BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Technology (page 29 of 60)

May 21, 2008

Memo to ePerks.com: You idiots! Trying to censor a real estate weblogger is a poor way to defend your reputation — such as it is…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[I’m kicking this back up to the top. At the time I wrote this, I thought it might be enough to make the jackasses at ePerks.com come to their senses. Apparently not. If you are a real estate weblogger, and if you don’t want some sleazoid attorney pulling these stunts on you, you need to set your shoulder beside Vlad Zablotskyy’s and fight for your right to free speech. Let the world know that this kind of behavior is unacceptable. –GSS]

 
Sleazeball lead vendor ePerks.com (corporate motto: “We don’t totally suck because we can’t get anything right!”) has found a great new way to respond to criticism: Censorship.

Real estate weblogger Vlad Zablotskyy exposed ePerks to what by BloodhoundBlog standards amounts to very mild scrutiny. His posts elicited a number of horror stories from Realtors who had been misused in their dealings with ePerks.

So far nothing surprising. Lead vendors suck. They persist by virtue of creating an artificial marketing chokepoint, interposing themselves between consumers and the vendors who can satisfy their needs:

In the Web 1.0 world, lead vendors snapped up domains and fought hard for dominance on organic and pay-per-click keywords relating to real estate sales, mortgage origination and refinancing. By these means, they harvested contact information from interested parties, which they were then able to sell to Realtors and lenders, often for enormous fees. The lead vendors created an artificial chokepoint by marketing, then charged practitioners a premium to gain access to the consumers trapped at that chokepoint.

It is hardly shocking that most of the victims of lead vendors come to hate the scum who run these scams.

In the long run none of this matters. The Web 2.0 world disintermediates all man-made chokepoints. ePerks.com is one with the dinosaurs — and sic semper tyrannosauris!

But wait. There’s more. Instead of ignoring criticism on what is (sorry, Vlad) a low-traffic weblog, instead of asking itself “What would David Gibbons do?”, instead of engaging the enraged while retooling the chokepoint like Homegain.com’s Louis Cammarosano, ePerks.com chose to do the stupidest thing any corporation or government can do in the Web 2.0 world: It sent a Read more

May 20, 2008

BloodhoundBlog Unchained: Commencement news, and then to bed

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve already been to sleep once, briefly. After Unchained broke up this afternoon, we came home to knock out the essential work. Teri Lussier cranked out a solid hour of video clips today, so I started pumping those into the YouTube mill. I’ve got a lot more to talk about, but first I have to go to sleep.

So first: The news.

Glenn Kelman gave a knock-out keynote speech. He spoke about Redfin.com’s recent performance, as compared with the company’s initial assumptions, and we all came away with a better understanding of how more alike our businesses are than they are different.

When Glenn finished speaking, we announced that he will be joining BloodhoundBlog as a contributor. This is a stone obvious idea that should have occurred to me a year ago, but, in fact, it only came to me last week. We’ve talked to other bigfeet in the realty.bot and franchise worlds, but, where the flesh has been willing, the PR department, until now, has always turned out to be weak.

I think Glenn made a lot of friends for Redfin today, and it certainly was an honor to have him with us. Whatever differences we might have had, he’s a fine writer and a thoughtful man, so it will be interesting reading him here.

The other news was Brian Brady’s announcement that we will be doing another Unchained event in Orlando, Florida, at the time of the NAR Convention. We don’t have a date or a location yet, but it will be right around Friday November 7, 2008. We want to be there to catch the Realtors before they rush into the convention center to spend a ton of money on hokey gimmicks that won’t work. This seems like an appropriate mission for a couple of wannabe Jesuits.

