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I love it when I’m able to read or witness geeks debating the finer points of TechnoGibberish. Seems most have never learned they’re in the <1% category about which most technology consumers couldn’t give less of a @#%&.

Though I harbor genuine and deep respect for those of you who’re able to help us TechTards, there are so few of them who actually DO help. It’s funny to watch, over time, as the vast majority of their ‘can’t miss’ predictions die ugly, without even an audible whimper from TechTards.

I bring this up in order to send you to a post I just read which has the most interestingly informing comment thread I’ve recently had the pleasure to read. I’d love to hear what the Bloodhound TechnoGeek posse has to say about the post, but am far more interested in hearing what they have to say about the comments.

For me, the comments were at times a revelation. I urge you to read every last comment — as I was riveted as various ’sub-threads’ emerged. But then I’m just a TechTard, right?

Here’s the link — I and my fellow TechTards will be waiting to hear from you guys.

Much thanks in advance for your TechTake.

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As I mentioned here earlier this week, I’ve been thinking about switching to a different network.  Love the iPhone, but am completely unimpressed with AT&T’s network.  So I went into a Verizon store to look at the Droid over the weekend, and then bought one after work at BestBuy on Monday. 

I did the transaction at BestBuy because you get the rebate immediately, instead of having to cut off the label from the box and send it in to Verizon if you were to buy the phone at the Verizon store. 

The phone itself is quite nice.  If I hadn’t been spoiled on the iPhone, it would be the best phone I’ve played with or had.  I’ve had a couple of Blackberries, used by wife’s Motorola Q.  I haven’t used a recent Palm, so can’t compare it to that.

Verizon has a superior network.  The call quality is night and day.  The calls are crisp, the 3G network is fast, and phone calls have not been dropped in the past three two plus days.  That’s a huge improvement over AT&T, which would’ve dropped at least 2 or 3 of those calls.

As for the phone: On the upside, the physical keyboard (in addition to a virtual keyboard), while not very good, is nice to have. The keyboard is too flat, so it makes finding the right keys hard. There are many free apps, and they’re pretty good quality.  If you use Google and Gmail for your email, contacts, and calendar, the integration is seamless.  Even Facebook contacts are properly synched.  Google Voice works great, and because I’m now on a fast network, the call quality between Google Voice and the regular phone isn’t different.

I got the 16 gig version, but thankfully I can swap out the 16 gig SD card in the future for a 32 gig card if I ever want to expand the memory on the phone.  If I bought an iPhone, I’d have to buy a whole new phone to increase the capacity. 32 gig SD cards now run at about $90 to $100, so they’re not cheap, but the price will come down and I’ll do that next year. 

Unfortunately applications have to be stored in the phone’s native 500 meg memory.  That’s not a huge limitation for me, since at no time in owning the iPhone with it’s 100,000 apps did I use more than 200 meg of memory.  So I’m assuming that I won’t really run up against that limitation here.

Here’s one of the best features, which I haven’t fully explored yet.  Google includes turn-by-turn GPS navigation.  I used it last night and it was great - better than my wife’s Garmin.  It even displays the street view at the end of your trip so you can see where you should’ve arrived.  It did have trouble finding the Verizon store last night, however, but the store is brand new and may not be in Google Maps yet.

Applications run fast, and run in the background.  This is an improvement over my iPhone 3G which could take a while to launch an application, and which could not run applications in background.

The removable battery is nice, so I don’t need to send the phone into the manufacturer to replace the battery, and so that I can buy an additional battery and swap it out if the battery life doesn’t suit my needs.

On the downside, the software lacks polish.  The same button may not work the same way across applications, the applications vary in quality and so don’t all run as they should, there are only three home screens of possible apps (instead of iPhone’s 11), the phone is not seamlessly compatible with my Mac (iTunes) although there are workarounds. In addition, processes can build up in the background, requiring you to kill them.

Some people will like that last point - you can theoretically have finer grained control over the phone.  But for most people, that’s just going to be a nuisance.  Think of the iPhone as being… well a Mac, and Android being slightly closer to a Unix box in the way you have control, but also the way you need to know how to control the phone.

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In the spirit of my #1 Bloodhound Blog Unchained takeaway, here’s a 70% ready-to-roll video.  Brian Brady was kind enough to teach me his brilliant way of leveraging Linked In to establish new relationships.  I haven’t been executing the Brady Principles consistently enough.  Check out a little something-something I stumbled upon (no pun intended) today:

Here are some related links if you’d like to learn more about Brian Brady’s Linked In techniques or Google Reader:

Brian Brady Training on Linked In (awesome webinar we recorded in March)

Google Reader vs. Twitter Lists (why I disagree with a recent article Scoble wrote vs. Google Reader)

Introduction to Google Reader (great article by Mark Madsen, fellow BHB contributor)

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Reacting to John Rowles’ post, Jim Duncan has been talking about the RPR idea for years, and I read a little more about it today, having been tipped over the weekend by Tom Johnson. My take: Yawn.

RPR is not the generals fighting the last war, but the war before that. Apparently, the NAR still believes that the added value of real estate representation comes from hoarding data. RPR is their attempt to put a new fence around the data, having let the last set of barriers fall to Realtor.com and to IDX.

It’s twice funny to me, because not only is that war already well won — by the consumer — so is the true last war, the Battle of the Realty.bots. After all of this chatter, none of this shit has turned out to mean anything in real life.

I mean nothing. I’m convinced by now that no one who does not actually represent buyers and sellers has any clue about what is going on in the real estate market. We don’t search for listings — our clients do — and our position is stronger than ever. We post our listings wherever we can — and our position is stronger than ever.

I’m no friend to any restraint or restriction on trade, but buying or selling a home is a lot more complicated than it was four years ago. Our clients don’t need flashy web sites, they need agents who know how to navigate the shoals of the transaction.

RPR, MLS, VOW, IDX — all of this goes away when we do away with the co-broke. In the mean time, it’s deck chairs on the Titanic, at best, one more dipshit time-wasting “tool” to mask sales-call reluctance.

Notes for the grunts on the ground:

1. Motivated buyers and sellers will not go through a middleman in the early phases of their search. This is 1974-style thinking from the NAR.

2. Motivated buyers and sellers don’t care how they found you. They care about what they found: Do you know your shit? Can you deliver the product? Is your word any good?

3. Whether or not the information you have is better than the information they have is meaningless — to them — until they have resolved to rely on your judgment.

Ergo: There ain’t no substitute for salesmanship.

I’ll play with this toy when it comes around, but that’s because I’ll play with anything. My IDX software is the same as my MLS software (FlexMLS from FBS), and so my clients are searching from the exact same database I use. This is a huge marketing benefit, one that will not be easily replaced.

Even so, the notion of a national MLS is absurd, so it’s most likely purpose is not to re-enslave the data (impossible), but, rather, to attempt to re-enslave the agents. Even that objective would seem to be doomed to failure, but it’s another problem easily corrected by getting rid of the co-broke.

Meanwhile: I don’t care.

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Updates Below 11/16/09

I live in the far suburbs (bordering on rural) of Raleigh, and have had the iPhone 3G (not the latest 3GS) since April.  I mostly love it. It integrates well with gmail, where I maintain my contacts.  It has a few really nice apps that make life easier.  And the design is very nice and intuitive. In fact, I’m in discussions with some folks from Bangalore about building an app for the iPhone that relates to part of my law practice. 

But AT&T’s network is terrible.  Lately I’ve been dropping two or three calls a day.  Back before I started my practice, it was mostly just annoying.  Now it’s getting to the point where it’s interfering with business.  On Friday, when I was in the midst of a major issue with a client, I dropped at least six calls. 

AT&T hooked me up with a new SIM card this weekend, and I went to the Apple store where they exchanged the iPhone with a new one.  But I dropped another two calls today.

So I’m thinking about switching to Verizon.  The Motorola Droid is out, and I played around with it today at the Verizon store.  I’ve gotten so used to the high quality of Apple software, that I was somewhat disappointed by the way the Droid moved from application to application and the fact that the same button did not have the same effect in each application. 

So I’m going to stick it out for a week with the iPhone.  If I continue to have phone troubles this week, I’m going to switch.

It’s unfortunate, because the iPhone has been great for me. But dropped calls are not acceptable.  If you’ve got some thoughts on a Verizon phone - Blackberry, Motorola Droid or Palm - that you love, let me know.  The Droid is appealing because of the open framework and the fact that apps are going to be developed for it in great quantities.

And if you know how to write an iPhone App, and are interested in having me pay you to write a simple one for my business, let me know!

