BLOODHOUNDBLOG.COM

I built FreePhoenixMLSSearch.com from an API that FBS Systems — creators of the FlexMLS system — made available last year. I may be the only person taking advantage of this interface. I don’t know of anyone else in Phoenix who is, in any case.

That much is cool, and the API, along with Flex’s general philosophical approach to software openness, enabled me to build a very robust search tool, much more robust than anything you can buy from IDX vendors. Still better, I can extend my search power whenever I want, building “pre-fab” searches that solve problems that might not be intuitively obvious to more-casual users.

Here’s an example: Doctors relocating to Phoenix — may their names be legion! — can do a radius search from any Phoenix-area hospital. Always on-call? You can live within walking distance. Need to be to the hospital within 30 minutes? You can search within a 15-mile radius.

My end of this stuff is all written by me, in PHP, with the code running on the SplendorQuest server. I can change the site whenever I want to, in the never-ending quest for better results.

All that is fun, and this is a big part of Bloodhound life for me, building and refining the tools we use every day — on- and off-line. Everything that I’ve worked on over the past four years is available to me to make new tools, and I’m mixing and matching that stuff all the time. The number of engenu pages on our sites is enormous by now, but the number of engenu-like pages runs to the tens of thousands. Even now I’m working out how to use ScentTrail to auto-generate an engenu-editable cloud-based transaction management site for every client we touch.

That idea — the equation of software with control — is something that I should write about. But not today. For now, Bloodhounds just want to have fun.

That image is a screen shot from Twitter. Every time someone runs a search from FreePhoenixMLSSearch.com, a Tweet is auto-posted summarizing that search. There is search-engine juice to be had from Twitter, but this is just dumbass fun for me, a perfect expression of the fundamental witlessness of Twitter: Zippy the Pinhead reporting on the latest real estate search news.

This is funny: FreePhoenixMLSSearch.com generates between 50 and 150 searches a day, so the Tweet-count for that account — PhoenixBargains — is fast approaching 4,000 (semi-)unique Tweets.

This is funnier: The PhoenixBargains Twitter account has 54 devoted followers.

Here’s a true fact: I’m pretty much disgusted with the RE.net — which denomination I quarried with my own hands, back in my early days on the apellation trail. By now, just about everything looks to me like hoke, smoke, hustle and jive — smirking vendorsluts and the clueless suckers who can’t stop themselves from pridefully posturing about having procured their own plundering. I know that’s not fair — or not entirely fair — but it often seems to me, lately, that everything I have ever hated about the real estate business is successfully infesting the on-line world.

This will fail, all of it, in the end, and I’ll say why in detail when I get time. But for now I persevere by holding my nose and holding my ground. Whether it is the seemingly harmless simian chatter of net.monkeys desperate to prove their ape-titude to all the other net.monkeys or the craven schemes of hack vendors looking for just one more gullible fool to make their month, I’m well sick of it all. I haven’t looked at a feed-reader in many months, and my Twitterverse consists of my Best Beloved, Cathleen, and Teri Lussier.

The rest of the net, however, is a different thing. I’ve been following Apple tablet posts for months, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog is the only blog other than BloodhoundBlog whose client I have on my iPhone. On and off last week, and in greater earnest today, I’ve been looking for decent iPad posts from the RE.net.

Not hard to foresee, but Agent Shortbus doesn’t get it. Typically insipid kibitzing with no real understanding of the revolution the iPad will bring to the entire universe of commerce.

But, alas, the Shortbus set doesn’t have the vision to come up with a truly idiotic argument against using mobile devices to market real estate. This honor was earned by Rob Hahn, an attorney in New York City who doubles as a vendorslut consultant or a consultant to vendorsluts or some bizarre combination of the two. Realtors follow his musings religiously, apparently because they confuse being an attorney with being a Realtor, and living in New York City with living in a normal real estate market.

In any case, “The Inglorious R.O.B.” insists that smartphones won’t work for real estate marketing, first, because the cops might not like it, and, second, because he bought a lame-ass smartphone. As a matter of courtesy, in case you are laboring under the false impression that these arguments are not totally absurd, let’s dispense with them:

First, people obey anti-texting laws just about as religiously as they obey speeding laws. And, on the off chance that a cop is not tied up with a real crime or a bloody traffic accident, it seems likely that the uniformly-disobeyed law he is most likely to enforce — if he’s already topped off on donuts for the day, that is — would be the speed laws. If you’re not getting pulled over for speeding all the time, text away. Nobody cares — except for “The Ignominious R.O.B.”

Second, good smartphones have good batteries — and the iPad will have a great battery. I think trying to use a smartphone to shop for real estate in New York City would be beyond stupid, but, as it turns out, people in the rest of America not only have cars from which to illegally use their smartphones, they also have a smartphone charger plugged into the cigar lighter. As I have mentioned, my car has three cigar lighters, but I use two of them for 330 watt 120 volt power inverters, thus to power my own laptop and my clients’. The horror! Not just smartphone use on wheels, but actual flagrantly criminal laptoppery! There oughta be a law, dammit!

And surely I am being unfair to “The Ignorable R.O.B.,” but it’s sane to argue that “mobile won’t matter in 2010″ for one reason only: Because 2009 was the most important year for mobile real estate marketing. This is why we talked about it so much here last year. Even so, I’m prepared to argue that the iPad could still win the year — but with a more interesting kind of mobile real estate marketing.

