BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Blogging (page 4 of 84)

March 30, 2010

Sequim Real Estate Blogger Dumbs Down America

by

Realtor, Attorney

Author website

I am a serial blogger and an Internet aficionado, but I had to read a book in print (yes they still make them) to learn that I am a member of an evil clan of bloggers who are dumbing down America.  In fact, according to this book, all who blog on this site are guilty of dumbing down American.  More than that, after reading only the Preface to the book, I began to realize that bloggers (that would be me) are responsible for the destruction of America, since America’s great structure of freedom is built upon the foundation of a free press of objective and independent journalists.  Since learning this from on high via the great journalists Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols in their authoritative work, The Death and Life of American Journalism, I commenced a concerted effort to reconcile myself to the sacred truths of journalism.

While prostrated in prayer on my knees encircled by burning candles late one evening, I fell asleep during my meditation and managed to bruise my elbow in the fall.  Fortunately, my elbow didn’t hurt, since I had also burned myself on the open flames of several candles and that hurt worse than the elbow.  The burns from the flames, however, were relatively minor in comparison to the greater discomfort from the hot wax that splashed all over my neck and face.  Since then, I have begun to consider the possibility that McChesney and Nichols may be incorrect.

I went back to their book.  Here are two true professional journalists with resumes longer than my life, writers for major newspapers, professors of the world, and experience that made my head spin, so who am I to question their wisdom and penultimate conclusions.  (Sorry, I just like to use the word “penultimate.”)  Here is how these objective journalists started their book.

In each of the first three paragraphs of the first page of the Preface, they praise President Obama for various things.  One gets the idea that they believe he is not only the savior of the world (little “s”) but the savior of journalism.  Yet was it Read more

February 23, 2010

UVEX missses the Cluetrain

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

“… learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.” — The Cluetrain Manifesto, Chapter 1

Until I resigned yesterday, I was a Web marketing consultant for the US distributors of UVEX products for 7 years.

Last week, after the IOC demanded that we remove anything Lindsey Vonn related from the US web site,  I posted a limerick to UVEXsports.com congratulating Lindsey for her downhill win without using her name while simultaneously exposing the IOC’s shameful tactics.

(This is an organization that goes out of its way to menace local pizza joints that use the word “Olympics” in their names. )

By Friday, my rejoinder had been picked up by SlashDot and from there, landed on BigPicture.com (Barry Ritholtz’s blog), which was picked up by USA Today, and just this morning the NY Post ran a blurb (which noted that the post was now gone without explanation).

This, of course, was exactly the reaction I was hoping for and the commercial justification for the post. Easily half of the comments were a variation on “Good for you. Screw the IOC. I never heard of UVEX before, now I will buy your stuff.”

The IOC, apparently, was not pleased.

The saddest part of the reaction from UVEX’s German management (knuckle under and kill the blog) is that it reinforces to the IOC that its strong-arm tactics work.

At the same time, UVEX  rejected an opportunity to  grow their brand by empowering a human being to speak on their behalf in a human voice, which — as Doc Searls and company pointed out in the Cluetrain over a decade ago —  is a powerful way for brands to leverage the Web.

People reacted to that post because we are sick and tired of big business using lawyers to get their way whether or not what they want is legally, morally, or ethically justified. We all know that it doesn’t matter who is right, what matters is who can pay Read more

February 12, 2010

Google and the artifacts of inefficiency

by

Realtor, Peripatetic Iconoclast

Author website

The interwebs are BUZZING about Google Buzz and how benevolent Google co-opted everyone’s contact lists from their Gmail accounts. I wonder how many million valid email addresses Google captured in the first 30 minutes of Buzz going live? I try to remember that Google is the same benevolent company that assisted the Chinese communists in censoring the internet for the billlions imprisoned in the PRC. More recently Google has gotten a Federal bailout in the form of assistance from the NSA to secure Google’s servers from the same ChiCom hackers they used to happily work with ‘doing no evil’, except for entrenching the folks who invented the involuntary liver donation.

The point is this: be aware of the cost of “free stuff”, no matter how cool. The price may be more than you are willing to pay in terms of your professional reputation. I would suggest that a cost benefit analysis is in order. What is the cost in professional reputation for all your social media efforts? Are your friend lists, contact lists and customer rosters available for any non-#RTB data scraper to start spamming with listing flyers? It is surely something to think about.

I don’t care if Google renders a contextual ad in my gmail account. I do care if my clients start getting real estate spam from competitors. Below is a relevant video.

