BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Marketing (page 92 of 191)

January 8, 2008

Two dozen hounds on the hunt: Galen Ward joins BloodhoundBlog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I started reading Rain City Guide in November of 2005 or so. Our second attempt at a weblog was foundering, floundering, flailing madly and failing badly, and I was out looking for clues. Galen Ward shone like a beacon, his posts incisive and informative, laced throughout with a pungent humor.

I am beyond proud to announce that Galen is joining us today:

Galen Ward is the co-founder of Estately.com, simultaneously the underdog and overachiever of map-based real estate search. He spends his time, reading, writing and coding for real estate from the heart of Seattle.

Galen has a deep understanding of the arcane world of hi-tech real estate start-ups, so he brings us a perspective so-far absent from these pages. We’re honored to have him running with us.

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January 7, 2008

The Odysseus Medal: “What would David Gibbons do?”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This week’s winners of The Odysseus Medal Competition are all vendors, which is a lucky chance, because I’ve been wanting to talk about vendor involvement in our world, the RE.net.

I’ve written this much before: Why do we trust Michael Wurzer of FBS Systems? Because he’s one of us. He lives in the Web 2.0 world, the Cluetrain world. We believe — on faith, in some respects — that he wants to deliver his product in the same way, with the same commitment to integrity and transparency, that he expects other vendors to deliver their products to him. Why do we have this outsized faith in him? Because we know him — because he’s a part of the conversation.

The same goes for Michael Price of mlbroadcast. We know where he stands on a host of issues, and we know he stands with us on the issues that matter to us. If I have any question about Mike or his business, I know I can shoot him an email and he’ll get right back to me, usually with more information than I thought to ask for.

By contrast, Krista Baker of Realty Business Coach is just getting her toe in the water. Her approach so far has been more a matter of broadcasting information than engaging in the meta-debate.

Another marketing coach taking that same broadcast approach is Gary Elwood of the Real Estate Marketing Blog. A few weeks ago I took him to task in a comment, saying, “You don’t link. You’re inaudible to the conversation.” Gary took me to mean that he wasn’t linking as a matter of footnoting his posts, but what I meant, as I’m sure most people reading this understand, is that linking is how we talk to each other, how the larger conversation is carried out.

Now consider that I beat the snot out of a vendor just last week. I wasn’t being mean, I was just calling bullshit by its true name. Krista and Gary are coming along, but there are a bunch of preening would-be experts who presume to lecture us on this praxis we are perfecting, even Read more

January 7, 2008

BloodhoundBlog.TV: Dustin Luther, Jeff Turner and Daniel Rothamel on the Inman Connect Conference and the state of real estate video

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A four-way video podcast of Greg Swann plus three of the biggest names in real estate weblogging discussing this week’s Inman Connect Conference in New York.

Dustin Luther talks about the presentation he and Brian Brady will be doing on The Long Tail in real estate weblogging.

Jeff Turner and Daniel Rothamel (whose site sports a new magazine-style layout) will be doing a presentation on real estate video, and they talk about some of the challenges and opportunities facing would-be video adepts in the real estate world.

My own audio is too loud, a problem we’ve had before and hope to have corrected sometime soon. My apologies for this defect, but this format — group video podcasting — is an effective way of connecting the islands of certainty in the oceans of information. As an example, where today Joel Burslem waxes rhapsodic about the promise of real estate video, a less sanguine (but much more ethereal) Jeff Turner takes you through some of the very high hurdles that must be leapt to produce effective, interesting video.

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January 6, 2008

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

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A total of 15 entries on the short list this week, out of a long list of 55 posts. Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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 $AltEntries = array ( "Brian Brady -- Todd Kaufman The Todd Kaufman Problem Is Your Problem, Too”,
“Dan Green — Mortgage economics High Unemployment Rates Are Good For A Lot Of People“,
“Dan Green — Political Calamity How Real Estate Markets Respond To Political Calamity Around The World“,
“Dustin Luther — Zillow RE Auction I may have found the Tellar in Zillow’s Cellar!“,
“Jay Thompson — Bureaucrats Gone Wild Todd Kaufman, Loudoun County Assessor — Starring in \”Bureaucrats Gone Wild\”“,
“Jay Thompson — Free the MLS! Free the MLS! Another Board Forbids the Use of the Term \”MLS\”“,
“Jay Thompson — Keyword Stuffing Keyword Jammed Posts are Polluting the \”RE.net\”“,
“Jay Thompson — RSS Feeds RSS Feeds – The Full vs. Partial Conundrum“,
“Kris Berg — Alphabet Soup Alphabet Soup“,
“Krista Baker — 5 Steps 5 Steps for Planning any Marketing Campaign“,
“Michael Wurzer — Open Letter Open Letter To Yahoo!, Google, Trulia, and Zillow, Encouraging Data Standards“,
“Mike Price — Armchair Quarterbacking Armchair Quarterbacking Real Estate 2.0“,
“Morgan Brown — 2008 Musings 2008 Musings – It’s going to suck a little less, depending who you are.“,
“Russell Shaw — Todd Kaufman Can Loudoun County Assessor Todd Kaufman tell me what to say and not to say?“,
“Troy W. Garris — Dodd Exits Presidential Race Dodd Exits Presidential Race; Focus Turns to Lenders“,
);
shuffle($AltEntries);

$radioGroup = “”;
$num = count($AltEntries);
for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++) { $pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]); $radioGroup .= "

  • “;
    $radioGroup .= “$pieces[0], “;
    $radioGroup .= “$pieces[1]”;
    }

    echo (“

      $radioGroup

    “)
    ?>

    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.

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    • January 6, 2008

    To “concerned citizen,” who may or may not be a sock-puppet for Loudoun County Tax Assessor Todd Kaufman: The Bill of Rights exists to protect citizens from government, not the other way around

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    This is an extended response to “concerned citizen,” who commented at length on my Loudoun County Tax Assessor Todd Kaufman has a friend post. The nom de poltroon “concerned citizen” may or may not be a sock puppet for Todd Kaufman himself, but it sure reads that way to me.

    Does not Mr. Kaufman have the First Amendment right to complain to the Realtor board? And does not the Realtor board have the duty to investigate whether there are false facts published?

    Don’t be absurd. You’re attempting to reframe the debate to portray Kaufman as the victim. What we have is a case of abuse of office, a government functionary attempting to abrogate the free speech rights of an innocent citizen. The Bill of Rights exists to protect citizens from government.

    The price for Mr. Kaufman exercising his rights, even if misguided, should not be ridicule

    To the contrary, this is the exact and perfect price, firmly established in the history of satire in America.

    and exposure of personal information.

    Straw Man Fallacy. Did not happen, at least not in anything posted on the RE.net.

    It comes across not so much as openness as exposure for further personal attack by others by way of letters to his home, phone calls and the like.

    Straw Man Fallacy again. We have done nothing of the sort. This may in fact be the Well-Poisoning Fallacy.

    It also distracts from the issue, which is, I think, whether any false information was published to consumers.

    The issue is Mr. Kaufman’s ham-handed attempt at censorship. Period. He made a bone-headed mistake, and he is paying the exact and perfect price for doing so. If you are his friend, you could help him find his way back to the light.

    Arguments pro and con in this matter should be couched in terms of truth or falsity of the blogger’s work,

    False. The right to free speech includes the right to be wrong. Your instant quibble will be to resort to libel or slander, but those are civil torts, to be adjudicated in a court of law. Absent proof of damage or malice, people in the United States are free to Read more

    January 5, 2008

    Loudoun County Tax Assessor Todd Kaufman has a friend…

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    …in our world, no less. A brand-new LiveJournal weblog exists to document Loudoun County Tax Assessor Todd Kaufman’s brave battle against the dark forces of First Amendment defenders. You could say that it’s lame and testy and more than just a little bit tetched, but it ain’t easy to compete in this arena. And while it may not be the better part of valor to come into a duel of wits half-cocked, I think Todd and/or his brother-in-law deserve credit for not just whimpering in the corner. It’s a matter of principle, dammit!, even if, like Todd and his anonymous defender, you have the principle ass-backwards.

    Seriously: Whoever truly loves Mr. Kaufman should consider having a little chat with him. It’s not rare for a boneheaded political hack to stuff his foot into his mouth, but a true friend would try to help him find a way to stop chewing.

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    January 5, 2008

    Announcing the Odysseus Medal Long List of nominees widget

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    I’m usually not awake when I post at this hour, but I am today.

    I built a new widget last night that will link to each new Odysseus Medal nominee as it comes in. This is something I’ve been planning to do for a while, but I took care of it last night in response to a goad from Drew Meyers at Zillow.

    You can find it live in the sidebar to the right, but this is what the little toy looks like:

    Each new nominee will be reflected in this list, posting blog-style, most recent nominee on top. I’ll have to moderate the entries for spam and porn, but I’ve built tools to enable me to amend the list by means of clickable links from my email — the power of PHP. This week’s list is semi-sorta randomized, because I didn’t have the standing nominations sorted by their date and time of entry.