Teri’s videos are chugging along, and I’ll get around to tagging them tomorrow or Thursday. Feel free to watch them anyway, as they get uploaded. In the mean time, here is Brad Coy doing what Cathy says is a spot-on imitation of me:

And just to share the love, Brad also gave a parody performance of Brian Brady:


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May 20, 2008

Unchained voices: Video clips from the conference and after-hours events: “It’s been like learning more than my brain can fit”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

BloodhoundBlog’s Geno Petro:

Don Reedy talking about his new venture:

BloodhoundBlog’s Cheryl Johnson:

Brad Coy and Andy Kaufman taught a working lunch session on Twitter. Here’s Brad:

And here’s Andy:

Katherine Whiting talking about her own Web 2.0 epiphany:

Teri Lussier and her posse had dinner Sunday night at Durant’s a famous Phoenix steak house. Here are Jeff Royce and Lenore Wilkas at dinner:

Mark Eibner and Dirk Freeman from BrokerIPTV.com:

And we are all of us Greeks, as Teri demonstrates by interviewing the kitchen crew:

There are dozens of other clips on the BloodhoundBlog Unchained YouTube Channel. Even more at BrokerIPTV.com’s UStream Channel.

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May 19, 2008

BloodhoundBlog Unchained: Real Estate Website Makeover…

by

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

We’re Unchained, but we’re still wired to the net — wirelessly. These posts are set up so that folks can make notes or comments in real time.

Mary McKnight of RSS Pieces will review and suggest improvements to several web sites and weblogs:

  • Mary Burak’s Advanced Access Site
  • JTC Realty Group’s Point2 Site
  • Gulf Coast Associates’s RealEstateWebmasters Site
  • Patti Herrington’s AgentImage Site
  • Karen Borden’s Z57 Site
  • Just for fun: BloodhoundRealty.com’s WordPress Site

Plus a surprise debut of a brand new blogsite for an RE.net mandarin

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May 19, 2008

BloodhoundBlog Unchained: The Way of the Farmer…

by

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

We’re Unchained, but we’re still wired to the net — wirelessly. These posts are set up so that folks can make notes or comments in real time.

  • Listing strong to farm strong
  • Building single-property web sites
  • Using engenu to dominate the long tail
  • Zestifarming to dominate Zillow
  • Blogging your listings – with SEO power
  • Belly-to-belly farming the Web 2.0 way

Applying Web 2.0 technologies to the the traditional real estate marketing idea of the geographic farm. Greg Swann will take you through a set of techniques you can use to establish an online ubiquity more complete than you could ever achieve with postcards and pumpkins.

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May 19, 2008

BloodhoundBlog Unchained: The Way of the Hunter…

by

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

We’re Unchained, but we’re still wired to the net — wirelessly. These posts are set up so that folks can make notes or comments in real time.

  • Two words: Ubiquity works
  • Setting traps on the sites that can expose you to consumers
  • Baiting the traps – providing relevant consumer content to match up with the community
  • Building a community – recruiting eyeballs that keep coming back
  • Getting commitment – how to convert engaged consumers to permission-based marketing participants
  • Channel marketing – building a referral network online

Brian Brady teaches you how to be as hard to miss as he is…

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May 19, 2008

BloodhoundBlog Unchained: The Unchained Epiphany…

by

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

We’re Unchained, but we’re still wired to the net — wirelessly. These posts are set up so that folks can make notes or comments in real time.

  • You are free at last, a free moral agent with no one to order you around — but no one to blame but yourself if you should fail
  • You are free to thrive
  • You are free to starve
  • But you are not free to escape the necessity of making a choice

An introductory convocation from Greg Swann featuring philosophy, history, stirring rhetoric and some really scary homework…

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May 18, 2008

Kevin Wilhelm on the first day of BloodhoundBlog Unchained: “Today was the first day, which was meant to be a bonus day. But if it ended today, it would be worth the money, period.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We planned these video clips as a way of communicating Web 2.0 ideas by effecting Web 2.0 ideas. Kevin Wilhelm, shown below, seems to make our point for us:

Here’s Bloodhound Teri Lussier, Saturday night, after a long flight and a day in the desert:

Real estate coach Jan O’Brien and Realtor Vance Shutes:

Nick Bastian, who surprised Brian with a real-time Twitter at our event ten days ago:

Kevin Warmath revised his sitemap while Mary McKnight was still speaking:

Bloodhound Geno Petro on the state of his SERPs:

Andy Kaufman and Brad Coy:

Bawldguy Bar-B-Que: Bloodhound Jeff Brown teaches prospecting with Kam Hubbard at Honey Bear’s Bar-B-Que in Central Phoenix:

Russell Shaw spoke for about 45 minutes. Here he is seen answering questions posed by Kevin Warmath:

There are half-a-dozen other Russell Shaw clips, along with three dozen others, on the BloodhoundBlog Unchained YouTube Channel.

Nick Bastian kicks in this clip of Mary McKnight on backlinks:


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May 18, 2008

More BloodhoundBlog Unchained video: The antediluvian trickle

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There’s a ton more in Unchained clips to come, but here’s a quick taste from the work done today by BrokerIPTV.com.

To start with, Brian Brady interviews my best-beloved, Cathleen Collins:

Russell Shaw put in an appearance and spoke for about 45 minutes. We’ll have clips of that later tonight. In the mean time, here’s a post-session interview he did with BrokerIPTV.com’s Mark Eibner:

My take is that we delivered a lot of content for the first day. Our plan is to ratchet things up quite a bit over the next two days.

One of the things that I think is totally cool about what we are doing is that we aren’t just talking about it, we’re doing Social Media Marketing for the conference as we’re doing the conference. All this video is just a piece of that.

I’d love to hear from people who are at Unchained about how the first day went for them.

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May 17, 2008

The Flip digital video camera makes illustrating real estate ideas fast, convenient and fun

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). Watch this space. There should be a lot of Flip video coming out of Unchained.

 
The Flip digital video camera makes illustrating real estate ideas fast, convenient and fun

I’m becoming a fan of digital video for marketing real estate.

I’ve always hated the video home tour: “This. Is. The. Living. Room. This. Is. The. Dining. Room. The. Family. Dines. In. This. Room.” The images will be small, dark and grainy. The motion will be either jerky, swooping or both. And the tour itself will do nothing that could not be done better with digital photos.

But just lately I got a Flip video camera, and I can’t seem to stop thinking of real estate uses for it.

The Flip uses solid state memory rather than tapes to store its video. It’s a tiny little thing, about the size of a digital still camera, and you can operate it with one hand. It’s really only good for certain kinds of work. It would be useless at a wedding or a basketball game. But for capturing interviews, it is the prefect video camera.

Even better, it comes with a built-in USB connection and software for emailing videos or pumping them directly into YouTube or MySpace. Shooting, storing, editing and sharing videos are all painlessly convenient.

The first real estate application I thought of for the Flip was to collect testimonials from clients. That’s kind of self-serving, but the next idea was all about selling houses. In the past we have done video interviews with sellers or neighbors, but the editing process for normal video is onerous. But with the Flip we can just shoot the interview, upload it to YouTube and then link it from the web site for that property.

If I want to make a quick video to show weather conditions or traffic around a house, it’s easily done. I had a home inspector deliver a short video summary of the repair issues on a home for out-of-town buyers.

The breakthrough for me was thinking of video in the same way I think of still photography, Read more

May 16, 2008

A link letter: Instead of a post by a man too scattered by the winds

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Colleen Kulikowski sent me a sweet card wishing us success with Unchained. Enclosed was a packet of Aster seeds. If I can get them to grow, I’ll take pictures.

Tom Royce sent an email note telling us to break a leg.

Kevin Warmath needs a roommate for Unchained. If you haven’t bunked up and want to split costs with a man who swears he’s not a Neanderthal, give him a call (678-438-3041) and work something out.

My post on transparency was picked up by my long-time friend and client, Richard Nikoley. Richard runs Provanta, a debt-reduction company. Partly owing to my influence, they’ve just switched their on-line presence over to a WordPress blogsite, putting them squarely in the warts-and-all Web 2.0 world.

I said this in email to Richard, an Unchained epiphany all its own:

What’s interesting is that everyone in our world shops this way: Full research, full knowledge of the pros and cons of everything. We might be at the right edge of the learning curve, but it’s all the same curve. Everyone is on it, and everyone is moving our way on that curve. Why would we market any way but as a reflection of how we shop?

Think about it, and I mean think about it a lot: Why would we market any way but as a reflection of how we shop?

