There’s always something to howl about.

Month: May 2008 (page 2 of 8)

The Unchained Originator: Ken Stampe

I was disappointed with the low turnout of loan originators at UNCHAINED. There were two local originators, who attended our Mesquite library performance, and my buddy Ken Stampe. Ken and I met in 2006, on Active Rain. He was one of the first to sign up for Unchained. His only condition was that I buy him a beer in Phoenix.

Of course, a thousand bucks is a lot to pay for a cold Bud so he was hoping for a whole lot more. He got his money’s worth by showing up. That’s the name of the game in mortgage origination today; showing up. There were some 70 REALTORs at Unchained. Some are beholden to the local originators and I might have impressed a few but Ken Stampe was the Trojan Horse.

The Trojan Horse, as told in Virgil’s Aeneid, depicts the Greeks as guerrilla warriors, using the Trojans’ strength against them.

Ken Stampe is a modern day Greek. While originators were bellyaching at TAMB conferences , Ken dressed up in a Web 2.0 costume, and penetrated the walls of the RE.net. Now before some smart fella reminds us of the saying the Trojan Horse story inspired,

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts“,

let me tell why Ken’s strategy is flawless. He is ONE OF YOU, now. He’s playing on the social media marketing playground. By definition, he knows the rules of web transparency. He screws up? You blog about him. He plays the bait and switch game? Zillow’s consumers will crucify him. I know Ken so I know him to be impeccable in his business practice but good fences make good neighbors. The transparency of the Web 2.0 world makes us better originators which, in turn, makes you better REALTORs.

Here are four things Ken did by attending UNCHAINED:

1- He met me. Seriously, that’s important. Originators need support systems across the country. We call each other frequently to bounce ideas off one another. While we were phone friends, Ken cemented an already strong relationship.

2- He Read more

Memorial Day 2008 – Taking A Long View

Today we remember and honor those who gave their lives in service of our country. Is it fitting and proper that we do so. 

But ours is a young country, our conflicts are recent, and the memories fresh in our collective conscious.

Proud and brave young lives have been sacrificed through out human history.

Imagine the Greek King Pyrrhus of Epirus surveying the blood soaked battlefield of Asculum in 279 BC. Pyrrhus deployed 40,000 calvary and infantry and 20 war elephants. The Romans under Publius Decius Mus deployed 40,000 calvary and infantry and 300 anti-elephant devices.

After a two day battle, the Greeks were victorious. The Romans lost 6,000 men; Pyrrhus, 3,500, including many of his officers. Pyrrhus looked on the devastation and stated “One more victory like this, and we shall be utterly undone.”

This Memorial Day, while I pause to honor the sacrifice of our country’s great heroes, and express my deep gratitude, I will think, too, of sacrifices made throughout history, even back to antiquity, sacrifices that formed civilization as we know it today. And I will say a tiny prayer that somehow, someday, humans will indeed find a way to put an end to war.

Taking it to the man: BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando

I finally had a chance to take a long nap today, and I’m substantially revivified. The ideas the Barrys threw off at the end of their interview with Brian about working in Orlando have me all pumped up, so I thought we might talk a little.

First, doing Unchained the Barrys way opens up quite a few opportunities for hour-long breakout sessions. We would devote four rooms to this, maybe more, so there could be a lot of speaking opportunities. I’d like to see sessions for beginners, geeks, brokers, lenders, etc. I don’t hate it if you’re a vendor if you’re a vendor in our world. To make that more plain: We’re doing this show to help Realtors avoid wasting money on useless crap. If you’re delivering value in the Web 2.0 world, there’s room — and hope! — for you. 😉

The point of all this: If you would like to do one of these breakout sessions, speak up. Figure a 45 minute presentation with 15 minutes of Q&A as the room is being turned over.

Second, we want to preach to the masses. This is not a money-making endeavor, at least not so far. We want to carry the message to the masses, to advance this idea of wired excellence in any way we can. To that end, I’m interested in hearing suggestions about how we can get a lot of Realtors to lend us eight hours of their time, while they’re in Orlando for the convention. One thing we can do is affiliate programs for real estate weblogggers, but, even better than that, we can set up off-line affiliate programs. In other words, we can help you help your co-workers get a price break on Unchained Orlando, say with a coupon code or something like that. What other things should we be thinking about to fill the pews?

I’m wicked excited about this. In my email I’m advised to speak quietly, so as not to stir the beast. My take is that the NAR should make a very public effort to stay the hell out of our way. But whatever they do, Read more

Brian Brady does a BloodhoundBlog Unchained post-mortem on Real Estate Radio USA

I missed this when it happened: Brian Brady did a great post-mortem rundown on BloodhoundBlog Unchained on RealEstateRadioUSA.com. Brian talks about key moments at the conference and about some of the Web 2.0 ideas that we had built into the event to emphasize the points we were trying to make. Near the end, Barry Cunningham and Barry Johnson offer some excellent ideas for making BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando a successful event.

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What happens when Google stops ranking you for all of your very best search terms? Nothing — if you’ve built your blog right

A funny thing happened on the way to Unchained:

Right about May 16th, BloodhoundBlog fell off of Google’s radar. Dozens of search terms that have always been reliable sources of inbound traffic — terms you might think of as being BHB’s “short head” like zillow.com — suddenly stopped producing.

I watch our numbers pretty closely, so I was aware of the sudden drop in traffic. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened: We had plummeted in the SERPs for terms on which we had always been very strong.

As to the why, I know nothing. It’s plausible we hit a Google penalty, but I have no certain knowledge of this — nor do I ever expect to have any certain knowledge of this. It’s also plausible that we ran into a hiccough in the search algorithm.

Certainly we have done nothing even remotely Black Hat. To the contrary, we lean all over the idea of clean, content-based SEO, and we lean even harder on the idea of building communities of like minds, not search-borne aggregations of fleeting butterflies.

The fun part was, I didn’t have any time to deal with it at the time. Saw it happen. Figured out what had happened. Had some ideas about why. But I was up to my ears in Unchained work, plus money work on top of that, so I had no time to deal with the problem.

Finally on Wednesday I was able to drop a request for review on Google, telling them that I’m a good boy and don’t deserve to be treated like a bad boy. Presumably, in due course, they will review the site and either agree that this is so or tell me explicitly what they want me to change. This could take weeks, possibly months.

But here’s the interesting part of the story:

It does not matter.

The growth of this community has never depended on Google. Obviously some people found us that way for the first time, but the overwhelming majority of our regular readers found us through some kind of referral mechanism:

  • Links from other weblogs or web sites
  • Comments I left on other weblogs
  • Press mentions Read more

Lil’ ol’ social me: my name is mike and i like you

(just for fun, no harm intended, i am slowly getting my groove back after years of corporate abuse and i owe it all to younger peoples )

Okay, so I’m blogging, being real, commenting like a responsible semi-adult who hates too much seriousness, heck, I’m even twittering. I belong to six or seven social groups and I make the scene from time to time, my name is Mike, but I sometimes go by mfarmer, sometimes by M, sometimes by mdfarmer so I might be mistaken for a doctor, but my middle name is David so you see the D is for real.

I’ve met swell people and smart people and people people and making new connections all the time. I’m a real estate broker by trade and my hood is Savannah, Ga — this is what I tell all the people I meet online — I’m branding.

I’m big on photos and looking into video, I learn all the time about new ways of walking and new ways of talking and I practice it on Twitter so that I might snap some jazzy lines here and there. In a sense it’s all about jazz online as I see it, cause I was raised with Kerouac and the beat thang, so it comes to me like a hungry dog. Jazz marketing sort of, a bop, a be bop, a bidddledy de dee bop and so forth. Remember me, I’m saying, when you got biz going down, when a little love’s to be shared. Social I am, my name is Mike. I sell a little here, a little there, I’m no mega, but I have fun and I like you.

I do a good job, transparently, I might add, but it’s not ALL about me, I’m working on a team concept, except I got lazy this weekend and, well, you know, I need rest, and sunshine, and i ain’t gonna be productive til Tuesday.

