Century 21 just announced the new “communities” section of their website (via FoREM), which is a question and answer product allowing agents and consumers to communicate publicly (somewhat similar to Zillow Advice and Trulia Voices). In addition to the new Communities section of Century21.com, they are now up and running with C21 Talk Radio, which is an online radio station for consumers interested in real estate. I really like the direction they are headed regarding their focus on building features that appeal directly to the consumers visiting Century21.com; I think anything that deepens the consumer/agent engagement, such as a question and answer product, is something worth pursuing for franchises/brokerages as a way to gain mind share with consumers. Here are a few suggestions on improvements that could be made related to their Communities section to take it to the next level:

• Add RSS and e-mail updates by topic as well as by geography. Maybe this is already built in on the back end for c21 agents, but it’s not apparent to a consumer visiting their site
• Add e-mail alerts to individual threads. I see the RSS icon on the individual thread level, but don’t see a way to get e-mail updates
• Integrate an “ask a question” module into their listing detail pages (current listing detail page)
• Enable tagging of questions by geography. For instance, this question is about the commute from Mesa to Phoenix, but I don’t see either Mesa or Phoenix in the architecture anywhere (either in the URL or in the user interface). Properly tagging posts would help C21 easily surface those questions in other parts of the site to deepen the engagement of their visitors.

Is their communities platform 100% perfect? No. But they are busy working on it, and that’s more than I can say about most in this space. It’s clear they are near the front of the pack in terms of franchises/brokerages digging in and implementing a solid social media strategy to benefit their agents over the long haul.

If you want to keep up to speed with what c21 is up to, they are now on all the major social networks. Facebook? Check. YouTube? Check. Flickr? Check. Want to follow them on Twitter? You can now do that too — @century21realestate.

Disclosure: Century 21 is an advertiser with my employer, Zillow.com