That post was also picked up by The Innkeeper’s Resource, a blog for Bed ‘n’ Breakfast innkeepers. Their take: Anonymous reviews are a reality of their business. Get used to it. I offered this in a comment:

Brilliant.

Here’s an idea that can work in any industry that can be hit with an off-site review:

“When Mark and Marie Olson complained about our threadbare linens on TripReports.com, we saw red. Not because the charge was false. It was true, alas. We had let ourselves become so distracted by the big picture of providing a great experience for our guests that we forgot that big things are made up of little things. Not only did we add a quality control procedure to our laundry, we built quality control into every aspect of our business. And we gave the Read more

May 15, 2008

So Far Twitter’s Just Not Worth The Effort

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

First and foremost let it be understood by one and all, I’m assuming all guilt until proven innocent.

So I decided to begin orbiting the planet twitter today. It’s simple. Easy as 1 2 3 the mantra goes. Not so fast cult breath.

Seems I’m from the Stoopid Tribe. First I don’t have IM. Hey, I’m 57 in a couple months, so give me some slack. My efforts to obtain IM are laughable, as nobody seems to want to help. By nobody I mean IM online sites. Google Talk apparently hasn’t been introduced to Steve Jobs yet, so those guys are out. You’d think they’d have at least run into each other once by now.

Take a few deep breaths, and email Lani for help. She sends Mathew and Andy — the twitter cavalry. They are both very cool and helpful guys, and along with my new application from Twhirl via Lani, I sent my first twitter. Is that even how you say it?

At this point I’m apathetic.

There’s no online help worth a used Snicker’s Bar. My password is now being denied. I changed it to the original password and they’re still telling me to go jump in the lake. Honest, they told me my new password was way cool.

And it’s not just the password thing. I see a message from someone I don’t know and decide to click on it. A new box comes up, but I can’t figure any way in hell to get back to all the other messages. I tried every icon there was. Go fish.

The first thought entering my addled but appealingly smooth pate, is — All this just to say ‘Buy low, sell high — I’m the real estate investor guy’. Really?

Again, I assume blame for all this. I have no clue whatsoever why it was working and now it isn’t, and until I get belly to belly with somebody who can lend a little hands on assistance, I’m officially putting the whole twitter thing in the rearview mirror.

Thanks again to Lani, Andy, and Mathew for their help. It was working for almost an hour. The Read more

May 14, 2008

TruliaTracking.php: Keeping track of the Trulia.com nofollow controversy with a widget for the rest of us

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Using Eric Bramlett’s green ribbon and a little bit of PHP, I have built a small widget to keep track of the accumulating body of weblog posts on Trulia.com policy of adding the “nofollow” tag to links back to its listing partners. Shown below is an image of the widget; you can see the real thing in the sidebar.

You can read the articles linked in the widget for clarification, but the issue in its essence is this: Trulia is using the listings you give it to enhance its own search engine performance on long tail search keywords even at is not sharing any search engine authority with you on the link back to your listing. Another way of saying the same thing: You’re buying Trulia.com dinner and it is scarfing down your dessert while you’re away from the table.

If you’ve written a post on this topic, let me know and I’ll add your link to the widget.

If you care about this issue, you should echo this widget. It’s easy to do. The widget itself is not complicated, and I built it to be shared. It’s designed to work flexibly in your sidebar without clashing with your look and feel. In other words, it should take on the characteristics of your Cascading Style Sheet, not mine. If you want to echo this widget, it’s dread simple. Copy this line of code:

<?php
include ("https://bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/TruliaTracking.php");
?>

and paste it on a line of its own in your “sidebar.php” file for your currently active theme. FTP that into the appropriate folder on your file server and you’re done. (Note: These instructions presume WordPress and an FTP connection. If you know how to deploy this code in another blogging platform, or if you know how to edit theme files from within WordPress, speak up in the comments.)

Will BloodhoundBlog get Google “juice” for doing this? Yes, but we don’t need it. Instead, I’m using my code and my hot-rod file server to host this widget for anyone who wants to echo it.

Will the posts linked in the widget get Google “juice” for being there. Big time. Riding on BloodhoundBlog’s sidebar Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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