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Real life at my house: We actually like to watch television, if watching TV means watching DVDs (lately almost entirely Netflix DVDs) or watching selected cable shows. This usually happens very late in the evening, usually when we’re pretty much exhausted.

But: TV at home used to be TV with laptops. Now it’s TV with iPhone. In six months, it will be TV with iPads — or just iPads on the sofa.

Take careful note:

Broadcast television is dead, as is broadcast radio. Let’s free up the bandwidth now. The iPad is the ultimate perfect television. On-demand. Stop and start at will. Goes with you when mom says you have to go to soccer practice. The iPad is the perfect entertainment-consumption device: Personal, portable, programmable — and infinitely extensible.

As was inferable from my first observation in this series of posts, the annual Christmastime frenzy of cheap-shit electronic children’s “educational” toys is dead. Anything that anyone in your home does while laying stomach-down on the carpet will be done on the iPad.

As I pointed out the other day, Microsoft, Amazon and many, many other hi-tech vendors are dead. (I have a quality/integrity argument to make about this, as well, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.)

Despite the iBook store, books are dead. I love literature and I love the drama, but you don’t have to spend seventy-five bucks a head to discover that the audience for live theater is dying. Books have it that much worse: The honest audience is dying off and the dishonest audience — thoughtless people who buy way too many non-fiction books out of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt — are able to capture much better information for free on the internet. Words-for-sale is as meaningful, by now, as air-for-sale.

And despite the hopes and the hype, magazines-as-we-know-them are dead. There is a future for magazine-like content, but it will probably require a revolution among publishers. The current doofuses think their job is to assemble a collection of readers — people with a shared interest in expensive stuff — so that the publisher can betray them, over and over again, to the advertisers.

The new magazine business model — I’m guessing — is being pioneered by unsigned rock bands. To get attention and build an audience, bands are releasing their content as iPhone apps. It’s give-to-get, and with Facebook and Twitter hooks, it’s social. The magazine of the future will be a real community — no betrayals — much like the relationship between striving young bands and their fans.

(This goes for every kind of marketer — including Realtors and lenders: If you’re making friends just so you can sell them out, you’re screwed.)

(I have Big Ideas on the marketing power of iPhone/iPad apps, but I may keep them to myself.)

I tweeted this last night: “If Apple and the data processing industry get this right, the iPad can become the first truly universal remote control device.” I hate the remote controls for electronic devices, and one thing we should insist on, going forward, is that every wired device in our lives should be IP-addressable and fully-controllable by internet connection. But the iPad is the perfect device for controlling any device or system — anywhere! — that can be driven through an internet connection. Let us all look forward to the day when we can chuck every useless, impenetrable remote control in our homes, at work, everywhere!

(On the subject: A useful remote control — useful for any purpose — will be context-sensitive. Instead of a sea of maddening little buttons, each one unreadably-labelled, you will have only those controls — big bright readable virtual buttons — that are appropriate to your current context. If you’re playing a DVD, you don’t need to worry about, wonder about or accidentally hit the buttons that switch you over to the cable-TV set-top box. (And death to it, too, as soon as possible!))

(One of the missed opportunities of the iPhone was the web-based, server-side service. Apps are really clients, like your mail client, and the app serves as as the client/server user interface. This makes for good static vertical market tools, but what we know from the web is that dynamic data is hugely valuable. The bigger screen on the iPad may result in more web-based services that look like apps to end-users. This gets the iWorld back to the constant-beta idea of Web 2.0: Web-based services are infinitely and instantly upgradeable. Combine that with social effects, and you can have sites that self-construct, on the fly, in response to user interaction.)

(And: So far we are not even taking into account the impact of simulated realties, which are right around the software corner, as it were.)

What else is dead? A lot of stuff. Dedicated devices as a group. Your daily schlep is down to a phone — doesn’t even have to be a smartphone — and your iPad. The iPad has the potential to become the universal interface to everything else, so why carry anything else?

What else? Home control. All those wicked-stupid little red LEDs, useful only — admit the truth — for telling you when your power has failed.

Here’s something you may not have thought of: Your wallet may be dead. Do you carry photos any longer? There’s is an app available that will mimic all of your frequent-shopper cards. Why not your credit cards, too? Why not your car keys, for goodness sake?

That stuff might be a few hardware/software revisions out, but consider this: Your sales resistance to the iPad will drop to zero. Wait for Version 2? Why? Let’s just buy a new iPad every year. If we get tired of the old ones, we can leave them in the guest bedrooms. That’s the completely-personal computer completely taking the place of the television, at the very least.

This is an idea I have discussed at BloodhoundBlog Unchained: The geeks have inherited the earth. From pay-per-click advertising to social media to the ability to suss out any marketing hustle, the world is being transformed into a place that makes sense to INTJs.

Here’s the social trend to watch: Will the proportion of INTJs go up over time?

Meanwhile, integrity selling is all that’s left. Hoke, smoke-and-mirrors, juice, jive, hype and hustle are all dead. The dinosaurs of lies will still be with us for a little while, but their extinction is already assured. If you find yourself mourning them, it’s because you’re one of them. Amend your ways or you will lose everything.

I’ll have more to say about this, but the essence of my case is this: What happened this week was the premonitory death rattle of every business model based on laziness and lies. The iPad is not the efficient cause, it’s just a precipitant. But the demise of every-sure-fire-gimmick-that-always-worked-before commenced this week.

Don’t know about you, but I could not be more delighted.

 
Further notice: Amending this in light of my third observation:

The implication of a computer that can train its end-users how to use it is that teaching as a profession is dead. All teaching, at all levels. Just imagine what the iPad could do for you if you really wanted to learn a foreign language…

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It’s funny, I am almost never at a loss for words. I have an opinion on just about any topic and am usually a passionate conversationalist….but put me in the yard with the Big Dogs and I’m feeling a little puppyish (you’ll find that I like to make up words).

To introduce myself I want to tell you about the path that led me here.  I found BHB right as things started to really get hairy in the third and fourth quarter of 2007.

I have to admit I had trouble understanding much of what I read here about technology, SEO and Greg’s passionate dissertations that seemed like they were written in Greek (come to think of it, maybe it was Latin).

