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Category: Inmanically Incorrect (page 2 of 2)

July 21, 2008

Bearing the sacred mantle of insolence in the Parliament of Whores: Win one of two free sets of BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs in “The just-exactly-how-dumb-are-you Realtor-scam of the week” contest!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Q: What’s the difference between cows and Realtors?

A: When they get the urge to be milked, cows don’t fly to trade shows at their own expense, wandering from booth to booth with their udders out.

Well. I certainly feel vindicated. The RSSPieces clusterfrolic is further proof of the advice I gave about dealing with vendors a year ago:

1. Avoid hosted software systems
2. Avoid proprietary technology
3. Pursue commodity solutions — and prices

BloodhoundBlog has been vindicated much more than I expected this year. On issue after issue, we’re the only national real estate voice to be heard on the topic:

In March, I noted that much of the RE.net had gotten in bed with Brad Inman. Minions of the NAR — I called them the “nice niche” and Teri Lussier is turning it into a meme — have made their incursions as well. The result is that, at the national level, we are the only consistent voice left for consumers and for the grunts on the ground, the people who actually do real estate — rather than strive to find new ways of milking Realtors and lenders of their income.

We are what we are, and I wouldn’t be anywhere else. I just didn’t expect to have the entire battlefield abandoned to us. Obviously we can more than bear the load. I worried for a while about Vlad’s Legal Defense fund, but we’ve more than covered what we’ve needed so far. For a time I was mildly dismayed that too much of the wired world of real estate seems, per Emerson, “to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression” — but that certainly doesn’t describe anything that happens here.

Real estate is a vendorslut industry, Read more

July 3, 2008

Yankee Doodle Dog: This weekend only, tickets for the BloodhoundBlog Orlando Unchained Social Media Marketing event are only $99

by

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

Author website

“It’s deja-vu all over again,” said Yogi Berra.

Yogi was referring to the multiple World Series rings he collected as a Yankee. For me, deja-vu is the grassroots campaign to kick-off the next BloodhoundBlog Unchained Social Media Marketing Conference, on November 7, 2008, in Orlando, FL.

Like Yogi, I take particular delight in this challenge. Unchained Phoenix was our first World Series victory. Many Unchained graduates tell us it was a four-game sweep.   Our challenge now is to RETAIN the championship.   The road to victory starts tonight.

What might you expect from the BloodhoundBlog Unchained Social Media Marketing Conference in Orlando?   Ask our newly commissioned guerrillas, on the front lines, if  what they learned in Phoenix is working.

Here’s Christine Beaur-Mortezaie’s take:

For the last couple of months I’ve enjoyed being a BloodHoundBlog spectator. Just keeping up with these prolific and interesting writers is a job, rewarding, but quite a job. I still can’t figure out how to carve out time for web 2.o.   I have been way too busy harnessing time for deals  that are generating income now but BHB and all its talented contributors have brought a breath of fresh air to my stale world.

I’ve been in real estate for 5 years and no one, except for Laurie Manny, whom I had the good fortune to meet recently in the Long Beach office, has ever challenged me to think beyond the tip of my nose. So break the mold! What a far-fetched idea! The modus operandi had been “Do as I have ALWAYS done and YOU TOO will be successful” and YOU TOO will be at the same place… chained in 20 years…

I had to attend BHB Unchained in Phoenix. Lucky me! At Unchained was the most phenomenal group of people, with such diverse personalities, talents and experiences. What made the conference so fabulous, beyond the presentations, was the continual sharing and exchange between presenters and attendees, table partners and neighbors, lunch companions and the water cooler cohorts. There was no right or wrong, just opinions – sometimes strong, and opportunities to share and learn. Quite different from what I had Read more

June 27, 2008

The just-exactly-how-dumb-are-you Realtor-spam of the day: Inman’s non-ad ad might be extortion, but at least you’re invited to help them betray their own advertisers — for a fee, of course

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is what you will see if you click on a link to an Inman News article:

First: What ad? There isn’t any ad there, just a ransom note.

Who’s the hostage? That would be you. Inman is deliberately interposing itself between you and what you want, demanding payment to get out of your way. That much is extortion, and it’s extortion of the Chokepoint Charlie variety, since the chokepoint is entirely an artifice manufactured by Inman in order either to extort your funds or to punish you by delay for refusing to be extorted.

Nice behavior, huh?

There’s more. The non-ad ad actually attempts to insinuate that it is a matter of prestige to have been extorted in this fashion. “Club members,” the concierge in the pro shop will inform you, “have first claim on available tee times.” If you cough up the dough demanded by this chokepoint, you’re not a schmoo who got rolled in exchange for faster access to regurgitated press releases. To the contrary. You’re a member, one of the privileged elite. In essence, it’s like a line pass in Las Vegas: You’re not some ordinary sucker. No, sir! You’re a very special sucker!