And: To hell with all that. Let’s talk about people who are getting things right.

Here is a wonderful post from TechCruch, speculating about the iPad the day before it was announced. The author manages in a few paragraphs to document everything the Vook could have been if Brad Inman had the kind of respect for his customers that Apple has.

The online buying model for newspapers and magazines isn’t going to save the publishers, any more than iTunes Music and TV downloads have been saviors for their respective content owners. Will consumers benefit? Absolutely. But they won’t be willing to pay a premium for content they can access on the web for free. And if old media shifts to a pay-only model, consumers will just switch to free online alternatives. There will be exceptions — publishers with high quality, exclusive content (say, the New York Times) will likely benefit. But the majority of newspapers and magazines? Not so much.

But what about this promised land of revolutionary hybridized content — won’t people be willing to pay for that? Thing is, that’s going to be time consuming and expensive to make. A handful of very large publishers, like the NYT, may be able to scrap together some compelling content on a regular basis. But it’s going to be difficult to quickly integrate additional supplementary material in a way that doesn’t feel tacked on.

So Who Will Benefit?

Textbooks. Guides. Biographies. Novels. Pretty much anything that has previously been offered in book form, but has been handicapped because it was restricted to paper. Few of these have ever been ported to the web in a rich media form, because they’re lengthy and it just isn’t fun to read a book on your computer screen. And even when textbooks have been digitized (like for the Kindle DX), they didn’t bring anything new to the table. But there’s so much room for improvement.

Imagine a biography of Abraham Lincoln that allowed you to pull up photos of every person and place mentioned with a single finger swipe.  Flicking the top of the screen would bring down an interactive timeline of Lincoln’s life, making it easy to get your bearings. The hybrid book could include comprehensive references for each person mentioned in the book. Not just a Wikipedia article, mind you, but information that is contextually relevant to the moment you’re currently reading about. The experience wouldn’t simply be one of jumping from hyperlink to hyperlink. All of this supplementary material would naturally flow into the reading experience, while you never left your place in the primary text.

There are plenty of other potential applications. Picture a chemistry textbook where you could freely rotate any molecule, tapping on a chemical bond to learn more about why it behaves the way it does. Or a Shakespeare play (in text form) where you could tap a piece of dialog to hear it spoken aloud, or perhaps even played in a video. Tapping a sidebar at any time would bring up a roster of characters and their allegiances, lest a love triangle leave you confused.

There are infinitely more possibilities ready to be unlocked.  Many of these things could be done were this content converted to a rich webpage, but up until now there hasn’t been much benefit to doing so because there was no way to comfortably consume it.

Read it all. That’s your Deep Think homework for the day. Here are some lighter bits:

The PC officially died Wednesday. So says The New Republic, and of course I agree with this evaluation. It will take a few years, and the die-hards will surely die hard. But the die is cast.

Mashable insists that the great eBook war aas already begun. I’d say it’s already over, but, as the article hints, dinosaur forces could be brought to bear. More from me on the latter later.

The Photography for Real Estate blog raises an interesting point: If your real estate marketing is Flash-dependent (that would be in your virtual tours, etc.), you’ve got some thinking to do. Your photos already aren’t making it to the iPhone, and soon they won’t be making it to the iPad, either. (Just in passing: engenu uses Javascript, for two reasons: Flash don’t travel and Flash don’t search. Lo-tech don’t mean no-tech.)

And Geek Estate has a nice post on the iPad as a Realtor’s electronic amanuensis. I talked about some of this stuff on Wednesday, but Michael LaPeter came up with some ideas I missed. Like this:

Build a fun, interactive signup sheet for visitors. You could let them choose to subscribe to various value add lists right there, and depending on what you use it could put their info right in your list/ database, no tedious transcribing later.

That’s brilliant, as is this:

Take notes directly into your online CRM/ organization software, with no risk of losing them and no tedious transcribing later.

Ignoring “The Inexplicable R.O.B’s” inability to understand the immense and accumulating power of mobile technology as a real estate marketing tool, the iPad is the perfect replacement for the Realtor’s portfolio, that classy-looking notebook you’ve been carrying around so you can pretend to take notes. Now you can take notes — and keep them forever in your CRM database.

There’s more out there, I’m sure, but I haven’t seen it. If you’ve spotted a particularly valuable iPad post, weigh in with the link. As much as I enjoy spanking idiots, I’d much rather see people working hard to improve their understanding of the world.

Linking frees slaves — I love that joke — but only if the slaves want to be free. I do. How about you?

Last Sunday’s New York Times featured an article about a foreclosure caravan in South Florida. It was the usual NYT sob story, but what popped out at me was the real estate agent. All through the piece he is arm-twisting his victims, and in several places his is plainly guilty of unsolicited — and very likely ill-advised — financial planning.

This morning on ActiveRain I read a post from an agent essentially boasting that he blacklists certain agents listings, keeping them from his buyer clients so that he won’t have to deal with practitioners of whom he disapproves.

I’ve been a real estate broker since October of 2005. If you’ve ever wondered why we don’t have agents, those two examples are perfectly illustrative. Presumably both of these Realtors are acceptable to their own brokers, but I would sever both of them in a heartbeat. They are each one of them a lawsuit waiting to happen, and I could not be rid of either one of them quickly enough.

Except that I will probably never have this problem, because, even when we do start to recruit agents, I will never have anything to do with people who would even think of putting their own interests ahead of the client’s.

You may at this point want to protest that I am being too harsh, but my belief is that Caesar’s wife must be above reproach. Never-been-sued is not a mark of pride. What we want is to achieve a level of rigor and candor in the work we do such that there is no room in our clients’ mind for even an implied accusation. We will have done our jobs the way I want them done when there is no possibility of even a hint of a doubt that we would ever serve our own interests at the expense of the interests of the people we work for.

People here and elsewhere have written a lot about the ideal post-Web-2.0 real estate brokerage. I’ve not participated in those discussions, because it’s not something I’m interested in. I don’t care how someone is going to make a brokerage of 10 or 100 or 1,000 agents work. I don’t want a brokerage like that. I don’t know that we will ever have independent agents, out in the world trolling for business — out, that is, from underneath my big fat thumb.

For now what I want is a very strong team built around the work we are already doing. I think we will probably grow to five people this year, and we’re going to do it using the DISC system, which I talked about last week, because DISC tells me where we are strong, right now, and where we are dangerously weak.

Here’s a nice rundown of the DISC personality types from Wikipedia:

Dominance: People who score high in the intensity of the “D” styles factor are very active in dealing with problems and challenges, while low “D” scores are people who want to do more research before committing to a decision. High “D” people are described as demanding, forceful, egocentric, strong willed, driving, determined, ambitious, aggressive, and pioneering. Low D scores describe those who are conservative, low keyed, cooperative, calculating, undemanding, cautious, mild, agreeable, modest and peaceful.

Influence: People with high “I” scores influence others through talking and activity and tend to be emotional. They are described as convincing, magnetic, political, enthusiastic, persuasive, warm, demonstrative, trusting, and optimistic. Those with low “I” scores influence more by data and facts, and not with feelings. They are described as reflective, factual, calculating, skeptical, logical, suspicious, matter of fact, pessimistic, and critical.

Steadiness: People with high “S” styles scores want a steady pace, security, and do not like sudden change. High “S” individuals are calm, relaxed, patient, possessive, predictable, deliberate, stable, consistent, and tend to be unemotional and poker faced. Low “S” intensity scores are those who like change and variety. People with low “S” scores are described as restless, demonstrative, impatient, eager, or even impulsive.

Conscientious: People with high “C” styles adhere to rules, regulations, and structure. They like to do quality work and do it right the first time. High “C” people are careful, cautious, exacting, neat, systematic, diplomatic, accurate, and tactful. Those with low “C” scores challenge the rules and want independence and are described as self-willed, stubborn, opinionated, unsystematic, arbitrary, and careless with details.

Right now BloodhoundRealty.com looks like this, with our tasks shown in the order or relative time-commitment:

Greg Swann, Di, investor-buyers, buyers, print and on-line promotion, investor-sellers.

Cathleen Collins, Sd, big-ticket sellers, staging, photography, buyers.

What’s missing in a big, bad, obvious kind of way?

We have no C in the mix, really essentially none between the two of us. We can both do C-like stuff, but we don’t like it, we’re not good at it, and, in consequence, that kind of work does not get done quickly or satisfactorily.

We are what we are. I don’t hate washing a big sink full of dishes, but I will almost never was a single dish. Big jobs are for D’s. Little jobs are for later — when they’ve had a chance to grow into big jobs.

So what we need more than anything, and I mean right away, is a high-C. We need a high-C for CRM, for Transaction Management, for the back-end on short sales, for management of our vast and ever-growing web presence — for everything! I love to convert new business, but I hate schlepping around dozens of little scraps of paper, upon which I’ve scribbled almost-instantly-forgotten notes and details. We need someone who really likes going to the office supplies store — and knows what to do with all that stuff.

With emphasis: If you are a high-C assistant or virtual assistant, we need you now. Email me and we’ll get the discussion started.

What next? As I mentioned in passing at Christmas, I want to put an assistant in my car with me, as I traverse the Valley of the Sun. I’m thinking I want a Dc, if such a thing exists, or a Cd. I want someone who can hammer out a lot of detail work, but who can also handle showings if we need to double-book. We will have investors buying in bulk this year, and I want to have someone with me who can stay behind in the car writing contracts and ironing out details while I’m showing, or, alternatively, preview properties while I am on the phone making rain.

For Cathleen, I want an Id or a Di, I think, someone who can help her with the endless visual details and quality issues that go into selling high-end real estate. Much of what she is doing now — such as promoting our listings on all the many RealtyBot sites — can either be handled by the back-office High-C or by software, but I want for her to have help with the staging and photography. I want for her to have what she needs to list one $500,000+ home a week.

Except for the high-C, everyone is a photographer. We already have photos from hundreds — maybe thousands? — of homes, but what I want, going forward, is for us to have a complete photographic record of every home we set foot in. With engenu pages for every one of them, all archived in a database so that we can share those photos on demand — which will be the high-C’s contribution to our archival efforts.

Again, except for the high-C, everyone will do open houses, with the bulk of that burden falling on Cathleen and her assistant. And when any of us have spare time, we’ll be out taking pictures of other Realtor’s high-end listings, both to add to our archives to extend our reach to buyers searching for those kinds of homes.

So: Two questions: In your opinion, am I thinking about this the right way? I know I am going to deprive our agents of a lot of the independence common to new licensees, but, in exchange, we’ll be training them in our way of working and providing a steady income from the outset. Is there something I’m missing in the way I’m thinking about setting this up?

And: How do I pay these folks? We will never have a 1040 employee, so hourly is only possible for a virtual assistant, someone with other sources of income. What I’ve been thinking about is a split on every deal we close while a particular licensee is under our roof. You could make money on your first day, but the money will stop on your last day. Meanwhile, we don’t have to worry about who worked on what. Does that make sense? If it does, how big is the split?

I want this now. We’ll add the high-C as soon as we can find someone, but I want every piece of this team in place as soon as we can get it done. I think five Bloodhounds on the trail can tear this town up.

Maybe a dozen posts are gone from BloodhoundBlog, along with around 400 comments, 300 of them about forced versus open registration. We lost a couple dozen engenu pages as well, along with the photos that make them up.

I treated this as a simple hardware swap, but it turns out that our incremental back-ups were failing all week. I was insufficiently paranoid, alas.

Contributors, if you have copies of your posts, you can re-enter them. If not, they’re gone.

Everyone: You have my apologies.

 
Further notice: We lost BloodhoundBlog.net, and I mean all of it. None of the backups of the database will restore, so it is gone for good. I’ve not been delighted with it, overall, for the past few months, so I think I’m not going to start over. If you had serious content there, I’m sorry but it’s gone. If you had an older Scenius scene running there (I had several), rebuild it at Scenius.net. Very sorry…

I still get quite a bit of activity from Craigslist ads. I have been using Postlets, because it puts listings a bunch of different places, and adding a bit of html before and after their code with links to the individual property site, my blogs and my real estate site.

Even though Postlets doesn’t put links in the Craigslist ads, I wanted links! So, since I’m lazy about coding and not very fluent in html, I did a draft post in WordPress with the things I wanted to say and link to and put three lines above the Postlets ad with links to the individual property site, my blog and my real estate home page, clicked to have it shown in html and pasted it in above and below the postlets ad. It looks like this. With 20 or so of these running, I get a noticeable bump in google search results and traffic. No problems with being flagged or having the ads yanked.

But, I’m thinking I can do more.

Craigslist is a more time consuming than I would like because the ads expire every week. I want to automate the process where I can create a template that I can prepare quickly, much like the custom page creation for each property can be automated using Engenu.

So, I took the source code for a property page from Engenu and pasted it into a Craigslist ad to see what would happen. I found out right away that only 30,000 characters were allowed in the post description (the place I can paste in html code). Since the file I tried was 11,000 lines of code, I found that limit pretty quickly. I wanted to see what would come up and I at least found how many characters are allowed. 30,000 characters of code is enough that I should be able to do something better.

Then, I finally searched BHB for Craigslist and found Greg’s post on CL from last year. The comment string is pretty important on that post. After reading those, I was ready to experiment with making a new .html template that let me put in more photos and links. I don’t know if I can figure out to do a slideshow in some easy way, or I should just use the Ryan Hartman technique of a screenshot with a click to link to my individual property web site.

THEN, I saw Ryan Hartman’t post on Realbird’s IDX product this morning. While looking at it, I found Realbird’s flyer/promotion product. It has unlimited pictures, allows some great chat stuff, and lets me put tons of copy into the flyers. When I used it to publish in Craigslist, it even put my IDX search into the post. Cool. I added some links like I do with Postlets and think it is a better solution than Postlets. A bit less refined in format, but with far more information I can control. I haven’t played with the chat feature yet. You can see it here.

I could build myself a better, still good looking template that I can easily change for different properties. However, I like the Realbird result if it isn’t too much work to do. I did not figure out how to upload multiple pictures at once, but it claims to do it. Better would be something that takes less time, but if I decide to use Realbird to syndicate to a bunch of other web sites, I’ll be putting listings into it anyway. Adding links to my Craigslist ads seems to work pretty well. Let me know any thoughts you have and I’ll keep playing with this and let you know what is working best for me.

Last week I was working, late at night, plugging street addresses into encartus, in preparation for building a bunch of new engenu pages for a new web site we’re building, an exposition of truly-distinguished homes in Paradise Valley, Arizona. While I was working, I got pinged by an incoming email, a moderated comment to Brian Brady’s first post on the idea of disclosing all real estate purchase offers.

While I was reading all the other great comments to that post, I got pinged again, this time a private email asking me what I thought about the nominees for Inman’s most-innovative blog award.

To misquote a line many Bloodhounds love: I don’t think about them. I will stop in at The Phoenix Real Estate Guy once or twice a month, and I know I’ve been to MyTechOpinon and the Clean Slate Blog. But I don’t associate any of those sites with innovation. They’re just weblogs, that’s all.

This is not sour grapes. I don’t give a rat’s ass about beauty contests, and I’ve deliberately painted Inman “News” into a corner: By consistently ignoring what is obviously the most innovative weblog in the RE.net, they come off looking like petulant crybabies even as they despoil their reputation as a “news” source. And does this malign neglect hurt us? Uniquely among RE.net weblogs, we’re a PR6, as is the Inman “News” web site. With no capital investment and nothing but part-time, amateur writers, we’ve pulled even with the life’s work of a big-baby billionaire. One would think the idea of gamesmanship was invented yesterday.

And please don’t post treacly little comments about how you get good ideas everywhere. I have no objection whatever to the Special Olympics, so long as you don’t insist on calling the contestants Olympians. The three innovations cited in the first paragraph of this post, three among hundreds, are more than enough to split BloodhoundBlog away from the herd.

But that’s the point. BloodhoundBlog is ten days away from being three years old. In those three years, we’ve pioneered a vast host of jaw-dropping ideas. If we stopped writing on June 29th, our anniversary, we would still be the most innovative real estate weblog in history, forever.

Why? Because the ideas that drive BloodhoundBlog are the ideas that will drive the real estate industry in the twenty-first century. The dinosaurs who insist that we can’t supplant the NAR are twice absurd: In every way that matters, we already have. Like Inman and all the wannabe social media gurus, the grand poohbahs of the NAR come to us, lurking in cowardice. We don’t go to them. We drive the debate, not them. We’re the big dog, and we have been for a long time. They’re just fleas — temporary hitchhikers.

But, all that notwithstanding, I thought we might have a little contest of our own: Most Innovative BloodhoundBlog Post. Anyone can nominate a post (or more than one, if you like), and there are a lot to choose from. In the days before our anniversary, I’ll post a voting tool, and we’ll let the audience pick a winner. But it is probably obvious that I am no fan of raw democracy, so if individual contributors want to write posts about the BHB entry (or entries) they see as being most innovative, I think that’s a fine idea.

Nominate posts in the comments or by email. Let’s see what we think about what we have thought about over the past three years.

I’m in need of clarity. Being mostly clueless to the concept of file management and hosting in general has led me here by way of looking to publish more then one blog.  That, and after spending far too much time with “online and phone help” with what should be a simple domain name transfer for Yahoo to Godaddy, I’m at my wits end.   Word to the wise.  If someone offers you a domain name for $1.99, don’t bite.

Here’s the deal. I have a “deluxe hosting account” with Godaddy which runs me, I think, around $6.50 a month and gives me what I need. ( I know your bluehost mediatemple whatever is better and that’s not the fix here ).  Focus.

When I started another blog, I created a new database via my SQL database and now this blog lives in a folder under the main account as well (see below).

So from what I gather, with 25 databases I can run 25 different sites under this one account, right?   The databases (sites) just become sub-files of the main account.  If I’m off, just let me know.

One other thing that puzzles me (utter ignorance) is the file placement in my directory.  I was going by the intructions given to me by the help desk at Godaddy, and what you see is what I ended up with.   Could you all give me a little insight to whether this looks OK or not?

Assuming that everything is set up right so far, my next question would be, what is the advantage of opening up a separate account for a new site?  With each and every domain I purchase, I am offered a free “Economy hosting account”, which of course will not allow you to host WordPress.   To do this, I would need to open another “Deluxe hosting account”.

Any insight here would be appreciated.  I plan on helping my wife with her own site and hosting and I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to get her set up separately or just run hers with mine.

Many thanks. If I get somewhere with this, I have one for Engenu one next.  These are the kind of mental stumbling blocks that hold me up for days.

I’m not cursed with having to get things perfect.  I don’t know if the 70% solution describes me either.  My goal is the 90% or better solution with 20% or less of the effort it may take others to get there.  Tools like engenu warm me to the core!

The Unchained crowd sets a complete new standard for real estate folks I’ve been around.  I have work to do on everything after Unchained.  But, at least I know a bunch of things to do, and who to talk with if I get stuck.  I can’t think of anything more powerful than that.

So, my list includes most everything.  In no particular order, webinars, SEO, engenu sites, focused CPC advertising, social media and what is for me the most fun, the Gonzo, unforgettable marketing.

But that sales funnel management still has me flummoxed.  I don’t give much due to the “automated” touch from a system.  I’m so good at filtering that type of thing, and give it so little credit, that I know that my incredibly smart friends and clients won’t like it either.  The experience from these systems just seems so lacking.  But I won’t argue that they can work successfully for a business.  Maybe I just don’t have the discipline to sustain them properly.

For me, a funnel that integrated with something like facebook might be better.  All I might really need is a periodic reminder to say something to those I’ve forgotten to contact in awhile.  If it automatically tracked who I had been in touch with, it becomes easy to use.  Frankly, that would be a great way to make sure I’m keeping in touch with my friends as well.  Which brings me to the crux of the issue; my clients and associates are a great many of my friends.  I need a reliable approach that treats them that way.

Do I feel like I need to “touch” my clients a dozen times a year?  Maybe not if the times I do engage with them are actually meaningful, memorable or gonzo enough.

Once I get some of the other things done, I won’t be able to put this one off.  In the mean time, I would love to hear what funnel management is working for folks that treats their clients like respected friends.  Thanks in advance for your thoughts, my friends!

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

True, but if you want Google to wake up and smell the roses (or in my case, espresso).. you need to give them what they want.
Some documents need time stamps – yyyy-mm-dd-hh-mm-ss-what-it-is.xxx implicitly sorts in chronological order. 24 is too intense for me, but a great way to time stamp.