I could not resist being drawn to this incredible community of creative, innovative and free thinking professionals sharing openly their trials and their triumphs as they searched for answers when we really didn’t know exactly what the questions were, or what they would be.  It was a true mastermind of master minds.

When I found out about Bloodhound Unchained in 2008 I spent every cent that I had to buy a plane ticket and book a seedy hotel to be there.  I still remember, the cheapest hotel I could find was about a mile and a half from the Heard Museum.  I grew up on a farm in Michigan and figured “a mile and a half, no problem – i can do that in my sleep!”…and I don’t recall any mention on the announcement for Unchained about Arizona heat.  Even in April it was about 109 degrees!

So I showed up every day, lugging my $300 Fry’s laptop that someone lent me the money for, soaking wet, looking like I swam to the event like that dumb Michael Phelps Subway commercial they keep playing during the football playoff games.

I had already read about, and implemented fully without completely understanding,  long tail SEO strategies posted by Greg on the blog.  I was almost blinded by the innovation in the conference and found solace at a time when everything seems like an uphill battle….we’re talking Everest uphill.

I remember the last day of the conference, people were standing up and talking about what they took away from the gathering.  At that time, public speaking and even being in crowds was very uncomfortable for me, but I had something I had to share.

While people were sharing their take aways and what they learned, I got an email notification from another application that came in from my long tail, bloodhound inspired homeownership education blog – it was really working, I stood up and shared the Win.  Little did I know, it was all about to go off!

I spent the next year working on my blogs and my social media systems.  I created specific and measurable mechanisms within the system for identifying metrics for tracking the monetization of my efforts.

I continued to learn and share what I learned and practiced implementing crazy ideas that I thought there was no way I can ever learn all this stuff.  If these guys can do it, so can I.

Fast forward to 2009.  I was still struggling to ramp things up, still reinventing, modifying and manipulating my systems in an effort to automate and simplify my marketing processes and continue to grow, getting closer to thriving in a down market.

Then it happened again.  Unchained 2009.  After 3 straight 12 to 15 hour days of sharing, learning, teaching and challenging – I reinvented myself and my systems again.

2009 ended with our company providing loans for 191 families that bought new homes.  Our 100% online, social media based marketing systems generated all of our leads organically, resulting in the 13 employees in our company making a respectable living for themselves and their families.

Moving into 2010 I feel a tipping point where we are operating, for the first time in over 2 years, with a completely offensive strategy making our business happen as opposed to having things happen…turns out it’s really just a mindset.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the Hounds.  I have made and maintained some incredibly rich and rewarding friendships IRL (in real life) with many I have met over the past couple of years through Bloodhound.

It is an honor and a privilege to be invited to share here.  I can only hope that I can offer as much value to the readers of this blog as I have myself received from reading it.

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I. am. not. BawldGuy. And I don’t play one on this, or any other blog. Okay, now we’ve got that (not-so) deep dark secret out into the open… If you are approaching BawldGuy status, God Bless You, and keep on truckin’ and you go girl! You can move along, because this is for those of us who are working on real estate at the ground floor level.

I’ve been given the gift of time in 2009 and looking back and looking ahead, I see some obvious truths about the real estate business. Some of these are based on mistakes I’ve made, but as long as we learn from them, I’m okay with sharing.

Truth #5: I like twitter. I don’t like facebook. But who cares? Without a goal-driven plan to use either for a very specific reason, then I’m wasting time on both, and I’ve wasted time so you don’t have to. Use them to chat, or use them to market, or use them to sell, but understand the difference and if you are going to use them for business, have a plan and follow the plan. Don’t get sidetracked, and do stay focused. If you are a lender or a vendor then you might want to network with real estate agents, but if you are an agent, then stop talking water cooler and find people who can tell you to go to hell.

Truth #4: You don’t need social media to do a great job in real estate. You don’t need to  blog, or twitter. You don’t need to go to conferences. You can. You might learn a nugget or two, but it’s entirely unnecessary to your success, and it just as likely will be a huge waste of your time and energy.

Truth #3: To be successful in real estate, you need to meet as many people as possible. Lucky us, people are everywhere, and we can find them through any means- the method is really unimportant to getting to close. What’s important is that everyday you get up and do something, and if you do the same thing every day- blogging, or door knocking, or postcard sending, open houses, or google ads, or chatting folks up at the local coffee shop- if you do this every day, and you pay attention to responses, you are going to close something. Hooray.

Truth #2: If you are not satisfied with the “close something” part but would like to close something specific, then you have to apply some marketing.  So we put our thinking caps on: Who is your perfect client? Go find them. Everyday. Find your perfect client everyday. Are they twittering? Are they really? Or do you just hope they are?  Are they on facebook? Are they at the synagogue? Are they on the golf course? In the local book club? Just go find them and talk to them.

Truth #1: Talk to people appropriately. Market to them effectively. Sell to them in ways that add value to their lives. Don’t be ashamed to be a salesman. Apply as needed, which means consistently. Lather rinse repeat.

Here’s to making 2010 the best year ever!

On a personal business note: I’m actually looking to team up with some sharp savvy souls who would like to share goals and keep each other focused for 2010. I don’t want people who will cut me slack, so if you are nice and sweet, that’s not going to work out for this. It’s just about making and meeting weekly, monthly, quarterly goals, nothing more, but nothing less. If you are interested, drop me line.

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Here below is my take on a possible action plan for any mid to large sized real estate brokerage that would like to increase local market share by drastically enhancing its brand visibility and recruiting more agents to its team.

At the core of this plan is the creation of a company standard “Agent Lead Generation Package.”

The thinking here is that as the brokerage works to serve (and mandate) the lead generation efforts of its agents, it’ll concurrently establish it’s standing as the most omnipresent, technically progressive, office in its market area.

Broker Market Domination Action Plan

• Establish a wide multi-author, wordpress based blogsite designed to serve as the cornerstone of your overall lead generation system. This site will double as a regional web based “newspaper” of sorts and will likely have eventual value as such. Key components of this site should include a video gallery page, idx integration, an evolvoing google map and individual agent pages that stream agent created content and feature unique lead capture offers for each agent.
• Establish Company Social Media Profiles – A Facebook page, Twitter account, and Youtube account. Set them each to automatically interact with the main site, with new content being syndicated and shared between all components. Any content posted to the main site will land on Facebook and Twitter, with links calling eyeballs there back to the main site. Any videos uploaded to Youtube will land on the video gallery page and if properly titled and tagged in Youtube they should provide a stream of traffic for years to come.
• Establish a Content Creation Schedule for Each Member of the Team. Make it a company mandate that everyone must contribute to the site on a regular basis. This includes ownership, management, administrative staff, and all agent partners. Assign each team member a themed piece of content that they are responsible for on a weekly basis. Figure out a way to punish those who don’t comply, and to reward those who do. Example – You could charge each agent who doesn’t contribute content a $50 penalty that will be used to hire a freelance writer to create some content instead.
• Manage the Content – Someone will have to monitor all content to make sure it is in compliance with local licensing regulations. It’s probably a good idea for the Broker of Record to commit to reading all content on a daily basis. This will not only take care of compliance, it’ll also keep this broker in tune to what his/her team is up to. It will also make great sense to hire someone to review and tweak each new piece of content for on-page seo. Ideally this would be someone internal to the company who understands the local marketplace, but it can also be someone hired externally with experience working on real estate website seo.
• Create The Company’s “Agent Lead Generation Package” – This package will do a great deal to both retain and help attract new agents to the company. As part of the package provide each agent with: 1. A Niche Focused Blog Page within the main company site, 2. The ability to blog text, photos, and video directly into the site via email either from computer or phone, 3. Assistance setting up a Facebook Profile, Twitter Account, Youtube Account, and Linked In Profiles if needed. 4. An individual niche specific content creation schedule (as mentioned above. ) 5. Automatic syndication of agent created content to all of their social profiles 6. Automatic marketing services as part of the Company’s core Listing Servicing System
• Create a Blanket Listing Servicing System – For each company listing, commit to executing a series of marketing tasks. Executing these tasks properly will: 1. Generate More Buyer Leads. 2. Make it Easier for Company Agents to Justify Price Reductions (thus ensuring a lower occurrence of expireds) 3. Give Company Agents a Competitive Advantage In Listing Appointments 4. Drastically expand your brand visibility locally.

  EXAMPLE OF A COMPANY WIDE LISTING SERVICING SYSTEM THAT MIGHT WORK – Each Listing Gets: A Single Property Website with Unique Street Address Domain Name, A (Hip, Not Cheesy) Photo Based Video Slideshow Uploaded to Youtube, Syndication to all the big National Real Estate Search Portals, A Blog Post about the property on the main company site, a Facebook Ad with at least 10,000 impressions for the property, rotating appearances within the overall company Google Adwords and Bing campaigns, a weekly Craig’s List post, and syndication to the company’s social media profiles.

• Recruiting- Create a separate company recruiting site. This site should be attached to a content creation plan that regularly touts the existence of the all of the stuff above, especially the Agent Lead Generation Package. The recruiting site should also bribe prospective recruits to receive the monthly recruiting blog E-newsletter. For example, you might offer the have the chance to win a free piece of juicy technology that the company provides on a monthly or quarterly basis. (Such as: An Iphone, Laptop, or perhaps a gift certificate for some paid search advertisting on Google/Facebok)
• Maintain The Progressive Culture

- Hold a weekly company wide lead generation webinar. This webinar can start with a new lead generation tip for agents and conclude with an open question and answer session where the agents can get help with any ongoing tech issues they are having. You can also invite prospective recruits (subscribers to the recruiting blog) to this webinar as a way to deepen the relationship. Company’s like KW are already doing this by inviting folks to in house meetings.. why not expand the reach by employing webinars!

• In House Tech Support – Of course implementation of all this might require the creation of another staff position or perhaps reshuffling of existing staff duties. But if you can find a way to provide all of the above while providing company agents regular access to unlimited in house tech support, you could see a healthy ROI. Consider how many of your current agents aren’t doing an extra deal every year because of some very minor tech issue such as the inability to configure pop email on their phone.

Expected Outcomes

HOW EXPENSIVE WILL THIS ALL BE?

Yeah, Expensive. But if executed properly, ROI will be generous. And of course, if you don’t act on a similar plan soon, one of your competitors will. And playing catch-up will be much more expensive than getting a jump on the herd…

So, What’s Missing

So.. what’s missing?

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if Arthur Laffer can have a curve for taxes that defies the static revenue generation models in use at the time and since, then I can have one for social media. (Hat tip to my friend Scott Hack at Selling Greater Louisville for starting me down this road…)

The true reach and impact of a given social media aite has a lifecycle. A site starts as an ineffective blob and the sites promoters must somehow inspire a LOT of people to waste a LOT of time building it up. **cough**Twitter**cough** As they do it gains traction, but unless it hits “critical mass”, a point at which it is a household word and EVERYONE is using it and will not stop using it, then it will decline. **cough**Myspace**cough**

For business purposes, since we are trying to maximize our ROI, my thought is that we only should spend time on those social media sites with enough RELEVANT traffic to warrant us spending our time on them. (Right now that is likely ONLY to be Facebook and then only where we can connect with our friends from the past effeciently and possibly get deals from them.

Twitter, for all of its rabid followers is now IN MY OPINION in decline.

**Eric ducks a tomato and few folks from NAR who are just now learning to spell the words “social media” (grin)**

How do I know? The aforementioned Scott Hack told me last week that he was noticing that more and more twitterers are doing less and less tweets. He is an avid twitterer. So I took it upon my self to do my own marketing research over Thanksgiving.

Of the many people in their 20s and 30s that I talked to, who were on Twitter, most (75%) planned on spending less time there in the coming year.Interesting to note that they STILL INTEND TO USE FACEBOOK.

So then I went to the younger crowd (read: Nephews and nieces) Are they getting on Twitter? No, No and no…why? Because they have become comfortable with the Facebook platform.

When I talk to the 35 to 45 year old crowd, they are climbing on Facebook to friend their kids and keep an eye on them, and then they get hooked and start meeting old friends from school and such…

Add to all of this that posts to a site we both (Scott and 1) contribute to, RealEstateIndustryWatch.com have been regularly tweeted by us with diminishing results in terms of people clicking to the blog via a link.