The people in the social connection network media transparent blogging being real thing is nicer than I imagined, so I’m getting out there and that’s all i had to say except i like U and my name is mike and if U R ever in Read more

Phoenix real estate conference teaches Realtors and lenders the brave new world of internet social media marketing

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Phoenix real estate conference teaches Realtors and lenders the brave new world of internet social media marketing

What happens when you bring the brightest Realtors and lenders from all over the country to Phoenix for a social media marketing conference? Great ideas are cross-pollinated, germinated, planted, take root and flower.

We run a national real estate industry-focused weblog called BloodhoundBlog.com. There are 24 contributors — Realtors, lenders and investors from all around the country — and hundreds of daily visitors. We’ve been doing this for nearly two years, and, in that time, we have avidly pushed for excellence among real estate practitioners, especially in the burgeoning internet side of the business.

This past week we hosted the inaugural BloodhoundBlog Unchained event at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. People came from all over — a third from Greater Phoenix, a third from the rest of the Southwest, a third from places where it rains and snows. Together for three days we explored the world of social media marketing in real estate.

What’s that? Social media marketing is the commercial arm of the participatory internet. As more and more people make the internet their primary means of interacting with the world, real estate professionals are learning how to move their own practices online.

The important question: What’s in it for you? The internet is a brave new world of commerce. No one likes sleazy sales people, but sleazy sales tricks cannot work on the internet, where every suspicious claim can be checked in an instant. Transparency rules, and the practitioners who succeed with net-empowered consumers are the ones who are prepared to back up everything they say.

The bonus for people willing to work this way is that consumers will have a much higher degree of trust in their Realtor or lender. Rather than picking a name out of a phone book or off of a yard sign, they will have gotten to know that person — passively and anonymously — online.

BloodhoundBlog Unchained was put on by me and my partner, Brian Brady of MortgageRatesReport.com. If you’d Read more

Was BloodhoundBlog Unchained so much work that it made you sick?

We told you for months that we were going to give you a lot of work at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. We knew we weren’t going to teach much, if anything, to Andy Kaufman or Brad Coy, but Joseph Runtz is trying to figure out how to eat an elephant. (One bite at a time, Joe.) Mark Eckenrode is erecting a secondary market in Unchained study aids, which I think is wicked cool.

But: Apparently, not everything was a raging success. Sue Griman had to leave during Glenn Kelman’s keynote address. By late evening, she was dreadfully ill, and she still isn’t back to full capacity. Laurie Manny reports that became ill when she got home in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, and she says the same illness may have affected Marlene Bridges and Lynda Eisenman at about the same time. Geno Petro’s post from yesterday suggests that he may have been sick and not just exhausted by the time he got back to Chicago on Wednesday night. [Geno confirms that he was ill, blaming a steak he ate Tuesday night.]

Sue thought she had food poisoning, and Laurie said the same thing, but the spaced-out timing would tend to suggest a virus or a bacterial infection, a contagion of some sort. Either way, while we certainly meant to send you home queasy with the workload, we didn’t intend to achieve actual nausea.

Even so, if you had a problem, let me know. If the problem really was food poisoning, we can let the caterers know about it. And if not, at least we’ll know more than we did before.

In any case, if BloodhoundBlog Unchained made you sick in any way at all — either physically ill or just dyspeptic at all that homework — you have our deepest apologies.

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How much is that Bloodhound in the window?

I’m a mutt, I’ll admit it–half Italian, half Heinz 57, solid C average across the board–any board.  No papers. I may have been a little smarter (transcript wise) had I attended easier schools in the early years but hey, I was always a low hanging fruit grabbing kind of guy.  I was born in Levittown, Pennsylvania where they planted a low hanging fruit grabbing tree in every front yard, for crissakes. It was included in the $9,999 List Price along with a garden hose and a rose bush.  Environmental Determinism, I argue.

