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Jeff Brown found this promotional film for Small Business Marketing Unleashed and passed it on to Brian Brady, who forwarded it to me. Could someone be pulling a Davison on both BloodhoundBlog Unchained and the Daniel Rothamel video?
My take: Synchronicity. As you might recall, Unleashed was one of the names we considered on the way to picking Unchained:
Here is why I like Unchained:
- The idea of free or even feral dogs
- Unleashed implies has-been-leashed or will-be-leashed-again, but unchained can suggest never-having-been-chained
- Again unlike unleashed, unchained has connotations of human slavery or imprisonment, and hence manumission or liberation
- The word looks and sounds hard and edgy, promoting a hard and edgy graphic representation
These metaphors are not new to me, nor is the metaphor of dancing. I don’t actually care about dancing, but I care a lot about metaphors.
That’s actually kind of interesting as a comprehensive glimpse into our marketing prowess. But Search Engine Guide got to a slightly different place ahead of us.
[This post was redacted to correct factual errors addressed in the comments. –GSS]
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
I’m ecstatic about our latest addition to the UNCHAINED faculty.
Laurie Manny, host of Long Beach Real Estate Home, has signed on to discuss how to build a locally-focused real estate weblog. In one short year, Laurie has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the search engines for the competitive keyword phrase “Long Beach Real Estate“. More effective, however, is her complete domination of long tail searches, “downtown long beach real estate“, “goldengate square“, and “oceangate square“. The latter two search terms are buildings in which Laurie has a major market presence.
Alas, search engine placement is nothing if the site doesn’t create fans. Laurie delivers the goods consistently with interesting content, a plethora of guest authors, and detailed market reports. She enjoys commercial success by employing a sophisticated IDX feed and CRM solution.
Laurie cut her teeth on Activerain.com and has strong following of “students” there who model her. She readily shares her success causing many Active Rainers to wonder why Laurie hasn’t had a more prominent, instructional role in RE.net conferences.
Frankly, we couldn’t let her knowledge escape the national spotlight so we invited her to join the faculty of UNCHAINED.
Ask Laurie a question about how she thrives in the rough and tumble world of online real estate marketing and the answer you’ll get will be complete. It’s like taking a sip from a fire hose as she rattles off actionable ideas about how to drive traffic and attract customers.
Leave your raincoat at home but bring a pen and paper. Laurie Manny is UNCHAINED.
PS- When Laurie writes, Active Rainers listen. The smart money is getting seats in the front row before Laurie’s fans hear about this and crash the server.
Tipped by ProBlogger Darren Rowse, I’m adding the PhotoDropper WordPress plug-in to four of our weblogs this morning.
What is it?
With the Photo Dropper plugin, you can now search millions of Flickr photos and add them to your WordPress posts with just 1 click, all without leaving your WordPress dashboard. Attribution links are automatically added underneath the images to comply with the Creative Commons license rules. It’s the easiest way to add photos to your blog. Period. And best of all – it’s Free!
I’m not a member of the images-incite-interest delegation. I believe mere prose is sufficient to attract attention if it is the right prose, and I’m only interested in a picture if it does that work that could be done by a thousand words.
But: I am a prototype without a production model, and many people writing here take exactly the opposite position, that pictures can make the post. That’s what makes horse races. And to be completely frank, sometimes the images our authors come up with knock me out.
These are the weblogs I’ve upgraded:
- BloodhoundBlog
- BloodhoundRealty.com
- DistinctivePhoenix.com — Cathy likes photos more than I do
- TheBrickRanch.com — we host it, and Teri likes photos, too
If it seems to work for people, I’ll add it everywhere.
A word of caution: A Creative Commons license does not put an image in the public domain. Russell Shaw, for example, loves to make image mash-ups in photo-editing software. People similarly inclined should make sure the photographer permits you to mess with his or her images, rather than simply displaying them.
How do you use it?