There is my anecdotal and certainly less than scientific social media market research pointing to the following:

1 Facebook MAY be the first and likely only social media platform to hit critical mass ala how Ebay, Google, and etc did in their respective industries.

2 Twitter is on the decline.

3 From a business perspective, to maximize ROI, time spent on any of these should be minimal and focused directly on connecting with people who are already connected with you that you may have lost track of over the years OR on connecting with specific people via advertisement since Facebook style targeting allows for precise ads to go to precise audiences.

Ok, my twittering followers and facebooking buddies, and all you social media geniuses and gurus that have poured the last 3 years of your collective lives into social media. Please show me where I am wrong.

Where should we REALLY be spending our time in 2010?

Fair warning, just because it is kewl, cool, or cuil (do y’all remember that search engine? they were supposed to put a dent in Google-snort), is no reason to spend time there for business purposes. You are throwing valuable cold calling time away…grin.

Thoughts?

How much time do you intend to spend on social media in 2010 and what is your expected return?

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In Gary Keller and Dave Jenks’ game changing book “The Millionaire Real Estate Agent”, the authors recommend a “33-Touch” follow-up system to stay top of mind with “mets”.

It was actually a brilliant idea – for Keller.  KW agents immediately began flooding the market with (expensive) calendars, post cards, and chotchkies – building the Keller Williams brand in the process.  While Century 21 squandered ad dollars sponsoring the MLB All Star Game and RE/Max floated its balloon on expensive and largely ineffective national TV ad buys, Keller Williams gained market share without spending a corporate dime.

Back in 2004, when the book was published, I felt strongly that 33 annual touches was too high a frequency for real estate professionals.  But that was before I started exploring social media.  Today, it’s very conceivable for a real estate agent to reach their database with 33 quality touches per year.  Below, I’ve mapped out a sample 33-touch program.

Postal Mail:  5 touches

Direct mail is relatively expensive when compared to some of the vehicles we’ll discuss below – but I still believe it should be a core component in any CRM campaign.  Of critical importance – your direct mail efforts need to look and feel as if they are “one-to-one” correspondences.  I have never preferred post cards and “newsletters” because they are clearly mass-mailing efforts.  We want your contacts to believe that you specifically thought of them when we reach them via direct mail.  Direct mail ideas:

• Birthday cards for the client and co-client
• Thanksgiving card (rather than the stale holiday card approach)
• Market updates (make these a mail-merged professional letter, not a bulk-mail blast)
• Announcements (invites to charity events, new hires, testimonials/case studies, etc)

E-mail:  12 touches

I’ve written a few articles about the trials and tribulations of email marketing on the Top of Mind Blog – all of which boil down to common sense.  Email is cheap and easy.  This low barrier to entry creates more and more emails being dumped into our inbox every day.  Clutter is a marketer’s worst enemy.  Your email correspondences must meet an extremely high bar in order to maintain readership and response over the long haul.  Here’s our email approach at Top of Mind – please note that our program is built for mortgage professionals, but I still think these principles could apply for real estate professionals:

• Quarterly Neighborhood Home Sales Reports (every 90 days we advise each contact on what homes sold within a 1/4 mile radius from their home)
• Quarterly Mortgage Checkups (advises each client how their mortgage is performing vs. market conditions)
• Beyond the Media (aims to debunk the doom and gloom consumers are bombarded with in the mainstream media, written quarterly)

Phone Calls:  4 touches

Most of us fail, myself included, to actually talk to our past clients frequently enough.  After all, it can be awkward calling a past client who is likely not in the market for our services.  But the beautiful thing about an effective CRM program is it gives us natural, compelling reasons to contact our database by phone.  For example, when you send a community real estate market update, you could simply select 30 clients to follow up with each time with a phone call.  Questions you might ask:

• Did you receive the letter/email?  (Heck, it’s important for us to ensure that our content is reaching the recipient and is being read!)
• Did you have any questions or concerns I might be able to address?
• Might you know anyone who I can help?  (Say, for example if you’ve written about the home-buyer tax credit.)

Web 2.0 – Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Blogging:  12+ touches

Up to this point, we’re “only” at 21 touches/year… still a long way from Keller’s magic number.  Enter social media and blogging.  It’s virtually impossible to measure how often, say, a Facebook status update is read by a contact in your database… or a blog article.  And I certainly don’t mean to beat a dead horse here… but these vehicles absolutely “work”.  I laughed out loud this morning when I saw Geno’s Facebook entry about his Persian night out.  I know intimately how Brian Brady lives and dies with each Chase Utley at bat.  Above all, social media provides the ideal complement to traditional CRM vehicles because they allow us to connect on a personal level with our database – rather than just on a professional level.  I never liked this expression… but after all we are “buying brain cells” here.

The Glue That Holds Everything Together Is:

Content.  Always has been and always will be.  It’s not enough to “stay in front of” your database anymore.  The ultimate goal is to deepen relationships with your contacts.  Before you hit the send button on a campaign, ask yourself a few questions:

• Would I see value in this correspondence as a consumer or would I immediately hit the delete button?
• Is the correspondence about me or is it about the contact I’m sending it to?  What’s in it for the reader?
• Is this correspondence a “one-to-one” touch point?  Will the recipient believe that I thought of them specifically?

Today, the concept of “33 touches to your database” doesn’t seem so intimidating anymore.  Rather, the challenge becomes providing deeper, more compelling content than your competition.

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This September has been my toughest in the last 43 that I have had. Not in the business sense, mind you. But I have been dealing with health issues that I now (thankfully) am well on the way to complete recovery from. I will be stronger than ever.

Like most things that have been tough, it has been the source of great learning as well. Aside from not writing here much at all, the main thing that this forced downtime did was to force me to think. And think I did.

In evaluating many aspects of my life one of the main faults that I found with myself was was that I simply had not lived deliberately. I did not spend my time deliberately. I did not connect with people as deliberately as I intend to now. And the business side of my life was / is no different. I had not marketed deliberately as I would have liked. I need to be more direct and deliberate and to the point. I had contented myself with the notion that if I did this and that…then eventually my actions would create customers who would at some point pay for my services. Hogwash.

I found myself siding with many of the folks here. The Jeff Browns who get belly to belly with folks who can either say “yes” or “shove off”. The Brian Brady’s of the world that do not have time to waste on less than direct marketing with measurable results. the Greg Swann’s (who if you ask him why listing with him is better than the next REALTOR can actually give you a direct answer). Even when dealing with new technology, the idea that we don’t need to be direct and deliberate and to the point is amazing to me.

We must have a pipeline. Deliberately. Leads. No matter how you get them they need to be there. Buy them from others. Rent them. Advertise for them. SEO for them. Network for them. Cold call. Whatever. Maybe all of the above. My new focus is to be direct.

Much of today’s “social media marketing” is simply too indirect. It is not deliberate enough. What you end up with is wasted time, mis-spent effort and low ROI in the final analysis will only lead to regrets. It does not matter that it is cool. It does not matter all the cool kids are doing it. It ONLY matters if you can CONNECT (directly and deliberately) with enough potential customers to fill your pipeline and build your business.

REALTORS asking themselves those tough kinds of questions will be the ones who survive this market (in my opinion). Yes the questions are tough. Avoiding them (or honest answers to them) is far more costly in my opinion.

What I have been through has not been fun…but what I have learned has been invaluable to me. Now it is my turn to apply it.

So where can you be more direct and deliberate in your marketing / sales plan?

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I asked if SMM were dead as a precursor to our session with the Phoenix Association of REALTORs.   A few of y’all mentioned that social media was helpful as a lead generation tool.  I suggested this yesterday and  I want to be perfectly clear about the utility of social sites as lead generation pools.

Serially creating overly commercial, spammy messages on your Facebook status bar is never going to be effective.  Kelley Koelher once said in my Unchained session that you’re supposed to be SOCIAL on social media.

I don’t disagree.  I often liken your behavior on social media like a party, wedding, or community event.  If you showed up to cousin Fred’s wedding and handed out your business card, you should be tossed out on your ear.  If  bride Wilma’s sister asks you “What’s the market doing ?”, it makes sense for you to get her number and reconnect with her a week later.

Now, more than ever, prospecting is paramount to success as a REALTOR.  Consider this video of Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, discussing the shift from marketing to prospecting.

Here are my takeaways:

1. the 8 X 8 is about cementing a relationship.  These can be phone calls, interactive comments on social media sites, e-mails, and postcards.  I think 3-4 different forms of media touches hardens the relationship cement quickly
2. the 33 touch is about saturation.  I can’t stress enough that you must have permission to continue this saturation strategy on a prospective client
3. The monthly newsletter is a non-threatening way to buy brain cells.  My yellow postcard might only be read for the 8 seconds it takes to go from the mailbox to the wastepaper basket but it does get read.  I get calls from it.
4. The principles of direct marketing are more important now than ever. This means that you should ask people questions…directly (eg- do you know any teachers looking to buy their first home?)

How do social media play into this strategy? Here’s a Facebook tactic:

1. Call everyone on your “friends list”
2. Ask them who their REALTOR is in (your town)
3. If they have one, politely move on.  If they don’t, ask if you can adopt them.  If they don’t live in (your town), inform them that you know they’ll refer someone to you one day and want to be know as their (your town) REALTOR
4. Look at their “friends” list for someone whom you find interesting; ask for an introduction

Does that sound creepy? Well, that’s sales, folks.  Lead generation is the MOST important part of your job.  Keller and Papasan suggest that 3 hours of your day be dedicated to lead generation daily.  Can you imagine how supercharged your business would be if you took their advice and optimized the social media contacts you spent years developing?

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I have always loved Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.  It is many things, not least of which is a truly amazing exposition on language.  I bring this up because I recently read Brian Brady’s piece entitled Is Social Media Marketing Worth the Effort and quickly imagined myself on a walk with The Walrus and the Carpenter.  Greg Swan commented on Brian’s piece by publishing a video of himself, talking to us about his lack of interest in Social Media Marketing.  I can only describe this as so eerily representative of what one might find on the other side of Mr. Carroll’s looking glass that it’s borderline derivative! For reasons that will be clear in a moment, I felt compelled to jump into the conversation.

‘Contrariwise,’ continued Tweedledee, ‘if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t.  That’s logic.’

That’s logic… You just have to love the confidence of that line.  What’s even more interesting is how well this quote appears to sum up a few of our SMM darlings.  I’m thinking of Twitter here and as a matter of full disclosure: I’ve never used it.  As a matter of fact, I don’t believe I’ve used any Social Media in a way that can be measured for Return on Investment or conversion of prospects into customers.  As a matter of fact, the very idea of measuring return on investment or counting conversions goes a long way in explaining why so few people succeed in our business: they confuse marketing with advertising.  I’m itching to write a piece exploring that malady and will get to it as soon as I can carve out a little extra time.  But meanwhile, we have Twitter.  I know people right here in the Hound who are so old-school when it comes to marketing that they’re actually successful in this business (I’m not directly referring to the Bawldguy here, but if you’re still unsure I will look in his direction and whistle) and yet even HE has a Twitter account!  Go figure…

In Twitter Policies Come to Workplace, the main focus is on the banal problems Twitter engenders for those who choose to trade hours for money (and those who employ them).  But here’s what I found really interesting:

TWITTER BY THE NUMBERS
2.9 million: Unique worldwide visitors to Twitter.com in June 2008.
44.5 million: Unique worldwide visitors to Twitter.com in June 2009.
40.5: Percentage of tweets that fall into the “pointless babble” category
37.5: Percentage of tweets that are conversational comments
21: Percentage of users who have never posted a tweet
5: Percentage of users who account for 75 percent of all tweeting activity

Now that’s eye-opening: 78% of all tweets are pointless babble and comments – which are often “stimulated” by pointless babble and must, by necessity, be babble themselves.  And almost all of that originated by just 5% of the users!  As a means for generating business, I would not call this a “target-rich environment.”  But hey, who am I to comment?  I don’t use the thing myself and maybe I just don’t see the logic behind it.  Maybe the Twitterati are on to something.  Maybe it all makes sense to someone… walking on some distant shore…

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing wax –
Of cabbages — and kings –
And why the sea is boiling hot –
And whether pigs have wings.”

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Responding to Brian Brady’s BloodhoundBlog post about the profits and pitfalls of social media marketing, here — surprise! — is my contrarian take on the subject.

