My respect for Eric Blackwell is, well, simply beyond my ability to wordsmith. This guy is not only smart, but he’s fun (in a funny way), creative, and shaped in the mold of Jeff Brown’s cat skinners.
So when Eric penned a post recently on how one might be a Bloodhound if……and then showed us a superb video by a cool guy right up the road from me, I decided it would be appropriate to thrown down a glove in the challenge and see whether I win the prize (get the princess) or am sent to the guillotine.
You be the judge. Joe Post and I have worked together for a long time, and our goal is to create a video site where we are THE go to guys for finding info other than square footage and HOA fees. Enjoy…..cause I might be a Bloodhound if this makes you feel like you’d like to get to know us better.
I’ve never loved video as a means of promoting real estate listings. I much prefer lots and lots of really big, really detailed photographs.
But: The SMS marketing we’re doing with DriveBuy Technologies makes video a necessity. The integration of YouTube into smart-phones is simply too compelling an opportunity to pass up.
Hence, on Thursday I pounded out six videos for three of our listings, all in about three hours total labor. That’s everything, from set up to sequencing to background music to recording voiceovers.
How is that possible? I used iMovie, the more basic movie-making software for the Macintosh. I also have Final Cut, but iMovie makes making basic plug-and-chug videos a breeze. Even better, it integrates directly with YouTube, so I can publish from within the app.
I’m promoting houses, so I’m using photographs, not full-motion video. Assembling these little films is quick and fool-proof.
How’s the quality? You tell me. I think these are more than adequate to the task.
These videos used iMovie’s Photo Album theme, again with no manual intervention.
Without doubt you could do even cooler stuff by intervening with the software, but these results seem pretty sweet to me without my having to do a lot of manual tweaking.
Give agents who are too lazy to adapt an excuse not to?
I think it’s brilliant… Because the number of agents that this vid will resonate with is much larger than the number of those who will shake their heads and call Mr. Ferry a dinosaur.
Is going to be fun to watch this one go ironically viral?
Ok, here’s the first episode for the CRM Channel. It’s a quick peek under the hood at ClientLunchbox.Com that I made tonight using the cool twitter integrated, web based screen capture tool, Screenr.Com.
[Just a quick disclosure, because I’m scared poopless of ever plugging stuff here: Dane Maxwell, the guy who created ClientLunchbox asked me if I would write a blog post about his product months ago. I told him I would, so here it is. At the time, I was thinking HouseYourMom.Com but sorta forgot, so I’m overcompensating by talking about Lunchbox on the big stage. For the record, Dane builds stuff for Realtors, but he didn’t even know what BloodhoundBlog was. Blasphemy, I know. I only mention because of the vendor sensitivity around here…. and… I guess I’d like to add — I’m hoping it’ll be cool to do a lot more (honest, nonpaid) vendor reviews in the coming months because at the risk of appearing to be hawking something, I think this kinda stuff is interesting to a lot of folks? ]
Anyway…here’s the video. It’s been set up with the “secret tag” for the CRM channel in Youtube and should flow onto the CRM page within a few hours…
Using the Tubepress plugin’s shortcode paremeters it’s easy to create a bunch of different video galleries within one wordpress install. I’ve been calling these different pages “galleries” because it sounds fancy, but maybe for BloodhoundBlog.TV we can call them Channels?
In order to have any of your videos show up on a channel, all you’ll need to do is use a “secret tag” when you upload the video to youtube.
I’ve tweaked up a special sidebar so that all channels will flow into the sidebar as links when created using some wordpress list_pages fun. I’ll spare everyone the nitty gritty technical details here and maybe save some of the code snippets for a later post, but I want to mention that this is all being set up within one wordpress install for a reason — Because I think following a similar configuration could be useful to any broker who’d like to create a TV station within his/her blog.
For example, a Mega Monster Multi Contributor Broker Blog could included the following channels, all with videos created and emailed from phones by agents.
Weekly Market Updates
New Listings
Neighborhood Driving Tours
Area Restaurants
Area Parks
Agent Interviews
Scenes From Settlement
You get the idea? Consider how sticky your broker site be if all visitors were confronted with a series of 2-5 minute videos created by your team of agents. How likely would these visitors be to “subscribe to receive all new videos? Combine this with open registration on a solid idx integration, and I think any broker with the stones to encourage (pay for) agent generated video content could quickly increase market share in any market.
But oops… sorry for the digress into how this stuff might actually be applied to make some coin. 🙂
Back To BloodhoundBlog.Tv
Obviously even though the technology behind the thing is the same, we’re going to need a different set of channels for BloodhoundBlog.TV.
So, I’ve gone ahead and created a “CRM” channel which I’m hoping will soon include various under the hood peeks at CRM systems geared toward Realtors. CRM’s a dirty little geeky Read more
Set Your RSS DVR. BloodhoundBlog.TV is almost ready to roll. We’ll be announcing the initial channel lineup in the coming days, but for now we dare you to resist the urge to spend the next 30 minutes or so with eyes glued to the 12 “trailers” below…