Most articles are best renamed with keywords.  When we travelled to London, I created a PDF of the London Tube, emailed it to my iPhone .Mac account, and had a nice bright scalable map easy to read on my iPhone in dark, cold and wet London.
Here’s the file name I used:

uk_london_tube_map.pdf

I gives me everything I need to find the file on my computer.  Being a digital kind of guy, I use the 2 letter International Internet Codes or State Code as a prefix.

th_bangkok_wat_pho_reclining_buddha_01.jpg

Back in ancient times (i.e. before taking the Bloodhound Unchained class last week), I would have used a more cryptic code, but Greg’s engenu batch creates ALT tags from the file name, so all my file names will now have embedded keywords for SEO juice.

th_bk_wp_reclining_bdh_01.jpg
But the bits are free.. no extra charge for using more of them…though I would like someone to tell me if I need to stay within an XXX character limit.

Adobe Bridge (Mac & Windows) is superb for organizing and renaming photos and movies.

If curious to know how Greg Swann builds property websites in the time it takes most of us to eat a bowl of cereal, tonight’s the night.

What: Engenu demo with Greg Swann
When: 8:30pm EST, 5:30pm PST
Where: At your computer

We’ll be recording this session too, so if you can’t make it and would like an email w/ the replay sent to you, go ahead and register anyhow.

As promised to the Unchainees, here are links to the stuff I talked about in my presentations:

First, Here’s the main Geek Marketing presentation page. If you want to follow along from home, feel free to pursue the links.

Second, Here is Cheryl Johnson’s engenu help page.

Third, for the people who came to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, you can make your own demo engenu pages by clicking on your own name from this link.

Okay, here’s are homework assignments for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix.

First, until this week I had no idea how deprived folks in the Windows world are. Just about everything I do is built around the idea of truly robust FTP software, and it turns out that this does not even exist for Windows users. Y’all are stuck behind the Iron Curtain and you don’t even know it.

The vast suckage that is Windows FTP drastically affects my plans, but I’ll work it out.

Meanwhile:

If you don’t have one, download and install a decent FTP client. Core FTP LE isn’t awful, and it’s free.

You’ll also need a decent text editor. Komodo edit is actually quite good, and it’s also free.

I’m going to be helping Mark Green talk about CRM and automated database solutions. If you want to play along with some of those ideas, sign up for the free demo of Heap CRM.

Heap is not all the way there as a real estate CRM, but it is adequate for the ideas we’ll be discussing, and a 31-day demo is free. Note that the link above goes to my Heap affiliate account, the vast proceeds from which my wife spends on food for stray animals.

But wait. There’s more.

I upgraded engenu today with the mapping software I talked about here.

You will need to download and install engenu on your file server.

If you have previously installed engenu, you won’t need to install a new copy of engenuPageDex.bin (your password file). (Likewise, if you have a customized “skin,” don’t install engenuComponents.) Even if you don’t want the mapping software, you should install the new version of engenu. First, there have been dozens of small bug fixes since the last official release. And second, I want you to get comfortable with your FTP client.

Do you need some remedial help with engenu? Cheryl Johnson is the world’s most unlikely super-hero, but you can see her heroic efforts at making engenu more understandable here.

And: We’re ready to rock. Class schedules are up.

Students are split into two groups, Alpha and Omega, and you can discern whether you are the aboriginal specimen or the living end by navigating your way here.

If you have questions or problems, hit me or Brian by email. Don’t let things wait. We’re only going to have 72 hours together, and we’re going to try to cram a year or two’s worth of results into those three days. Take tomorrow to review this note and those from the other instructors.

We’ll have time Tuesday to plug any gaps, but let’s all be good Cub Scouts and Be Prepared.

Can’t wait to get started!

Greg Swann
602-740-7531

That’s a screen shot of the user interface of the beta version of the mapping software I talked about on Friday.

This version:

• Creates a Google Maps KML file from a list of street addresses
• Assigns a user-selectable map marker to those addresses
• Optionally creates a folder on the file server for that address — to serve as an engenu folder
• Optionally creates folders and folder structures, thus to create an engenu hierarchy
• Optionally builds links from the map markers to the individual street address folders

This is me writing to the Swallow Hill Gang last night, a very brief outline of features and capabilities:

Any valid addresses, one to a line, will produce a KML file that can be imported into Google Maps.

Like this, which is me and my best beloved:

314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

You’ll have the map marker you choose. I’ll be adding more.

If you select Folders, a folder will be created for that address:

“314_East_El_Caminito_Drive,_Phoenix,_AZ_85020″

If you select Links, the folder will be linked from the map marker.

If you select Links without Folders, neither one happens, for obvious reasons.

If you precede a line with a tilde — “~” — a folder is created, and subsequent address lines and their respective folders and links are created hierarchically. Like this:

~Top Level Folder

would create a folder at the top level named “Top_Level_Folder”.

