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Category: Marketing (page 51 of 191)

March 3, 2009

Tell Todd Carpenter to stand down. “The Social Media Marketing Institute” is how the RE.net will be sold to the NAR.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As Monsignor Cecil used to say: Oh, my sweet, suffering Jesus… And in echoing that exhortation, I am doing something none of these “experts” can do in return: Giving them a link from a PR5 weblog.

I would eviscerate the writing style on the web site, but it’s too painful to look at. Okay, just a taste, but you asked for it:

The designation course is the first of its type with relevant content-rich material and cutting edge techniques utilized by these Social Media pioneers.

They left out all the relevant content-poor material, along with the stuff that was content-rich but irrelevant, thus to leave more time for utilizing cutting edge techniques.

Evidently commas are not on the cutting edge, but they wouldn’t help, anyway. As we have discussed before, “Neither can his Mind be thought to be in Tune, whose words do jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous.” People who write badly think badly. You permit them to enter your mind at your own risk.

I don’t mind these self-made mediocrities — all of them, not just this crew — chasing people away from here. It works to our benefit: We end up talking only to people who can keep up with us, a boon for everyone. But I can only foresee two futures for a stunt like this:

First, they will milk the punters with a second-rate curriculum. This by itself is hardly rare.

And, second, they will sell this lipstick-slathered pig to the NAR, where it will ossify — which is not to imply that it is, even at present, timely or relevant — or worthwhile. Given some of the people involved — and the recommendation to buy a Kindle! — I would expect the opposite.

But disappointing people don’t disappoint us — when we have our minds properly inverted. Consider this, from the “Affiliate Links” section:

In some cases, we have also negotiated a “commission” to SMMI as well.

Yours is not to ponder oughts, yours is to be sold and bought.

Drop me a line when you get sick of being the entree at the Feast of the Vendorsluts.

March 3, 2009

Putting the charm back into CRM: Introducing Top of Mind Networks’ Mark Green

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joining us today is Mark Green of Top of Mind Networks, a lender-focused CRM system with automated follow-ups.

Mark is a database marketing expert, permission Marketing disciple and overall CRM junkie. He’ll bring a dry wit, along with practical execution strategies that’ll help you evolve beyond sending meatloaf recipe cards to your client database.

Mark lives with his wife Abby and 5-year old daughter in Atlanta, Georgia.

As a matter of disclosure, Mark’s product is used by Brian Brady and possibly other BloodhoundBlog contributors. Like the rest of us, he’s not here to sell product, but he won’t kick you out of bed if you approach him with the right proposition.

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March 2, 2009

Daisy-chained source-tracking with the Universal Contact Form

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

One of the features I built into the Universal Contact Form last night is source tracking. This is Direct Marketing 101 — know where your efforts are producing the best returns.

So to invoke the form with source-tracking, you would just do this:

http://www.domain.com/UniversalContactForm.php?source=CLad2

In this case, we’re assuming that the source of the click into the form is a Craigslist posting.

Same thing, but as a unique form:

http://www.domain.com/UniversalContactForm.php
?action=Relocation&source=CLad2

(I had to break the line at the question mark to make it fit. Here and below, these should be seen as being all one line.)

In reality, though, you’re not going to want to go directly to the form. You’re going to want to hit a landing page that has the form as its call to action. And, in light of that, you’re going to “include” the form in PHP.

Alas, the variables passed from the URL in your Craigslist ad will be lost. You can’t live without the action variable, but you already know what to do about that: Hard code it.

And that’s essentially what you’ll do with the source variable, as well — except you’ll soft code both variables by passing them through.

So you invoke the form like this:

include ("http://www.domain.com/UniversalContactForm.php
?action=$action&source=$source");

The action variable is being received into the PHP variable $action on the way into the landing page, and source is being received into $source. When you do the “include,” you are transferring to another variable space, so you need to pack up the two variables and ship them along as you go.

But having done that, the form has access to them, so it behaves just as you want it to. You can daisy-chain like that as many times as you need to and the form will still receive the variables.

March 1, 2009

Building an even more universal Universal Contact Form

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve talked before about the idea of a software universe — where the set of actions possible in a given software configuration is so large that you can come up with tools and techniques never anticipated by the developers.

We went through this last fall when we started playing with WordPress Multiuser — and I ended up with my “featured listings” database running out of two Scenius scenes.

I’ve been enthralled all week with the idea of web-based forms that can talk to — and drive — my Heap database. I want to revise every form we have to work the Heap way, and I have a zillion ideas for a zillion new forms.

In consequence, today I rewrote my Universal Contact Form for the fourth time.

What I wanted was something I could use in many circumstances, in pursuit of many objectives, without creating one-off, manually-edited versions of the form.

For one thing, I want to play with “Gooder Group”-style ideas in a big way, and that will require a bunch of unique forms. So I built a form that I could make unique by editing parameter files, rather than by editing and re-editing PHP code.

Here are the major changes:

1. Any headlines or text setting up the form are now outside of the form and are your responsibility. The form begins with the anti-spam disclaimer and ends with the “submit” button. Everything else is up to you.

2. The behavior of the Heap-specific initialization file now includes optional menu-selected landing pages. Kudos to Scott Cowan for this wonderful idea.

3. The form behaves differently based on the contents of the Heap-specific initialization file.

4. It is now possible to invoke custom configurations of the form via the calling URL.

5. I added optional source-tracking.

Taken altogether, this change to the Universal Contact Form permits you to create as many unique variations of the form as you might need.

But: That’s all just chatter. Let’s see it in action:

Register here to get your own copy of the newer, even more-universal Universal Contact Form

< ?PHP include("http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/UniversalContactForm.php?action=Register&source=BHB"); ?>

Play with it. Work with it. Let me know if you can break it.

February 28, 2009

The federal government’s housing casino will never play fair as long as there are votes to be bought by cheating

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). Since I wrote this on Tuesday, events have overtaken some details, but it remains that few if any borrowers in the Phoenix area will be able to renegotiate or modify their loans under the Obama plan. Everyone who used to have home equity will still get to bear their losses unassisted, however.

 
The federal government’s housing casino will never play fair as long as there are votes to be bought by cheating

To qualify for a renegotiated mortgage under the plan President Obama announced last week, your new loan can be as much as 105% of your old loan — which sounds to me like curing alcoholism with a good stiff drink.

But the people who are in the worst trouble on their loans bought with 100% financing. Even if there had been no decline in values, they probably could not refinance at 105%, not without bringing cash to cover the closing costs.

But, of course, the typical home in the West Valley is down 50% from its peak value in December of 2005.

Suppose you bought a new home for Christmas 2005, paying $275,000. If you get everything just right, you might be able to sell it today for $135,000. You still owe $275,000, but you can refinance your note at only $141,750 under the Obama plan.

Something’s going to have to give.

But what about the people who were move-up buyers in 2005? They may have put 50% down, which means they’ve lost all their equity, but they probably can’t lay claim on a hardship refinancing. What about the people who paid all-cash? Now we’re talking about people who have actually lost real money — their own money.

Meanwhile, many of the people who end up qualifying for restructuring could easily continue to pay on their notes. We all of us pay on our car loans, even though a car loses half its value when you drive it off the lot.

But we don’t think of our cars, clothing, furniture or appliances as investments. By mucking around in the real estate market, the federal government Read more

February 27, 2009

Do Loan Originators “See” The Opportunity?

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

“If you thought REALTORs were behind the learning curve in Web 2.0, you should see the lenders”

If you’re a loan originator, reading this article, congratulations.  There are some 300,000 working loan originators today and I’m guessing that about 1% of us are actively using social media.  Certainly, the REALTORs are way ahead of us but even they have room for growth.  If the participatory web is the future of commercial communication, this gives loan originators a tremendous opportunity to “stop buying donuts” and start teaching the close to 900,000 real estate agents, who don’t get it, how to succeed.

Remember when you started in the business?  The most successful loan originator told you to “beat the streets and talk to agents”.  Today, beating the streets requires nimble fingers rather than worn-out shoe leather because…

YOU CAN BRING VALUE TO THE AGENTS FROM YOUR COMPUTER

Here’s the idea; teach the unwired agents how to get connected.  They’ll love you for it.  In the past four months, I’ve:

If I market to 100 real estate agents, consistently, I close 100 purchase loans annually.  In California, that’s a pretty good living (even after I pay out my team members).  See where I’m going with this?

TEACH THE UNWIRED AGENTS HOW TO GET CONNECTED– They’ll love you for it.

What’s the matter?  You don’t feel confident enough to instruct the unwired agents about how to use social media?  Forget the folks here; they get it.  Certainly you’ll want to establish and nourish relationships here but the REAL opportunity lies in the other 90%- the unwired agents.  You already know more than they do…BUT…

I’ll tell you how to learn even MORE so that you’re potent; an expert of sorts.

Come to the BloodhoundBlog Unchained University of Online Marketing, in Phoenix, at the end of April:

Who should come to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix? If it’s part of your job Read more

February 25, 2009

Getting Paid to be Motivated

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I love marketing.  I love figuring out a theme and creating the copy and running a campaign.  What I have a lot more difficulty with is prospecting.  The daily grind of converting people who haven’t met me into people who want to elect me mayor.  I read posts by Jeff Brown and Chris Johnson and I get all fired up like when I was a stock broker: 200 calls a day and all the throat lozengers you can swallow.  Then I’ll read something by Greg Swann or Brian Brady and I’m speeding down the 2.0 path toward Social Media Marketing Mecca.  But at the end of the day (actually the beginning of the day for me), I still need to do the basics: phone calls, emails, letters and so on.  I’ve got HEAP running some of that for me and I use Facebook and I’m usually bleeding somewhere from all my efforts to skin cats!  It’s a whole lot to digest on the salary we’re paid… Oh yeah, we’re not paid a salary.  We’ve got to keep all those balls in the air AND wait for the big pay days when an escrow finally does close.  Come on… admit it: sometimes a little daily motivation would help.

Lately, I’ve been monetizing my efforts.  Nothing ground breaking here; just some good old fashioned methods for spicing up the day.  If you’re looking for a little more excitement, give this a try.  (Warning: involves a little bit of math.  If you don’t DO math, or you’re already sufficiently motivated by the repo guy outside the door… skip this post now and save yourself the headache.)

One for the Money
Know your dollar figures.  There are two dollar figures I care about: What is my average Gross Commission Income (GCI) per transaction? and What monthly  income do I expect? (This can be found in the business plan you create and update each year… right?)  I live in San Diego and work with lots of investors, so my expected GCI is $7500 per transaction.  I live in San Diego Read more

February 25, 2009

The three little pigs and the housing rescue plan, a modern fable

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Once upon a time there were three little pigs, and, although they were brothers and looked a lot a like, they could not have been more different.

The first little pig was hard-working and thrifty. He spent very little of his income, saving and investing as much money as he could. He lived with his mother well into adulthood, helping her with her expenses. He finally bought a home of his own when he could afford to pay for it all in cash. As you might expect, the thrifty little pig’s home wasn’t flashy, but it was all his, free and clear.

The second little pig didn’t save very much of his income, but he earned a lot of money as a rising executive, and he had an uncanny luck in the housing market. He bought a condominium on his 18th birthday, then traded up to his first single-family home before he was 21. By the time he was 30, the lucky little pig owned a very stately executive home — and he had been able to make a whopping 50% down-payment.

The third little pig wasn’t very good at working hard, and he had never kept a job long enough to get a raise. He wasn’t at all good at saving money, but he could borrow and spend it better than any little pig anywhere. Like the lucky little pig, he moved away from home early, but he just kept moving — from apartments to friends’ couches to rental homes and then to one girlfriend’s house after another.

If you are a liberal, you may be thinking of the third brother as the unfortunate little pig. If you are a conservative, you will want to call him the lazy little pig — or worse. To keep the peace, let’s just call him the puerile little pig — the little brother who never quite grew up.

The original version of this story was about construction quality as a metaphor for planning ahead, anticipating disasters so they don’t take you by surprise. But the world of real estate has changed a lot since then. The most important Read more

February 24, 2009

The participatory internet is a singularity, not a trend

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Referring back to the Boojum under the bed, this is me in email to a Realtor Association executive:

Not to be flip, but I don’t want any group of any sort to do anything at all with social media. The first totally disintermediated business in the history of business is communication. Social media will not work for groups because there are no groups — only individuals. If you approach Web 2.0 as a new way of doing the same old things, you will miss out on everything that is amazing and wonderful and liberating about our world.

This is not a trend. This is a singularity. The old models no longer apply.

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February 24, 2009

Podcast: Wrapping your mind around dynamic web pages

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is the third and final installment from my conversation Saturday night with Scott Cowan.

In the podcast linked here, Scott and I talk about using PHP to create dynamic web pages.

Why would you want to do this? Mainly you wouldn’t. But working with PHP and a data set, you can manage you ignorance in such a way that you make some pretty smart web pages.

For reference, you might work with the BloodhoundBlog posts headed “Speaking in tongues.”

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February 23, 2009

Taking little teeny steps toward single-property web sites on little teeny mobile web browsers on little teeny mobile phones

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Little Teeny Eyes by Tom Digby

Oh we got a new computer but it’s quite a disappointment
‘Cause it always gave this same insane advice:
“OH YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY EYES FOR READING LITTLE TEENY PRINT
LIKE YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY HANDS FOR MILKING MICE.”

So we re-read the instruction book that came with the computer
But it kept on printing crazy stuff that reads
Like: “YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY EYES FOR READING LITTLE TEENY PRINT
LIKE YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY SHOES FOR CENTIPEDES.”

So we got an expert genius and he rewrote all the programs
But we always got results that looked like these:
“OH YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY EYES FOR READING LITTLE TEENY PRINT
LIKE YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY LICENSE PLATES FOR BEES.”

Then we tested each resistor, every diode and transistor,
But our electronic brain just raves and rants:
“OH YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY EYES FOR READING LITTLE TEENY PRINT
LIKE YOU NEED LITTLE BRANDING IRONS FOR BRANDING ANTS.”

Now we’re looking for a buyer for a crazy mad computer
That will only give out crazy mad advice
Like: “YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY EYES FOR READING LITTLE TEENY PRINT
LIKE YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY HANDS FOR MILKING MICE.”

So I got spammed yesterday for yet another piece of vendorslut crap. TextMyMLS.com will send a SMS text message containing details about your listing to a mobile phone-using prospect who requests information from you. The text message can also include photos if the prospect’s phone supports them.

What do the text messages look like. Look up and you will see a demo screen, as seen on my iPhone. That’s 100% to scale, y’all, and, no, you’re not getting old. These message might look good on other devices, but on the iPhone they’re useless.

There’s more, of course. TextMyMLS.com is a stealth lead-capture system. When the prospect “texts” for more information, the TextMyMLS system pages the Realtor with the prospects phone number — which is transmitted without the prospect’s knowledge or consent. In addition to the text about the home, possibly unreadable, the prospect also gets spammed with information about the Realtor. And then, of course, the poor punter is stuck having to fend off sales calls for the next 90 days — Read more

February 23, 2009

Adding a new hound to the pound: Introducing Ryan Hartman

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Ryan Hartman has been a fun and fascinating voice in our comments for a long time. My error was that I was too stupid to invite him to join us as a contributor. I corrected this defect yesterday, and Ryan joins us today.

His biographical sketch is simply incomparable, so I will quote it in its entirety:

Ryan dropped out of a Philly college and started selling real estate at age 19 in 1998.  He invested pretty much all of the GCI he earned in his early 20’s on beer, mushrooms, and florida. Then a wife and some kids showed up, so he figured out a way to “settle down” by replacing  7 day Realtor work weeks with lead-generation/blogging/tech-type gigs at a few local RE/MAX offices.

The man is wicked smart and a very fun read. We’re lucky to have him among us.

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February 23, 2009

Podcast: Building your own custom engenu skins

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is the second installment from my conversation Saturday night with Scott Cowan.

In the podcast linked below, we discuss the procedure to be followed in order to build your own custom engenu skin.

What’s a “skin”? It’s simply the visual theme for a particular engenu installation. If you work with the default engenu skin, your sites will look like this one. But here is that same site on our weblog devoted to historic and architecturally distinctive Phoenix homes. And here it is on our main Phoenix real estate web site. The same HTML code is used at each site. The difference in the way the pages appear is inherited from the skin.

In the course of the discussion, I reference a BloodhoundBlog post on page geometry. It might be worth you while revisiting that page during the podcast.

If we get very lucky, Cheryl Johnson will listen to this podcast and translate it into more-helpful instructions.

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February 22, 2009

Podcast: Installing engenu on multiple domains

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Linked below is a recording of a conversation Scott Cowan and I had last night about installing engenu on multiple domains.

Cliff’s Notes: Each domain needs its own copies of the engenu folder and the engenuComponents folder, including a separate copy of engenupageDex.bin. The advantage is that each different domain can have its own unique appearance, and each domain can have a separate password, so you can limit how much of your world you share with colleagues.

We also talked last night about how to build an engenu skin from a standing CSS style. I’ll upload that podcast tomorrow.

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February 21, 2009

In the world of internet marketing, Realtors and lenders have to know how to solve their own on-line marketing problems

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathleen encouraged me to take exception to Jeff Brown’s most recent post, and, by the time I was done, I had a whole new post.

Quoting from Jeff:

If you honestly believe your income is higher with you spending time changing your own hi-tech oil, then continue along that path — it’s obviously working for you. On the other hand, if you think putting yourself in front of 50 more serious prospects a year might be more productive for your bottom line, AND that would make you happy, you may want to modify your approach.

This is a false dichotomy.

First, you do not have to change your own oil, so to speak, but if you don’t know how to change your own oil, you are at the mercy of every money-hungry automobile service writer on the planet.

Second, assiduous hi-tech marketing, going forward, is the best path to belly-to-belly appointments. This could our best year ever in volume of sides (not, alas, volume of dollars), and much of it — and all of the multi-home buyers — came from our web presence. There is room to be impressed by lo-tech success stories, but the two details left out are these: Buyers and sellers are increasingly shopping on-line, and the cost-per-conversion of old-school lo-tech marketing is comparatively very high. It’s not how much you make, it’s how much makes it all the way home.

Third, as should be obvious from everything I talk about, the kinds of chores Realtors and lenders need to keep a fat thumb on are those that would be too costly, too onerous or too error-prone if done by vendors.

As an example: Cathy and I made more than 1,400 engenu pages last year. The end result is work product that was done faster and made a much better impression on our clients than trying to communicate by other means. This stuff knocks the socks off clients, which I consider to be our most important sales function in everything we do. But those pages also put 1,400 new, permanent breadcrumbs on the web, so that other clients can find us in the future. As Read more

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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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