Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training, technology
Author: Greg Swann (page 120 of 209)
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
The printed membership directory came in today’s mail. Straight to the trash barrel, unopened.
Who’s the real moron, though? I pay to belong to the Clueless Morons Club. I pay to have the Morons-in-Charge print and mail a membership directory for me to throw away…
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, technology
The F.Q. Story Historic District Home Tour is tomorrow, so I’m going to be out for much of the day. In consequence, I’m moving the deadline for Odysseus Medal nominations to 9 am, to give me time to put together the short list.
Between church and the hangover brunch, there aren’t a lot of nominations on Sunday mornings, anyway. But if you had plans in that direction, amend them. Anything that comes in after 9 will be kicked into next week.
I can’t predict my time tomorrow, so my thought for BHB.TV was do do a piece on BHB.TV — how it’s done. If you have other topic ideas, speak up.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
The trouble with trade shows is the shopportunities. I can restrain myself, by Cathy can be suggestible. Jeff Brown had been talking to me about after-dark lights for our yard signs, but it wasn’t until StarPower, when Cathy saw the product offered by ListingLight.com, that we bought into the idea:
That’s flash photography. The light emitted by the ListingLight is adequate for reading at night, but taking a useful picture would require a tri-pod. Even so, they do the job. Where every other sign on the street is an unreadable silhouette, ours pop out at a distance.
Is it enough to sell the house? Perhaps not, but every little thing helps. There’s no telling when the buyer is coming by, and, even in Arizona, evenings are dark in Winter.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, StarPower, technology
By way of Teri Lussier, Brad Coy hooked me up with an invitation to Seesmic, a video-based social-media start-up.
I’m interested for all of the foregoing reasons. I want something that can do to TV news what weblogging has done to print journalism.
This is my first Seesmic disturbance:
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Here is a selection from Brian Brady for the theme for BloodhoundBlog Unchained, Bruce Springsteen doing Born to run.
Opening line in the video:
“Remember, in the end, nobody wins, ‘less everybody wins”
and the last stanza of the song:
The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive
Everybody’s out on the run tonight, but there’s no place left to hide
Together, Wendy, we’ll live with the sadness
I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul
Someday, girl, I don’t know when, we’re gonna get to that place
Where we really want to go, and we’ll walk in the sun
But ’til then, tramps like us, baby, we were born to runI grew up in Jersey so it biases my selection. If you’re 17, driving down Route 9 to Avalon, and Born to Run comes on the FM, you feel completely Unchained.
Got a different take? Assert yourself by email.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Resurrexit! Witness. Reflect. Celebrate!
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Here is Teri Lussier’s pick for the theme for BloodhoundBlog Unchained, The Who performing Won’t get fooled again.
Got a different take? Assert yourself by email.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
So someone, somewhere in the alphabet soup of Realtor associations is selling my email address — or perhaps just giving it away. Realtors all over Phoenix are watching an idiot’s spam-fest, as one clueless victim after another tries to escape the spam spiral started by an agent who seems not to know that we discover properties for sale in the MLS system — that this is what the MLS system is for.
This by itself is nothing. I get at least a thousand spam emails every day. Moreover, I know that a lot of people in my profession get painfully flustered when they sit down at a computer — so worried they’ll make a mistake that they cause a disaster instead.
But I am sick to death of being “led” by morons.
Witness:
- ZipForms does not work. It is crap software written by crap minds, with its bugs exceeded only by its omission of rational options. It was rammed down our throats by idiots at the AAR who obviously do not themselves use it. And yet, come the start of the year, we will have no choice but to use this piece of garbage — a fate which includes the vast legions of the flustered and the flummoxed.
- And because ZipForms has not been a big enough disaster, the AAR is now preparing to ram a piece of transaction-processing software down our throats — which will almost certainly also be a piece of buggy Windows-centric crap.
- The idiotic gateway software in our idiotic MLS system has never worked in Safari for the Macintosh. We’re getting rid of that crap vendor, thank god, but it is of a piece with the way the chefs of the alphabet soup have operated, that nothing they have promoted, until now, worked properly on the Macintosh.
- They spam me, and they sell or give my email address to spammers — and they charge me hundreds of dollars a year to deliver my inbox up to this rape.
I don’t care that other people don’t thrive at my wavelength. That’s understood. But I do care that they use power I never ceded to them to Read more
The podcast linked below is a piece of a conversation Brian Brady and I had today about styles of real estate weblogging that make sense in the onrushing world of social media marketing.
