Just a few weeks after a conversation inspiring the Wanted – Real Estate Agents to Blog post, Samantha launches her Strong Urban Realty blog.
Congrats Sam.
Other Minneapolis real estate bloggers include Duane Thilmony offering a very comprehensive write-up of Zillow.com
Before I bought my current place, Jen and I talked with a handful of real estate agents. We didn’t purchase from any of them. In general, they didn’t feel authentic, connected, credible. Felt like the stereotypical used car salesman. With a housing boom like this – I don’t blame them. Problem is, demand won’t always be this strong, interest rates this low, and the need for agents will only diminish.
At some point in the next year or so, there’s a very good chance I’ll need their services. This is what I’m looking for in the next real estate agent I work with:
These 3 items help me build a relationship with an agent, on my terms and without the risk of spam and unwanted phone calls. While at the same time, building the agent’s reputation, credibility, and network. This is very much the agent equivelant of Alex Stenback’s Behind the Mortgage.
Historically, real estate agents have operated in a world where market information is difficult and inconvenient to consolidate. Google Maps mash-ups like DC Homeprices, HousingMaps.com, and ChicagoCrime.org bring buyers, sellers, and agents closer to the same level. Not to mention neighbors with blogs.
Anyone out there doing this today?
Elsewhere: 20 Aug 2008:
The Work Better Weblog is 2 years old this month. To celebrate, I’m starting an experiment in multi-author business blogs, community-building, and transparency – each Working Pathways client gets posting access.
That’s right – if you’ve hired Working Pathways, you automatically receive a login and password to publish whatever you’d like to the Work Better Weblog.
As I stated in the invitation email:
“Post anything you’d like. Yes, anything – your thoughts on the internet, work process, whatever’s on your mind, even about working with me, and this experiment. Everything’s fair game.”
The first batch of invitations has gone out.
There’s a good chance there’ll be some new voices here in the coming months. Keep an eye on the by-line.
Yesterday, I had a great conversation with Matt and Jon about the benefits blogging for business. Out of it Matt brought up the very attractive ‘blogging as business backporch’ metaphor. I’ll attempt to paraphrase:
Let’s say a business is a house, and the website is it’s front door – the formal method of greeting visitors – strangers or customers.
The blog then is the backporch. More informal. Probably can’t be seen from the street. Lots of voices and lots of conversations. A place where friends, customers, and colleagues all hangout together.
Yes, some people with come through the front door – and become customers – on their way to the grill. Others, the people in the know, will come around the side yard, straight to the conversation. These people might not be customers. That’s OK.
Like Dave and so many others, I’ve done the same thing and ended up with the same conclusion. Recently on the PodcastMN mailing list the conversation of making money from podcasting came up. Though there’s a big difference between making money and building a business, these are the half dozen off-the-top-of-my-head strategies that make sense to me.
As you can tell from this list, I prefer the ‘because of…not with’ models, as in “it’s far more important (and interesting) to make money because of our blogs, rather than with them” – Doc Searls.
Advertising might work as product placement, on a one-off basis. Ad networks won’t work for two reasons:
Charging to access mp3 podcasts will work once. Customer #1 will buy them, then redistribute them for free. Anything other than an mp3 (m4p, mov, etc) artificially limits reception. And if you want to limit when and where people listen to a podcast – just stream it.
In an age when every employee and customer is a few mouse clicks from their own weblog and podcast and Forbes is spreading blog FUD it’s refreshing to see Big Blue is not only publishing podcasts, but encouraging their employees to do the same.
As a nearly hundred year-old company that no one ever got fired for choosing, you might anticipate a hundred page document signed off by every lawyer this side of the Mississippi. Nope. Just seven very reasonable, sensible points in the IBM podcasting guidelines.
I agree with 6.5 of them.
I only half agree with high audio quality. As you’ve heard me say before – if we as people were concerned with high audio quality, telephones wouldn’t exist. That said, higher quality audio quality is easier to listen to over the wind noise in my car. There is a different expected level of quality with the IBM-brand than say, MOMbo.org. IBM is admitting that.
Kudos to IBM for leading the charge for sane employee guidelines.
Matthew Holden published a conversation we shared about;
There are at least 2 different internets. One with popups, popunders, spasm-inducing Flash banner ads, and the actual, unique information squeezed to the size of an IAB standard microbar. The other, without. Until now, this latter internet was filled with RSS feeds from blogs with real people behind them.
Until now. Until Splogs.
Back in August Mark Cuban outlined the splog problem. I didn’t think anything of it until today. While doing research on a vertical market I’m not versed in, the first page of Technorati results were useless, uninformative, non-helpful splogs. Blech.
Perhaps my query terms are being too generic. Asking Google for ‘digital camera’ won’t tell you answer anything more specific than, “What does Google return for ‘digital camera'”. So, I’ll try being more specific.
A tip for business bloggers out there: Running a business blog on blogger.com is the equivalent of running a business off a Hotmail or AOL email address. It doesn’t help build credibility.
UPDATE 16 October 2005: If my standing Technorati searches are any indications, yes as Tim Bray said, we have a splog emergency on our hands. I’m reading FightSplog.com right now to figure out how.
It’s Wednesday and I’ve already had 3 conversations this week on advertising in podcasts or somehow monetizing podcasts to support thousands of thousands of podcasts listeners.
If a podcast is so popular that it’s running out of bandwidth on a regular basis, there’s a really good chance the vast majority aren’t listening – even though everyone is downloading. This means that even if the podcast is supported by an underwriter/sponsor/advertiser the sponsorship message won’t be heard. Putting us back to wasting (at least) 50% of our ad dollar.
Downloading and not listening to a podcast is bad for everyone involved. It hurts the podcaster by artificially inflating their listener-base and eating up their monthly bandwidth. It hurts the listener by unnecessarily filling up their hard-drive. Throwing an advertiser into this will only hurt them – and if this statement from the media buying community is any indication – advertisers are no longer interested in throwing away ad dollars (finally):
If you’re struggling to cover your podcasts bandwidth bills, I recommend 3 options before exploring advertising or switching hosting plans.
If you’re not listening, it’s time to start unsubscribing (or at least stop downloading). You’re taking up downloading slots from people that are listening. On my end, I’ve just flipped the switch in NetNewsWire from automatically downloading audio files to not. Then, I reviewed each of the 40+ podcasts I’m subscribed to and checked ‘use custom setting -> automatically download audio files’ for the handful I listen to regularly. In iTunes, you can do the same by selecting ‘do nothing’ in the ‘when new episodes are available’ pulldown menu under podcast settings.
Take a moment now and support your favorite podcaster by unsubscribing.
Tonight Jen and I attended PKR&G‘s Never Out of Fashion show. Yes, in the interest of full disclosure, our invitation was part of our 6 part PKR&G podcast series at the First Crack.
Howard Rubin kicked off the event asking, “Why does a law firm host a fashion show?”
The same reason you’d blog. Here’s the break down;
Does it work?
How doesn’t it work?