UPDATE:

Walt Mossberg of the WSJ has a mostly positive review of the Motorola Droid. As does David Pogue of the NYT.

Gizmodo says “If you don’t buy an iPhone, buy a Droid.”

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This was in my email this morning, spam from LinkedIn.com:

Joel Burslem is no longer Director of Product Development at Vook

Means what, I don’t know. Deck chairs on the Titanic. There is no huge surging mass of sub-literates demanding even easier-reading access to the half-shouted profundities of Gary Vaynerchuk. Love him or hate him, the guys lives and dies in video. He cannot be caged by a page, no matter how stylish or expensive or electronic that page might be. The book is a dead letter, so how could the Vook not be an even-deader letter? You cannot even pretend to believe otherwise unless you are in the pay of Brad Inman.

But: None of that matters. The Vook is instructive because it teaches us a host of interesting lessons about how to fail in business. Big names. Big funding. Design budget. Attractive product that works. Fancy offices filled with bigfoot corporate types. Even Aeron chairs, I’ll bet. What could go wrong?

Only this: There is no market for the product.

Remember that “find a need and fulfill it” bit from Business 101?

Can you name even one person who has confided to you, “You know, I’d probably read more if books were more like television?”

“I’d sure like to read more books, but the books I want to read are interrupted at intervals by bad actors enacting bad scripts.”

“What I want from books requires a sub-woofer!”

That’s a disaster from day one, and I have been ridiculing the Vook since first I heard about it. But even now, I can see an actual use for this technology: How-To books: How to build a rocking chair in 24 easy steps or The Kama Sutra for Klutzes. Those could sell, because they answer a need that can be served by both text and video. Even then, though, they’d be better as web sites — easier to control, easier to revise, etc.

But let’s go back to the Vook’s original marketing problem and try to solve it in a better way.

Brad Inman is a choke-point dinosaur. His goal was to come up with a “blade” dispenser — a relatively cheap razor that could be used to sell higher-profit “blades” over and over again. Gillette’s razors, Kodak’s cameras and Amazon’s Kindle device are all examples of this very-common business model. Because he has worked his whole life in publishing — selling vast quantities of a publication no one reads — he naturally gravitated to publishing for his new venture. He has a background in video, also, and video — unlike paper — is not easy to produce, reproduce, exhibit or copy. If anything could make a book into a “blade,” it would be video.

Except that books themselves are dying as an information transmission medium, dedicated devices you have to schlep around are an anathema and no one is crying out in desperate need for badly-animated comic books starring Gary Vaynerchuk.

I had two words for this idiot product when it was announced: Market research.

The Vook is just a dumb idea, but the base idea — a dedicated device that people are willing to pay added-value fees to gain access to — that may not be completely off the wall. Or maybe the place for an idea like that is on the wall.

Look at this:

That’s a beautiful photograph. So it this one:

Those are just two news photos I found today on-line. There are hundreds more, just as striking, taken every day. And there are millions of other very striking photos that have been taken over the decades. And thousands of drawings, illustrations and paintings.

High definition video monitors are the perfect picture frames, and we are soon headed for the day of video fabrics that will work like wall-paper — and eventually like garments.

We are on the cusp of an age when the quantity of available video screens will be massively increased — and every one of them is going to need programming.

For now, a dedicated device could connect a big Aquous-like monitor to a net-based service that fed images to that huge screen.

This is programmable art as decor.

You already have big picture frames all over the place.

You already have a small USB-fed picture frame on your disk, filled with eight gigs of family photos.

A device like this combines the two: Huge, striking graphic images that change at intervals — an evanescent art far better than you can afford to purchase in atoms, but yours for pennies a day when sold to you as electrons.

You’re already paying for decor. All we’re doing is turning decor into “blades” — something you purchase continuously, rather than only when you change homes.

That’s a business.

Your mood is programmable — on the fly. The intervals, the arcs of the color wheel, the tone and tenor of the images themselves — all controllable by you.

This is something people would pay for. This is something I would pay for, and I hate everything.

And remember, the quantity of available video surfaces in our lives is about to explode. There are a lot of business opportunities in here, but there are a lot of Web 2.0-like options, too. What a DeeJay does is more than just records, and what an Image- or Video-Jockey does can be far more than mere images.

This could be huge…

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Rotarian Socialism in action:

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt favors net neutrality, but only to a point: While the tech player wants to make sure that telecommunications giants don’t steer Internet traffic in a way that would favor some devices or services over others, he also believes that it would be a terrible idea for the government to involve itself as a regulator of the broader Internet.

The impulse is to say, “What a schmuck!” But once they’ve screwed up the internet, that will be one more once-free aspect of American life that will be enslaved forevermore.

Here’s a little rule of thumb to head off objections: If an allegedly-valuable social objective cannot be effected without force, it’s crime.

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I don’t know if the local board in Phoenix allows agents to display recent sales transactions via idx feed, but it seems to me from talking to others around the land that most boards don’t.

Doesn’t it kinda sting that Trulia can display this info, but Realtor folk can’t?

Or can they?

How To Display Real Estate Transactions On Your Wordpress Site Via Trulia’s Pretty Up To Date RSS Feed

1. Install and activate the “EXEC PHP” plugin
2. Do A General Property Search For Any Area On Trulia.
3. Click the “Recently Sold” Tab
4. Once the results are up, click on the link for more details on the first property.
5. When the info shows up, click “back.” - [This is key! ]
6. Now there will be an RSS feed link at the very top right of the page.
7. Click On It, Then Grap The RSS Link That Pops Up Slightly Lower To The Left
7. Insert the RSS feed into the code below within a blog post, where indicated by “PUT YOUR JUICY SALES TRANSACTION FEED URL HERE”

< ?php // Get RSS Feed(s)
include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');
$rss = fetch_rss('PUTYOURJUICYSALESTRANSACTIONFEEDURLHERE');
$maxitems = 30;
$items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, $maxitems);
?>

< ?php foreach ( $items as $item ) : ?>

• < ?php echo $item['title']; ?>

< ?php endforeach; ?>

Phoenix Real Estate Sales Transactions

What you’re seeing below is actually a screen capture of the transactions on my own site… didn’t want to mess with plugins/php over here at bhb (or cause other trouble for ma and pop.)

Which leads to the point of all this. Can you see adding pages upon pages of dynamic content to your site using this little trick? Or is this content theft? Does Trulia own the data? Does your local board?

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Were ready for step two of the series on how to effectively use a tablet PC to run your day to day real estate tasks.  I’m including a screencast to actually give you some visualization on how I actually use my tablet PC for working with buyers in the field. Warning: Please turn down volume on screencast prior to starting.
Using a tablet PC when out in the field

The basic premise of what I do with buyers out in the field is extremely simple but very effective for organization, having a go-to information source, and being looked to at a whole new light in your clients eyes.

What I do when working with buyers using my tablet PC:

• Fire up my MLS and find the homes that I will be showing to my buyer
• Go to File Print and select the Print labeled “One Note 2007″
• Once the spec sheet is in One Note I move it into a pre-created notebook for my specific client for organizational reasons
• You can also print specific tax bills or anything relevant to that specific house you can think of that maybe handy and impressive to show in-front buyers.  The most relevant thing that I have added into my showings is the listing history/price change sheet.  (We all know they ask they questions almost every time no more fumbling, time to be the expert we really are!)
• Next I go show the house and take notes on each property that we see so I can give relevant feedback to the listing agent.  Taking notes on every house is also a great way to remind buyers about the prior homes.

As you can see what I’m presenting here is really simple and should not intimidate anyone that is afraid of technology.  It’s as simple as Print/Move to a Notebook this is a good start of what we will be building in on future posts.
The real reason I’ve decided to take on this Tablet PC for Real Estate blog journey is to communicate with other people who share similiar interest’s and can share new ways of working with a tablet PC to become more efficient and profitable.  Time is money!

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If you want to build a paperless law office, then avoid the practice of criminal law. While other parts of the legal system are slowly, but surely, moving into an electronic and paperless future, all important documents in a criminal practice need to be produced in hardcopy form.

And so I do have to maintain and secure client files.

Still I’m finding ways to minimize the paper flow. My discoveries may make sense to you in your real estate business, so I’ll share them here from time to time.

Today: The scanner.

I need something that is fast, produces good quality scans (but need not reproduce the Mona Lisa in all its glory), and is inexpensive. Right now my firm is me. But later I expect to add a support person and additional attorneys.

So I want something that can be networked so that colleagues can share the scanner.