1. Once you have the plugin activated, you will see a “Photo Dropper Browse Photos” panel right under your Write Post (or Write Page) editor. Enter keyword(s) for a photo you would like for your post (Example: “sunset”, “black cat”, or “HDR bridge”) and click the Search button.
2. The search will return photos matching your keywords.
3. Once you find a photo you would like to add to your post, click on any of the sizes (”S”mall, “M”edium, “L”arge) to add that photo and attribution link to your post.
Here’s a Heard Museum photo I snagged in a split second:
I like working with experienced buyers, somewhere in their fifties, savvy, know what they want, know they can get it. I like working with investors because investors don’t cry, they’re rational, straightforward, wham bam, that’s it, buy it.
I like working with experienced home buyers and investors, but I love working with first time buyers. There’s something about the mixture of fear and excitement that’s exhilarating J. The dream in their eyes rekindles mine. It’s a special joy of achieving something big, something life changing.
There are many cynics who would read this and snipe about subprime and foreclosures, anything to tarnish what the jaded and hip-ironists see as illusion. May I never become jaded.
Of course there’s a huge difference in the check at closing between a waterfront home on the island and a starter home, but the satisfaction is greater with the starter home, and whatever high-end niche I may lean towards, I don’t think I’ll ever quit working with first time buyers.
There’s a sense of satisfaction in doing a good job and most times work is work and the satisfaction comes from doing it well; however, there’s a spiritual aspect to work that makes it more than a job. “Spiritual” is a loaded word and sounds pretentious in the context of real estate.
To me, spiritual, in the context of work, means that part of experience that transcends the banal actions of accomplishing a job, or the routine, logical actions of work – it’s the combination of physical action, mental application, emotional connection and something greater that includes the participation of others. The “something greater” is the spiritual part.
When buying a home becomes more than buying a home, as it is with many first time buyers, it creates in me a sense of participating in “something greater”. The buyers are planning their life, thinking about the future, the creation of “home”, the pride of ownership, and the excitement is contagious.
They are also open to new knowledge, asking questions, absorbing the experience, connected to the experience, alive with the idea of having something that’s their own and full of creative ideas of how Read more
It starts out as a lovely, sunny, holiday weekend in Southern California. Most of your tenants at the Palm Grove apartments are enjoying a day off, and having a barbecue in the parking lot.
Missy from unit C goes back into her apartment to get a few more cold ones out of the frig, comes out her front door carrying the six pack, somehow trips on the step, falls and fractures her ankle. The other tenants call 911 and Missy is rushed to the hospital.
As a responsible property owner, you will of course immediately report this to your insurance carrier, as soon as you learn of it. Your insurance carrier investigates, and offers Missy a settlement. But Missy’s no fool. She sees the physical injury attorneys that advertise on daytime TV. She rejects the amount offered by your insurance carrier, finds a PI attorney, and files suit.
Being served can ruin your whole day. But as soon as your heart rate returns to normal, you turn the summons over to your insurance carrier. (Note to property owners: While there are lots of ways to cut costs, skimping on liability insurance is never a good place to do it). But even though your insurance carrier provides your defense, you must still participate in the process.
And one of the first events in that process will be answering interrogatories, a formal set of written questions that one party in a lawsuit asks an opposing party. If you are new to litigation, the questions asked in the interrogatories will seem bizarre, obscure and strangely repetitive. You visualise the lawyers pouring over law books and carefully, meticulously crafting each question for maximum effect.
For example: Every set of PI interrogatories I’ve ever seen has contained a question about Sweep Records. Sweep Records? The local supermarket keeps records of how often the parking lot is professionally swept. The owner of a small four-plex probably doesn’t.
Here’s what you need to know: Those questions are canned. Attorneys have been seen in online law forums posting questions about where to obtain interrogatories for their particular case. Attorneys also purchase them on CD from Read more
No less than Seth Godin has now come out and said it’s the only way to go. Even went as far as telling agents to quit otherwise. 🙂
Seriously, take a look at what I’m talking about. Yeah, yeah — I know Greg already beat me to it. So what?
Maybe it’d be better if you read (Reread without scoffing?) something from the archives
I feel so vindicated. 🙂 What cracked me up most? He used high school sports as an example to include in your blog, or ongoing conversation. Go figure. Seems like I’ve read that somewhere before.
The folks doing this best? Our own Eric and Teri. Eric is showing agents how, while Teri is an agent doing it in real time.
Life is good.
Excellent advice, start to finish. He’s not a Realtor, but he’s actually sold things other than jawbone in his life.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training, technology
If you’re a working Realtor, Zillow.com’s Virtual Sold Sign technology is another weapon you can deploy in your guerrilla marketing strategy.
I raved about this when it was announced, but now the feature has finally gone live.
What’s a Virtual Sold Sign? If you were the the listing agent the last time a particular home sold, Zillow will associate that home’s record with your Zillow profile, noting that the homes was “last sold by” — you.
Because Zillow has a database of almost all of the homes in the country, we have the unique opportunity to provide this feature. Traditional listings sites just take a listing down once the transaction is complete, but we have over 4 million visitors coming to Zillow and viewing millions of recently sold homes each month. In fact, over 35 million homes have been viewed on Zillow since we launched. In some cities (Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, among others), over 90% of ALL homes in those cities have been viewed on Zillow. Your sold homes are already getting viewed a lot on Zillow, with (until now) nothing to distinguish them as your sold homes.
The VSS program allows agents and brokers to continue marketing themselves on their sold properties for free, long after the home has actually sold. Past transactions can even be submitted, to get attribution for listings that [sold] long before the Zillow Listings Feed program was even started. It’s like leaving the “sold” sign up in the yard of each and every home you’ve ever sold.
Aside from the obvious benefit to agents and brokerages, the VSS program is beneficial to prospective sellers, and even buyers to find out who the top agents and brokerages are in their neighborhood, or the neighborhood where they want to move.
This is another piece of the marketing strategy that Brian Brady, myself and others have been working on, but which Tom Johnson has given the sizzling sobriquet “ZestiFarming.” Not to get too unhinged on the Unchained promises, but I’ll be teaching two hours of ZestiFarming techniques to enable you to completely dominate a geographic listing farm.
And this is also another demonstration of Read more
This is the year I’ve thrown down the gauntlet to myself. By the end of the year I’m gonna have my feet firmly planted, technologically speaking, in the 21st century. This may require leapfrogging most of the decade of the 1990’s, but I’m approaching this venture fearlessly. (Or at least without noticeably trembling.)
Numero Uno on the A-List is my database. It sucks so much Dyson wants to know my secret. Seriously, we’re organized, but we’re only slightly ahead of Willie Loman.
I’d love someone to tell me how I can get things done seamlessly, without either writing a check with a comma not appearing ’till after the second digit, or buying something at Databases R Us that promises me the moon but delivering something akin to Willie’s Roladex with a prompter.
Here’s what I need. I’m hoping against hope these needs will resonate with others out there, ‘cuz being the Lone Ranger would mean my checkbook is the only plausible remedy. So please, pretty please with a real estate recovery on top, chime in with anything you can add, or recommend. I’m officially lobbying for a database expert to get some face time at Unchained. (I hope that’s subtle enough for Greg and Brian.)
If it helps, here’s what we’re up against. We not only work with folks in San Diego, but in many states. We must deal with staffs or teams in each state, along with our clients and their property portfolios — all of which must be at our grubby little fingertips. (In my case of the Flintstone variety.) We’ll also have moderately large sub-databases in each region we really like. These are composed of investment property owners to which we’d like to market some day, or already have. Each one of these sports around 20-80,000 names/properties. These need to offer the capability to be kept separate or meshed together — at our whim, over and over again.
My new database would be perfect IF
I could break it up into various segments without giving up the ability to blend everything together if it suits my purpose. I could email from it Read more
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
I’m a Dan Kennedy disciple, a card-carrying member of the Glazer-Kennedy Inner Circle. I read his book, The Ultimate Marketing Plan, six years ago, and was hooked. Gene Simmons is one of the keynote speakers at the GKIC Super Conference, this April. I listened to an interview with Gene Simmons today about his message for this April’s Super Conference. Oh, if you’re wondering why I listen when a 70’s rock and roller talks, it’s because he’s a marketer; a damned fine one. Here are some snippets from the interview. I think it may give you a glimpse to why I think the way I do about marketing.
1-You only get the respect you demand.
Gene tells a story about his advice to a fifteen-year old girl. He advised her to get over the idea that people’s perception of you somehow defines you. He continued by saying that you are only as important as you believe you are; how you perceive yourself is eventually how others behold you.
Does your marketing message convey that? I’m not talking about ego. Do you truly believe that you are an expert agent or originator? This isn’t about “act, as if”, it’s about demonstrated expertise. Can you deliver the goods? If your self- perception is less than expert, correct the flaws that hold you back.
2- Originality is overrated.
I don’t think I could agree more. To the doers come the riches, not the thinkers. Anyone can have a great idea; it’s the implementers, the innovators, the action-based people who change the world. Gene Simmons called KISS a pastiche; part rock and roll, part comic book, and part horror show. A great example of pastiche,in theater, is Quentin Tarantino. Neither Gene Simmons nor Quentin Tarantino “created”, they innovated.
Are you constantly planning or constantly doing? I talk to agents and originators, daily, about their customer acquisition systems Sadly, most explanations are long on ideas and short on action.
3- Marketing is the most important thing you can do. If the market is crowded, move the market.
Gene Simmons told the story of the Citrus Growers of America. They crafted a message that the first thing you should do, Read more
Defining disingenuousness: Am I beating a dead horse? Or am I staring down a headless high-horseman?
This is a comment I just posted to Dustin Luther’s weblog. I’m putting it up here, too, so that people can see it (without the typos I found after I posted my 4Realz comment) and so that I can include links without getting shunted into moderation.
To be honest, I hate this kind of ugliness. But one of the reasons I am married to Greg is because I learned the hard way, a long time before I met Greg, that if you are not willing to stand up for what’s right, you are surrendering to evil.
This is my comment:
Dustin,
Disingenuous? From Dictionary.com: “lacking in frankness, candor, or sincerity; falsely or hypocritically ingenuous; insincere.” You believe that anything here is descriptive of me?
And let’s look at your entire concluding paragraph:
“And finally, Cathleen, I’ve been avoiding responding to comments on this thread because there is a small group of people (dare I call it a “pack”) who seem to be searching for any opportunity to defend Greg by criticizing people who were offended by Greg’s comments (seeing as how we’re in the midst of a political season, it seems appropriate to call it “negative campaigning”). I don’t assume you, or anyone else, was offended by Greg’s post, but it certainly seems disingenuous for you to insinuate that those of us who were offended must have an ulterior motive.”
How is that not a personal attack? You are smearing the integrity of people who have disagreed with you as a means of undermining their arguments without addressing them. How is this not an ad hominum attack? Or, do you claim to be righteous in offending Teri, Mike, Brian, Russell, Geno and me (the only six from, excluding Greg, twenty-two BHB contributors who have commented on this thread) because you’re Dustin Luther? And, by the way, isn’t your blanket statement that the BHB contributor’s comments “search for any opportunity to defend Greg by criticizing people…” a straw man argument? I certainly didn’t read the kind of defense you describe into either Teri’s or Geno’s comments. So that leaves Russell, Brian, Mike and me. Have you ever seen any Read more
From Google Blogoscoped, for geekFun: A series of conversational idioms expressed humorously in PHP and C code.
My favorite?
if ( ape.inLineOfSight(it.x, it.y) ) ape.do(it);
What is it?
Teri was talking about it last night: Monkey see, monkey do.
Technorati Tags: blogging, technology
A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
The very first thing she said to me was, “I’m Anastasia.”
She had pronounced the name ‘Anna-stay-juh’ but I took care to be more formal. I nodded gravely and said, “‘Ah-nah-STAH-ziuh’. I’m honored.”
She giggled delightedly. “Why’d you say it that way?”
“To lilt, to laugh, to dance, to dream. To fly, to sigh, to sing, to speak. To embroider the air, to perfect it with the perfect sound: ‘Ah-nah-STAH-ziuh’.”
She giggled again and that was answer enough.
She was four-and-a-half on the day we met. Not awfully, terribly short, but at no risk of scraping her head on anything. She had a round little face that had borrowed too much mischief to be cherubic but was angelic nevertheless. Her hair was brown and it was almost always almost everywhere; it was obviously brushed and tied and obviously instantly disarrayed by her mischievous wanderings. She was a beautiful child, beautiful inside and out, but her eyes were the crowning glory of her nobility. They were bluer than blue, deep and dark and purple, as purple as the crest of a dynasty. They were clearer than any gemstone, and they seemed not to reap the light but to sow it. For all the days I knew her, I could never see enough of those purple gemstone eyes.
“What’re you doing there?” she asked. I was sitting in the shade of a little olive grove reading a book. She was standing on something behind the block wall of the property next door, just her head and shoulders above the wall.
“House-sitting. You know what that means?” She shook her head and her hair flew into a more advanced state of disarray. “It’s like baby-sitting only easier.”
“Why’re you doing it?”
I shrugged. “The official answer is, I’m helping out a friend. The unofficial answer is, TV, refrigerator, hot and cold running everything. Does that make any sense to you?”
It might have or it might not, but we’ll never know, because she changed the subject. “I have a kitten. His name is ‘Sputin.”
I said, “Rasputin. Somebody likes Russian names. Say it: ‘Ra-spyoo-tin’.”
“Why?”
“Just say it. ‘Ra-spyoo-tin’.”
She said, “‘Ra-spyoo-tin’.” Her voice Read more
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Sometimes, you don’t have to look far for expertise; it’s right in your own backyard.
Jeff Brown took me to lunch, yesterday. Our lunches usually last a couple of hours. We crunch numbers for investors, tell stories about the Padres, and try to start conversations, with the server, for his bachelor son. Yesterday was different because I had an agenda. I wanted Jeff Brown to participate as a faculty member of UNCHAINED.
I crafted my sales pitch as a sped down the 805 (remember when I talked about scripting?) . I reviewed all of the reasons it made sense to participate and tried to translate those reasons into tangible benefits for Jeff.
The sales pitch lasted 3 seconds. Jeff accepted because he’s the kind of guy who believes in abundance. He wants you to wildly succeed regardless of what’s in it for him. That philosophy is important because it’s why Jeff is so successful. He makes people wealthy first, then worries about how he gets paid.
I talk about bridging the digital divide; Jeff has perfected it. Jeff Brown can teach you how to turn a comment into a contact and a contact into a client. Jeff is a guerrilla commenter. He find opportunities in comment threads and capitalizes on them like a halfback hits the seven hole.
If you’re coming to UNCHAINED, you should be thinking of questions for Jeff. Here are some of mine:
1- How do you determine that a commenter is a good fit for you?
2- When is the right time to initiate contact?
3- How do you deal with “angry” emails?
I have the luxury of face time and can tell you, it’s worth every minute. Please welcome Professor Bawld Guy to the UNCHAINED faculty.
PS- Jeff is truly an amazing online marketer. His branding efforts are second to none. When my six-year old daughter hears that I’m on the phone with him, she whispers to my wife (he’s the bawld guy, right?) . His branding is so effective that we have to explain to her teachers Read more