This structure:

~Top Level Folder
314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

would create a link to a folder from the map marker for my house inside of the “Top_Level_Folder” folder, hence:

“Top_Level_Folder/314_East_El_Caminito_Drive,_Phoenix,_AZ_85020″

If you do this:
~Top Level Folder
~Top Level Folder/Second Level Folder
314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

You would get this:

“Top_Level_Folder/Second_Level_Folder/314_East_El_Caminito_Drive,_Phoenix,_AZ_85020″

You have to build each level of the hierarchy as you go. No harm, no foul if you try to create a folder that already exists.

You can do this:

~Love
~Love/Barefoot Boy With Cheek
314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020
~Love/Barefoot Boy With Cheek/Girl Next Door
322 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020
~Love/Barefoot Boy With Cheek/Girl Next Door/And Baby Makes Three
402 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

and you will have created what I hope will be a by-now obvious hierarchy.

If all you want to do is create a folder hierarchy, you don’t have to add any addresses. You’ll make a KML file, anyway, but it won’t do anything.

You don’t have to use the map, in any case, whether or not your hierarchy includes addresses.

You don’t have to create folders. If you were mapping schools or Starbucks locations, you probably wouldn’t.

A Google Maps map can be accretive, which means that you could add one database of addresses after another — schools, hospitals, fire stations, etc., each with its own marker.

Here’s live work from me:

~The Bannister Home Search
~The Bannister Home Search/Day One – Laveen and Ahwatukee
~The Bannister Home Search/Day One – Laveen and Ahwatukee/Laveen
1721 West Magdalena Lane, Phoenix, AZ 85041
9709 South 46th Drive, Laveen, AZ 85339
2205 West Harwell Road, Phoenix, AZ 85041
2514 West Darrow Street, Phoenix, AZ 85041
4521 West Paseo Way, Laveen, AZ 85339
4419 West Lodge Drive, Laveen, AZ 85339
~The Bannister Home Search/Day One – Laveen and Ahwatukee/Ahwatukee
15830 South 33rd Place, Phoenix, AZ 85048
16813 South 28th Place, Phoenix, AZ 85048
16040 South 18th Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85045
11439 South 45th Court, Phoenix, AZ 85044
~The Bannister Home Search/Day Two – The East Valley
~The Bannister Home Search/Day Two – The East Valley/Gilbert
383 South Ironwood Street, Gilbert, AZ 85296
448 South Bay Shore Boulevard, Gilbert, AZ 85233
989 South Roles Drive, Gilbert, AZ 85296
3577 East Vaughn Ct Gilbert, AZ 85234
920 North Blue Marlin Drive, Gilbert, AZ 85234
431 South Laguna Drive, Gilbert, AZ 85233
745 East Barbarita Avenue, Gilbert, AZ 85234
~The Bannister Home Search/Day Two – The East Valley/Mesa
720 South Glenview Circle, Mesa, AZ 85204
2833 East Downing Circle, Mesa, AZ 85213
1017 East Fairfield Street, Mesa, AZ 85203
7830 East Portobello Avenue, Mesa, AZ 85212
11332 East Fairbrook Street, Mesa, AZ 85207

That site is about half built right now. I’ll be doing the other half today. And I could end up adding more later.

This is all about engenu, of course. You can use this software for lots of purposes, but my ideal deployment is to create the hierarchies and the maps, then dump the photos into the folders, then auto inherit everything into engenu, then go in any do any needed touch-ups. This cuts my engenu time in half for projects like the one shown above.

Let me repeat that: “This cuts my engenu time in half for projects like the one shown above.”

Just using engenu, my time to build that web site — 29 web pages documenting 22 houses and four neighborhoods — would have taken less than an hour. With this new software, my time will be cut to less than half an hour, with a very sexy, rigorously-linked map for every neighborhood.

Permit me to repeat another section from the text above: “A Google Maps map can be accretive, which means that you could add one database of addresses after another — schools, hospitals, fire stations, etc., each with its own marker.”

On Christmas Eve, I pointed out that Realtors have a publishing problem. This software takes away a big piece of that problem: Once I make this available, you will have the ability to pound out as many maps as you need, as quickly as you need them. Zillow or Redfin have resources you don’t have, so they can map the damn Mohave Desert. But you’re selling Agoura Hills, and you can map that patch of turf better than anyone.

All of which leads me to this question: What the hell are you doing with your time?

I’m just one piece of the program at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, but everyone teaching with us will be like me: Very smart people doing insanely original work at the bleeding edge of real estate marketing technology. If you want to go to New York or San Francisco and get drunk, rock on. If you want to go to some punter’s event and get in touch with our world as it existed three years ago, take heart: It might be worthless, but it’s FREE! But if you want to learn how to leverage your limited resources to maximum marketing advantage, we’re the only game in town.

We’re down to the wire, and down to our last few spots. If you want to learn how to leverage your time into vastly greater marketing reach, you know what to do.

CyberProfessionals: $397

Unchained Alumnus: $597

Regular Price: $697

The event runs from April 28th to May 1st, 2009. Many more details can be found at the BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix weblog.

I have very alpha software that makes a KML file that Google Maps will eat to make something like this:

View Larger Map

It’s kinda-sorta like ZeeMaps, except I get a true Google Maps map, which I can then customize and embed.

I start with a list of addresses, which I can type if I absolutely have to.

There’s more: I’m going to build in the ability to create an engenu folder structure from the list of addresses, so that a site like this essentially builds itself.

