There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Technology (page 28 of 60)

Imagineering Unchained Orlando: The All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

Everything about taking BloodhoundBlog Unchained to Orlando is in flux until we find out what we can do about meeting rooms. Even so, I’m swimming in ideas for how I want it to work.

As before, as always, I want for there to be a ton of hard-headed content. We set a new high-water mark for real estate conferences in Phoenix, and I want to bump that mark quite a bit higher.

Here’s how my thoughts run right now, all subject to amendment by cruel reality and subsequent brainstorms:

This is a one-day affair, and so it has to be a concentrated dose of that Unchained attitude. We also have to accommodate the comings and goings of the conventioneers, since it seems less than likely that they will all be available for the same one huge block of time.

What I thought we might do is run the circus from 8 am to 8 pm, with Brian and I doing a four-hour show three times or a three-hour show four times — thus to deliver the most that we can to the greatest number of people. An even better idea: Two different three-hour shows, each delivered twice. Unchained in Phoenix was eleven-plus hours of content, but we could condense that down to a very highly-concentrated six hours of material.

Then, in the next room over we could have a trade show floor with vendors we trust having an opportunity to present their value propositions and give away tee shirts and frisbees.

And then in a third room, this one cut into three or four breakout rooms, we could offer hour-long breakout sessions aimed at every level of geek, from infra to ultra. We need beginner sessions. We need expert sessions. This is a way we can meet a multitude of needs. Twelve hours times three rooms could accommodate up to 36 unique class sessions. I would expect many sessions to be repeated through the day, but 36 class slots presents a lot of teaching opportunities.

In the end, we end up with a sort of All-You-Can-Eat Buffet: Show up when you can, stay for as long as you Read more

Damn-straight department: “Greg Swann I believe has a better understanding of where the real estate industry is going than most people out there right now.”

Real Estate Success Tools CEO Matthew Hardy speaking on BrokerIPTV.com:

Greg Swann I believe has a better understanding of where the real estate industry is going than most people out there right now. Greg has a perspective on understanding that this is a bottom up industry, that the individual real estate agent, their ability, their ability to own their own technology, to own their own systems, to own their own approach to business, is what is changing the entire industry. It is wrapped up in this thing called Web 2.0, but it is all based upon the idea of control and the power for the individual real estate agent to do what they want to do for their business.

You bet. We’ve known Matthew for more than a year, and his approach to business is very much like ours. If your income depends on milking underlings you think you have hypnotized into believing they need you, I cannot wait for the hammer of justice to fall on your head…

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Agent branding is good, but Trulia.com is still deliberately hi-jacking street addresses, frustrating the interests of sellers

I’m still digging out from Unchained, so this is not as timely as it might have been.

First, I think we might have gotten distracted by whatever cozy arrangement does or does not exist between Trulia.com and Number 1 Agent.

Second, I think Trulia’s recent announcement that agents can “brand” their own listings is a move in the right direction. Trulia has always seemed to me to play favorites with the White Shoe set, and giving the grunts on the ground a chance to compete with their bosses for their own business is… damned near decent.

But: I am not prepared to yield on the main issue. When Trulia.com puts a “nofollow” on the link back to my single-property web site for my listing, it is depriving my sellers of the natural dominance they should have in Google over their own street address.

The issue is one of canonicity. If Truila were giving my URL an ordinary HTML anchor link, then Google would know that my site is canonical and Trulia’s is derivative — which is undeniably the truth.

By putting the “nofollow” tag on what is in fact a JavaScript link, Trulia is falsely implying that it is the canonical resource for information about that property.

That much is a lie, but it gets worse: If someone Googles the street address for my property and finds my single-property web site, my sellers — through me — have an uncontested opportunity to sell their home to that potential buyer.

If instead that potential buyer finds Trulia’s link to that home, the buyer is thrust into a vast supermarket of real estate, and the sellers are deprived of their opportunity to sell their home and their home only.

This is not a dual agency issue here, this is simply a matter of giving sellers the best advantage they can possibly have from searches on their own street address.

Because Google would regard a normal link as leading to a more canonical resource — regardless of differences in Page Rank — by putting a “nofollow” tag on its links to agent- and broker-supplied real estate listings, Trulia.com is deliberately hi-jacking the street Read more

What Hi-Tech Tool Helps Agents/Lenders The Most — Bottom Line Most

Though I think I know the answer to this query, the answers might just surprise many of us. Also, it makes sense the answer for me might be third best for you, right? Hi-tech tools, not toys, are what we’re lookin’ for here. Though for some, blogs and/or websites might top the list, I’m eliminating them from the menu. For me they simply don’t qualify as hi-tech. I’m lookin’ for what you closet geeks out there are leveraging to the max.

An incomplete list might include spreadsheets, presentation apps, Blackberrys, iPhones, data bases, and the list is almost endless.

Or maybe there’s an office machine to which you attribute increased income. What hi-tech tool is performing like a champ in your business these days? How much impact has it actually had on your bottom line?

For the legitimate geeks on steroids out there, what hi-tech stuff have you combined in order to build your personal Frankenstein tool? Or maybe there’s a group of apps out there that play well together.

There’s no right answer here. Well, that’s not really the case. I think there’s a right answer, but what’s right for my operation might be on your B-List. As I’ve been known to say once or twice in the past, bottom line results is what we’re searchin’ for with this question.

There you have it. Now, what’s performing for you from the Hi-Tech menu that’s translating into dead presidents?

NAR/DOJ settlement: “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing…”

After years of song and dance, the DOJ reached a settlement with the NAR that seems to have achieved absolutely nothing — except the waste of a bunch of tax and dues money. At least that’s what you would think if you read nothing but the NAR’s spin. In fact, the NAR lost the major point of contention, the attested right of brokers to withhold listings from Virtual Office Websites (VOWs). From eWeek.com:

The Department of Justice said May 27 it has reached a settlement in its long-running legal dispute with the National Association of Realtors. Under the terms of the settlement, the Realtors will enact a new policy that guarantees Internet-based brokerage companies will not be treated differently than traditional brokers. 

Under the new policy, Realtor-affiliated brokers participating in multiple listing services will be prohibited from withholding their listings from brokers who use virtual office websites, generally known as VOWs. The Realtors agreed to a 10-year settlement to ensure the group continues to abide by the requirements of the settlement.

“Today’s settlement prevents traditional brokers from deliberately impeding competition,” Deborah A. Garza, deputy assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, said in a statement. “When there is unfettered competition from brokers with innovative and efficient approaches to the residential real estate market, consumers are likely to receive better services and pay lower commission rates.”

The Realtors also agreed to adopt antitrust compliance training programs that will instruct local associations of about the antitrust laws generally and about the requirements of the proposed settlement. The National Association of Realtors is a trade association of more than 1.2 million residential real estate members who operate in local real estate markets nationwide.

That sounds like something, but it ain’t. For one thing, the NAR gets to define what a VOW is. From its own press release:

The terms of the proposed final order validate NAR’s position – that MLS members must be actively engaged in real estate brokerage by actually helping people buy or sell homes. This will ensure that MLSs are used for what they were originally intended to do – to help real estate professionals find Read more

Taking it to the man: BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando

I finally had a chance to take a long nap today, and I’m substantially revivified. The ideas the Barrys threw off at the end of their interview with Brian about working in Orlando have me all pumped up, so I thought we might talk a little.

First, doing Unchained the Barrys way opens up quite a few opportunities for hour-long breakout sessions. We would devote four rooms to this, maybe more, so there could be a lot of speaking opportunities. I’d like to see sessions for beginners, geeks, brokers, lenders, etc. I don’t hate it if you’re a vendor if you’re a vendor in our world. To make that more plain: We’re doing this show to help Realtors avoid wasting money on useless crap. If you’re delivering value in the Web 2.0 world, there’s room — and hope! — for you. πŸ˜‰

The point of all this: If you would like to do one of these breakout sessions, speak up. Figure a 45 minute presentation with 15 minutes of Q&A as the room is being turned over.

Second, we want to preach to the masses. This is not a money-making endeavor, at least not so far. We want to carry the message to the masses, to advance this idea of wired excellence in any way we can. To that end, I’m interested in hearing suggestions about how we can get a lot of Realtors to lend us eight hours of their time, while they’re in Orlando for the convention. One thing we can do is affiliate programs for real estate weblogggers, but, even better than that, we can set up off-line affiliate programs. In other words, we can help you help your co-workers get a price break on Unchained Orlando, say with a coupon code or something like that. What other things should we be thinking about to fill the pews?

I’m wicked excited about this. In my email I’m advised to speak quietly, so as not to stir the beast. My take is that the NAR should make a very public effort to stay the hell out of our way. But whatever they do, Read more

Brian Brady does a BloodhoundBlog Unchained post-mortem on Real Estate Radio USA

I missed this when it happened: Brian Brady did a great post-mortem rundown on BloodhoundBlog Unchained on RealEstateRadioUSA.com. Brian talks about key moments at the conference and about some of the Web 2.0 ideas that we had built into the event to emphasize the points we were trying to make. Near the end, Barry Cunningham and Barry Johnson offer some excellent ideas for making BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando a successful event.

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What happens when Google stops ranking you for all of your very best search terms? Nothing — if you’ve built your blog right

A funny thing happened on the way to Unchained:

Right about May 16th, BloodhoundBlog fell off of Google’s radar. Dozens of search terms that have always been reliable sources of inbound traffic — terms you might think of as being BHB’s “short head” like zillow.com — suddenly stopped producing.

I watch our numbers pretty closely, so I was aware of the sudden drop in traffic. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened: We had plummeted in the SERPs for terms on which we had always been very strong.

As to the why, I know nothing. It’s plausible we hit a Google penalty, but I have no certain knowledge of this — nor do I ever expect to have any certain knowledge of this. It’s also plausible that we ran into a hiccough in the search algorithm.

Certainly we have done nothing even remotely Black Hat. To the contrary, we lean all over the idea of clean, content-based SEO, and we lean even harder on the idea of building communities of like minds, not search-borne aggregations of fleeting butterflies.

The fun part was, I didn’t have any time to deal with it at the time. Saw it happen. Figured out what had happened. Had some ideas about why. But I was up to my ears in Unchained work, plus money work on top of that, so I had no time to deal with the problem.

Finally on Wednesday I was able to drop a request for review on Google, telling them that I’m a good boy and don’t deserve to be treated like a bad boy. Presumably, in due course, they will review the site and either agree that this is so or tell me explicitly what they want me to change. This could take weeks, possibly months.

But here’s the interesting part of the story:

It does not matter.

The growth of this community has never depended on Google. Obviously some people found us that way for the first time, but the overwhelming majority of our regular readers found us through some kind of referral mechanism:

  • Links from other weblogs or web sites
  • Comments I left on other weblogs
  • Press mentions Read more

Phoenix real estate conference teaches Realtors and lenders the brave new world of internet social media marketing

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Phoenix real estate conference teaches Realtors and lenders the brave new world of internet social media marketing

What happens when you bring the brightest Realtors and lenders from all over the country to Phoenix for a social media marketing conference? Great ideas are cross-pollinated, germinated, planted, take root and flower.

We run a national real estate industry-focused weblog called BloodhoundBlog.com. There are 24 contributors — Realtors, lenders and investors from all around the country — and hundreds of daily visitors. We’ve been doing this for nearly two years, and, in that time, we have avidly pushed for excellence among real estate practitioners, especially in the burgeoning internet side of the business.

This past week we hosted the inaugural BloodhoundBlog Unchained event at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. People came from all over — a third from Greater Phoenix, a third from the rest of the Southwest, a third from places where it rains and snows. Together for three days we explored the world of social media marketing in real estate.

What’s that? Social media marketing is the commercial arm of the participatory internet. As more and more people make the internet their primary means of interacting with the world, real estate professionals are learning how to move their own practices online.

The important question: What’s in it for you? The internet is a brave new world of commerce. No one likes sleazy sales people, but sleazy sales tricks cannot work on the internet, where every suspicious claim can be checked in an instant. Transparency rules, and the practitioners who succeed with net-empowered consumers are the ones who are prepared to back up everything they say.

The bonus for people willing to work this way is that consumers will have a much higher degree of trust in their Realtor or lender. Rather than picking a name out of a phone book or off of a yard sign, they will have gotten to know that person — passively and anonymously — online.

BloodhoundBlog Unchained was put on by me and my partner, Brian Brady of MortgageRatesReport.com. If you’d Read more

Unchained at the sign printer: How we make our custom yard signs

I think this might be less than useful, but it keeps coming up in my mail. I love it that people are trying to make custom yard signs for their listings, but it seems plausible that the best technical advice will come in the comments.

Why is that? Because I use professional pre-press tools that most people don’t have.

Our signs are made in QuarkXPress for the Macintosh at one-sixth scale. In other words, the big sign with the full-bleed photo is made at 25p6 x 37p6 — one pica scales to one inch. The reason for working at this scale is simply to keep the Quark files manageable.

When we’re dummying up a sign, I will often work with low-resolution versions of the photos, this to enable faster printing so we can see what the sign looks like.

For the finished version, I use Adobe PhotoShop to produce very high-resolution CMYK EPS photo files to be placed back in Quark, there to be scaled and positioned. It’s possible to do everything I’m talking about within PhotoShop, but Quark is much better for both positioning and typographic control.

We take our listing photos at 5 megapixels. The camera will do more than that, but since most of these photos are going to be down-sampled to 640 x 480 pixels, we make a trade-off between resolution and the number of available photos on the memory card.

For the smaller photos on our signs, I normally down-sample to 2400 x 1800 pixels at 300 pixels per inch. For the large photo, I normally up-sample to 16000 x 12000 pixels at 300 ppi. If you get very close to that big image on a sign, you’ll see some pixelization. This is not visible at normal distances.

Once everything is in place in Quark, I save the page as an EPS file. The raster images — the photos — will be encapsulated as is, with the positioning and scaling information conveyed in PostScript. The type, rules and logos are vector images, infinitely scalable.

I import the EPS file into PhotoShop, scaling it to 25.5″ x 37.5″ at 300 pixels per inch. This Read more

To Sir, with love: A rundown of the links in the Unchained chain

Brian already cited some of the constructive criticism we have received about BloodhoundBlog Unchained, and that’s as it should be. I think we did a nice job, for a first swing at the ball, but the whole BloodhoundBlog idea is about doing better. Praise might be sweet to the ears, but it is criticism that puts us on the path to perfection.

Even so, I promised some link love to people who blogged about or wrote to me about their experience at Unchained, so I’m going to discharge that duty in this post. We’re very grateful to the people who gave us their minds and their time and their funds, and I am more than delighted to pay back what I can.

Don Reedy paid more than most of us to attend Unchained. While he was in Arizona, his dog, Sir, a one-time Universal Studios movie star Rotweiller, made the run for the last exit. Don made the decision to forge ahead at Unchained, keeping us up to date as his wife nursed Sir through one medical procedure after another. But by the time Don got home late Tuesday night, Sir had passed away.

If you’re not a dog person, it might not mean anything to you. Cats and other pets have their charms, but a good dog is like a playful four-year-old child who never grows up and moves away. I don’t delude myself. I spend a lot of time thinking about the epistemology of dogs. But to have a friend that game, that loyal, that full of heart — always thrilled to see you, always eager to be involved, always there for you no matter what — that’s a love unbearable to lose.

Even so, we have to force ourselves to press on regardless. Sir’s life is over, but life goes on. Here’s to Don and to his wife, Beth. And here’s to another great dog they will learn to love, when their grieving for Sir has waned to something easier to endure.

Vance Shutes wrote about his experiences at Unchained. He also wonders if we’re going to run out of water. Not before Read more

Profiling our Zillow.com profile: Using landing pages and photos to try to create a compelling long-copy ad for our brokerage

We talked quite a bit at Unchained about profiles on Social Media Marketing sites. Once you’ve made a commitment to a site, you’ll be adding a significant amount of content to that platform. When someone comes across something you’ve done, their natural impulse is to click through to your profile. If they do, what will they see?

Chances are, when you first signed up for that site, you blew right past the profile page, plugging in the minimum necessary information to get your registration done. You wanted to get to the content, after all, to find out if that site even met your needs. You discovered over time that it did, but you probably never thought to go back and complete your profile.

This is a mistake. Your profile is the space that web site provides for you to sell yourself. At a minimum, you can direct interested people back to your own weblog or web site. Some sites will provide multiple links. Some will let you flesh out a free-form “about me” section, so that you can say exactly what you want in your own words. Some will permit fairly elaborate HTML coding, with links back to specific landing pages on your web site: You can sell relocation to relos, rentals to investors, re-fi’s to the equity-enriched.

A couple of different times, I mentioned my Zillow.com profile. Zillow is pretty liberal in the kind of coding you can do — allowing links and photos in the “about me” section, for example.

Vance Shutes asked me to share my Zillow profile with him. I thought it might be better to take up the issue in the blog. I can talk about what I’m doing, you can talk about what you’re doing, and we all can learn better ways of building Social Media Marketing profiles.

So: Between the horizontal rules is the code we use on our Zillow.com profile, as well as on other sites:


Why do we deliver so much more value for our clients? For one thing, it’s a great strategy for marketing our real estate brokerage. But even before that, we love selling real estate, Read more

Google Juice? Yeah…That Hits the Spot!

Lots of fun at the Bloodhound Blog lately! Unfortunately, I had to miss Unchained, but was able to catch enough on Youtube to realize that I missed out on a lot – not the least of which was a great networking opportunity. I’ve been enjoying BHB more and more, though, and I know it has to do with increasing the level of my participation.

I think it just took me a bit to get warmed up, and to find a topic that I could really sink my teeth into. As much as I love real estate, I’m a relative pup (5 years) compared with most of the ol’ dogs here, so it took the introduction of a pretty serious SEO debate to reel me in. I’m not here to grind this topic in. In fact, I think we’ve done a fine job getting the word out about a practice that bothers us. However, during the debate, the statement “No one really knows how Google works” was thrown out a few times. Because of this, I wanted to write a quick tutorial on one basic concept that we know Google uses, and that has been proven time & again to be correct.

Page Rank, or “Google Juice,” was developed by Larry Page & Sergey Brin in the mid 1990’s while students at Stanford. The algorithm utilizes the inherent democracy of the web, counts the links to different websites as votes for those particular sites, and so measures the relative importance of each website.

Rand Fishkin, of SEOMOZ, put together one of his fabulous illustrations demonstrating the very basic function of the Page Rank system:

innate-pagerank.JPG

Obviously, the algorithm is much more complex than this, but this gives us a very fundamental understanding of how Page Rank works, and why inbound links are so important. The web, according to Google, is one big popularity contest, with the authoritative sites (like BHB) holding a lot of the juice, and less authoritative sites (like my dinky search blog) carrying less juice.

The easiest (but not always the most accurate) way to measure the Read more

Black Pearls: Controlling your own destiny in your hi-tech real estate practice: Three simple rules for dealing with technology vendors

[This post came up yesterday in a discussion at Unchained, and I’m kicking it back to the top of the blog because the issue of data portability is so important for people who might be coming anew into the world of Web 2.0/Social Media Marketing. –GSS]

 
Would it surprise you to learn that host, hostage and hostility are cognate terms? They come to us by way of French and German, but that hos idea in Latin trips lightly from guest to stranger to foreigner to enemy.

I happen to be thinking of these English words — host, hostage and hostility — because I wanted to come up with a very simple rule for dealing with technology vendors. Alas, I think the best I can do is three simple rules:

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

I bought and populated two new domains tonight. We buy all our domains from Godaddy.com — a commodity vendor — to simplify management and renewals. I control all of our hosting through a semi-dedicated server at HostGator.com, which means that I pay nothing extra to propagate a new domain. I have to pay for the domain registration, but I pay no additional charges beyond our regular flat monthly fee for hosting as many domains as I want.

I’m at the far right edge of the Realtor geek curve — as of tonight, we control 79 domains — but, with one exception, we control all of our data, with no need to fear the vicissitudes of vendors. (What’s the exception? Our virtual tours are hosted through VisualTour Obeo.com, which seems to us to be less odious than the other odious virtual tour vendors.)

Why does this matter? If you don’t control your own data, you don’t control your business. You are at the mercy of the vendors who do control your data. If you lose faith in them — or if they look like they might fail the test of the marketplace — you may find out much too late that applying my three rules would have made good sense.

So: Let’s go through them again in detail:

  1. Avoid hosted Read more

Satire is an evermore difficult and demanding art. Why? Because the world around us is often so risible as to be beyond parody…

Like this

Unchained was promoted by Social Media Marketing only, most of it here. No advertising. No affiliate marketing. No ass-kissing. No taking crap from morons. No Inman.

If the lesson of this is lost on you, then you missed out on the biggest piece of what we were doing this week. I might try to convey the point in a satirical post, but how can I top the item linked above?

All of this broke out as I knew it would. We talk all the time about “What would David Gibbons do?” but this sequence of events came straight from the “What would Greg Swann do?” playbook. We’re not revolutionaries, despite the poses we might sometimes seem to strike. We’re all about supplanting what we see as negative forces, not up-ending them or making war on them.

So: What did Inman News do to itself this week — and in the preceding months? It ignored us, which did us no harm at all — but which demonstrated beyond all doubt that it is not devoted to news in the real estate industry.

It’s a dead letter, just like the NAR. In their heart of hearts, Brad Inman and his employees have known this all along. Now you know it, too.

In any case, here’s my great idea: No chokepoints. No bosses. No taking crap from morons. No Inman.

Feel free to add your own great ideas. There’s no “application form,” and you don’t have to kiss anyone’s “community” to win recognition for your brilliance.

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