I think I’ve found a solution: The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500. I got the S1500M - the “M” is for Mac. It’s roughly $400 from Amazon, although I bought mine slightly cheaper. For the $400, Fujitsu throws in the latest version of Acrobat Professional, which itself runs more than $250 retail.

I haven’t fully exploited Acrobat Professional, but I’m sure it’s got some features I could incorporate into my workflow.

But I have worked with the ScanSnap for the past two months, and it’s been nearly flawless. It’s fast - Fujitsu claims 20 pages a minute - and handles a pile of documents of all sizes, automatically adjusting the scanner to accommodate different sizes.

Very rarely the multi-document feeder jams on a document that’s folded or wrinkled. But fixing the jam is painless. Most of the time the scanner powers through like a champ. Just put the documents into the feeder, and press the scan button. The scanner handles the rest.

This is a color scanner, but I have not used it to scan in photos so couldn’t say whether the scan quality is good enough for anything but the most basic color scanning.

Best of all, the scanner is only 12 inches by 6 inches, so fits nicely on any desk. It’s by no means a portable scanner, but it is light and small enough that you can move it from place to place without much hassle.

I had the ScanSnap up and running within 5 minutes out of the box. The Fujitsu-supplied software is not refined. It runs in the background and detects the scanner in operation. The software also offers the ability to create profiles to automate the handling of documents.

The ScanSnap S1500 is a USB device, not a networked device. One solution: connect the device to a spare computer/server and share the Scanned Documents folder so that everyone in the office can reach his scans.

Another problem: the ScanSnap software has not been updated for the latest MacOS version, “Snow Leopard”. It crashes on the “Scan to Folder” feature, although there are workarounds for this bug. Fujitsu promises to have a fix out by the end of 2009, but that’s an absurdly long time to wait for a $400 product to integrate seamlessly with a major operating system like MacOS.

The ScanSnap 1500M doubles as an excellent copier by scanning in documents, and then printing. So if you need a scanner to handle workplace documents, that has a small physical footprint, is reasonably priced, and just works, then I’d recommend this product.

If you need something that’s somewhat less robust (and less expensive), try an earlier model: the ScanSnap S500 is the previous version of the S1500, and, while somewhat slower, is apparently also a very good product.

Finally: I get nothing, got nothing, and will never take anything for recommending a product or service on this blog. You’ll just get my thoughts about products or services that I have found valuable in my work, and think you might find useful as well.

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Believe it or don’t, just yesterday I was telling Cathleen that I felt remiss in not having made fun of the Vook lately. The Vook, as you will recall, is Brad Inman’s latest attempt to prove that he stumbled onto half a billion bucks by accident. The trouble is, as he is discovering, pissing away that kind of dough isn’t easy, no matter how clueless you are — and Inman takes a back-seat to no one at cluelessness.

Even so, I need to issue a mea culpa of my own: The Vook has actually made it to the marketplace, a feat I would have bet against. Simon and Schuster — which has always made all of its profits from crossword puzzle books — turns out to be possessed of its own Inmaniacal cluelessness: The New York publisher is issuing Vook content, apparently because its printed books are not already selling badly enough.

But: Don’t despair. Even though there are very few people who are stupid enough to buy this stupid gadget, the Vook will still serve a purpose in the history of marketing: It will make the Zune look popular by contrast.

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Okay, so all the Realtors know that short sales are like a jack-in-the-box: You crank and crank for weeks or months and nothing happens, then everything pops all at once.

Happened to me today, with the Sphinx-link bank suddenly lurching to life in order to issue two must-rush-now documents that reiterate terms my buyers have already agreed to.

That doesn’t matter. Must-rush-now! Must-have-today! Must return to hibernating state no later than 5 pm.

So Mom is at home and Dad’s at work — and both of them are 35 miles away from me.

We could trade faxes, but the originals are already barely readable.

But: No worries: We’ve got DocuSign on our side.

I set up the whole workflow: I sign, Mom signs, Dad signs — and then the whole package goes back to the lister, all untouched by human hands.

Note that I set everything up so that I could leave if I needed to, once I had signed, and the rest of the job would percolate through the ether on its own. I love this feature, since I no longer have to nurse documents.

But, as it works out, the whole job, Tinkers to Evers to Chance, was done in seven minutes flat.

I plan to write more about DocuSign when I have more time, but for now: If you don’t have DocuSign, get it. Your time is your money, and, in consequence, this is some of the best money you will ever spend.

And now the bank can roll over and go back to sleep…

 
P.S.: Just got confirmation that the lister has the documents. Twenty-two minutes total.

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This is a long-delayed post. A thank you to BHB. A clue for others to see, use, follow. This post is about marketing techniques. A case study. A “you can do this, too.”

Apology in advance

Gregg, please pardon the backlinking to myself. I don’t like to pee in the pool by hyping myself, but the project I’m backlinking to is almost over, and will be worthless by the 15th of October, so I have no long term benefit from this. I’m deliberately not linking to my main website.

The world we live in

BHB is interesting to me. The philosophy (treat your customers like humans, get ‘em smart, treat ‘em right), the approach (use the tools that Teh Interwebs give ya), the people.

The real estate world is hidebound and burdened with useless historical debris. But the law world is worse. Lawyering is a closed shop industry and the State Bar is hellbent on protecting union members. Using ideas imported proudly from Elizabethan England.

BHB-style thinking and action to me is what the individual can do — constructively — to rage against the machine. (Hmmm. Good name for a band, I think.)

The opportunity

First, background. The IRS announced a voluntary disclosure program in late March, 2009 — people with money hidden offshore could Come to Jesus and avoid criminal prosecution for tax evasion.

I’m an international tax lawyer. Ding-ding-ding.

Seizing the opportunity

With help and coaching (ha! Chris hates that word!) from GenuineChris I launched www.foreignbankaccountamnesty.com. Simple WordPress install, various plug-ins, no biggie.

With me so far? Yep. All of you have launched blogs. Ain’t but a few of you who have made money on them. Listen up.

Get to work

Here’s what happened next. Chris Johnson harangued me. “Write!” he commanded. I wrote like an SOB. I remember one time when he said “It doesn’t matter what you write, just write.” As if content doesn’t matter. My “A” student overachiever feelings were hurt. But I wrote. Brute Force SEO. That’s what we did.

Hint. Here’s how you generate a LOT of posts fast. (1) Go buy a little digital recorder. Cheaper = better. Sony = badly-designed overpriced POS to be avoided at all costs. (2) Sign up for an account on www.speak-write.com. (3) Talk into your digital recorder. (4) Send the sound file to www.speak-write.com by email. (5) Get it back in an hour or less, fully transcribed for about 2 cents a word. (6) Light edit. You’re not Marcel Proust. (7) Post.

Then he said “Do video.” I fretted about that. I’m not photogenic. I don’t have high quality equipment. I didn’t have a pretty background. Guess what. I used my iMac’s native camera. Sitting at my desk. If I was lucky I remembered to pull out my Eyeball microphone to get better quality audio. And I did video. Lots of it.

Hint. Want to generate blog posts at the same time you do video? (1) Pick up that digital voice recorder of yours. (2) Push start on video recorder. (3) Push start on camera. (4) Start talking. (5) Stop talking. (6) Video to blog, audio to www.speak-write.com for processing into text.

What happened

Here’s what has happened. Starting from the first week in June.

What’s next

The amnesty closes on October 15, 2009. I am already plotting my next internet move.

Action > Whining

Memo to all personnel:

• Prospective customers call me, having read EVERYTHING I wrote. They have watched ALL of my videos. They have already decided to buy from me.
• Videos matter. One guy came in last weekend (flew in from the East Coast) and said “Hey, you look just like you do on your videos!” I about bust a gut.
• Videos REALLY matter. People saw me, heard me, and knew what to expect when they dealt with me. One less obstacle to the close.
• Just write. Quantity matters more than quality. Sorry but it’s true.
• Don’t do the tech stuff yourself. Hire someone. Chris knows way more than me. It wouldn’t have happened without him. If I had tried to do this myself, I would have washed out.
• This is fun. REALLY fun.
• This will work for anyone, even real estate brokers.

Thanks Gregg for the opportunity to talk about this out loud, and for the BHB inspiration. Funny how I tell local real estate friends about BHB and they don’t get it.

Mr. Google

Oh. Adwords. We eventually decided to experiment with this, a couple of months after we launched. Took our daily traffic up 5X. Stopped buying ads and traffic dropped again. Hmmm. Cause/effect is obvious even to me. Can’t tell you if we got clients from them or not. But it was at the level that ONE additional customer paid for all the Adword spending we did. And I figure Adwords brought us at least one new customer.

Mr. Google is your friend. Give him money.

Anyone else out there, contact me if you want to know more about what I did, how I did it. Do what I do, get what I got.

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Greg’s written: “The trouble with free software, is that you don’t really explore what you’re getting with it.” When I read that, I thought, “True, but…” The “but” being Google, a company whose free products I’ve (mostly) explored to death, even when they’re not very good. I’m looking at you, Google Docs.

When Google announced that it was entering the telephony business with Google Voice, I was excited, and applied for an “invitation” that came in July in the midst of preparing to take the North Carolina Bar. I couldn’t seriously play with it until August. But now I’ve spent two months with it, and here’s my take: I’m not sure Google Voice is ready for primetime.

Here’s how it works: At sign up, a user selects a phone number. That number can become the new primary number, which the user gives out to family, friends, clients, and so on. Google Voice allows the user to set which phones will ring when people call the Google Voice number. (Outside callers have no idea they’re calling a Google Voice number. To them it’s just another phone number.)

The setup was a cinch. Within a few minutes I was up and running with a new phone number that now rings my cell phone, but could also ring an office phone and home phone all at the same time.

Eric Bramlett has posted about Google Voice’s killer feature: Voicemail Transcription. Since I spend a good deal of time in court, where answering a phone will get you tossed out by an annoyed sheriff’s deputy, being able to glance down at my iPhone to read a voicemail that’s been transcribed for me is fantastic. Even if the transcription is not perfect, getting the gist of the voicemail without having to leave the courtroom saves a ton of time.

I’ve found transcriptions to be marginal at best, but still good enough to give me a sense of the message. Maybe it’s the southern accent that Google has not yet nailed, but Google still has a ways to go.

There are other nifty features: the ability to route calls to specific phones, assign phone numbers to groups that can be handled in various ways (send certain groups straight to voicemail or assign certain voicemail greetings to certain groups), or send telemarketers to an “Out of Service” message. I could imagine still other cool features that don’t seem to be terribly hard to implement: the ability to create a voice tree that allows callers to select who at your Google Voice number they’d like to reach.

But here’s my major concern: Call quality. When a caller calls you on your Google Voice number, his call is routed through Google’s servers, the same servers that handle the transcription, routing, and other features. This routing seems to generate some distortion or latency on the line. Most of the time the latency is imperceptible. Callers don’t notice a thing. But sometimes the delays are noticeable. Callers experience echoes, lags, or distortions.

Because I like the features, I really want to make my Google Voice number my primary phone number for my business. But I’m not sure whether I can put up with (or have my clients put up with) questionable call quality when they try to reach me.

I’d love to be convinced of Google Voice’s awesomeness. So If you’re using Google Voice regularly as part of your work or business, please leave your feedback, good or bad, in the comments.

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I’ve never loved video as a means of promoting real estate listings. I much prefer lots and lots of really big, really detailed photographs.

But: The SMS marketing we’re doing with DriveBuy Technologies makes video a necessity. The integration of YouTube into smart-phones is simply too compelling an opportunity to pass up.

Hence, on Thursday I pounded out six videos for three of our listings, all in about three hours total labor. That’s everything, from set up to sequencing to background music to recording voiceovers.

How is that possible? I used iMovie, the more basic movie-making software for the Macintosh. I also have Final Cut, but iMovie makes making basic plug-and-chug videos a breeze. Even better, it integrates directly with YouTube, so I can publish from within the app.

I’m promoting houses, so I’m using photographs, not full-motion video. Assembling these little films is quick and fool-proof.

How’s the quality? You tell me. I think these are more than adequate to the task.

Let’s take a look:

For 5415 West Hasan Drive:

The house…

And the neighborhood…

This is just plain vanilla Ken Burns stuff, and you can take it the way the software does it or manipulate the effect yourself.

Here are two more, made for 1946 East Vista Drive:

The house…

And the neighborhood…

These two were done using iMovie’s Scrapbook theme, and all the transitions were done automatically by the software.

One more: 5708 East Paradise Lane:

The house…

And the neighborhood…

These videos used iMovie’s Photo Album theme, again with no manual intervention.

Without doubt you could do even cooler stuff by intervening with the software, but these results seem pretty sweet to me without my having to do a lot of manual tweaking.

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