BloodhoundBlog

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Month: January 2009 (page 4 of 4)

January 2, 2009

Bloodhounds In The Emerald City

by

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

Author website

RE BarCamp Seattle has a time and a date.  From Todd Carpenter:

Rich Jacobson and Brad Andersohn from Active Rain, along with Drew Meyers from Zillow have established the basics. A date and venue. February 13 at Zillow Headquarters.  This happens to follow a Bloodhound Unchained preview event held the day before, also at Zillow headquarters, and also free!

Greg and I are pretty stoked about heading to the Emerald City.   Scott Cowan signed up for Bloodhound Unchained Phoenix ‘O8 but had to decline participation to tend to familial duties.  Since then,  Scott’s been lobbying us to head up to Seattle to out on our “Mini-Unchained Event” for Coffee Bean Town.  Last month, I told him we’d gladly come if he could round up a venue and a group of eager people.  Scott called the folks at Zillow and we arranged to be a prequel to Seattle RE BarCamp.

Our event will be from 1PM until 5:30 PM, on Thursday, February 12, 2008, at the Zillow Headquarters. We’ll be talking about Direct Marketing (online and offline), Social Media Marketing, and Blogging.  David Gibbons and Rich Jacobson agreed to speak, as well.  Marlow Harris raised her hand to attend but I’m hopeful to have her to speak.

Our concluding session will be a debate between Glenn Kelman of Redfin.com and Greg Swann.  They’ll be discussing Glenn’s thoughts about whether size really matters.  Glenn outlines the case for why the little guy might get squashed:

This is a change. Marketing, which used to be the large brokers’s primary advantage, is actually getting cheaper — if Bloodhound has proved anything, it’s that the web has made marketing a question of what you have to say not how much you have to spend.

But the cost of running a real estate search site is rising fast. Large brokers throw money (if not always expertise) at the problem, while small brokers struggle to compete. The small brokers ask MLSs to provide a common set of services, like listing alerts, but the large brokers sometimes block these efforts as being beyond the MLSs’ charter.

Greg Swann thinks the little guy has the advantage:

I want Read more

January 2, 2009

Thinking About This Whole Social Media Thing As a ‘Non Expert’

by

Realtor, Certified EcoBroker

Author website

Ya know, this whole Social Media thing is pretty funny when you think about it.  For a little while now I have just sort of sat back and watched instead of hopping in to create a conversation.  It’s kind of like sitting at the airport and watching how people react to different things.  By no means am I a social media expert, I don’t really think I want to be one ~ I’m just a Real Estate Professional that finds it all really interesting and enjoys meeting new people and reconnecting with old friends.

One of the sites I find the most interesting is Twitter.  It’s amazing how everyday there seems to be another site that helps you ‘use’ it as a tool.  You can go and find out who is following you back-maybe get your feelings hurt when you find out who is not reciprocating or Grade your twitter stream and find out how you rank or if you just pretty much suck at socializing..

All of these tools seem, in my eyes atleast, to make us more vulnerable in so many ways.  It all takes so much time.  Where our blog used to be what we needed the most, folks are saying there is no point in having a blog if you are not on every Social Media site imaginable.

While I love the Social sites, have met some amazing people and truly value all of the Relationships that have formed through Social Media Sites-what is this doing to business?   Are we at some sort of tipping point?

All of this just makes me think about how much time it really takes away from conducting business.   While we may be out there creating opportunities, marketing a listing or other service, prospecting…are all of these ‘tools’ that ‘grade’ us  in a way taking away from what we should really be focusing on?  Are we worrying so much about making others happy in what we say, tweet or update that we are not connecting with people on a real one on one level?

I am totally in agreement that Social Media is a place to be, Read more

January 2, 2009

Kevin Kelly: A New Kind of Mind

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Technium:

Instead of dozens of geniuses trying to program an AI in a university lab, there are billion people training the dim glimmers of intelligence arising between the quadrillion hyperlinks on the web. Long before the computing capacity of a plug-in computer overtakes the supposed computing capacity of a human brain, the web—encompassing all its connected computing chips—will dwarf the brain. In fact it already has.

Pascal kept a room full of “Rainmen” — idiot-savant math geeks — as human calculators. He could have done the problems he threw off to them himself, but they saved his time for the work they could not do.

While we will waste the web’s ai on trivial pursuits and random acts of entertainment, we’ll also use its new kind of intelligence for science. Most importantly, an embedded ai will change how we do science. Really intelligent instruments will speed and alter our measurements; really huge sets of constant real time data will speed and alter our model making; really smart documents will speed and alter our acceptance of when we “know” something. The scientific method is a way of knowing, but it has been based on how humans know. Once we add a new kind of intelligence into this method, it will have to know differently. At that point everything changes.

Read the whole thing.

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January 1, 2009

Upgrade play Part II: Grunion contact form

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

All of the stand-alone BloodhoundRealty.com-hosted blogs (that is, the SplendorQuest.com blogs) are going to WP 2.7 this weekend, with a few changes in our standard line-up of plug-ins. If we host you at BloodhoundBlog.net, your big changes will wait for the release of WordPress Multi-User 2.7.

But the plug-in discussed here, the Grunion contact form, is available to you from any weblog we host. (SQ.com admins may have to Activate it.)

Here’s how you use it: Put the words contact-form between [square brackets]. That’s all. You’ll get a contact form that emails its responses back to you. Very simple, very smart.

So: In the text-input box shown below, tell me how much you like the Grunion contact form:

January 1, 2009

Content is King: How do you crown yours?

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

I was quietly writing on a different post this morning when an email or two from my buddy Cal Carter kicked me in the butt and made me switch gears.

One of the first principles of internet marketing (and marketing in general) is that you follow the eyeballs. Preferably the RELEVANT (targeted) eyeballs of those who are mostly likely to use you product or influence those who will. Wherever they are find them. Target them. Starting with the highest ROI and working down the list until you have all of the business you can handle.

Why do we optimize for Google vs Yahoo or MSN?
More relevant eyeballs to be had at the least cost. Simple as that.

Why do we use facebook?
Brian Brady showed us in Orlando that you can HIGHLY target niche eyeballs using it. And those coming to Unchained in Phoenix will hear MUCH more about that I am sure.

Would it surprise you if I told you that for the last month or two, over 30% of the traffic to EricOnSearch has come directly from Twitter? (true story…).

That’s what I get for listening to Teri (thanks Teri!!) and finally trying to make solid business use of Twitter! 2 new customers, and much more traffic every day. (Hint: What’s your Tweet / Follower ratio?) That’s the key metric in terms of ROI in my world.

(side note: Do you have the authority (read: credibility) to send 100 people to your blog simply by letting them know that you posted? Here is the BEST question…when they visit, are they impressed enough to link to it? Maybe even to syndicate it?)

Pat Kitano and friends are promoting Social Media conscious marketing as “online marketing without blogging”. Of all of the things I think Pat gets right, this is a point I (humbly) disagree with. Blog is NOT a 4 letter word (contrary to popular belief).

LAZY is. (I don’t wanna blog is too often code for I don’t wanna put effort in. Time to face that truth and call it what it is.) Own that.

I totally agree with him that a Read more

January 1, 2009

Happy New… ah, to hell with it.

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Please, allow me to be the very first to wish you a Happy New Year!  What’s that?  Not the first huh; the second?  The tenth?  Well just forget it then.  Truth be told “Happy New Year” is kind of silly isn’t it?  I mean, it’s just an imaginary line drawn in a calendar.  The time of year we just know we’re going to write the wrong date on our checks and when we do we’re still surprised by it: “Look what I did here Mac, I was writing out a check and I wrote ’08 instead of ’09!  Can you believe it!  Golly, I wonder how many more times I’ll make that mistake.”  (Note of explanation for the younger readers out there: we used to carry around these little pads called checkbooks.  They were nicely encased in a faux leather little cover and you would write on one of the sheets in this pad a kind of IOU that your bank would pay out of your account.  It had the benefit, especially right after the holidays, of creating a little time between when you paid something and when you necessarily had to have the actual cash.  You could not use them for online purchases, which was OK because the world was offline at the time.)

Where was I?  Oh yeah: saying Happy New Year on this day is a bit arbitrary.  When you think about it, we begin a new year every single day of our lives.  As a matter of fact, we begin a new life every single day of our lives.  Why don’t we wish each other Happy New Life each day instead of Good Morning?  Wouldn’t that put a much finer point on the power of today?  Oh I know what you’re thinking: “arbitrary or not, this is the time for Resolutions.”  Have you read the statistics on New Year’s resolutions?  Do you know how many are broken within hours of their creation?  (If so, please go ahead and post them in the comments because I didn’t bother to look them up – one of my resolutions is to Read more

January 1, 2009

What Is a Good Scent Trail ?

by

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

Author website

Kelley “Klik Kween” Koehler, instructing from the ARE-TEC blog:

Users like to see words describing their goal on a site, it helps them have more confidence that the thing they’re looking for is indeed there to be found. It’s called a scent trail.

Which means that if I create a page on my site just for people looking at townhomes, then I need to very carefully optimize for those kinds of words, and then I need to restate those words plainly on the page.

Kelley taught us about scent trails at Unchained Orlando.  She explained her “long-tail search engine marketing strategy” and how she makes it easy for online shoppers to find exactly what they want.  Kelley told us to build a landing page with the exact same phrase as the web surfer searched.  

I’m using my BloodhoundBlog.net weblog for these experiments.  Greg Swann suggested that I use it to post mortgage rates.  I built a page on the weblog, titled “Current Mortgage Rates Report”. “Current Mortgage Rates” is a keyword search phrase that a plethora of consumers search.  If I start a PPC campaign, I’ll play in that keyword search phrase.  “Current Mortgage Rates” is the scent trail I’m trying to build.

I want to build it with a long-copy sales letter, with no links other than a “Contact Me Now” link (call to action) throughout the landing page.  I want to have that landing page present the proposition, air out (and hopefully answer) all of the potential objections, and ultimately weed out anybody who doesn’t have interest.  My goal is to have clicks that are consumers who have “flopped” and want a mortgage right now.

BUT…as Kelley states, I have to “title” and theme the page with the keyword search phrase that EXACTLY matches what the consumer wants.  I have to make it as simple as possible for them.

Who’s implementing what Kelley taught us?  How are you doing it?

PS:  I changed the title of this post from “Give them What They Want” To “What Is  A Good Scent Trail ?” to reaffirm what Kelley says.  When you click the links on this post,  you get 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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