Category: Marketing (page 95 of 191)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have a long-time investor client — he happens to be in town right now — who delivers his most effusive praise by exclaiming, “Outstanding!” I think this is a valuable exhortation of a valuable idea: It denotes appropriate enthusiasm for the most profound kind of excellence. When I selected the short list of Odysseus Medal nominations yesterday, I thought they were all very good. But when I looked them over this morning, there was nothing that made me want to shout, “Outstanding!” In consequence, I’m not awarding the Odysseus Medal this week. The posts are good, unassailably good, but nothing spoke to me of the sublime. Next week we’ll do better, I’m sure.

Gary Elwood wrote a post this week called The 3 Commandments of Online Marketing You Must Obey. I thought it was very good, but I think it was eclipsed by Bill Leider’s What Is A Brand?, winner of this week’s Black Pearl Award:

I believe your Brand is a widely held set of beliefs and expectations about what you deliver and how you deliver it. That applies whether you’re an individual or a multi-national organization. Your Brand is strengthened or weakened by every person in your organization and every function performed that directly or indirectly touches anyone. It embraces things like (and this is not an all-inclusive list):

• Name recognition
• Expectations held by the vast majority of people who will or might do business with you about what they can expect from you.
• The experience(s) that people have when they deal with you. Do those experiences exceed, meet or fall below their expectations.
• The consistency of many experiences.
• How you deal with people after the sale: customer service and how you solve problems.
• How and how well you maintain continuity of relationships with customers and potential customers.
• The perceived value received for the price paid.

Read both posts, though. They reinforce each other.

The People’s Choice Award this week goes to Chris McKeever for A [HAR]d Lesson:

We are in a period where listings are flying everywhere. You post a listing in one place, it appears on several others. Some you may not even realize you Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Some news first:

The first of the BloodhoundBlog Unchained lapel pins sold for $20.50. The second auction closes in about 24 hours.

Todd Carpenter is hosting a contest for the funniest RE.net blog post for 2007. I am badly eclipsed in a contest like this — where’s the award for Exotic Quixotism? — but I expect a number of posts from BloodhoundBlog to make the short list. (Nominate yourselves, y’all; nothing ever makes if off my to-list.)

Now then: The Odysseus Medal nominees: A dozen entries on the short list this week, and, again, a lot of Deep Think stuff. 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 $AltEntries = array ( "Kevin Boer -- Redfin The Lessons Of Redfin, Part I: The Marketing Value Of The Obvious”,
“Joel Burslem — Scripps Scripps Cracks Open the Door“,
“Kris Berg — Concurrent closings Newton’s Umpteenth Law – Concurrent Closings“,
“Dan Green — Foreclosures Why Healthy Bodies and Healthy Marriages May Be More Relevant To Slowing Foreclosures Than Interest Rate Adjustments“,
“Brian Boero — Blurred vision Blurred vision“,
“Krista Baker — Emotional needs Do You Address Your Clients’ Emotional Needs?“,
“Kris Berg — RESPA What’s my real estate license worth? More than a hundred bucks.“,
“Rhonda Porter — Closing procedures Major Proposed Changes for Residential Closings in 2008“,
“Gary Elwood — Online marketing The 3 Commandments of Online Marketing You Must Obey“,
“Chris McKeever — Listings portals A [HAR]d Lesson“,
“Bill Leider — What is a brand? What Is A Brand?“,
“Brian Brady — Sub-prime oil We’re All Sub-Prime Borrowers (Who Consume Oil)”
);
shuffle($AltEntries);

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