Brian cites a post of mine from the first of this year, Think globally, blog locally: If you want local leads from your real estate weblog, pursue local interests. I wrote about this because I had mentioned it in the first-ever Phoenix-area weblogging salon that Brian had organized the day before. The ideas discussed in that post formed the skeleton for Real Estate Weblogging 101.
What you’re getting here is just a small taste of the material we will cover at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. I think people have pretty low expectations for trade shows and business conferences. I know I do. What we want for you to understand is that we intend to deliver a rich curriculum, rooted in a deep conceptual framework, that will help you break free of the chains of competitive pressure. But just for now, if you’ll give us 38 minutes of your time, we’ll show you snapshots of a whole new world of marketing.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training, technology
This is my choice for the theme for BloodhoundBlog Unchained. Teri Lussier has a different idea, which I’ll share with you tomorrow. If you think both of us are all wet, say so by email, telling me what you think our theme should be. Be assured that there will be music. It it’s too loud, you’re too old.
This is Tom Petty again, covered by Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam. The song is I won’t back down — in many respects the theme song of my own life. Petty has hundreds of letters from people who turned to this simple little shit-kicker song for strength when they were confronted, by threats or temptations, with the prospect of betraying their own souls. I can’t think of a more important job for art to do than to lend people the courage to be who they are, damn the consequences.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
It’s a year to the day since BloodhoundBlog became a group blog.
Coincidentally, I was talking to Brian Brady today about our long tail, why the accumulated effort of a weblog is a leveraged asset: The most recent content will be the most popular today, but older content will attract greater and lesser attention in perpetuity.
To illustrate the idea, I ran the last year in MyBlogLog. We served nearly 600,000 pages of content in that time. The report is limited to the 2,000 most popular pages, with who knows how many more stretching out in the long tail.
It’s more a curiosity than anything, but, if you like, you an see it by clicking here.
This is not a BloodhoundBlog Unchained theme, either, but it’s another move in that direction. When I met Jeff Turner and Dustin Luther at the NAR Convention, I talked to them about the idea of people who seem to oscillate at the same frequency, like similar isotopes.
I wrote about this once, a long time ago, because I think it’s a fun idea. Ours is a second-generation star, after all, so everyone you know, everything you’ve ever seen or touched is made of nuclear waste from an eons-ago super-nova.
I don’t believe in anything supernatural, and yet I can take note of circumstances where souls seem to harmonize instantly without having to be tuned to each other. I can say the same thing by talking about people coming from the same dirt or just smelling right to each other.
I grew up in Downstate Illinois, in coal country, and I feel a kinship with Teri Lussier — who was raised in Kentucky — that doesn’t require a lot of explanation. And while I’m a fast-talking, hard-charging intellectual entrepreneur — truly a mystery to the folks back home — I never forget the dirt that I came from. This is Southern accents, a Tom Petty tune covered by Johnny Cash. It’s about people who oscillate at a frequency I can always find. It’s about people who smell right to me.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Let’s talk about real estate weblogging, shall we? By an accident of synchronicity, that seems to be what bubbled up to the top this week. The Odysseus Medal goes to Gary Elwood for Naked Conversations: The Lynchpin to Your Real Estate Marketing Blog:
In a nutshell, blogging is one of the best ways to communicate with your market. Better than postcards, email newsletters, flyers, magazine articles, weekly radio shows.
How are blogs better than these communication channels?
There are six key differences between blogging and any other communications channel.
1. Publishable. Anyone can publish a blog.You can do it cheaply and post often. In addition, each posting is instantly available worldwide.
2. Searchable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author, or both. The more you post, the more findable you become.
3. Social. The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build relationships unrestricted by geographic borders.
4. Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a news service. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.
5. Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free “home delivery” of RSS- enabled blogs into your e-mail software. This process is considerably more efficient than the last- generation method of visiting one page of one web site at a time looking for changes.
6. Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.
Of course you can find each of these elements elsewhere. And none is, in itself, all that remarkable.
But in final assembly, they are the benefits of the most powerful two-way Internet communications tool so far developed.
However, bloggers and sophisticated readers of blogs will sniff you out as a fake if you lie, hide, withhold or micromanage information.
Successful blogging is about being off-the-cuff, transparent and off-the-record so to speak. Even if you sin.
SEOBook has a tutorial on SEO for webloggers up today, and this is a rockin’ thing — in context. Real estate weblogging is relationship-based Read more
Click to the flick. There’s an MP3 version, also, so you can listen from your iPod if you want. Dan Green weighs in as well.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology