As I said yesterday, I had already picked this week’s Odysseus Medal winner, so I didn’t include his posts among the Short List of nominees. Instead, I’ll present them here. The Odysseus Medal this week goes to Mike Farmer for his tour de force series of posts on Web 2.0 and the real estate practitioner. Mike had an astounding thirteen posts on the Long List last week, but the eight posts (!) cited here are a cut above everything I saw last week. These are Mike’s essays, in chronological order:
- Real Estate Web 2.0 Community part one
- Real Estate web 2.0 – community/groups
- Real Estate Web 2.0 — I just want to sell real estate
- Real estate Web 2.0 — A Personal Network
- Real Estate Web 2.0 — Google Is Watching
- Real Estate web 2.0 – Network Relationships
- Real estate Web 2.0 — Free Speech
- Real Estate web 2.0 — Brief Conclusion (whew)
If you didn’t read them — or didn’t read them all — making the time will repay your effort. Cathy and I were talking about thanking authors for the gifts they bear — not as fawning fan mail but as a simple expression of gratitude. I’ll thank Mike now for this compendium, and I hope you will take a second to do the same by email or in a comment on his weblog.
The Black Pearl Award this week goes to Set Godin for Advice for real estate agents (quit now!):
The second asset to build is permission. It turns out (according to the NAR) that 91% of all Realtors never contact the buyer or the seller of a home after the closing. Not once. Wow. Someone just spent a million dollars with you and you don’t bother to call or write?
The opportunity during the current pause (and yes, it’s a pause) is to find, one by one, the people who would benefit from hearing from you and then earn the right to talk to them. Earn the right to send them a newsletter or a regular update or a subscription to your blog. NOT to talk about what matters to you, but to give them information (real information, not just data) that matters to them. Visit dailycandy.com to see an example of what people like to hear.
The opportunity is to reinvent the way you interact with citizens, with prospects, with the mildly interested and with your past clients. The opportunity, in other words, is to stop waiting around for the phone to ring and instead figure out how to do what you do best… connect buyers and sellers in a way that makes them both confident.
This week’s People’s Choice Award goes to Jim Cronin for Is Your Website Working Against Your Real Estate Career?:
Before blogging it was virtually impossible for agents to counter the media and their claims.
As the nation braced for the “resettling” of home values, for lack of a better phrase, real estate was caught with its pants down, and unable to curb the media frenzy.
When it comes to the perception of your potential client, you are not just competing with the agent next door; you are also competing with perception set by the local and national media. Right now, there is plenty of money being made in real estate, just not in commission checks and equity. The doom and gloom are great lead-ins to the 11 o’clock news and selling the Sunday paper.
Having your voice in the ears and eyes of your past, present and future clients will continue to have you being seen as their trusted resource for real estate consulting. The news may not always be good, but building an audience that trusts your perspective is the goal.
We just went though yet another episode of the bonfire of the vanities, the occasion for much lamentation — which the lamenters themselves might have had trouble hearing, given that they first put their fingers in their ears and their heads up their in a dark, warm, moist and redolent place. (Speak the truth: I make it look easy, don’t I?) In any case, invariably, the second plot line to these spasms is the claim that I, personally, like it when people behave this way, because it’s somehow good for BloodhoundBlog’s traffic. This is false in three ways:
- I hate it when people go into these seizures of mob frenzy. It doesn’t make any difference to me personally — I mean none — but I am at war philosophically with the idea of self-destruction — the self-willed, progressive and largely irreversible dismantlement of the ego. In my own interior, I am all about Splendor — egoism in action, in one’s real choices and chosen behavior — and I wish everyone else shared this point of view.
- These episodes don’t do anything for our traffic — which is huge and growing rapidly — not a flea on a Bloodhound’s ear.
- Our actual traffic is driven by hard-headed, hands-on, practical posts about how to work better, faster and more profitably. I love the Odysseus Medal competition because it enables us to throw off so much traffic to thoughtful and practical posts originating on other sites. The idea of “our community” is abhorrent to me — “our” anything without explicit mutual consent is just coded language for slavery, imprisonment, coercion, censorship, theft or rape. But I am beyond delighted that we are able deploy the trust we have earned with BloodhoundBlog’s audience to draw attention to the brilliant work other people are doing. In my country, we call that leadership. Your local patois may vary.
If you didn’t check out this week’s nominees for The Odysseus Medal, you should. Nothing but Black Pearls, hard-headed, practical stuff.
We have a brand new tool for promoting The Long List of Odysseus Medal nominees. The Long List will be shown in that little gizmo until the current week’s Short List is announced and then I’ll update it with the new week’s nominees. This is link-love back from BloodhoundBlog, but my reason for building the tool is to promote the best ideas in real estate any way I can. To that end, read this post so that you can learn how to echo The Long List on your own site.
The Long List also has its very own weblog, a link blog of the latest Long List nominees as they are nominated. Feel free to visit, but probably the best way for you to keep abreast of the best in real estate weblogging is to subscribe to The Long List RSS feed.
And as always, if you bespy Athena’s reflection, nominate it.
Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon MST. You can nominate your own work or any post you admire here.
Congratulations to the winners — and to everyone who participated.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Mike Farmer says:
Oh, man, thanks! All that typing DID pay off. I’m freaking honored. Seriously.
February 25, 2008 — 1:29 pm
Greg Swann says:
No, sir. The debt runs all the other way. Excluding all other considerations, it’s an honor to know you.
February 25, 2008 — 1:43 pm
Brian Brady says:
Mike hit a home run with that series. Rising slowly, off the bat, over the big green wall in left, and into the cheap seats.
February 25, 2008 — 1:46 pm