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Greg Swann and I are working together, later this week.  We’re meeting in Phoenix to do some video work (mostly Q & A stuff), discuss the what we want BloodhoundBlog Unchained to look like,  and host a discussion about SMM at the  Phoenix Association of REALTORs (with Kerry Melcher).

We KNOW social media marketing works because we’re both busy but we really want to start measuring the efficacy of each effort.  BloodhoundBlog Unchained is a labor of love.  Our profits have been miniscule but we learn so much from the process of hosting the conference.  Hobby or not, we’re still committed to producing the premier three-day workshop, about online real estate and mortgage marketing, in the industry.

One of the reasons Greg and I have such a great partnership is that we approach the same issue from completely opposite camps.  Many of you have seen us “do our bit” about filling the funnel vs. pure pull marketing. I’m gonna let y’all in on a secret; we both practice what the other preaches.

I watched the forced registration issue with great interest.  I’m spending thousands of dollars to have a similar IDX for mortgage rates developed.  Naturally, I want to recoup the thousands as quickly as possible without threatening the customer to the point of having her click away.

I’ve watched people preach expertise about SMM who have never dealt with a bad Yelp rating, never engaged a stranger about their profession on Facebook, and haven’t monitored their blog comments in a year.  We’re all trying to find the highest and best use of our time while providing good content for the stranger who graces our websites with a question.

I want those people to become prospects, then customers, then clients, then sneezing fans but I don’t want to spend all day wired to the laptop or answering questions via e-mail.

Our critical mission is to find out what works and what doesn’t.  Most of the ideas we develop come from questions in these little workshops we do. People ask us questions and Greg and I try to find the answers.  Those answers usually come from you; we observe  what you try, swipe it, and try to improve upon it.

I’d appreciate it if you could answer some questions for me.  If you have any questions, ask ‘em and Greg and I will stick them on our list:

1- How are you engaging with anonymous strangers on the internet?  How are you moving them from the wary question to think of you as a trusted advisor?

2-Which online medium is converting best for you?  …connecting with old friends and customers on Facebook?…meeting local folks on Twitter? …your IDX system?… e-mail marketing?… blogging?

3- Which offline techniques are converting the online relationship?  Why?  When?  How does it work?  More importantly, how does it fail?

4- What social media suck?  Seriously, I found Gather.com and AARP to be a waste of time.  LinkedIn Answers works for me if I jump on the telephone but it is mostly ineffective.  Where did you waste most of your time?

I appreciate your thoughts, insights, and questions.  As always, we’re intrigued with how to make this engine run more efficiently, want to figure it out before everyone else, and share it with the finest group of people on the net; the BHB community.

Many thanks in advance for your contributions.

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Not to undermine Chris Johnson’s message about salesmanship, which is spot-on and very-much-needed, but Ian Greenleigh of DriveBuy Technologies, in agreeing with Chris, demonstrated the value of social media marketing to the sales process.

How?

By posting a comment to Chris’ post, he drew attention to his product — a product we have been actively shopping for.

SMS promotion is next on my radar. I want to be able to add SMS marketing to our signs: “For more information about this property, text HOUND7 to 88000.” We got this from SmarterAgent for our MLS client (text HOUND to 87778), and we knew at once that it would be wicked cool to have as a tool for promoting our listings.

As with our signs, we knew what we wanted before we knew it even existed. Over the weekend, I web-shopped some generic SMS marketing vendors, but I hadn’t moved beyond the window-shopping stage.

And then today Ian posted his comment. And the product is precisely what we need, precisely the way we want it. The price is sweet — eight bucks a month per ad-code — and the codes are reusable. We’ll start tomorrow with five ad-codes, then grow as the business grows. For $40 a month, paid monthly, I’ll have something way better than IVR that delivers tons of value to our listing clients and to our buyer prospects. That totally rocks, and it’s a nice proof of the Bawldguy technique of comment-based marketing.

I have a feature request, of course: We’re moving to SalesForce.com as our CRM — probably next month — and I would love it if DriveBuy would devote some attention to direct integration with SalesForce. They’re already there with TopProducer.

Ian Greenleigh works on commission, just like us. If you buy his product, reward his enterprise by buying from him. The link at the start of this paragraph is his email address. His direct phone number is 512-410-0282.

(As a matter of disclosure, I have no financial stake in promoting DriveBuy. But they’re doing a job I want done, so I want to help them and Ian make more money. If you bristle at the term “vendorslut,” you might reflect on what BloodhoundBlog can do for you, should you focus your attention on delivering value to respected clients instead of quarrying for more boobs to hustle out of their money — and more stooges to bribe for phony endorsements.)

I have other great products that I’ve been meaning to write about, but DriveBuy is going to be an important tool for us, so I’m delighted to talk about it today.

 
Further notice: Text HOUND7 to 88000 as indicated above. Ian built a demo out of one of our listings. I have an iPhone and a Palm Centro, and it looks great on both.

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The Realtor® Fantasy that is part of social media fascinates me.

Social Media “experts” have attitude that if you’re cool enough, transparent enough, and seem to care enough, a brinks truck full of money will be backed up to your door, you’ll get on the cover of a National Real Estate Magazine, and you’ll be given the recognition that you’ve always wanted.

Your “personal bland” will dominate the landscape and you will become the recipient of tickertape parades all across the country.

As if.

We are…salespeople.  We have intimate relationships with people’s finances.  We must sell people on our own competence.  Not coolness.  We must sell people on the idea that we care.  And, buddy, that doesn’t happen when we ‘drip’ on them.   We must truly be caring and competent, or else we’re screwed.  And we’ve gotta convey it.  (Dan Melson again comes to mind).

There is no Search Engine technique that will cause the web to organize itself to have presold buyers slobbering to pay us 6 percent on something.  There ’s no blogging technique that will eliminate the need for someone to answer questions and be a fiduciary

We…are salespeople.  Social media is just a way of meeting, reaching, helping and working with fun people.  It’s nothing more than that.  Your marketing is probably generating leads.  Your leads can’t be sent to AMEX to pay the bill.

But are you closing them?  Are you reaching out to demonstrate-definitively–that you are their best and most caring option?  That you have sharpened your skills to navigate this market.   Probably not.  And that’s where the problem lies.   You are not selling.  You are not reaching out, risking rejection and trying to help.  And despite the cries that people have that they “don’t wanna be sold to.”   They “don’t wanna be sold to” by a moron.  Don’t be a moron.  People need someone to take charge.  They need some expert in Real Estate, Mortgage or wherever to just get the damn thing moving forward.

When you’re building a “you-centric” personal brand, website that is bereft of information that your friends might want…you’re not selling.  Your social media is not selling.  It’s broadcasting, spamming, looking cool, but NOT SELLING.  I am cleaning the clock of web people that are legitimately better than me.  I’m doing it with–no lie–a shoebox and index cards.  Every time I see someone’s website I can make better, I write it down.   I call those people up, introduce myself…and sell them.  I dump ‘em into aweber or wherever eventually.

And I’m not that good at sales yet.  I sell a lot, but on a scale of 1-10 of selling, I’m probably a 3.5 or 4.  I just do it.  Call, ask, repeat.   I’m digging myself out of the IRS hole that I spotted the world (current estimated emancipation date is 1 November 2009).    But still–I’m not that good.  But I don’t suffer the entitlementality that is sweeping the social media landscape.  I’m not gonna get mad if someone rejects me or needs a refund.  It’s business.  My own soul isn’t so heavily invested in this stuff

I don’t expect you to think I’m cool, or be impressed enough to call me.  I don’t expect you to call me.  I don’t care if you don’t.  I’ll call you and do the best job I can helping you get whatever the hell you need.  Because all of us in our professions–are fundamentally salespeople.

We must embrace–not eschew–that concept if we’re gonna win anything.    And we must not use the marketing we do to insulate us from salesmanship.  Get it?  Good.  None of us are gonna become superstars…unless we’re here to help other people.  It’s about what someone else wants, beeing there to meet the need.  Social media is not gonna make people genuflect at our greatness.

Now…follow up matters, auto-responders work.  But none of it performs at half the level it could without the passion and enthusiasm of an earnest and dedicated salesman.

Don’t think of sales as a redheaded stepchild.  Marketing is good, but it’s a poor substitute for sales.  It gets you a date, but it get doesn’t you upstairs.

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I’ve received a few emails and calls from my loan officers this week about some new exclusive opportunity that Activerain.com is pitching to the mortgage industry.

Apparently, Active Rain is cold calling mortgage professionals who have an AR blogging history and offering them an “extremely rare opportunity” to pay $299 / month for the privilege of being able to re-sell upgraded AR products to real estate agents.

The following email is an example of what the new Active Rain business model appears to be:

xxxxxxxxx,

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to speak with me.  As I said, this is an extremely rare opportunity.

WISCONSIN

Currently 848 Real Estate Agents

Currently 123 Loan Officers

You will have a full training course with ActiveRain to learn the knowledge on how to dominate the first page of Google.  With this knowledge you will train agents to do the same.  You will keep in contact with these agents as their trusted advisor who has directly taught them on how to fully market themselves successfully.  There will be loyalty here.  You will have full access to every single new and old agent in the whole state of Wisconsin.  You will be highlighted all over ActiveRain for this.

$299/month is your investment.

After 15 upgrades you will receive $700.

For every rainmaker upgrade thereafter, you receive $25.

The relationships and possibilities are endless.

Please let me know as soon as possible as time is of the essence.

xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Member Services
ActiveRain.com
xxxxxxxxxxxx

I’ve obviously blanked out the names to protect the people involved in this specific conversation, but I’ve already been given permission by my loan officers to talk about this on Bloodhoundblog.

________

Let me get a few disclaimers out of the way before I dive in to this Active Rain thing.

I’m a loan officer with several blogging platforms – some are free, and some cost money to participate.

My main objective with 99% of the group blogs that I build is to help my contributors expand their reach online with a little help from a few friends who share the same goals.

I understand the importance of having a well capitalized web project so that the development crew can stay on the cutting edge of innovation.

The real estate industry is brutal enough, so I can truly empathize with the additional complexities and logistics involved with building a social media business in this vertical- especially when competing with the new economics of free.

Matter of fact, the overwhelming demand of advances in technology, combined with limited time and resources may ultimately force us to shut down our real estate social network after 3 hard years of blood, sweat and tears.

Either way, the experience has taught me how vital it is for real estate and mortgage professionals to take ownership of their online presence and actually build equity in something that they personally control.

________

Basically, I respect AR’s right and need to create revenue streams to be able to facilitate the perceived value their members expect.

However, I’m insulted as a loan officer by a Goliath like AR thinking that it is OK to base a business model off of the same tired “pay us a bunch of money for the opportunity to meet more agents” pitch that we’ve been guarding ourselves against for years.

It just sounds dirty.  And according to one phone call I had this week with a loan officer, the AR sales team is laying it on thick – telling loan officers that if they don’t call back by the end of the day, Active Rain will find another mortgage company to give exclusivity to.

Here are my 3 main issues:

1. The veteran loan officer members have sacrificed their valuable time over the years writing content and earning points for the potential to be featured somewhere special on the site.  Yet, now a new loan officer can just buy preferred  placement and access to all of the agents in that state?

I know that the $299 may not replace the relationships that the non-paying LOs have worked hard to build with the AR agents, but it will create a little confusion.

How can you measure the true value of a point system when the members have to consider whether or not someone has actually earned their place at the top?

I guess AR is going to issue these loan officers a special badge, but that is just going to let the community know that they were one of the suckers who got duped into buying “full access to every single new and old agent in the whole state of……..”

Keep in mind that the email above clearly states this is for Active Rain, not Localism.

2. Real Estate agents have worked hard establishing a presence on AR for the purpose of reaching their target audiences in the search engines…. But instead, they are being presented as a dangling carrot in front of  hungry loan officers who are starving for the opportunity to take a bite out of that agent database.

3. I guess it would be fair to give agents free blogs since they are being traded as a commodity for the $300 / month from loan officers.  But actually, the loan officer is simply buying the right to re-sell the blogs to new agents with the potential for a kickback after a certain quota has been met.

First of all, most loan officers don’t have $300 a month to blow on a new business venture.  And, the ones that do have the money are way too busy closing loans to spend their time pushing Active Rain blogs on their few producing agents.

This sounds more like activeway than a real mortgage marketing solution.

________

If loan officers are interested in teaching their agents the super cool new tricks of getting found on Google, then here are six great resources that won’t cost you $3600 a year:

• BloodHound Unchained
• Social Media Marketing Institute
• Breaking News / Social Broadcasting / Twitter
• Mortgage Revolution
• REBlogWorld
• REBarCamp

I’m just a loan officer with a few mortgage blogs and a single voice in the business, so I don’t have any personal reasons to be threatened by Active Rain’s new loan officer marketing campaign.

Actually, if I want to be selfish about things, it works to my advantage if a bunch of competitors are chasing shiny AR objects while I focus on building my own domain’s strength in the search engines.

However, for some reason, I just can’t sit back and let these giant media companies poach on our industry like this.

I mean, when did Active Rain go from being a great industry social network to just another company that wants to gouge the already battered loan officer?

We’re not mules chasing carrots anymore, and we’re not the solution to boosting your bottom line.

Image Credit

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At 57 I still can’t decide if those insisting on always doing things themselves are deluded, arrogant beyond understanding, or so much brighter than I am, I’m doomed to forever be in the dark. The unrelenting confidence oozing from the pores of do-it-yourselfers piss me off if only on principle. How many times do they hafta reinvent the damn wheel — reborn as a richly elegant octagon — before they discover the problem is them? Of course there are usually so many questions they don’t even know to ask — their ignorance basks in the glow of never ending faux bliss.

Wanna know the problem with ignorance? Ya never know how much you don’t know. Why? Often cuz you’re a do-it-yourselfer. Today I’m speaking mostly to real estate agents, but the principles apply to any job. As an agent your bottom line job description ain’t rocket science. You’re either finding a home for someone or selling a home for someone — both in a timely and professional manner. As simple as that is to state, we all know from experience that’s a bunch of overflowing plates on our daily table. All the skill sets required to become expert in those two jobs can be daunting when one wishes to actually, you know, be an expert.

Those skill sets are learned. Mentors, company training programs, blogs, seminars/conferences, webinars, and even books are some of the vehicles carrying agents to the legitimate status of expert — combined of course with endless hours of repetitive study and practice. Yet how many times do we see a so-called expert, often self-proclaimed, wanting us to believe they did it all themselves? They all have brown eyes eventually, cuz spewing that BS long enough tends to turn ‘em that way.

You’re not an expert in online technology. You’re not an SEO expert. (Though you and I may be the only ones online who don’t claim that these days.) Let’s look at an incomplete list of related areas of expertise for which do-it-yourselfers fail miserably while belligerently maintaining they’ve mastered them. What a crock.

Using the web via blogs/websites to sell/list property.

Successfully employing SEO principles online.

Using ’social media’ in general.

Drip email programs. Or, more honestly put, how to stretch out the time it takes to finally get folks to threaten bodily harm due to your expert marketing. Don’t get me wrong, I think the drip approach works as well as intended — but only when designed/executed by an expert.

Direct mail marketing.

Postcard marketing.

There’s plenty more we could put on that list if we put our heads together, right?

Here’s how do-it-yourselfers convince themselves of their superior expertise. They compare their results to other do-it-yourselfers. Agents do this incessantly on blogs and at conferences, seminars, and REbarcamps. If it wasn’t so sad it’d be funny. Don’t misunderstand me — this isn’t a blanket indictment of those media — but seriously, the person on the stage is often the one who’s merely a couple chapters ahead of everyone else in the book.

In my time I’ve been a competitive bodybuilder, a marathoner, and an NCAA umpire, including post season. Was I a do-it-yourselfer? No, as I had more respect for those who were legitimate experts in those three fields than to demean their expertise in that manner. In the gym I was trained by a world champion one on one. When a runner, San Diego was blessed with numerous long distance experts who were nationally and sometimes even world famous. As an up and coming umpire, former major league umps and several with NCAA World Series experience trained me on the diamond, hands on.

The arrogance demonstrated by do-it-yourselfers who think they’re at levels they can’t even see, much less execute, is possibly exceeded only by the difference between what they think they know and reality.

This isn’t to say I don’t understand economic realities. Sometimes something is better than nothing, and good enough for now can become much improved over time. I get it. I’m not endorsing the typical agent who’s forever getting ready to do something — just prior to leaving the business. We all do what needs to be done if we’re serious. But when there’s a choice, please, stop with the I can do-it-myself as well as the expert, cuz you’re embarrassing yourself.

If you studied what a real expert does for six months you probably still wouldn’t know what they’ve forgotten. Harsh? Not really. The word expert has been bastardized second only to the word ‘great’ in sports. I was a pretty decent umpire, but I wasn’t within sniffing distance of Doug Harvey, a slam dunk expert, who was one of the best Major League umps who ever trod a diamond. I learned to train and run ever improving marathons, but was never on ESPN. With one exception I never finished in the top ten WOMEN in my age division. I competed in bodybuilding, once placing 7th in what I think was called Mr. Teenage So. California. Don’t be impressed though, as compared to the top three, my name might as well have been Nancy. Though I was trained by an expert for two years, they’d been trained by experts for 8-10 years. The winner went on to have quite a career, making several magazine covers. Talk about perception meeting reality. Crestfallen doesn’t cover it.

So can we please temper the do-it-yourself mania? It’s gettin’ on my last raw nerve. My son makes the argument the do-it-yourself era in real estate related skill sets has been slowly fading for the last year or two. He bases that on the observation that he doesn’t read any more about agents ‘…lying naked on the beach while the money pours in from leads generated from their miracle website, designed and engineered by them alone.’. Gotta love the way he puts things.

He further notes that those who’ve survived this latest cleansing have, to the extent affordable, ‘called the guy’ whenever possible. I hope he’s right.

‘Calling the Guy’ has been my M.O. since forever. I’m a real estate investment expert, but only a pretender when it comes to CRM, various forms of marketing, internet technology, and the like. Those thinking they’ve effectively mastered all those skill sets are either kiddin’ themselves, or truly are way smarter than the rest of us. That said, it’s amazing how many answers I get to questions I never knew to even ask when talking with a real life expert. Why would anyone want less than the best results possible?

What say you?

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