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
Category: Marketing (page 100 of 191)
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:
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"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
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.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
I’m behind on these, but this is a good time to catch up. This is my column from the Arizona Republic from last week.
Real estate representation has never been about information brokerage
As I write this, the National Association of Realtors is holding its annual convention at the Venetian Hotel and Conference Center in Las Vegas. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the trade group, a cause for celebration.
But the NAR is also embroiled in a years-long anti-trust suit brought by the United States Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. Real estate buyers and sellers are steadily migrating to the world-wide web as their primary communications medium, even as the housing market is suffering through an extended downturn in many parts of the country.
Of the challenges facing the NAR, perhaps the greatest is finding a path to relevance in the internet age. The group’s own statistics demonstrate that a steadily increasing percentage of home buyers and sellers are conducting their search for real estate information and representation on the web.
This internet-focused client base can be significantly more tech-savvy than many Realtors, with agents constantly racing to catch up. At the same time, Realtors’ presumed traditional value proposition, access to MLS listings, has been obviated by on-line MLS systems and nascent Realty.bots — venture-capital-funded internet start-ups devoted to delivering real estate information.
In fact, truly valuable real estate representation has never been about information brokerage — a fact both the Realtors and the Realty.bots seem to be slowly discovering.
The value a Realtor brings to a home seller is not the MLS listing, which is at best an administrative function. A skilled listing agent should advise sellers on pricing, preparation and presentation — the factors that get skillfully-marketed homes sold when no other houses are selling.
The best advice a buyer’s agent can provide to his or her clients comes not in a stack of MLS listings but in specific tactics to deploy during negotiations, inspections and throughout the escrow process.
Whether the NAR can sustain relevance into the twenty-first century remains to be seen. But, even though consumers may find Read more
I know, I know. Greg just wrote that even though there are no rules here at BHB, there is one rule. We’re not selling our products here. However, for this listing I need to make an exception. Look it over carefully and see if you don’t agree.
Remember, this one won’t last. So please call now. Thank you.
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…
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic. Not by coincidence, I’m talking about the curriculum of our forthcoming marketing conference.
Consumers to Realtors: “Don’t push me, I’ll pull you instead — and if you push too hard, I’ll pull away”
There is a quiet revolution going on in the world of real estate marketing — in the world of marketing in general. We are gradually changing from a push-based kind of selling to something that is much more pull-oriented.
What do I mean? Picture me pushing my business card into your hand. Or pushing a flyer at you. Pushing an ad in front of your eyes in the newspaper — or a commercial on television. Since marketing began, it has always been about pushing things, with the effort being led by the pushy salesperson.
As with everything else, the internet is changing this. Your own pursuit of information — not just marketing information but putatively disinterested facts — is becoming more and more pull-oriented.
Interested in wide-screen TVs? You might visit a store or two tomorrow, but tonight you’re going to research everything you can find on the internet. You might start with a Google search, then go to Wikipedia to learn all the arcane details. You might click on a few manufacturers’ or retailers’ pages, but you’re just as likely to read weblogs or discussion forums to find out what real people just like you love and hate about their new televisions.
By the time you show up at a store — or more likely an on-line store — you will know enough to make the right choice without any help.
And here’s the interesting thing: If some pushy salesperson tries to talk you into making the wrong choice — you’ll understand exactly what is going on.
Buying or selling a home is more complicated than shopping on-line, but more and more consumers are going through the same research process before they contact a Realtor.
What does it mean? In the long-run, push-based marketing is a diminishing return. Consumers are going to shop until they find a Realtor they know they can trust — and Read more
Everything’s all right until something goes wrong. You child takes a bad fall and broken bone tears through the flesh and skin. A jet engine on your vacation flight flames out. You took the wrong road in a driving rain and now you’re up to your hubcaps in mud.
Jay Thompson is a man out of Kipling, and I can imagine him in each one of those stories. Calmly setting and splinting a bone, then racing to the hospital. Exuding quiet confidence as he explains why the plane can fly safely on three jets. The man owns a Jeep, and I’d bet a large dollar he knows how to extract your sedan from the mud.
Jay is a man possessed of an unprepossessing competence, a man’s man who just gets in there and gets the job done. I’ve worked with him on half-a-dozen projects, and it has always made me proud to set my shoulder beside his.
And so I am very proud to announce that Jay is joining us today as a contributor to BloodhoundBlog:
Want to find Jay Thompson? Just Google for “Phoenix real estate” — he’s above the fold. Jay is a legend among real estate webloggers, but he’s also an incipient broker, a confirmed desert rat and a committed family man.
Make him feel welcome, if you would. He won’t even have to try to make you feel safe.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
I’ve build an interest-list sign-up form for the BloodhoundBlog Marketing Conference I wrote about this morning.
Here are two things you can do:
- If you’re interested in coming to or teaching at or sponsoring the conference, fill out the form so we can keep you updated by email.
- While you’re there, give this dog a name. Clearly we love the Bloodhound idea. I’m also enamored of the idea of the guerrilla — the little warrior in Spanish. Tell us the overarching metaphor that encapsulates everything we’re talking about.
A boatload of interest so far, including happy noises from folks who want to sponsor and exhibit. And Brian is trying hard to take us all to a Diamondbacks game. There ain’t nothing like a Corona Bomber and a couple of Diamond Dogs. Plus which, we can check out the facilities for the 2010 Conference. 😉
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
We’re adding another Bloodhound to the pound today, and this one is a real treat, Bill Leider of Real Estate Shows:
Bill Leider is the CEO of Real Estate Shows, a hosted virtual-tour solution. His background is in corporate and business management in publicly-traded and privately-owned mid-size companies.
Bill has won The Odysseus Medal and The People’s Choice Award, and Jeff Turner told me why when we met at the NAR Convention: The man simply will not stop trying to perfect his message.
I tell the contributors that there are no rules at BloodhoundBlog, but there actually is one rule: We’re not selling our products here. We throw off a lot of traffic to contributor’s sites, and I think that great thing. I want for people to prosper as a result of their work here. But the work we do here is about improving our minds — yours, ours, everyone’s.
I’m saying this because Bill is in the business of selling virtual tours, and I know he has strong feelings on what does and does not work in real life. If he touches on these subjects — and I think he might with his first post — understand that he is writing from his experience, not trolling for your business.
More announcements to come, believe it or don’t.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
There are five current and former Bloodhounds — so far — on the faculty of Inman’s imminent Blogger’s Connect. That’s about fifteen Bloodhounds too few, but that’s not the only flaw I can think of. I told Joel Burslem when he was in Phoenix that the keynote address should be mine, but of course it won’t be. That would make entirely too much sense. Beyond that, the critical defect of the event is that the curriculum is established by people who aren’t doing this stuff. That’s why it’s a Blogger’s Connect, because it’s all about last year’s war.
Brian Brady had a better idea, a BloodhoundBlog Conference about truly contemporary guerrilla real estate marketing, the tactics real grunts on the ground are using right now in the jungles we find ourselves in. Two days in Phoenix, for a start, with intensive classes on how to make the stuff that really works really work for you right now.
David Gibbons, bless his eager mind, came up with this in a comment last week:
My primary takeaway from NAR was that the social media marketing opportunity in RE is misunderstood and largely ignored. Yet, I’m more convinced than ever that SMM can revolutionize real estate. I actually had a fleeting thought yesterday as I walked the expo floor that it would have been cool to have a booth dedicated to Real Estate Weblogging 101 and that “Bloodhound” might well become a premier REALTOR (or agent?) designation/qualification.
I don’t like it as a designation. Our world moves too fast. To say, “I have arrived,” is to announce that you have volunteered to be left behind. But an annual Bloodhound badge to put on your web site would be a potent testament to your valor as a guerrilla marketer.
We’re thinking Sunday, May 18, and Monday, May 19, 2008. After that, things get nebulous. But: All work and no play makes for a boring Bloodhound, so we’ll do something fun Saturday night, May 17, if you fly in early. Then maybe a networking/cocktail party Sunday night. There will be time for a round of golf on Monday morning. We might Read more
Good grief. I do hope there are additional forms to be filled out. What’s a goofy new policy without goofy new paperwork? That’s how you know you’ve got a job…
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, Redfin.com
My thought is that Michael Wurzer of the FBS blog doesn’t do anything badly. Certainly his weblog is ripe with first-rate content. Michael is this week’s winner of The Odysseus Medal with Data Portability Ain’t Just A Real Estate Problem:
You see, whether it’s in an MLS or a social network, the value is in having the data together or aggregated. Yet, once you aggregate the data, in an MLS system or Facebook or wherever, the immediate question is how you can get it back out to be used elsewhere, by other applications, because choice is desired and the aggregation stifles choice.
This is a non-trivial problem. The ideal answer is in the web itself. As Tim O’Reilly puts it, “Small pieces loosely joined.” Yet the web, in its current form, doesn’t address all the concerns, because yet to be defined are permission or privacy or identity schemes. In other words, who owns the data, who can access it, and what can they do with it when they do access it? The answers to these questions so far have been defined by silos, like MLS systems and social networks, but we’re now seeing that isn’t the long-term answer, rather standards are.
In the real estate space, one part of the solution is to have a broad and deep agreement (standard) on the minimum data necessary to constitute a listing. This is close to reality with the RETS payloads. Equally necessary, however, is a standard for defining who can access the listing and the terms of use for doing so. The first attempts at some terms of use in the real estate space led to the lawsuit against the NAR by the DOJ, which necessarily but unfortunately has caused the conversation to grind to a halt as the status quo is sought to be preserved. But the work on these terms of use needs to continue, either to resolve the litigation or end-run it.
Ideally, the terms of use should be dictated by the owner of the data on an individual basis. Again, “small pieces loosely joined.” Yet the challenge is gaining broad enough Read more
Clearly, this is a star-crossed enterprise. The audio worked fine tonight, so the video started capturing out of phase about 17 minutes in. The video is short, but the accompanying audio podcast contains our full discussion.
Ignore all that. I fixed it. The video shown below is complete, and it is also linked as the first video at BloodhoundBlog.TV. Dan Green’s audio is a little weak, mine is a little strong, Jay Thompson is a little out of focus, but we’ve gotten to a place we’ve never been before, a do-it-yourself multi-camera remote interview segment. Many more to come — with steadily increasing quality.
This is Daniel Rothamel, Dan Green and Jay Thompson discussing their experiences at the NAR Convention, carrying forth from there to a broad discussion about how the benefits of Web 2.0-style marketing might be communicated to the 1.3 million members of the NAR.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Eighteen nominees this week. I had a bunch of posts from Active Rain, and, while I didn’t pick any this week for the short list, I’d like to encourage y’all to continue to enter. There is some good stuff over there that I would not see otherwise.
Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.
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:
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"Michael Wurzer -- Distorted advertising Moving From Distorted Advertising to Useful Information in the MLS”,
“Michael Wurzer — Data portability Data Portability Ain’t Just A Real Estate Problem“,
“Joel Burslem — NAR Reflections on NAR“,
“Robert Ashby — YSP Is Yield Spread Premium Good or Bad for Consumers?“,
“Steve and Kris Berg — Six months The Six Month Solution – Our New Deal“,
“Morgan Brown — Credit mess Top 10 Ways to Navigate the Credit Mess“,
“Brian Brady — Compensation How to Pay Real Estate and Mortgage Professionals For Their Advice“,
“Todd Carpenter — Keyword SEO Key word SEO is at best, a hedged bet.“,
“Doug Quance — Stay home We Can Just Stay Home And Go Broke“,
“Jay Thompson — Short sale The Short Sale From Hell“,
“Justin Smith — Active Rain How I Sold My ActiveRain Profile for $6,750.00“,
“Todd Carpenter — YSP Forget YSP, let’s just do away with Mortgage Brokers“,
“Tim Kane — YSP Let Brokers charge what they want. Do away with YSP.“,
“Kris Berg — Vista A New Operating Environment“,
“Geno Petro — Feng Shui Feng Shui… It’s All Chinese Math To Me“,
“Jeff Kempe — Bossy visionaries Bossy Visionaries, Portland, and how to ram “Green” down the throat of an uncooperative market“,
“Brian Brady — Federal banks HR 3915: Why Federally-Chartered Banks Get The Pass“,
“Jim Duncan — NAR Working from within the NAR”
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Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing