BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Tag: social media (page 1 of 1)

November 5, 2010

I don’t play Farmville and I don’t disagree with Brian Brady!

by

Realtor, Media Mogul

Author website

But I do question whether prospecting using facebook is the most efficient way to prospect.  I’m sure everything Brian Brady said is correct, he’s just that kind of a guy!  I’m also a one person office and time spent trolling facebook for leads isn’t as quick as calling up expired listings in my area, or working the internet where buyers are looking for homes!

For me, there are just quicker ways of getting calls from interested buyers than slogging through my facebook friends’ friends, tracking down phone numbers and calling them.  If there was some clever tool to just get those folks names and numbers (Greg has probably written one), with some sort of a relationship graphic so I have something to chat with them about, count me in on the calling.  I don’t mind cold calling.  Expired listings are quick to get and easy for me to call.  They can be pretty productive too.

I spent some time playing on Ebay’s classifieds today.  I’ll tell you how that works out when I know, but being where buyers are looking usually works pretty well for me.

So, I’m not disagreeing with Brian, I’m just wondering, like apparently the Zillow CEO is, if facebook is worth the time.  I haven’t found it to be the most productive way to do business prospecting.

“We’ve taken a number of swings at social (networking) that have not paid off. We might have invested less,” said Spencer Rascoff, chief executive of Zillow.com.

His site has some social networking features and some integration with Facebook and Twitter – mostly as a result of following the conventional wisdom that any vertical could benefit from a social emphasis.

What Rascoff discovered, however, was that real estate is one area that truly doesn’t lend itself to social.

“In our category, we have not found it to be a social experience,” he said. “When you’re looking to buy a home, your network is small – it’s you, your spouse, and your real estate agent. You don’t tell your 300 friends, ‘I’m looking at this house.’ And especially in this market, Read more

November 1, 2010

Developing The Perfect Content Map For Your Real Estate Blog

by

Las Vegas Mortgage Blogger

Author website

Regardless of the recent debates about whether or not a real estate blog should be considered a solid foundation for a single agent to develop a realistic business model on, there are still many benefits of publishing content on a site you own… provided everything is organized properly.

I follow the CopyBlogger school of thought for designing strategic landing pages to ensure my target audience gets the exact information they’re looking for when they hit my sites for the first time.

While I do feature categories and tags in non-prominent areas of the footer or custom sidebars, I try to keep my main informational points of interest flowing from the top down in order to respect the time my readers have to spend online.

Homeowners and new buyers can easily get overwhelmed with the hundreds of details they may need to be aware of when it comes to the mortgage or real estate process.

One simple answer can easily lead them to five other questions that they didn’t know they needed to be asking.

Designed with the big picture in mind, your blog can effectively lead someone through their fact-finding mission in a painless and strategic manner.

Obviously, articulating this complex home buying thing in a manner that non-industry people can understand is great way to build trust with your potential clients.

Agents are obsessively consumed with “Personal Branding” to the point where buyers have to invest valuable seconds of their life on a site sifting through awards, testimonials, twitter feeds and media interviews before they can find a page that actually addresses their real needs and concerns.

However, I feel industry blogs have come a long way in the past five years.

But, we need to get better at focusing on homeownership education if we’re truly going to impact a positive change in our local real estate markets.

Here’s an example of my Mortgage 101 section, which has significantly increased in stickiness since I took out the sidebars and customized the page layout to serve as more of a site index with a purpose.

My ultimate goal is to be able to send borrowers and agents to my mortgage blog without Read more

January 19, 2010

Unchaining a Bloodhound Pup

by

Mortgage Systems Samurai

Author website

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 Read more

June 15, 2009

The Case For Twitter, Really Fast

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

House Hunting? in Ohio?

or maybe

LandLord Problems In Pittsburgh?

What if your:

“Rate Went Up”

maybe you want to

“Look At Another House”

Whatever you do, don’t be a “Stupid Realtor”

These people are BEGGING for some help.  They are SCREAMING for it. And you can fish though and find some phrases in your area that will get you houses this week.  And you gotta fish a little bit, but seriously?   What the hell else are you doing?

Search.Twitter.com and a little elbow grease and a friggin’ phone call is the way to go.  Betcha you can get tweetdeck loaded on a computer, run about 10 searches near your area and throw 65,000 in GCI.  And I’ll betcha you can do this without having to talk to any idiots.

These are people with their hands up.  And the first person that clicks through and responds on their website or not JUST on twitter…they are the differentiators.  They are the ones that get to date the prom queen.

So…loads of people are needing a deal.  A connection.

Make that, and get real paid.

February 26, 2009

The Twitter Experiment: SWRake Seeks Companion for Possible LTR

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Alright.  I talked about posting my results on this post.

Today’s pay pal of $575.00 allowed me to cross the finish line, early.   I have blogs to build, SEO to SEO, copy to write, PHP to PHP and more work than I can possibly do.  And way more than that, to channel Yogi.   Lawyers, a local News Station…Realtors®…and others have contracted with me to do everything from setting up social networking profiles (boring), to trying to aggregate information on their competitors (fun).  I have a pile of work to do.  From Twitter.  It’s an efficient clearing house when you’re ready to pick up the phone and be a catalyst and when you see phrases and words you dig at http://search.twitter.com.

I’m not highly skilled as a cold caller compared to many.   But I make the calls.  That’s most of it.  And, I had one shitty response.  Only one.  But I pick up the phone, I say I’m enjoying your tweets.  And, I now have money to pay 2008’s extortion taxes.   I’ll probably have $14,000 after I pay my subs out. There’s money in twitter.  Just lying around.   If  I’m a mortgage lender, EVERY Realtor® would get a phone call in EVERY state I could lend in.  Why?  Because being ON twitter is instant credibility & rapport.

I didn’t spend hours doing this, really.   I spent probably about 70-75 minutes a day initially calling, and then I did follow up, scheduled through ACT 6.0 now that I have my PC working on my MAC.   (Act 6.0 was the pinnacle of single user CRMs) .  I also asked the Twitterers for referrals that WEREN’T on Twitter.  That was $8,000 of my $25,150.    I have probably another $4,000-8,000 in business I could extract if I’d follow up with zeal and vigor.

And there’s the rub.   See, I need someone to manage and do the work.  I’ve sold it, gotten project requirements, I’ve found people with real needs to be helped.   And I’m looking for someone to help grind out the work so I can honor my clients, and keep the pace up.  I want someone that Read more

September 8, 2008

Fragments Shored Against Our Ruin

by

CEO, Redfin.com

Author website

Clive Thompson just wrote a brilliant article for the New York Times magazine, describing the cumulative impact of following someone across Twitter, Facebook and other social media. I read it with interest because Redfin has been thinking about embedding our agents’ micro-blogs into Redfin’s site, so that clients can get updates (e.g. touring properties in Capitol Hill) and timely, local advice (e.g. seeing a lot of price reductions in Noe Valley).

But the New York Times article was interesting for personal reasons too, because it speaks to how anti-social people in social software can be.

I’ve already struggled to describe the phenomenon of feeling loved, but by no one in particular, of not-being alone when you are totally alone, of intimacy with everyone (several friends have told their inquisitive mothers to “just read my blog” and I always wonder how that makes the moms feel).

Clive’s most interesting argument is that the cumulative effect of a Twitter feed is larger than we realize. “Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting,” Clive writes, “because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel.” 

I’m not sure that I completely agree. A friend of mine once paid $9.95 a month to get a daily voice-mail from Jose Canseco when Canseco was a slugger for the A’s; every day, he mumbled something about working out and washing his hair (nothing about Madonna). It was somehow even more disappointing than we thought it could be.

But Clive’s observation does begin to answer the question people always ask about why anyone bothers to update Twitter three times a day: it’s the only way most of us can write a novel, piece by piece. And it’s the only way most people will read one either, 160 characters at a time. I think his point was that the most evanescent thing in the world, a twitter, might be the most permanent thing we have.

Sometimes it seems like the Internet is an elaborate record of our contradictions, our multitudes, which we can blast off Read more

July 19, 2008

Project Bloodhound: What’s A Little More Change? Choosing a New Broker Based on Social Media Involvement!

by

Real Estate Broker

Author website

I made the decision a few months ago, that even though I could afford to maintain my current office space through this winter, that I really didn’t want to spend a fortune doing so! I’m paying a pretty pricey rent for about twice as much space as we really need.

After a little discussion with my top agents, my search began for smaller office space. I thought I had found the perfect space, only to find out that the telephone service that I wanted (that reduced my office phones cost from $350 a month to $150 a month) wasn’t available and would not be for quite a while! So, I started really looking at my/our options:

  • I already gave notice – I have to move by 7/31/2008
  • I hate the affordable space that is available
  • I hate to admit it, but I really miss being part of a franchise somedays

I put out a feeler to another franchise broker in town and he jumped all over it: “Come on over, bring your folks, and be part of our team”. Oh h*ll what have I done now races around my mind. After being a managing broker for 7 years of a large franchised company and an owner/broker of a small independent office for 4 years, this feels really weird! Sure enough, in a few days I’m being recruited – I forgot what that feels like – not by 1 but by 2 of the companies in town! I had a gut feeling, but decided to “google” my potential new brokers – one of them is at least on Facebook! Whoo Hoo – I think I’m going to choose my new broker to affiliate with based on his being on Facebook.. some research and my gut. Some of you know how I feel about Facebook, and other social networks, so it may be no surprise that I would never go to work for/with someone who had least didn’t somewhat embrace the Read more

Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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