    What Drew was interested in is something like TechMeme for the RE.net. I don’t think we’re big enough to justify something like that, or for it to make much sense even if someone were to do it. But the Long List of Odysseus Medal nominees is already a fairly comprehensive list of important posts in real estate weblogging. The Short List is selected by me, but the Long List is inherently democratic: Anyone can nominate anything. This widget will provide an added incentive to nominate good posts.

    The widget itself is not complicated, and I built it to be shared. It’s designed to work flexibly in your sidebar without clashing with your look and feel. In other words, it should take on the characteristics of your Cascading Style Sheet, not mine. If you want to deploy the widget, it’s dread simple. Copy this line of code:

    <?php
include ("https://bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/TheLongList.php");
?>

    and paste it on a line of its own in your “sidebar.php” file for your currently active theme. FTP that into the appropriate folder on your file server and you’re done. (Note: These instructions presume WordPress and an FTP connection. If you know how to deploy this code in another blogging platform, or if you know Read more

    January 4, 2008

    Speaking in tongues: A step-by-step guide to speaking in web sites

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    I never know what other people don’t see. Cathleen didn’t know that BloodhoundBlog and DistinctivePhoenix.com are based on the same WordPress template. Likewise for Real Estate Weblogging 101 and The Phoenix Real Estate Technology Exchange. She could see the differences, but not the similarities, not until I noodged her to look for them. Yesterday, I posted on a program that works out of an array, and it was only after I had hit publish that it occurred to me that I hadn’t defined what an array is. My expectation is that these posts, professions of enthusiasm notwithstanding, are progenitors of a profound megoism, but, if anyone craves a deeper understanding of arrays, email me.

    Meanwhile, take a look at this image:

    This is a highly-stylized rendition of what Easter will look like in a world where pi equals four. No, that’s not right. It’s a map to very common sort of web page layout in the world of Cascading Style Sheets. If we ignore the differences and focus only on the similarities, that stylized page looks like… this page. And your own web pages, very probably, and dozens or hundreds of other pages that you’ve seen. There can be superficial differences — the sidebar can be on the left, or there can be two sidebars, or the two sidebars can straddle the main content area — but what we’re looking at, at bottom, is the essence of a text-oriented web page in the CSS world.

    Why think about this?

    (Oh, man! Don’t get me started! I’m going to think about it, with you or without you, because I want for there to be at least one space in the void where it’s permissible to have a brain…)

    Wait, that’s not why. Here’s why: Because if we think about how pages are engineered, we can engineer them.

    Like this: If we see a page like that on a web site — a page like this one — we know that it’s just one of tens or hundreds or thousands of pages, all of which will look pretty much the same.

    Here’s an important question: When one of those pages Read more

    January 4, 2008

    Heads up, folks: They’re not consumers, they’re his cousins

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    What they’re saying, no matter how true it might ring to you, is scripted. (Why does it ring true to you? Because they’re parroting back to you the things you’ve written and read over the last two years.) They’re not talking to your clients, they’re trying to snare your broker for their consulting practice.

    Video isn’t interesting just because it’s not text. Bad remakes of commercials so bad they were parodied years ago on a bad TV show are not good content for your weblog. It’s a good scam on their part, but why are you promoting their business?

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    January 4, 2008

    The Todd Kaufman Problem Is Your Problem, Too

    by

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

    Author website

    I’ve been saying this ever since I started marketing on social networks:

    PICK UP THE DAMN PHONE, PEOPLE!

    Just look at this mess! Now, egos are involved so we’re now at a point of mutually assured destruction.

    The digital divide. I’m talking about the importance of bridging the digital divide, next week. This debacle is yet another example of how dangerously potent misinterpreted information, transmitted on the internet, can be. The simple act of pressing ten digits can initiate a REAL connection. Try it with a commenter and you’ll be surprised with the result; you’ll make a friend for life.

    Let me tell you my story:

    I started writing here, last Christmas. I was having dinner, right before New Year’s, and checked my e-mail on my new, bad-ass cell phone…incoming Bawld-Mail; it was Jeff Brown. Rather than Twitter, e-mail, or comment on a blog post, I called him. That call was worth about 40 grand.

    I’ve moderated a group on MySpace, for Realtors, since 2005. Before Active Rain came along, it was letting me peek at 4-5 loan opportunities a month. Active Rain? More profitable than the Jeff call. Christine Forgione chuckled about my yellow postcard but she knows who I am.

    Ten digits. Ask Laurie Manny what happened when she put MLS search buttons on her blog. The phone numbers came streaming in…begging for help. No tweets- ten digits. Ask Rhonda Porter what happened when she closed comments on her weekly mortgage rate posts. The calls started coming in.

    Unfair? Opaque to the consumer? Are we trolling to trick people into becoming leads when we insist on taking the conversation off-line? I don’t think so.

    The phone call separates the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise, the serious from the frivolous. When attacked, on my home weblog, I offered a three-way call, to explain my math. The drive-by commenter scurried away, too important to deal with the likes of me. His attitude was that he wanted to win a blog comment war, not educate nor be educated.

    Do you want to be even MORE powerful in your on-line marketing efforts? Try to set up a meeting, like investment guru Read more

    January 3, 2008

    Speaking in tongues for Morgan Brown: A quick and dirty contributors’ blogroll

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    I know I promised to do nothing but “includes,” and we’ll come back to those soon, but here is a real PHP routine, doing an actual real world job. What does it do? For a multi-author weblog like BloodhoundBlog, it produces a blogroll of the contributors’ weblogs or web sites. I’m sending this out to Morgan Brown, because Blown Mortgage is a multi-author blog — and because Morgan has joined ranks with Cheryl Johnson as a geek-blogger.

    Why do this with software when it can be done with the “Links” feature within WordPress? Because a list done this way is self-maintaining. This code is based on the “Frequent Contributors” code on BloodhoundBlog — which would be a lot harder to explain. I added this last week when I upgraded to WordPress 2.3.2.

    Here’s the code. I’ll go back through it and comment line-by-line:

    <h2>Our Contributors' Web Sites</h2><UL>

<?PHP
$contribs = array(1,3,6,8,9);
$count = sizeof($contribs);
shuffle($contribs);
for($i=0;$i<$count;$i++)
	{
	$thisUser = $contribs[$i];
	$curauth = get_userdata($thisUser);
	?>
	<li><a href="<?PHP echo $curauth->user_url; ?>" 
	target="_blank">
	<?php echo $curauth->yim; ?></a></li>
	<?PHP
	}
?></UL>

    Here’s the thing: PHP is a very sloppy language.

    From Ada Lovelace to Kernighan and Richie, programming was always done with very tight, very clean code. Hardware was slow and expensive, so programmers were, relatively speaking, plentiful and cheap. Moore’s Law inverts that paradigm, with the result that any cost in hardware is worth bearing to maximize programmer time. This is why you’re always buying bigger, faster hardware, because programmers are sucking up every bit of it and then some. ANSI C was perhaps the apogee of the orbit for clean code: Strongly typed, strict syntax, unforgiving compilers. But, written right, C could get right down to the bone, running as fast, or almost as fast, as functionally-equivalent machine code.

    PHP is like C in many, many respects — except that, like Javascript before it, it dispenses with type-checking, function prototyping, most syntax-checking, etc. It’s interpreted at run-time, not compiled, so there’s no compiler to catch errors. Instead of maximizing machine resources, PHP maximizes programmer time. It exists to let a skilled programmer bang out tons of original code in no time flat. Many other web programming environments are similarly loose, and, while this grates Read more

    January 3, 2008

    Attention Loudoun County Tax Assessor Todd Kaufman and friends:

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    We see you.

    For inlookers: What’s all the fuss about? And: What happens if you bet wrong in the Brave New World of Web 2.0? Google doom…

    More: Here come the big dogs:

    Any citizen of the United States of America can, and should demand a “redress of grievance” from Government, when a “grievance” is apparent and applicable.  The Western States Constitutionalist Alliance, will keep a close eye on this matter as it unfolds, and I can assure you that we are fully equipped to take appropriate actions when necessary to defend the United States Constitution, ask the City of San Diego, California.

    Under separate cover we are enclosing a copy of the United States Constitution, read Amendment One…carefully.  Ask Mr. Plowman, Commonwealth’s Attorney: the Constitution is the “Law of the Land”. We teach it and defend it!

    Love it!

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    January 2, 2008

    Unchained melodies: Matrimonium unchained…

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    I met her ten years ago tonight. On my best days, I actually deserve her. These first two are the “our songs,” No Myth by Michael Penn:

    And Thunder Road by Bruce Springsteen, covered by Melissa Etheridge and The Boss himself, live and Unplugged:

    This third tune, Something In The Way She Moves by James Taylor, is more about how I feel about her, why I’m so lucky to have her even when I don’t deserve her:

    Ten years… It seems like yesterday. But every day is better because she’s in it. I’d be lost without her…

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    January 2, 2008

    Speaking in tongues just for Cheryl Johnson: Building content-rich custom web sites in PHP

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    The deafening clamor in my mailbox suggests that almost nobody is interested in what I have to say about using PHP to automate weblog and web site content creation. That’s actually a good sign, in the sense that automated web site creation is one of the key tools we use against our competition in the Phoenix real estate market.

    So: I think this might be of interest to Cheryl Johnson only.

    Take a look, Cheryl:

    <!--index.php-->

<?PHP $thepath=$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']; ?>
<?PHP include ("http://$thepath/pageCap.php");?>

<title>A Street</title>

<?PHP include ("http://$thepath/pageTop.php");?>

<?PHP include("links.php"); ?>


<iframe src="main.php" frameborder="0" width="650"
height="650" name="main.php" scrolling="no">
</iframe>

<?PHP include ("http://$thepath/pageBot.php");?>


<!--<p class="h1">A Street</p>-->

    This is the index page for a top level page in a BloodhoundRealty.com slide show. Almost a year ago, I talked about how we do these, and I linked to a demonstration at the time — although all of our single-property web sites and most of our previewing and staging web sites and other photographic demonstrations are based on the Slide Show Marge technology.

    Note that this is entirely modular. The “included” files named pageXxx.php are all standing components at the top level of the file server. They consist simply of the plain vanilla HTML needed to make that part of the page.

    The index.php file and the other two “included” files are generated by the software at run-time and are stored together at that particular level of the hierarchy:

    <!--main.php-->

<p class="h1">A Street</p>

    That’s the top level of the slide show. There can be a photo and descriptive text here, too.

    And these are the subfolders linked below this level in the hierarchy:

    <!--links.php-->

<?PHP $thepath=$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']; ?>

<?PHP include("http://$thepath/pageLink.php"); ?>

<p class="body" style="width: 600px">
<a href="2 A St/index2.php"
	target="main.php">2 A St</a>&nbsp;| 
<a href="4 A St/index2.php"
	target="main.php">4 A St</a>&nbsp;| 
<a href="8 A St/index2.php"
	target="main.php">8 A St</a>&nbsp;| 
<a href="main.php"
	target="main.php">Return&nbsp;to
	Home&nbsp;Page</a>
</p>

    Because we’re built out of an iframe, each one of these subfolders opens up as a slide show within the iframe. Each of those subfolders has its own variations of the files shown here.

    I first wrote about this style of building web pages in August of 2006. At the time, a still-encloaked 4Realz wondered why I didn’t use the WordPress “Pages” technology instead. A WordPress “Page” is an excellent way to build a static page that anyone on Read more

    January 1, 2008

    Goals! by Brian Tracy

    by

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

    Author website

    The concept of lifetime education is embraced by successful people everywhere. While a college education is an invaluable experience, most of what I’ve learned about sales, marketing, investing, and business has come from books, tapes, CDs, seminars and Russ-casts.

    There are a lot of “success marketers” out there. Rather than criticize some of the fugazi, I’ll highlight one of my favorite authors, Brian Tracy. I started reading Brian Tracy’s sales training books some 10-15 years ago. Brian gives direct advice like “come to work an hour before everyone else”. What appears to be a 400-page “no-brainer” guide actually works if you implement his advice.

    As luck would have it, Brian offices about 4 blocks from my home and has his mane coiffed at the same salon as I do. One afternoon, about 3 years ago, we shared neighboring chairs and I had a 20-30 minute conversation with the man. He graciously accepted my compliments and suggested I read his new book, Goals ! and the accompanying Goal Planner workbook. I have read it each December since that day.

    Goals! was published in 2003 and explains the 7 key elements of goal setting and the 12 steps required to set and accomplish goals of any size. Suggestions like become an expert in your field, associate with the right people, and make a written plan of action are not furtive. Mr. Tracy gives actionable ideas for implementation that are written in plain English; no metaphysical overtones nor MBA-speak.

    The Goal Planner is not a workbook of revelation. If you perform the simple exercises, over a 30-day period, the ten bucks spent will be returned within the first 60 days. It’s not a bad way to kick off the new year.

    Brian Tracy International has a whole goals package available but most of us won’t take the time to watch the DVDs and listen to the audio. If you want some simple direction for the new year, grab the book and workbook, spend a weekend reading, and start 2008 with clarity.

    Happy New Year 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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