Related articles
February 11, 2010

I wanted to say, “Let’s hear it for the dogs!” — but before I can, I need to say: “Let’s clean house for the dogs…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a true fact of BloodhoundBlog life: This is a very busy place. It always has been, but this one site — BloodhoundBlog — has been a huge resource hog virtually from day one.

We started off on a shared account at GoDaddy.com, but our traffic and our RSS subscriptions were killing us, so we had to move to a semi-dedicated server at HostGator.com.

Not long after that we had to move again, this time to a dedicated server. We ran all our domains off of that one box, but it was BloodhoundBlog that created all the headaches.

Since we’ve been on the dedicated server, we’ve had to go into both the server software and our WordPress configuration again and again to try to squeeze more performance out of the hardware.

As you will recall, we had a huge crash last summer, losing days of data and hundreds of comments. At that time, we moved to a different dedicated server — having smoked the first box to death.

And guess what? Here we are again. We’ve been redlining this server for months. In the past few weeks, we’ve been running from 30% to 75% of capacity for twenty hours a day. Surely you’ve noticed the sluggishness of service while waiting for posts to display or for comments to post.

So we’re moving yet again. Sometime tonight (I hope), we will be upgrading to much more robust hardware, a much faster server with four times our current hard disk footprint. I wish I could say that this will be our last move, but I’m sure it won’t be.

Unlike the server swap last summer, we’ll be moving to new IP addresses, which will entail an update to all the Domain Name Servers in the world. What that means is that the BloodhoundBlog you see over the next few days may or may not be the new server. If you land here by way of a non-updated DNS server, you will be landing on the old server. When I can, I’ll post a note to the new server to distinguish the new one from the old one.

Practically speaking, a DNS Read more

January 26, 2010

Finding versus Discovering

by

Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

Take me home

Do you still buy magazines and books? Or are you hell bent on reading everything on the internet? Do you love statistics? Has Google Maps got you salivating for bigger and better satellites? Do you love good graphs better than sex? Is a bigger IDX better? Do you want to be completely plugged in, connected, always on line?

Well it turns out that I guess I’m more dog than human sometimes, especially when it comes to what makes a great web presence, and how best to graft a marketing strategy. I’ve spent some time today, you see, smelling other dogs beeeeehinds, and I think I’ve picked up the scent of something y’all might want to bury for a rainy day.

The scent I’ve picked up is either the Finding or the Discovering scent. I think it may be important to think about these two concepts as you put together your marketing, for your Web presence, and maybe more importantly, your belly to belly presence.

Turns out, you see, that people are still buying magazines. Though through the internet we can get all the information on who’s doing what to whom, how they’re doing it, why it shouldn’t be done, and where we can go to get more information on everything we just digested, people are still buying and reading magazines. Wonder why?

Turns out that people simply like to discover things, not just find them. Magazines, you see, lie around waiting for just the right moment to spring into our consciousness. Sure, you want the 4 bedroom, 2 bath home in Elevado Hills, with view, pool and lots of land, but sitting in front of an agent’s IDX (even the good ones) just isn’t the same as opening “San Diego Magazine” and seeing a home just like the one you imagine living in. Or you’ve been watching the statistics from a great blog site or newsletter from Brian or Scott or Mark or Tom on rates and terms and the market in general, and you’re educated and knowledgeable because of this. Read more

November 10, 2009

Reach Out, Connect, Be Careful and Other Worthless Advice

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

There roughly 50 days left this year, depending on when I get this post done.  About 14% of the year left.  And, really, truly, a lot of people take it down a notch after Halloween.  Or three notches.  Because the presumption is that nobody buys in the winter.

Look at the NAR monthly numbers: every year, December and January are only 8% off from August and September in the housing industry.  2008 is an outlier. Probably still time to do one of 2 things: crank 2 transactions out of this year or have an amazing January, or both.  But “shutting it down,” and waiting, and coming into the office in the role of listless mope in adult failure spiral.  If you are going to fail, stay home and don’t infect the office.

But that’s not really the point of this post.  The point comes from a tawlk with Bawld Guy I had last night.  He pointed out that a blog was well intentioned but had vague unactionable advice.  I see it too.  Because being told to “work harder, and be careful” is the sole substance of most of the Social Media, or Investing advice you see these days.   “Connect more, be authentic and transparent, and use common frolicking sense.”  And then wait and you’ll get to join the Twitterati.  Buncha crap.

That’s the rub, nobody gets really specific about what “works” and what doesn’t work.   A lot of this you have to learn on your own.  What works for Brian Brady may not work for Greg Swann.  You have to create your own system.  Try things  and go to what you are good at. The key part of the equation.  From Always Be Testing (my new Scriptures):

  1. It’s OK To Not Know.
  2. It’s Not OK to Assume
  3. What Works For Them Doesn’t (necessarily) work for me.
  4. There’s always room to improve
  5. There are no sacred cows.

This Stuff Works For Me

OK, so we’ve got a little direction.  Try a bunch of stuff.  Real good.  Well, let’s get more specific:  have you tried one new, scary and risky idea this week? Write that down.  Make it a commandment.  I call Read more

October 14, 2009

The passive path to active real estate investment marketing

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was talking with Jeff Brown on the phone yesterday about how much we depend on passive marketing devices — our Phoenix real estate weblog mainly — to generate new business.

We don’t even do all that much. By now there are much better resources to turn to than me for advice on how to do real estate weblogging. But what we do is consequential, because we are constantly adding to our inventory of hard-headed real estate information.

As an example, I wrote a post this morning on the factors that contribute most to the profitability of Phoenix-area rental home investments. That post in turn supports a basic guide I have prepared on rental home investing in suburban Phoenix.

What am I up to? I’m pre-conditioning future clients, for one thing. I’m sharing a lot of hard-headed information, but I’m also letting them know what it’s going to be like to work with me. In addition, I’m splitting the herd, isolating the people I will want to work with and sending the others packing.

The weblog post will have a future in other locations. I can use the HTML to make a very compelling Craigslist ad. And, in the long run, that post will add to the content on our static real estate investments page.

Here’s the best news: The people I hear from who will have pursued all of this information will come to me pre-sold. I won’t have to cover as much of the basics with them on the phone. They will not have picked up the phone to call me until they had already committed to hearing more of what I have to say. They won’t be slam-dunk conversions, necessarily — investors never are — but their business will be mind to get — or to lose — with no significant competition.

I am not diminishing more active prospecting strategies — much the contrary — but this is the kind of thing that I can set up once that will pay me over and over again. And as others here have noted, the climate for rental home investors in Phoenix just keeps getting better Read more

October 9, 2009

Mr. FTC-Man: Don’t Gore My Ox!

by

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Author website

The FTC issued guidelines this week requiring bloggers to disclose whether they have received free products in exchange for endorsements. It was as if the FTC had read my post earlier this week praising the ScanSnap Scanner and my voluntary disclosure that the fine folks at Fujitsu had not plied me with a free gift, and said, “We like the cut of Chetson’s jib! We’ll create mandatory disclosure policies for the whole country!” Thanks FTC!

Al Lorenz (full disclosure: I don’t know Al, and he has never seen fit to send me a single present) had a good comment a few days ago about the double standard. The FTC rule is enough of a regulatory overreach that it’s got virtually everyone up in arms. Jack Shafer, another stingy bast*rd who has failed to send me any gifts of value, has a terrific article in Slate about the whole thing.

But I do want to defend the FTC in one small way: many people, including some of the same now griping about mandatory disclosure rules on poor-me bloggers, have no problem with the regulation of other kinds of pay for play schemes – see, Payola, 1950s. So there’s some logic to the idea that if radio broadcasters can be regulated on content, so can any kind of broadcasters, including blogger-broadcasters.

September 14, 2009

Video: Howling with Brian Brady in Phoenix in the dog days of summer

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Brian and I gave a three-hour presentation last Friday to a small group of top-producers at the Phoenix Association of Realtors. We asked Bloodhound Terry Melcher to help us set it up, and she packed the room with some of the most successful Realtors in Metropolitan Phoenix.

Brian was in town to help me shoot promotional videos for BloodhoundRealty.com, and we made a video of the speaking event as well. Don’t pester Ryan for a BHB.TV channel: It’s our usual garage-band quality production.

We cover a lot of ground in the 2.5 hours of video linked below, but there’s not a lot of cutting-edge stuff in there. If you’re new to our schtick, though, this might be a good short introduction to the BloodhoundBlog Unchained way of thinking.

September 1, 2009

Urf! We’re back up, kinda-sorta, but we lost a week’s worth of data

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

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

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

Everyone: You have my apologies.

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

August 19, 2009

Social Media’s Dirty Secret: It’s Not About You, It’s Not About Marketing

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

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.  Read more

August 12, 2009

Introducing Tony Gallegos: The Mortgage Cicerone as guide dog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joining us today is mortgage expert Tony Gallegos. You’ve known him for years as The Mortgage Cicerone. Tony has just left the cloistered confines of corporate lending and struck out on his own. As a secondary benefit of making this move, he promises to tell BloodhoundBlog readers the unvarnished truth about the world of mortgages.

He’s been a friend of BloodhoundBlog for a long time, and he’s personally acquainted with quite a few of the dogs, so I know y’all will have no trouble making him feel welcome.

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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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