There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Blogging (page 33 of 84)

Unchained melodies: Born to run

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 run

I 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.

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Sex and Real Estate Brokerage

Shaun Mc Lane sells real estate in Orlando. No, strike that. Today, Shaun does not sell real estate in Orlando; he will be opening his own real estate brokerage in December.

Tuesday, Shaun experimented with a racy Web 2.0 offering. He posted a video asking if sex sells. The video was a short slide show of bikini-clad women, in various poses. Should you click through, you’ll see that it isn’t “Betty Grable in a cheesecake” pose. It is a more prurient collection of photographs typically seen on MySpace.

Wednesday, Shaun’s broker laughed about it and asked him to remove the post from his website. Shaun called her bluff and was handed a pink slip. Shaun is claiming independent contractor status, because he pays his own marketing costs, and is visibly irritated with the decision. He’ll be “going it alone” which may have been his intention all along.

Similar controversy gained national attention when Wendy Heath posed with her bulldog, in a bikini, on a billboard in Long Beach, CA. Wendy’s strategy:

“I wanted to set myself apart and kind of shock the shore, and, you know, drive people to my website and increase my business,” Heath told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. “There’s many, many real-estate agents in our area, and it’s hard to break through and set yourself apart. … I am absolutely amazed that one billboard could cause so much attention, but I am absolutely elated.”

Competing female REALTORs dissented:

Well, as a fellow realtor, but also someone with the body to do exactly what she did, I think she took the blonde-bimbo way out. If we, as professional real-estate agents, have to result to using our scantily clad bodies to gain clients, maybe we need to look inside ourselves at what we are lacking professionally. There are many tough real-estate markets nationwide, but when we tear down the image we are struggling so hard to display (which is that every real-estate transaction benefits from the experience and knowledge that only a professional realtor can provide), we essentially lose all that we have worked to achieve. Read more

Weblogging without chains: A BloodhoundBlog Unchained introductory podcast to viral, hyper-specific real estate weblogging

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.

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Please, please, please do something different!

This dawned on me the other day as I was filling out my Inman Connect Speaker Information email that they’ve sent me 4 times now but I hadn’t properly synthesized it until now and while it is an axiom as old as time it is something worth remembering every day: Be remarkable.  Why remarkable?  Because remarkability wins.  Because remarkability is what makes you stand out from the white noise that impinges on success in every competitive ocean out there.  Because with out remarkability you are just a part of the landscape; and no one that I’ve yet to meet likes the prospects associated with that business proposition.

It’s said a million different ways, but it all amounts to the same thing: a purple cow, a free prize inside, an unique selling proposition, are all imploring us to do one thing – something remarkable.  It’s as simple and as complicated as that all at once.  See different and remarkable are interchangeable in language but not in action.  Being different is easy, being remarkable is hard.  Being different doesn’t win and doesn’t necessarily have any attached benefits to the customer; in fact being different can have adverse affects on them – but being remarkable is a different story.

Being remarkable is about being different to a point where that person you are trying to impact takes notice and is so moved that they make an effort to tell someone else.  Seth Godin illustrates and “riffs” on this beautifully in the above mentioned titles but allow me to indulge just a bit further.  There are examples of remarkable things across the real estate and mortgage space and they range from the mundane to the spectacular.  A mortgage broker that discloses YSP on a GFE and explains it (sadly, not as mundane as you would like to believe) is remarkable.  A Kris Berg post is remarkable.  A Zillow Zestimate is remarkable.  The NAR home sale forecasts are remarkable.  (You can see that being remarkable is a powerful force for both good and bad).  Remarkability is what gets noticed, what rises above the rest, it is the short Read more

Unchained melodies: I won’t back down

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.


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The long tail of a big dog: The group blog a year later

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.

Unchained melodies: Southern accents

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.


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The Odysseus Medal: “The most powerful two-way Internet communications tool so far developed”

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

The RE blog arms race

The (un)intentional arms race continues.

RCG, BHB, AG.

Seemingly every week brings another contributor, but to what end?

The writing has inarguably elevated the conversation. Two years ago the “divorced commission” concept was one that made sense, but had not congealed on a national level. Now, to a much greater degree, it has. I believe that there may be an end to Dual Agency in my lifetime, thanks in large part to the conversations held locally and nationally – again, due to these national blogs. The disagreements and debates are of a higher level than found almost anywhere else. The intensity with which writers and commenters argue is frequently fierce and typically civilized.

There is authenticity found here that isn’t found elsewhere. We’re not doing it for the advertising revenue. We’re not doing it for the salaries or the bonuses. We’re not doing it for all the “leads” that come our way. We’re doing it because we believe in what we do and seem to share a collective passion.

As Greg said earlier this year

My immediate goal for BloodhoundBlog is to make it the best-read, most-rewarding real estate weblog in the RE.net. Further out, I want for our contributors to be so well known that they can pursue other opportunities: Public speaking, freelance writing, books, seminars, television shows, etc. I don’t know that we will attain this, necessarily, but the goal itself is definitely attainable: Witness Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit.

