There’s always something to howl about.

Month: February 2008 (page 1 of 8)

Speaking in tongues: Making more-professional-looking CraigsList HTML ads — even if you don’t know how to code in HTML

[I’ve amended this post somewhat based on our recent experiences with CraigsList, which are discussed in the comments. The point of this post is not CraigsList, but, rather, learning how to extract HTML from existing code, this as a means of learning to write HTML on your own. In the comments, a number of vendor solutions are discussed, and these my be worth exploring, if only as a prophylactic against censorious behavior by CraigsList users. But your need to produce professional-looking HTML can extend far beyond the major on-line services. As an example, Cathleen Collins pulled buyers out of an ad we were able to post on a church’s bulletin-board-like system. –GSS]

 
A couple-few weeks ago, I was on a conference call with Jerry Matthews. He’s a one-time grand poohbah in Realtor Association politics, but now he works as a consultant to the NAR and certain state-level Associations. I was the waxed-fruit-flavor-of-the-day in a series of calls with Association executives, so that they might take the pulse of market innovators. I think I might have been the Designated Radical. If so, I promise you I did not disappoint.

As one stage, I was talking about how new licensees might market themselves cheaply in what is, for now, a hard world to get a break in. I mentioned a lot of different ideas, including CraigsList.com, which may be the single most effective advertising medium available to Realtors or lenders right now.

I said, “Of course, most CraigsList ads stink, so, with just a little bit of HTML you can really make yourself stand out?”

“But how is a new agent supposed to know anything about HTML?” someone asked.

I didn’t say, “Young people know a lot more than you give them credit for.” Instead, I pointed out that weblogging software like WordPress creates HTML for you, even if you don’t know what it’s doing.

So you could do something like this:

  1. Create a weblog post about a house you’ve listed — or, with explicit permission, that another agent has listed
  2. Write a good, compelling headline about why buyers should want to see that house
  3. Write good, clean — error free — Read more

It is a mistake to think that the language of the bureaucrats is merely an ignorant, garbled jargon. They may not always know what they are doing, but what they are doing is not haphazard. It works, too.

More, for Diane Cipa and others who have commented. You can’t buy Mitchell’s books, except used. The man is an incredible gift America mostly never bothered to unwrap. The fun part is that you can have everything he wrote as The Underground Grammarian at no cost. That’s not the same as “for free,” of course. If you’re going to get anything out of Richard Mitchell, you have to have the means to pay attention.

 
The Voice of Sisera

by Richard Mitchell

The invention of discursive prose liberated the mind of man from the limitations of the individual’s memory. We can now "know" not just what we can store in our heads, and, as often as not misplace among the memorabilia and used slogans. Nevertheless, that invention made concrete and permanent one of the less attractive facts of language. It called forth a new "mode" of language and provided yet another way in which to distinguish social classes from one another.

Fleeing the lost battle on the plain of Megiddo, General Sisera is said to have stopped off at the tent of Heber the Kenite. Heber himself was out, but his wife, Jael, was home and happy to offer the sweaty warrior a refreshing drink–"a bottle of milk" in fact, the Bible says. (That seems to find something in translation.) It was a kindly and generous gesture, especially since Sisera asked nothing more than a drink of water.

Having drunk his fill, the tired Sisera stretched out for a little nap and told Jael to keep careful watch, for he had good reason to expect that the Jews who had cut up his army that day were probably looking around for him. Jael said, Sure, sure, don’t worry, and when Sisera fell asleep, that crafty lady took a hammer and a tent spike and nailed him through the temples fast to the earth.

I suppose that we are meant to conclude that the Kenites, not themselves Jews, were nevertheless right-thinking folk and that Jael’s act had a meaning that was both political and religious. I’m not so sure. I’d like to know, before deciding, just what language it Read more

A Season To Be Objective

Modernism, or post-modernism, has little use for philosophy . Pragmatism is most people’s mind bent. Tough-minded pragmatism has a lot going for it, but when it denigrates philosophy it might be acting a little too tough. Isn’t philosopy that old-timey pursuit back when intellectuals talked endlessly and abstrusely about whether we really exist or just a bundle of impressions. What good did any of that talk do? It doesn’t pay the rent, by God, and it doesn’t bring the bacon (tofu?) home.

Others are more mystical about life, therefore philosophy is an illusory construct created by dead white European males to rule by reason and logic, or to confuse the issues with consistency — there is nothing consistently true for mystics, and all the intellectualizing in the world won’t reveal the mystical flow of The Great Unknown to the puny mind of reason — it’s intuitive, soft and open in spirit — felt by those connected to the universal spirit.

One looks at “what works” as the only marker for value, and the other goes by “what feels right”, what can be intuited as the marker of value. There are many variations of these two types of believers. And there are many who are mostly social, who don’t think much at all about the larger issues of life; they want to belong and be accepted, and merely being a part of a group is fine with them. They might take a stand if it’s to protect a friend or if they feel like their group is being threatened, but mostly they just want social comfort.

The second definition of philosophy from The Free Dictionary is — 2. Investigation of the nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning rather than empirical methods.

The first definition is — 1. Love and pursuit of wisdom by intellectual means and moral self-discipline.

Very few people live by, or hold ideas to the test of, a set of principles that they’ve forged through a consistent philosophy. They usually go by antecdotal evidence, snapshots of reality taken out of context, as their measure to make decisions. “I have a cousin who did this and got this result, and it seems to be Read more

If You Want To Be On HGTV, Read This

I received the email posted below the graphic yesterday. Rather than forward it to a list of handpicked people, I am posting it here so anyone who is interested can respond.

HGTV - Meet Russell

From: Conrad, Melissa mailto:MConrad@HighnoonEntertainment.com]

Subject: Hello!

Hello,

I am with HGTV’s show called “My First Place”. We chose Arizona to film our next 10 episodes and we are having a hard time finding people and realtors to be on the show. I am a casting producer and I would love your help to find some great AZ realtors with first time home buyers that would like to get an expensive gift from HGTV. These episodes will get national attention and since we are one of the top rated shows on HGTV, we hope it will bring positive attention to your beautiful city. Hopefully it will bring more home buyers in your direction! Also the realtors who are on the show get on screen credit so they can be contacted nation wide. Everyone who has been on the show has had a great time and our producers are very fun to work with.

If you are interested in being a part of the show along with your first time home buyer, I will send you over an application that we need them to fill out. It will start off our casting process so we can set up a casting interview with all of you. Thank you so much for your help and I hope to hear from you soon!

Melissa Conrad
Associate Producer
High Noon Entertainment
303-349-6800
303-712-3209

Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.

From Less Than Words Can Say

by Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian

A colleague sent me a questionnaire. It was about my goals in teaching, and it asked me to assign values to a number of beautiful and inspiring goals. I was told that the goals were pretty widely shared by professors all around the country.

Many years earlier I had returned a similar questionnaire, because the man who sent it had promised, in writing, to “analize” my “input.” That seemed appropriate, so I put it in. But he didn’t do as he had promised, and I had lost all interest in questionnaires.

This one intrigued me, however, because it was lofty. It spoke of a basic appreciation of the liberal arts, a critical evaluation of society, emotional development, creative capacities, students’ self-understanding, moral character, interpersonal relations and group participation, and general insight into the knowledge of a discipline. Unexceptionable goals, every one. Yet it seemed to me, on reflection, that they were none of my damned business. It seemed possible, even likely, that some of those things might flow from the study of language and literature, which is my damned business, but they also might not. Some very well-read people lack moral character and show no creative capacities at all, to say nothing of self-understanding or a basic appreciation of the liberal arts. So, instead of answering the questionnaire, I paid attention to its language; and I began by asking myself how “interpersonal relations” were different from “relations.” Surely, I thought, our relations with domestic animals and edible plants were not at issue here; why specify them as “interpersonal”? And how else can we “participate” but in groups? I couldn’t answer.

I asked further how a “basic” appreciation was to be distinguished from some other kind of appreciation. I recalled that some of my colleagues were in the business of teaching appreciation. It seemed all too possible that they would have specialized their labors, some of them teaching elementary appreciation and others intermediate appreciation, leaving to the most exalted members of the department the senior seminars in advanced appreciation, but even that didn’t help with Read more

Pictures are Worth a Thousand Words, but what are your pictures actually saying?

Pictures are worth a thousand words. Wouldn’t it be nice if all thousand of those words were actually in praise for the subject of the picture? Time and time again I see photos of homes in the MLS that make me NOT want to look at the house, it’s either too dark or washed out or it just doesn’t make the house look appealing. Or it’s pictures of inconsequential things, like the seller’s dog, or a squirrel in the lawn, or 5 photos of the staircase and no other interior pictures. I swear I’ve seen pictures that were made by a camera phone.

What is the point of pictures in our line of work? It is to showcase the house. In this day and age when the vast majority of folks are going online to see everything they can about a house, the photos we have are your first impression. It can make a buyer drool and want to jump in the car to go see it right away, or it can make someone simply pass over it without a second thought. What kind of photos are you taking?

The options are pretty simple. Take good pictures or pay someone that can take good pictures. I was very close to start paying a professional photographer until I learned how to make astonishing photos myself. This isn’t for everyone, but it might work for some! So let me show you some examples.

Everett House

This one is your ordinary every-day split-level house. The picture on the left was pulled from when the house was for sale 4 years ago. It has nothing wrong with it. It’s actually fairly well exposed in that you can see the house clearly. However it’s kinda plain and split-level homes here have a certain negative stigma. The photo on the right is of the same house that I am listing now. This house has a gorgeous front yard and the goal was to emphasize the overall property’s beauty and de-emphasize the split-levelness. Read more

Bebop and the brain — Thelonious Monk’s career advice to working Realtors and lenders: “We wanted a music that they couldn’t play”

We listen to Bebop Jazz in the office. If I talk about music, I tend to talk about Rock ‘n’ Roll or Country, just because they’re more inclusive. Bebop is demanding music even for Jazz, definitely an acquired taste.

Instrumental music is good at work, of course, since you can play it fairly quietly, and since there are no words (except “Salt Peanuts!”) to interfere with your thinking.

I would argue that complex compositions — like Classical or Modern, Progressive or Cool Jazz — will tend to improve the quality of your thoughts, through time, since your mind has to work so much harder to process the music. Constant exercise for the muscle of the mind should make you a stronger thinker. It seems reasonable to me that a familiarity with musical cadences will make you a better writer, as well.

Lately we’ve been tuned into the Bebop station at Yahoo’s LaunchCast on-line radio portal. Like all LaunchCast stations, the playlist could be a lot longer, but it’s a pretty nice representation of the Bebop idea in Jazz: Bird, Monk, Dizzy, Dex, Mingus, Trane, Miles. A little bit of Art Tatum, which I love, and a little Hard Bop, which I loathe. Bud Powell and Cannonball Adderley to show the world how a sound this demanding can still be fun. If you really want to listen, you have to go to your own record collection. But for the office, it’s the best solution we’ve found so far.


Creative Commons License photo credit: MikeLove

That’s all beside the point, though. You either like Jazz or you don’t, and many people don’t. But the quote from Monk in the headline

“We wanted a music that they couldn’t play.”

is practically a mission statement for Web 2.0-empowered Realtors and lenders.

Bebop was born during a musician’s union strike in 1942-43. Players who had been working as sidemen in Big Band and Swing orchestras would spend their idle days together in two Harlem nightclubs, jamming for each other. Over a very short span of time they created a brand new form of music, with a brand new music theory all its own.

The “they” in Monk’s Read more

Don’t Cut The Granite

Marketeers and salespeople often use the phrase “think outside the box”.  And when the phrase is used in that way, I usually think of clever, creative marketing and promotional stuff.

People involved in the day to day operation of rental properties, tend to think in more practical and pragmatic terms.  Heaters need to be fixed, sewer drains need to be unclogged.  Drain augers exist in a world that is somehow outside of any box/unbox metaphor.

However, one of the finest real world examples of thinking outside the box I have ever experienced, came from a low budget contractor during a kitchen renovation.

The tenants had left the property, a single family home, in sorrowful condition.  The kitchen had to be gutted.

Our low budget contractor had managed to salvage a rather nice granite countertop from somewhere else.  No, I didn’t ask where.  I’m not sure I wanted to know the details.

One little problem though, the countertop was just about three inches too long to fit in our subject property’s kitchen.  And the contractor did not have any tool that could be trusted to safely and cleanly make a straight cut in the granite to lob off those excess inches.

The solution?  The kitchen wall at the side, abutting the short side of the countertop — He cut a slot slotinwallhere1.jpgin the drywall, to allow those extra three inches of countertop to just simply slide into the wall.  Then he patched up the slot, sealed the wall and caulked it.  Done!

My marketing friends will probably find a slogan here “Don’t Cut The Granite, When You Can Cut The Wall!”  And that’s great, take from it what you will. 

I personally learned a subtle little lesson about making things work.  A true moment of epiphany, if you will.  And if I could create a new topic category here on BHB, I would create one titled:  “Epiphany”.

Wanna see how to win the BloodhoundBlog Black Pearl Diver’s contest? You’re not selling us, you’re selling you . . .

Mike Farmer wrote a sweet note this morning about using single-property weblogs in his marketing, but his post was not an entry in the BloodhoundBlog Black Pearl Diver’s contest.

What’s the trick to writing a winning entry?

Think your benefit, not ours.

How can you write a post about an idea you first heard about here that better establishes your competence and expertise with your readers?

How about something like this?

When we list your Encanto-Palmcroft home for sale, why do we give it is own custom weblog? To make sure it sells, that’s why

We’re Encanto-Palmcroft real estate specialists. A jack of all trades is master of none. But, when we list a home for sale in Encanto-Palmcroft, we always give it its own fully-detailed custom weblog.

Actually, we build a full-blown web site, with rich color photos of everything. A floorplan. A custom Google Map of all the nearby amenities — schools, parks, shopping. We include a downloadable version of the listing sheet itself — along with the full-color flyer, the plat map, historical photos — everything we can lay our hands on.

Why do go we to all that trouble?

Because, along with all the other things we do to earn your business, custom weblogs sell houses.

We first heard about this idea on BloodhoundBlog, a nuts-and-bolts weblog for real estate professionals, but we’ve added our own unique twists…

And like that. You go on to detail those unique twists, you sprinkle in some screenshots and links from single-property weblogs you have built for past clients. And you make your call to action.

There’s more: This is a good example of how to use your most valuable keywords without being irritating. Relevance to search engines equals Title plus Headline plus Body Copy. I have written a highly relevant post about Encanto-Palmcroft — not about BloodhoundBlog — and about our real estate practice there.

You can’t win if you don’t play, but your victory is guaranteed if you play the game this way. You might win the scholarship to Unchained. You might win a spot on our sidebar. But — let the dog biscuits fall where they may — you will certainly Read more

This is not for the contest — just tipping my hat

The most powerful marketing Idea I’ve heard lately is to create a separate blog for listings. I’m in the process of giving area information, one area at a time on my home buyer’s website/blog with plenty of links to pertinent information.

But the idea of creating a blog for each listing is something that didn’t dawn on me. To tell the story of the listing. The 455 50th Street Blog! My provider allows categories, so I can create as many blogs as I want to create and delete them when it sells.

The possibilities are many – you could even have the owners write a guest post, you could fully explain the area surrounding the listing, you can place powerful photos highlighting the strong points; you can have one post that gives demographics, one post that gives comparables, and if it’s an older home like many in Savannah, one post that gives the history. You can highlight in one post all the improvements, in one post talk about its energy efficiency, on and on.

It’s a lot of work but it would be powerful and sellers would love it. Talk about rich content and Google love! It would distinguish the home and it would place it in a great position to compete in a tough market.

I have two new listings coming up and I’m going to try this. There may be objections I haven’t thought of, but I believe it would be worth the effort.

I’m Sick Inside Because Lani’s Sick

Lani Anglin drives me nuts. She texts, twitters, lauds shiny objects on the internet, and mostly, reminds me that I’m middle-aged and she’s not. Every time she posts about how Gen Y demands business to be done, I wake up in the middle of the night with the anxious feeling that I may be turning into a dinosaur.

Her husband, Benn Rosales used to be a public relations professional. Amidst my PR challenges, I turned to Benn for some practical advice. After all, I’m trying to find my way in uncharted territory. I hammered Benn’s cell phone yesterday. I was driving up the 805, last night, and tried him one last time, before it got too late in Austin; I wasn’t prepared for what I heard.

We’re in the hospital. Lani’s got vertigo.”

Vertigo? What the hell is that?

I called Benn this morning to check on Lani’s condition and he communicated her condition completely. She’s at home, hopefully recovering from what be a fleeting incident. She might be dealing with something more permanent.

Benn, the consummate professional, asked “What’s up?”

“Um, uh…nothing. Just checking on Lani’s condition”

BS, man. You got a big announcement today, right? Give me the advance notice so I can post some good news; Lani’ll be pumped

That’s exactly what Benn did.

This is what I hate about Web 2.0; you get to really know people without meeting them. Bad things happen to good people and it sucks when those good people are one of your own.

Today was a great day but I feel like crap. Get well, Lani.

Why is Zillow.com sponsoring BloodhoundBlog Unchained? Discover the answer to that question for yourself by diving for Black Pearls — and win a link on our sidebar or even an Unchained scholarship

Why is Zillow.com the premier sponsor of BloodhoundBlog Unchained? They can speak for themselves (as they have), but my thinking all along was that they expected that we could put them in front of the kind of Realtors and lenders most likely to make the best use of the incredible software Zillow is producing.

I said this yesterday in email to Drew Meyers of Zillow.com:

You are at or near the kind of software “universe” that is so rich that all kinds of unexpected ideas can take root. A commendable state only nerds can appreciate, but one which can yield huge harvests of new tools.

I think you might have to have the geekiest turn of mind to appreciate the difference between a mere API (Application Programmer’s Interface) and a true software universe, but Zillow is the real deal — and I’ll be teaching on this point at Unchained. (I’ll make it easy, fast and fun, I promise.)

The simple fact is, whatever differences BloodhoundBlog and Zillow.com might have, we are on exactly the same page for much of the hymnal: How can we leverage the incredible power of the internet for home buyers, borrowers and sellers?

There are 2,338 posts on BloodhoundBlog as I write this, and many of them, perhaps the majority, are about tools, tips, tricks, tactics and techniques for Realtors and lenders. We’ve written about single-property web sites, maximum-power leveraged SEO, how loan originators can thread their way through the landmines, social marketing sites from MySpace to LinkedIn to FaceBook to Twitter. I’ve taken you step-by-step through our custom yard-sign strategy. Brian and I, with help from Tom Johnson and others, pioneered the idea Tom calls “Zestifarming.” I could go on forever — and our archives do.

And that’s the point: When you hunt with a Bloodhound, you don’t have to go everywhere the dog goes. But it’s the dog who runs down the game. Why does Zillow want to sponsor us? I think it’s because we are constantly coming up with new Web 2.0 marketing ideas.

And, as I realized yesterday, that could be a good weblogging contest. Brian announced on the radio Read more

Brian Brady on RealEstateRadioUSA.com: Mortgages unchained

Brian Brady did a half-hour interview this afternoon on RealEstateRadioUSA.com, the internet radio station for real estate. He was talking about BloodhoundBlog Unchained, but hosts Barry Cunningham and Barry Johnson also probed him about the mortgage market. To top things off, there’s an extensive discussion of the “What would David Gibbons do?” philosophy.

I made a recording of Brian’s interview. Click on the link below for the MP3 podcast.

Or: If you click on this link, you’ll find MP3s of the full broadcast, of Brian’s segment and of another show segment with Mary McKnight of RSSPieces. The baton-passing is not quite perfect, but Brain and Mary manage to announce that she will be one of our guest speakers at Unchained. Thanks to the folks at RealEstateRadioUSA.com for the link to the MP3s.

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