There’s always something to howl about.
Not all business cards are created equal. Good ones burn into the brain. Start a relationship. And build your brand. The best ones turn a simple intro and some bare info into lasting commitments and customers for life.
Some cards are better than others as this recent article from Inc. shows. Use it to ignite your marketing imagination. And make your own card an ace.
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P.S. Already have a great business card? Or one you admire? Do share…
It’s funny, I am almost never at a loss for words. I have an opinion on just about any topic and am usually a passionate conversationalist….but put me in the yard with the Big Dogs and I’m feeling a little puppyish (you’ll find that I like to make up words).
To introduce myself I want to tell you about the path that led me here. I found BHB right as things started to really get hairy in the third and fourth quarter of 2007.
I have to admit I had trouble understanding much of what I read here about technology, SEO and Greg’s passionate dissertations that seemed like they were written in Greek (come to think of it, maybe it was Latin).
I could not resist being drawn to this incredible community of creative, innovative and free thinking professionals sharing openly their trials and their triumphs as they searched for answers when we really didn’t know exactly what the questions were, or what they would be. It was a true mastermind of master minds.
When I found out about Bloodhound Unchained in 2008 I spent every cent that I had to buy a plane ticket and book a seedy hotel to be there. I still remember, the cheapest hotel I could find was about a mile and a half from the Heard Museum. I grew up on a farm in Michigan and figured “a mile and a half, no problem – i can do that in my sleep!”…and I don’t recall any mention on the announcement for Unchained about Arizona heat. Even in April it was about 109 degrees!
So I showed up every day, lugging my $300 Fry’s laptop that someone lent me the money for, soaking wet, looking like I swam to the event like that dumb Michael Phelps Subway commercial they keep playing during the football playoff games.
I had already read about, and implemented fully without completely understanding, long tail SEO strategies posted by Greg on the blog. I was almost blinded by the innovation in the conference and found solace at a time when everything seems like an uphill battle….we’re talking Everest Read more
Some semi-informed speculation from the Financial Times:
The name and functions of the new machine are not known, but intense speculation and leaks from component manufacturers and business allies have pointed to a number of expected characteristics.
The consensus is that the tablet will have a large screen, perhaps 10 inches on the diagonal, and run the same operating system as the iPhone and iPod, as opposed to the Mac computers.
That means that it would be able to handle many of the more than 100,000 applications – or apps – that are designed to run on the smaller gadgets. A touchscreen would be a significant feature.
Video game manufacturers expect the device to have strong appeal for their audience.
The iPhone and iPod are already challenging portable products from Sony and other console makers as popular gaming devices.
Among the big unanswered questions are what internet connectivity will come with the tablet and what other forms of entertainment it will provide.
Apple has been in discussions with cable network channels about carrying bundles of video for a monthly fee.
Book and magazine publishers, meanwhile, have been hoping that Apple might enliven their electronic formats.
Time Warner recently showed off a conceptual version of an electronic, full-colour Sports Illustrated magazine that allowed for fast-flipping, zooming and other functions in need of support from new hardware.
Don’t Vook now, but dedicated device makers might want to slash prices on standing inventory — and cancel those reorders. AT&T told us yesterday that they’re going to be in the game, so figure 3/3.5/4G wireless plus Wi-Fi. This is going to rock.
To date, I’ve not paid a lot of attention to RPR™, the REALTORS Property ResourceTM, because so far it’s just a big roll-out hoo-ha PR wingding, which I try to ignore, so the pros and cons and discussions about this being a game changer or not and how are brokers and local MLS going to respond, are online, you can read those yourself.
If you haven’t seen the RPR™ demo yet, go grab a cup of coffee and take a look. At 30 minutes, it’s a nice overview of some of the best features the RPR™ has to offer, and I’m sure there is other stuff for us to discover. Features are nice: Market stats, the ability to keep private and public property notes online, the ability to add layers of information- like a sidewiki- about property, neighborhoods, etc. It’s rich with data, and invites sharing more data and information with other professionals, as well as with our clients. That’s powerful, and empowering if you stop to think about it. All this real estate information that we compile in our heads could be shared with each other online.
But, I’m a simple girl with simple needs. What I want to know right now is this: Does RPR™ offer anything of value for me to share with clients? And the short answer is, yes, it does appear that way. You’ve been doing this for awhile- researching information, compiling that information, presenting that information, and what RPR™ does it make it super simple to research, gather, present, and share property, neighborhood, and market information with our clients, in a very professional, complete, concise manner. In a matter of moments I can compile a professional report to either email or pdf for my clients that includes market stats, neighborhood info, property info, a glossary… Informed clients make the best clients. This is good for consumers.
I know, I know, the path ahead is rife with uncertainty. All that transparency is both liberating and chafing at the same time. Should the NAR mess with this at all? Are there turf wars involved? Why is this information still behind Read more
This is the car we bought for me in July. It’s a used Kia Rondo, a semi-unassuming wannabe minivan that I have denominated with this demanding appellation: Prometheus.
My favorite god, as you might have guessed, from all of human history. Prometheus, you will recall, stole the fire of the gods from Zeus and gave it to the people. An alternate reading of the Greek cites Prometheus as having borne the gift of mind to humanity, a rendering of the tale I like even better. If you are a life-sucking real estate broker or any other functionary of the life-sucking National Association of Realtors, the memes that move me will tell you a lot about my long-term plans for you.
But: Sometimes a minivan is just a minivan. I chose the Rondo because a client of mine rented one when he was in town, and I realized it was the perfect real estate car. I had looked at more expensive so-called “crossover” vehicles, but we have practiced and perfected the art of being cheap bastards. At ten grand out the door, the Rondo seemed like the optimax choice.
And this has it proved to be. I’m in it a lot, and it is a very comfortable roaming office for me. I don’t know how other Realtors deal with all the lengthy phone calls that go into selling real estate, but I take down a whole bunch of them from my car. I can make anywhere from one to five calls between stops, and if I were not doing those calls from behind the wheel, I wouldn’t be doing them at all.
But wait. There’s more. I bought the Rondo because I knew I would be doing more and more real office work from the car. The vehicle has three cigar lighters, and I have 300 watt 110 volt power inverters plugged into two of them. That is to say, two three-prong outlets in the front seat and two more in the back. I could be working on my laptop, an assistant on another and a client on a third, all of us plugged in to Read more
All this week there has been a lot of buzz around the interwebs about Google’s possible acquisition of Yelp.com. The local reviews website has been wildly popular almost everywhere I have been in the country and could stand an image makeover in my humble opinion. One big enhancement could be the business user side to there social networking and business placement. Something Google is doing a good job of with their “Place Pages” for Google search and maps (example: San Francisco Real Estate Services )
With Google Place pages, business owners have the opportunity to have a publish the content of a business page, including video, where as “Yelp for business owners” seems to be geared towards offering buy up features such as advanced profile control and targeted advertising to the tune of $300-$1,000 a month. I’ve never really cared for this option too much as an advertiser or a consumer and think that Google might do a much better job of providing what’s best for the consumer. Yelp’s approach has been, in my experience, at bit heavily controlled.
Yelp for Real Estate has been at best an ongoing resource of placement for you business, à la Citysearch, and some seem to think a resource where Reviews of actual agents should be found.
What else might be under the tree?
Even Bigger news for Real Estate on the Google front broke just last night when Kara Swisher from All Things Digital posted about talks going on regarding the acquisition of Trulia.com.
It is unclear what price Google (GOOG) would pay, but sources estimate that Trulia’s valuation ranges between $150 million and $200 million, although there could be a big premium on that.
Rumors about Google’s interest in the real estate search market–and specifically in Trulia–have been rebounding around Silicon Valley for the last year.
But Google has pulled the trigger on a number of acquisitions of innovative start-ups recently and, sources said, will continue to do so.
There’s also been a lot of chat about Google’s interest in Real Estate in the online Real Estate space which is mostly about us looking inward. Google, in my opinion, is Read more
All right: So: Let’s start in the middle.
First, we have four cell phones among the two of us. We have the two spares in case we need to put a phone in the pocket of a subcontractor. We keep a close eye on the folks who work with us, but we don’t ever want for our people to be without a lifeline.
Even so, the phones we actually use are the iPhones. It seems plausible to me that I may add a Droid and a Pre in 2010, both of them to keep any eye on what else can be done. But the iPhone app universe is exploding like the universe of time, space, mass and energy, and it seems reasonable to me that that the iPhone will be driving cell phone/pocket computer/etc. innovation for the foreseeable future.
Just in recent days, the appworld has added live video streaming and real-time credit card processing, and my thinking is that there are a lot of as yet undisclosed tricks in the iPhone developers’ APIs. In other words, I suspect that Apple has been holding back on the iPhone’s feature set to kill competitive features as they’re aborning, nipping every supposed incipient iPhone-killer in the bud.
I realized last night that I want for my laptop (a MacBook Pro) and my desktop computer (an iMac) to be the same one computer. Does that make sense? I want for those two computers to be cloned and continuously-syncing instances of the same one database of files. And I want for my iPhone to be a moon of that doubled planetary system.
This is singularity thinking: One way that human beings could leap to the next level of our evolution is by moving into computing hardware. The philosophy of all this is brain-breaking: Hardware geeks insist that the human mind must be a finite-state machine, while everyone with an introspective consciousness acts reflexively upon a seemingly undoubted belief in free will.
That’s a problem we’ll have to deal with on the way to the singularity. Meanwhile, a software instance of “you” could be cloned to live on as many hardware devices Read more
Don’t let anyone tell you that I never say anything good about ActiveRain. I saw a passing note yesterday about Ustream.com’s new iPhone app, but I ignored it in the crush of business. But this morning there was a post about the Ustream client in ActiveRain’s daily spamletter, and that led me to download the app.
What does it do?
Live video streaming from any iPhone 3G or 3GS. No kidding. Ustream quality, of course, compounded by the cheesy little lens on the iPhone, all compounded by WiFi or 3G transmission speeds. But still…
Live video streaming from your phone…
Practical applications?
Well, for one thing, Rodney King now has nothing to fear. Abusive cops are a thing of the past, and I would love to see a Ustream/YouTube channel devoted to abusive government functionaries everywhere. Especially in Iran, by the way, and I can’t think of a better antidote to bad behavior everywhere than instantaneous, live, streaming video for all the world to see.
But what about real estate applications?
Don’t throw away that video camera. It’s still Ustream, after all. But when you’re doing a home inspection for an out-of-state buyer, a live video conference with the inspector may be just the ticket. With a second phone, the client and the inspector can talk as you are shooting live video of the repair issues. Is that more sizzle than steak? I say it’s good salesmanship.
Are there other uses you can think of in your day-to-day real estate work? I’m never a big booster of new-for-the-sake-of-being-new. Mission-critical is all that ever matters to me in judging a new tool or idea. But I’m thinking that live or easily-recorded lo-rez video might serve a host of mission-critical functions.
Two (bad) videos as examples, as I learn to play with this new tool:
First, a bad demo recorded to the phone, then uploaded to Ustream.
Second, a live stream saved directly from Ustream.
In both cases, the iPhone shut off on me. To make this software work, you will have to change your auto shut-off setting in the main iPhone preference app. Then you have to remember to switch it back — or Read more
This was in my email this morning, spam from LinkedIn.com:
Joel Burslem is no longer Director of Product Development at Vook
Means what, I don’t know. Deck chairs on the Titanic. There is no huge surging mass of sub-literates demanding even easier-reading access to the half-shouted profundities of Gary Vaynerchuk. Love him or hate him, the guys lives and dies in video. He cannot be caged by a page, no matter how stylish or expensive or electronic that page might be. The book is a dead letter, so how could the Vook not be an even-deader letter? You cannot even pretend to believe otherwise unless you are in the pay of Brad Inman.
But: None of that matters. The Vook is instructive because it teaches us a host of interesting lessons about how to fail in business. Big names. Big funding. Design budget. Attractive product that works. Fancy offices filled with bigfoot corporate types. Even Aeron chairs, I’ll bet. What could go wrong?