My parents stood in line to buy their asbestos and plywood dream home, along with every other aunt and uncle in the Petro family, back in the early 1950s.  I, my one sister, and at least 17 of my 27 first cousins, were all conceived under identical roofs over identical floorplans and given the limited TV Guide lineup of that particular era, possibly with the same program airing on the tube during many of our respective magic moments…as it were. Reruns, Vatican I et al…

This inauspicious start in life is not to imply that I don’t have good taste; or an appreciation of the finer things in the universe; or a penchant for all treasures classic, or rare, or unique. On the contrary, I love all those things. I embrace the perfect example of anything. I’m all about pinnacles. (I may even suffer from a little pinnacle envy, if you must know.)  I’m just saying…putting it out there, as it were…that I may not be a 100% blue blooded, redbone Bloodhound.  Somewhere along the line, I misplaced my registration, or forgot to apply, or didn’t qualify by the published AKC Flemish Hound Standard as follows:

Temperament: Extremely Affectionate. (Points taken off immediately)

Expression: Noble and Dignified. (Ditto)

Gait: Elastic. (I can see that. Give me a point)

Weight: Male–90-110 LBS. (Whack me double)

Head: Narrow in proportion to its length.  (See where I’m going with this?)

We all saw the You Tube video. My big fat head is not narrow or proportionate to anything. As I told  Don Reedy, my table mate and new BFF at Unchained,

“I look like my grandfather. He was a butcher. Five foot nothing and bald as a polished walnut.”  Not Read more

Unchained at the sign printer: How we make our custom yard signs

I think this might be less than useful, but it keeps coming up in my mail. I love it that people are trying to make custom yard signs for their listings, but it seems plausible that the best technical advice will come in the comments.

Why is that? Because I use professional pre-press tools that most people don’t have.

Our signs are made in QuarkXPress for the Macintosh at one-sixth scale. In other words, the big sign with the full-bleed photo is made at 25p6 x 37p6 — one pica scales to one inch. The reason for working at this scale is simply to keep the Quark files manageable.

When we’re dummying up a sign, I will often work with low-resolution versions of the photos, this to enable faster printing so we can see what the sign looks like.

For the finished version, I use Adobe PhotoShop to produce very high-resolution CMYK EPS photo files to be placed back in Quark, there to be scaled and positioned. It’s possible to do everything I’m talking about within PhotoShop, but Quark is much better for both positioning and typographic control.

We take our listing photos at 5 megapixels. The camera will do more than that, but since most of these photos are going to be down-sampled to 640 x 480 pixels, we make a trade-off between resolution and the number of available photos on the memory card.

For the smaller photos on our signs, I normally down-sample to 2400 x 1800 pixels at 300 pixels per inch. For the large photo, I normally up-sample to 16000 x 12000 pixels at 300 ppi. If you get very close to that big image on a sign, you’ll see some pixelization. This is not visible at normal distances.

Once everything is in place in Quark, I save the page as an EPS file. The raster images — the photos — will be encapsulated as is, with the positioning and scaling information conveyed in PostScript. The type, rules and logos are vector images, infinitely scalable.

I import the EPS file into PhotoShop, scaling it to 25.5″ x 37.5″ at 300 pixels per inch. This Read more

Unchained Hunting: A Video Summary

Mark Eckenrode does it again. He summarized my presentation, “The Way of the Hunter”, from the Unchained conference, in a 26 minute video, with mindmaps. He improved my presentation with a few thoughts about market specific platforms.

Watch it over at his house.

PS: I dig the picture of the hunter on his post.

To Sir, with love: A rundown of the links in the Unchained chain

Brian already cited some of the constructive criticism we have received about BloodhoundBlog Unchained, and that’s as it should be. I think we did a nice job, for a first swing at the ball, but the whole BloodhoundBlog idea is about doing better. Praise might be sweet to the ears, but it is criticism that puts us on the path to perfection.

Even so, I promised some link love to people who blogged about or wrote to me about their experience at Unchained, so I’m going to discharge that duty in this post. We’re very grateful to the people who gave us their minds and their time and their funds, and I am more than delighted to pay back what I can.

Don Reedy paid more than most of us to attend Unchained. While he was in Arizona, his dog, Sir, a one-time Universal Studios movie star Rotweiller, made the run for the last exit. Don made the decision to forge ahead at Unchained, keeping us up to date as his wife nursed Sir through one medical procedure after another. But by the time Don got home late Tuesday night, Sir had passed away.