We’re not done. Consider the advertisers, even though I can’t ever remember seeing an ad in this non-ad ad’s place. The “social contract” between Inman and the advertiser runs like this: “We know that our readers don’t want to be delayed. We know they just want access to whatever it is they clicked through to find. So, in exchange for your money, were going to frustrate and betray them — with your ad being the instrument of that betrayal.”

I cannot imagine an advertiser stupid enough to want to try to engage the people it just pissed off, but this is literally the expectation governing that particular advertising space.

But now we’re back to the non-ad ad. What does it really say? It says that Inman will take money from advertisers to frustrate and betray its own readers. Unless those readers are willing to pay the extortion money, in which case Inman will frustrate and betray its own advertisers, from Read more

June 23, 2008

Inmanically Incorrect: Vendors Are Tools

by

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

Author website

I think a little bit differently about marketing than Greg Swann does.  Not much, but we’re of slightly different mindsets.  I’m not scared to call a name a lead, a voice on the phone a prospect, a loan applicant a borrower, and a funded loan recipient a client.  I KNOW they’re people because I’ve always treated them as people. I don’t need a rip off of a Nike ad to tell me that.   Ain’t nuttin’ original about treating people who inquire about your services with respect;  Sister Brigid taught me that back in 1972.

Greg and I think a bit differently about vendors, also. While Greg envisions a world without vendors, I see them as a necessary evil.  My goal is to maximize the necessary (efficacy) while reducing the evil (money paid).  The problem with the whole vendor/practitioner relationship is that practitioners are looking for the little purple pill; the shortcut.  That’s what the charlatans prey upon.

We talked about this at Unchained. Mary McKnight taught us how the fish can find your bait,  Louis Cammarosano gave us a demonstration about how to cast our nets,  Steve Hundley taught us how to hook them, and Ron Cates taught us how to prepare them so that they’re edible. Moreover, David Gibbons taught us where the schools of fish are swimming so that you’re better prepared for the next big expedition.

All of them…”vendors”. Vendors inasmuch as they insert themselves in between the practitioner and the customer and get paid for it. They get paid for it because they deliver hungry people to your restaurant for less money than it would cost to do yourself.

Should Greg’s utopian prayer of zero acquisition cost be a virtue? Of course.  We should all strive for utopia.  His message, if I’m not mistaken, is that the brave new world is building pressure behind the dammed chokepoints so that the chokepoints have to evaluate their efficacy.  The smart ones are evolving their models to increase their efficacy while the irrelevant proclaim that we practitioners are all idiots.

Wanna know how I know this? I watched them call you “glorified delivery people, gatherers Read more

March 4, 2008

The All-Spin Zone: The big news from the Inman News relaunch is that much of the RE.net is now in bed with Brad Inman

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had mail from a vendor just lately asking me if I might be interested in a forthcoming story. This was my reply:

Just so as not to disappoint, this is the way we work:

Good for consumers, agents or lenders, we eat it up.

Good for the vendor, we ignore it.

I should think this would be obvious, but much of the RE.net has gone into pure PR mode — more high-fives than your kid’s soccer match — so I just wanted to be clear.

As evidence of this phenomenon, witness the fawning coverage for Inman News’ relaunch this weekend. For all the hype, what actually happened was that they moved the furniture, and gave everything a coat of paint — hardly earth-shaking events.

Interestingly, it’s still a for-pay site, but, as far as I can tell, the “news” is now free. Here’s an unencrypted telegram from Secret Agent Slobbering Dog to Brad Inman: Regulating access to the news was the chokepoint. No one should pay for ordinary information — mostly regurgitated vendor press releases, just like Realtor magazine. But no sane person has any reason to pay a hundred-and-fifty bucks a year for an official Inman News sippee cup.

Of course, while everyone else was fawning over that boffo furniture-moving job, we were talking about strangling the last of the chokepoints in the twenty-first century marketplace. Oddly enough, we have the idea that what is important is what is important to you — not to the people we have drinks with — or hope someday to have drinks with.

My take is that people can crave affection or admiration or companionship entirely too much. The same goes for prestige. What makes real weblogging work — and what makes most corporate or commercial or vendor blogging fail — comes down to spin, juice, PR. You either shun it or you embrace it, and there really isn’t any middle ground. It’s a nice thing that Inman News did a little sweeping up. But that ain’t news.

On the other hand, there is ample room in these events to draw inferences. BloodhoundBlog has nothing to gain or lose. I set it Read more

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