For that kind of engenu site, I’ll cut my time from 40 minutes to 20 minutes, on the order of two minutes a page for brand new, original, knock-your-socks-off content.

I’m having an exceptional week.

On top of money work, I got the Universal Contact Form to the point where I can deploy new variations in seconds.

I’ve been playing Gooder games for fun — except the fun keeps turning into profit.

I worked out an algorithm for round-tripping data out of and back into Heap, making it possible to use rigorously self-populating forms to get existing databased prospects to scrub their own records. I did a small piece of this before Seattle, but I fleshed out the whole strategy this week.

That algorithm is general enough that it can be used to generate any kind of intelligent email: Any CSV file can become an email that uses a coded URL to self-populate a form that in turn produces other intelligent results: New database records, new CSV files, etc.

I hit upon — but have not yet implemented — a completely new way of organizing my sidebar at our Phoenix real estate weblog to make each WordPress Page its own quarterback in still more Gooder games — all of which, of course, are also Heap games.

I’ve been bugging Michael Wurzer at FBS Systems about making the FlexMLS IDX system responsive to coded URLs. If they will do this, I can build forms that can punch data into Flex just as I’m doing with Heap.

And today I worked out a way to take back the fattest third of the long tail from HomeZillTruGain at a cost in money and labor approaching zero dollars and zero cents. To the contrary, what I’m doing should actually pay us in added incremental SEO juice.

And the funny part is, I have two other long tail strategies that, so far, I’ve only implemented in pilot projects because those two do require a modicum of labor and I just don’t have the time to throw at them.

My thinking is that, by the time I’m done, I can plant three sloppy Bloodhound kisses on the first page of the SERPs for maybe 2,000 long tail keywords — maybe more.

And that’s just the stuff that I’m thinking about right now. The first quarter of 2009 has been pretty good for Scenius.net, and we’re approaching 500 free blogs on BloodhoundBlog.net. And it could be I’m finally starting to put a dent in the universe with engenu.

But even then, I’m ignoring huge bodies of ideas: The Zillow stuff, the listing stuff, the direct marketing stuff — I could go on for something like three years…

And all that turns out to be just so much chopped liver. Comes today in my email a flyer from my own local MLS system:

Without intending to be acrimonious, Dustin Luther is a famous future has-been. He lives on the Social Media moon of the Web 2.0 universe, a very crowded and relatively unimportant piece of the Wired Real Estate marketing puzzle. Adapting viral weblogging ideas to real estate marketing was a genuine innovation, but his first new idea was his last. There is nothing else there, and it is no accident that the market for his lectures consists of clueless Realtor organizations and clueless big-name brokers. He is very far from being alone in mining those varicose veins.

Take note, however: Jay Thompson, who lives here and is an actual ARMLS subscriber, is a much bigger deal in Social Media than is Luther — more popular as a weblogger and better known among actual working Realtors.

John L. Wake, who lives here and is an actual ARMLS subscriber, is echoed on Seeking Alpha for heaven’s sake.

Nick Bastian, who lives here and is an actual ARMLS subscriber, has done remarkable work turning a niche real estate weblog into a minor religion.

Any one of them could do everything that Dustin Luther can do, as well as connecting much more intimately with actual ARMLS subscribers.

As for the other goofball, Jason Edwards, I don’t even know who the hell he is.

Meanwhile: What am I, chopped liver?

Without intending to be self-aggrandizing, there is no one who has more to teach to actual ARMLS subscribers about the Web 2.0 world than me. Instead of paying these two dilberts to come to Phoenix and regurgitate the obvious, everyone — including me — would learn more if ARMLS paid Cheryl Johnson, Brad Coy and Scott Cowan to come to town and ask me questions.

I’m not being vain. I’m being objective — which for some sick reason pisses people off. I throw off way more ideas that I ever have time to implement, but the people who follow up on my ideas are building businesses on them. I’m about a year away from having this pig half-way hog-tied, but engenu alone puts me in a different orbit from everyone else in our world.

I get left out of these local tech events all the time, and I have no idea if I’m being snubbed or if the organizers truly don’t know who is whom in the RE.net. I don’t care, except to note the irony of it all. The good news is, if I’m not speaking, I don’t have to go.

But six days later, starting April 28th, the floor is mine. For the most part, I’ll be teaching things nobody knew a year ago, and it could happen that I’ll be teaching ideas I just worked out today.

The contrast is funny to me, but I’m reluctant to write about it at all. People are much too quick to conclude that I must be gnawing on sour grapes. This is not the case. I love sharing what I know with people who are serious about ideas, but I’m happy enough to let the rest go to hell in their own way. It’s a shame that ARMLS’ management does not know how much of the Wired World of Real Estate calls Phoenix its home, but ARMLS is not taking anything away from me by settling for third-best, and there is nothing of mine that cannot be had in exchange for the proper functioning of an active, eager mind.

My being obscure in my own home town, whether this is accidental or intentional, doesn’t even rise to the level of ambivalence for me. I want for smart Realtors to learn what I know, but I don’t hate it that the Realtors we compete against directly are so slow to catch a clue. Let ‘em have their Dustin Luther and their Jason Edwards. I’ll be in my office, working out newer and better ways to market our real estate practice — at a cost in money and labor coming as close as I can get it to zero dollars and zero cents.

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