For now, I’m interested in growing our talents to see where they can take us. I think we benefit each other more together than we would apart …

At least six Bloodhounds are speaking at Inman Connect in January; if that’s not a form of acceptance, I don’t know what is. Look at the list of speakers – Presidents, CEOs, Directors … bloggers! The numbers of bloggers is phenomenal. Gaining acceptance and influence is a journey, and each day, week, month brings another convert – and another reader/listener/follower. In response to a recent email – the people in Chicago are reaching out; the RE.net is too large and influential to be ignored. Influential and powerful groups all Read more

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

Twenty-five nominees. I confess that it’s faster for me on Sunday if I’m not too picky, but this week saw a surplus of very good posts.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Please don’t spam the voting. I accept that there can be differing moral standards on scamming social media, but only one of those standards applies here. If you email 300 of your closest friends, telling them to vote for you, I will ignore all your votes. We’re interested in what is popular among people who participate here, not how popular you are with your buddies. That doesn’t even seem to me to be a complicated idea, but I’m explicating it nevertheless.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Wade Young -- FSBOs How to convert FSBOs into listings”,
“Todd Carpenter — Interest rates
MBS, 10 year notes, the long bond, and why I couldn’t care less“,
“Benjamin Bach — Follow-up How to add $150,000 in gross commissions to your bottom line“,
“Geno Petro — Racoons Racoons in the Trash“,
“Steve Belt — Trulia Voices From Trulia Voices: Is central Phoenix an African American area of town?“,
“Jonathan Dalton — Trulia Voices What Did My Mom Say About Cows Giving Away Milk?“,
“Jeff Brown — Brian Brady The Difference a Lender Can Make — Real Estate Investment Savvy“,
“Eileen Tefft — Thanksgiving A Thanksgiving Real Estate Story“,
“Dan Melson — Housing mess How to Avoid A Repeat of the Housing Market Mess“,
“Jay Thompson — Business card Experimental Business Card #1“,
“Rhonda Porter — LO compensation Let’s Do Away with Loan Origination Compensation“,
“Gary Elwood — RE blogging Naked Conversations: The Lynchpin to Your Real Estate Marketing Blog“,
“Kris Berg — Lake Arrowhead WTF – The Lake Arrowhead Home Blog“,
“Morgan Brown — Option ARM An Open Eulogy to the Option ARM“,
“Krista Baker — Targeted messages Reader Q&A: How To Write Your Message from Your Prospect’s Perspective“,
“Dan Green — Mortgage rates Pre-Qualify Your Loan Officer By Asking: \”Where Do Mortgage Rates Come From?\”“,
“Dan Green — Bloggers video Oh, The Bloggers You’ll Meet, The People You’ll Read more

Unchained melodies: Extraordinary machine

Teri Lussier asked me if there would be a theme song for BloodhoundBlog Unchained. She later repented of the question, but she was more right than she knew. Of course there will be a theme song for the conference.

We are champions of iconic ideas, words and images and sounds and scents that communicate the same one message on multiple, parallel tracks. The goal is to say one thing that says tens or hundreds of things, all of which turn out to be the same one thing.

This is not the theme song for BloodhoundBlog Unchained, but it is very definitely a theme undergirding my own unchained life. This is Fiona Apple performing live this August with Nickel Creek (O, for a DVD!). The song is Extraordinary machine.


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Quarrying metaphors to name the BloodhoundBlog Conference

We have a name, and we have the birth of a look:

We went through zillions of ideas — Brian and Cathy and I, our contributors, some commenters here, but mainly marketing guru Richard Riccelli. Richard came up with fantastic names — not just words but their graphic expression — but we went off and did things our own way anyway.

All of us were looking for a defining metaphor, an idea that encapsulates everything we are trying to communicate. Richard, to his credit, was much more benign toward our attendees. My position was that we built this place on attitude, and we need for people to understand that that attitude will be on the program — in essence will be the program.

The graphic look falls out from the metaphor, and, if the idea is the right one, everything falls out from the metaphor. Integrity is the state when every disparate thing is all one thing, when every different way of communicating ideas comes together to communicate the same one idea. I don’t know if we’ve achieved that here, but that’s the goal we’re aiming for.

We have an idea for a conference exploring a radically different kind of real estate marketing. You can learn more about it by clicking here.

We have an interest list that you can join so that we can keep you up to date with our plans by email. Append yourself to that list by clicking here.

We have dates: May 18th and 19th, 2008, with some advance fun on the evening of May 17th.

We have an insatiable lust for the most killingly perfect venue, but we don’t know yet if we can get it.

We are having preliminary conversations with the most killingly perfect keynote speaker, the progenitor of many of the ideas we champion.

And we have a name and a look and a big, bold, bad-ass attitude.

And there is much more to come…

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