There’s always something to howl about.
By way of Teri Lussier, Brad Coy hooked me up with an invitation to Seesmic, a video-based social-media start-up.
I’m interested for all of the foregoing reasons. I want something that can do to TV news what weblogging has done to print journalism.
This is my first Seesmic disturbance:
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Here is a selection from Brian Brady for the theme for BloodhoundBlog Unchained, Bruce Springsteen doing Born to run.
Opening line in the video:
“Remember, in the end, nobody wins, ‘less everybody wins”
and the last stanza of the song:
The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive
Everybody’s out on the run tonight, but there’s no place left to hide
Together, Wendy, we’ll live with the sadness
I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul
Someday, girl, I don’t know when, we’re gonna get to that place
Where we really want to go, and we’ll walk in the sun
But ’til then, tramps like us, baby, we were born to runI grew up in Jersey so it biases my selection. If you’re 17, driving down Route 9 to Avalon, and Born to Run comes on the FM, you feel completely Unchained.
Got a different take? Assert yourself by email.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Resurrexit! Witness. Reflect. Celebrate!
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
The latest Harris Poll has Firefighters, Scientists & Teachers at the top and Bankers, Actors & Real Estate Agents at the bottom of their “Most Prestigious Occupations” list. This poll has been referenced in many articles on the internet. Here you can see the actual results from Harris.
It is not surprising that teaching is such a coveted job. Just look at the picture and see if you can spot the teacher’s pet?
Here is Teri Lussier’s pick for the theme for BloodhoundBlog Unchained, The Who performing Won’t get fooled again.
Got a different take? Assert yourself by email.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
There have been several interesting conversations going on in my small corner of the blogiverse lately. One was a comment to a Bloodhound post I wrote eons ago. Someone wanted to know if blogging really works for lead generation. Well sure it…Wait. What?
I forget how small the RE.net world is. It’s tiny. I thought everyone knew that blogging works, when in reality only bloggers know that blogging works and probably most people still don’t know what a blog is. It’s hard for me to keep that in mind, and frankly I find myself living in two seperate worlds- the Web 2.0 world and the other world. My conversations and connections in the 2.0 world move quickly, almost instantly. It’s as if, Shazam! You now have made a connection to someone you didn’t know ten minutes ago. Now that person is going to connect you to this person and Shazam! Another person and fifteen minutes have passed.
When was the last Inman Connect? Late July? Much of the discussion was how amazing it was that people could connect quickly through blogging. You all know this is true because you are here on the Bloodhound Blog, in the RE.net world. The truth is that in my nonRE.net world, people don’t know this and I can’t explain it to them, and I’m not sure they care, and that’s the tricky part for me. How do I gracefully move between the two worlds?
Another interesting conversation took place on Daniel Rothamel’s Agent Genius post about Social Media. The comment stream is from bloggers who are wondering if Twitter works in terms of usefulness. It’s so interesting to me because I’m having that same conversation here about blogging and my reaction is the same: Well, of course Twitter can…Wait. What? The fact is that no RE Twitterhead has yet to get a lead from Twitter, but why couldn’t it happen?
If like-minded people move toward each other, and find each other, which I know to be true- after all, we are all busy, we have to pick and choose who we spend time with, how much time do you make for people you don’t like? Wouldn’t it be nice to find like-minded people quickly? To Read more
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Shaun Mc Lane sells real estate in Orlando. No, strike that. Today, Shaun does not sell real estate in Orlando; he will be opening his own real estate brokerage in December.
Tuesday, Shaun experimented with a racy Web 2.0 offering. He posted a video asking if sex sells. The video was a short slide show of bikini-clad women, in various poses. Should you click through, you’ll see that it isn’t “Betty Grable in a cheesecake” pose. It is a more prurient collection of photographs typically seen on MySpace.
Wednesday, Shaun’s broker laughed about it and asked him to remove the post from his website. Shaun called her bluff and was handed a pink slip. Shaun is claiming independent contractor status, because he pays his own marketing costs, and is visibly irritated with the decision. He’ll be “going it alone” which may have been his intention all along.
Similar controversy gained national attention when Wendy Heath posed with her bulldog, in a bikini, on a billboard in Long Beach, CA. Wendy’s strategy:
“I wanted to set myself apart and kind of shock the shore, and, you know, drive people to my website and increase my business,” Heath told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. “There’s many, many real-estate agents in our area, and it’s hard to break through and set yourself apart. … I am absolutely amazed that one billboard could cause so much attention, but I am absolutely elated.”
Competing female REALTORs dissented:
Well, as a fellow realtor, but also someone with the body to do exactly what she did, I think she took the blonde-bimbo way out. If we, as professional real-estate agents, have to result to using our scantily clad bodies to gain clients, maybe we need to look inside ourselves at what we are lacking professionally. There are many tough real-estate markets nationwide, but when we tear down the image we are struggling so hard to display (which is that every real-estate transaction benefits from the experience and knowledge that only a professional realtor can provide), we essentially lose all that we have worked to achieve. Read more
So someone, somewhere in the alphabet soup of Realtor associations is selling my email address — or perhaps just giving it away. Realtors all over Phoenix are watching an idiot’s spam-fest, as one clueless victim after another tries to escape the spam spiral started by an agent who seems not to know that we discover properties for sale in the MLS system — that this is what the MLS system is for.
This by itself is nothing. I get at least a thousand spam emails every day. Moreover, I know that a lot of people in my profession get painfully flustered when they sit down at a computer — so worried they’ll make a mistake that they cause a disaster instead.
But I am sick to death of being “led” by morons.
Witness:
I don’t care that other people don’t thrive at my wavelength. That’s understood. But I do care that they use power I never ceded to them to Read more
The podcast linked below is a piece of a conversation Brian Brady and I had today about styles of real estate weblogging that make sense in the onrushing world of social media marketing.
Brian cites a post of mine from the first of this year, Think globally, blog locally: If you want local leads from your real estate weblog, pursue local interests. I wrote about this because I had mentioned it in the first-ever Phoenix-area weblogging salon that Brian had organized the day before. The ideas discussed in that post formed the skeleton for Real Estate Weblogging 101.
What you’re getting here is just a small taste of the material we will cover at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. I think people have pretty low expectations for trade shows and business conferences. I know I do. What we want for you to understand is that we intend to deliver a rich curriculum, rooted in a deep conceptual framework, that will help you break free of the chains of competitive pressure. But just for now, if you’ll give us 38 minutes of your time, we’ll show you snapshots of a whole new world of marketing.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training, technology
This dawned on me the other day as I was filling out my Inman Connect Speaker Information email that they’ve sent me 4 times now but I hadn’t properly synthesized it until now and while it is an axiom as old as time it is something worth remembering every day: Be remarkable. Why remarkable? Because remarkability wins. Because remarkability is what makes you stand out from the white noise that impinges on success in every competitive ocean out there. Because with out remarkability you are just a part of the landscape; and no one that I’ve yet to meet likes the prospects associated with that business proposition.
It’s said a million different ways, but it all amounts to the same thing: a purple cow, a free prize inside, an unique selling proposition, are all imploring us to do one thing – something remarkable. It’s as simple and as complicated as that all at once. See different and remarkable are interchangeable in language but not in action. Being different is easy, being remarkable is hard. Being different doesn’t win and doesn’t necessarily have any attached benefits to the customer; in fact being different can have adverse affects on them – but being remarkable is a different story.
Being remarkable is about being different to a point where that person you are trying to impact takes notice and is so moved that they make an effort to tell someone else. Seth Godin illustrates and “riffs” on this beautifully in the above mentioned titles but allow me to indulge just a bit further. There are examples of remarkable things across the real estate and mortgage space and they range from the mundane to the spectacular. A mortgage broker that discloses YSP on a GFE and explains it (sadly, not as mundane as you would like to believe) is remarkable. A Kris Berg post is remarkable. A Zillow Zestimate is remarkable. The NAR home sale forecasts are remarkable. (You can see that being remarkable is a powerful force for both good and bad). Remarkability is what gets noticed, what rises above the rest, it is the short Read more
This is my choice for the theme for BloodhoundBlog Unchained. Teri Lussier has a different idea, which I’ll share with you tomorrow. If you think both of us are all wet, say so by email, telling me what you think our theme should be. Be assured that there will be music. It it’s too loud, you’re too old.
This is Tom Petty again, covered by Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam. The song is I won’t back down — in many respects the theme song of my own life. Petty has hundreds of letters from people who turned to this simple little shit-kicker song for strength when they were confronted, by threats or temptations, with the prospect of betraying their own souls. I can’t think of a more important job for art to do than to lend people the courage to be who they are, damn the consequences.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
It’s a year to the day since BloodhoundBlog became a group blog.
Coincidentally, I was talking to Brian Brady today about our long tail, why the accumulated effort of a weblog is a leveraged asset: The most recent content will be the most popular today, but older content will attract greater and lesser attention in perpetuity.
To illustrate the idea, I ran the last year in MyBlogLog. We served nearly 600,000 pages of content in that time. The report is limited to the 2,000 most popular pages, with who knows how many more stretching out in the long tail.
It’s more a curiosity than anything, but, if you like, you an see it by clicking here.
This is not a BloodhoundBlog Unchained theme, either, but it’s another move in that direction. When I met Jeff Turner and Dustin Luther at the NAR Convention, I talked to them about the idea of people who seem to oscillate at the same frequency, like similar isotopes.
I wrote about this once, a long time ago, because I think it’s a fun idea. Ours is a second-generation star, after all, so everyone you know, everything you’ve ever seen or touched is made of nuclear waste from an eons-ago super-nova.
I don’t believe in anything supernatural, and yet I can take note of circumstances where souls seem to harmonize instantly without having to be tuned to each other. I can say the same thing by talking about people coming from the same dirt or just smelling right to each other.
I grew up in Downstate Illinois, in coal country, and I feel a kinship with Teri Lussier — who was raised in Kentucky — that doesn’t require a lot of explanation. And while I’m a fast-talking, hard-charging intellectual entrepreneur — truly a mystery to the folks back home — I never forget the dirt that I came from. This is Southern accents, a Tom Petty tune covered by Johnny Cash. It’s about people who oscillate at a frequency I can always find. It’s about people who smell right to me.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Let’s talk about real estate weblogging, shall we? By an accident of synchronicity, that seems to be what bubbled up to the top this week. The Odysseus Medal goes to Gary Elwood for Naked Conversations: The Lynchpin to Your Real Estate Marketing Blog:
In a nutshell, blogging is one of the best ways to communicate with your market. Better than postcards, email newsletters, flyers, magazine articles, weekly radio shows.
How are blogs better than these communication channels?
There are six key differences between blogging and any other communications channel.
1. Publishable. Anyone can publish a blog.You can do it cheaply and post often. In addition, each posting is instantly available worldwide.
2. Searchable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author, or both. The more you post, the more findable you become.
3. Social. The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build relationships unrestricted by geographic borders.
4. Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a news service. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.
5. Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free “home delivery” of RSS- enabled blogs into your e-mail software. This process is considerably more efficient than the last- generation method of visiting one page of one web site at a time looking for changes.
6. Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.
Of course you can find each of these elements elsewhere. And none is, in itself, all that remarkable.
But in final assembly, they are the benefits of the most powerful two-way Internet communications tool so far developed.
However, bloggers and sophisticated readers of blogs will sniff you out as a fake if you lie, hide, withhold or micromanage information.
Successful blogging is about being off-the-cuff, transparent and off-the-record so to speak. Even if you sin.
SEOBook has a tutorial on SEO for webloggers up today, and this is a rockin’ thing — in context. Real estate weblogging is relationship-based Read more
In his post here earlier today, Jim Duncan said something I’ve thought since the day I stood up, raised my right hand and pledged to uphold the Realtor Code of Ethics:
I have argued before that if you need
89 pages to explain ethics, rather than a simple code of honor, you just might need too much guidance.
Adopted in 1913, and amended 31 times, the NAR’s Code of Ethics is 9 pages of double column single-spaced text. Seventeen Articles. Eighty two “Standards of Practice”. 7,373 words in 266 paragraphs.
It is loaded with gems like this (Standard of Practice 17-4, Subsection 5):
Where a buyer or tenant representative is compensated by the seller or landlord, and not by the listing broker, and the listing broker, as a result, reduces the commission owed by the seller or landlord and, subsequent to such actions, claims to be the procuring cause of sale or lease. In such cases arbitration shall be between the listing broker and the buyer or tenant representative and the amount in dispute is limited to the amount of the reduction of commission to which the listing broker agreed
Huh? Maybe it’s just me, but I had to read that 3 or 4 times just to make sense of it. And I’m not so sure I actually figured it out.
Do we really need 7,373 words to tell us how to act?
The United States Military Academy has an Honor Code. It’s no real stretch of the imagination to equate an “Honor Code” with a “Code of Ethics”.
West Point’s Honor Code consists of one sentence. 12 words.
A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.
It was derived from the Military Academy’s motto – the lengthy and convoluted, “Duty, Honor, Country”.
One of my old schools, THE University of Texas, adopted an honor code long after I left those hallowed halls. It is substantially longer than the Military Academy’s code, coming in at a War and Peace like 41 words:
The core values of The University of Texas at Austin are learning, discovery, freedom, leadership, individual opportunity, and responsibility. Each member of the university is Read more