If you’re not a dog person, it might not mean anything to you. Cats and other pets have their charms, but a good dog is like a playful four-year-old child who never grows up and moves away. I don’t delude myself. I spend a lot of time thinking about the epistemology of dogs. But to have a friend that game, that loyal, that full of heart — always thrilled to see you, always eager to be involved, always there for you no matter what — that’s a love unbearable to lose.

Even so, we have to force ourselves to press on regardless. Sir’s life is over, but life goes on. Here’s to Don and to his wife, Beth. And here’s to another great dog they will learn to love, when their grieving for Sir has waned to something easier to endure.

Vance Shutes wrote about his experiences at Unchained. He also wonders if we’re going to run out of water. Not before Read more

Exposed, Exposing & Exposure of Capitalism’s Inherent Blessing

Unchained has wrapped up and, by all accounts, done a stand-out job exposing Social Media Marketing and the power of the individual.   I was bummed I could not attend.  Funny thing though: if you are hungry enough you get fed anyway.  My hunger was sated in seeing how a democratic, capitalistic, free economy continues to reveal our greater selves.  This past Friday that idea was brought home in a powerful, if disjointed, way in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

There were three, seemingly unrelated, articles that taken together gave me great joy.  From time to time we need to polish our appreciation for the economically empowering era we live in (and sometimes take for granted).

> Guy Sorman wrote an op-ed piece exposing the massive cracks in communism and the potential for political fall out that stems from the natural disaster of an earthquake.  The buildings whose failures caused the most damage – the schools and the hospitals – were those constructed by the state.  The graft and corruption that leads to the crushing of school children does not go unnoticed by the people.

So it is with China and with tyrannical regimes: The party is convinced it controls everything. But it is often the unexpected events that reveal fault lines in the system, the hypocrisy of public discourse, and the most unbearable injustices.

Tyrannical or sublimated, political or economic: the chokepoints of the world are slowly exposed

> The second article was a front page celebration of Erin Callan, the most powerful woman on Wall Street.  A free economy coupled with a free exchange of ideas is contributing to women taking their place in the most powerful of positions.  Even better, in my humble opinion, is what Ms. Callan has become known for and, one must assume, what helped move her to the very pinnacle of the economic pecking order:

She aggressively roots out rumors, even while pushing her bosses to disclose more financial information.

The open and transparent exposing of information leads to success.

> The third article discussed CEO Willie Walsh of British Airways PLC.  The company saw a record performance to end the year and is paying an annual dividend for the first time in seven years.  The staff will share in Read more

Profiling our Zillow.com profile: Using landing pages and photos to try to create a compelling long-copy ad for our brokerage

We talked quite a bit at Unchained about profiles on Social Media Marketing sites. Once you’ve made a commitment to a site, you’ll be adding a significant amount of content to that platform. When someone comes across something you’ve done, their natural impulse is to click through to your profile. If they do, what will they see?

Chances are, when you first signed up for that site, you blew right past the profile page, plugging in the minimum necessary information to get your registration done. You wanted to get to the content, after all, to find out if that site even met your needs. You discovered over time that it did, but you probably never thought to go back and complete your profile.

This is a mistake. Your profile is the space that web site provides for you to sell yourself. At a minimum, you can direct interested people back to your own weblog or web site. Some sites will provide multiple links. Some will let you flesh out a free-form “about me” section, so that you can say exactly what you want in your own words. Some will permit fairly elaborate HTML coding, with links back to specific landing pages on your web site: You can sell relocation to relos, rentals to investors, re-fi’s to the equity-enriched.

A couple of different times, I mentioned my Zillow.com profile. Zillow is pretty liberal in the kind of coding you can do — allowing links and photos in the “about me” section, for example.

Vance Shutes asked me to share my Zillow profile with him. I thought it might be better to take up the issue in the blog. I can talk about what I’m doing, you can talk about what you’re doing, and we all can learn better ways of building Social Media Marketing profiles.

So: Between the horizontal rules is the code we use on our Zillow.com profile, as well as on other sites:


Why do we deliver so much more value for our clients? For one thing, it’s a great strategy for marketing our real estate brokerage. But even before that, we love selling real estate, Read more