Only this: There is no market for the product.
Remember that “find a need and fulfill it” bit from Business 101?
Can you name even one person who has confided to you, “You know, I’d probably read more if books were more like television?”
“I’d sure like to read more books, but the books I want to read are interrupted at intervals by bad actors enacting bad scripts.”
“What I want from books requires a sub-woofer!”
That’s a disaster from day one, and I have been ridiculing the Vook since first I heard about it. But even now, I can see an actual use for this technology: How-To books: How to build a rocking chair in 24 easy steps or The Kama Sutra for Klutzes. Those could sell, because they answer a need that can be served by both text and video. Even then, though, they’d be better as web sites — easier to control, easier to revise, etc.
But let’s go back to the Vook’s original marketing problem and try to solve it in a better way.
Brad Inman is a choke-point dinosaur. His goal was to come up with a “blade” dispenser — a relatively cheap razor Read more
I attended the recent Seattle version 2.0 of RE BarCamp earlier this week. Also attending was fellow BHB contributor Al Lorenz. Held at the Armory on Lake Union, it would be hard to find a location that was more beautiful to hold an event. And yet, I did not come to the event looking for beauty. I came to the event to learn more about techniques that we discuss all the time about marketing and salesmanship. What I discovered was a trade show masquerading as a grass roots event. The main hall of the Armory was lined with various vendor booths fully stocked with the obligatory vendor salespeople. Guys wearing crisp white button-down shirts standing in front of a large tradeshow booth. Bored looking salespeople just hoping that someone with a pulse would stop by their table and inquire about what shiny silver bullet they were selling. To entice agents to stop by and visit, there were all manner of free pens, flashlights, discount coupons, and much, much more…. I don’t know how much business any vendor did. I did pick up one flyer which has already found the way into the recycling after I looked that the product in greater detail online.
The attendance of the event was outstanding. There were over 600 RSVP’s for the event. The Armory easily held the crowd. The challenge of noise was something that everyone struggled with throughout the event. The PA system was difficult to understand simply because the hall was a gymnasium in previous years. The Keynote was by Ian Watt from Vancouver BC. It would have been a very entertaining and enjoyable speech had we been able to see the slides that he brought. The sheet hanging from the balcony was not really the best way to show off all that is glorious about PowerPoint. Ian is a very entertaining person and his presentation was the highlight of the event for me (even with the technical challenges).
The number of real estate professionals that had glazed over looks was disconcerting to me. I overhead a number of people mention that they did not Read more
In response to Greg’s request for innovative ideas from BHB, I thought that would list a few real life examples of how the contributors here have impacted my personal evolution in mortgage marketing and Web 2.0 world domination.
While I believe success is merely a component of innovation, I also agree with the people who need to see proof of results in order to determine a true measure of value.
Since it is too difficult for me to pick one or two innovative or game changing ideas for Greg’s contest, I’ve embedded links to some of the BHB articles that have inspired me over the past few years.
Where did BHB begin for me?
I have been an avid reader of BHB for a couple of years. This place use to scare me (still does), but I eventually gained the confidence in expanding my own online presence as a result of the education that I gained from reading and participating in the conversations on this blog.
As a loan officer back in the boom days, I only cared about the web because one of my Las Vegas real estate agents was feeding me with leads that he generated from his site.
I basically just helped contribute content and pay some of the expenses in our joint marketing venture.
When I did find time to pay attention to what others were saying online, I’d read about bubbleheads and doom pundits, real estate agents blogging about blogging, how the housing slowdown was only going to last for another 6 months, and how Zillow didn’t have accurate estimates.
However, when the market really did shift as Brian predicted, I was faced with the options of either becoming more involved in our online marketing agenda or walking away and getting a new job.
I kind of did a little bit of all three by developing a game plan for the industry that focused on a more sustainable purpose and different priorities.
The early innovation:
One of my first successful web projects was a FSBO campaign that combined single property web sites, highly visible yard signs, Craigslist, Call Capture, and a solid listing presentation.
My pricing Read more
