people that preferred instead to open their weekly copy of Estates Gazette and browse through the pictures.
“It is interesting, then, that the results of our latest snap survey found that the most popular source of information from MIPIM was the website, beating the magazine into second place.”
