Stemming off my previous post — It doesn’t get any more clearer than this!
Jessica Swesey of Inman News interviews Bob Hale of the Houston Association of Realtors
Archive for March, 2008 Page 2 of 2
This is probably going to be the first of a series of articles (how many I do not know) that were inspired by the think tank known as the Clareity Summit. As I was sitting there,so many topics came to mind. Unfortunately, I wasn’t TransTwittering like Michael Wurzer was(update: I was told this probably should be called TransTweeting). On the other hand - I also want to expand on them. Maybe Twitter, for me, could be used as a thoughtpad for me to get to later, and if not, at least I put it out into the public realm more so than on my napkin-note. Anyway - I am diverging bigtime.
At the end of the first day of sessions, Bob Hale (Houston Association of REALTOR Fame) gave a mesmerizing presentation about their marketing strategies, and just why it makes sense to fish upstream. I knew I had to dissect this and regurgitate some of the numbers that he presented.
I was turned on to this video by Doug Whitehouse, a member of the NAR Business Issues Committee. I liked the production, use of medium and of course, the cause. This is one of my favorite committees and I’m not really bult for committee work
NAR has been active on technology issues like this, on behalf of members, through the Government Affairs division.
NAR has no affiliation with the group behind this video, I just thought it was educational.
Update: You can also find it on YouTube
While at the Technology Directors conference here in Atlanta, GA I was asked by a few people in short order, what the value is in using twitter. If you don’t know what twitter is, in a feat of amazingly good timing the commoncraft.com team has come out with Twitter in Plain English, which does a great job of explaining the social aspects of the tool.
However, as Keith pointed out in his introductory post, I am a passionate about not only social media, but about lifehacking and Getting Things Done, so I use twitter in a outside-of-the-box way to make my life more productive, and I’ll share some of those ways with you below the jump. Continue reading ‘I’m a tweeter, he’s a tweeter, don’t you want to be a tweeter too?’
Just a link to an article that made me think about how the business may change over the next couple of years.
When I speak about business models, I present those that are known and already in the field. One of the questions I get asked is “How will the business models change in the future?”. Putting my finger on how the next generation of REALTORS will engage had been difficult. I recently came to the “collaboration” thought and have been using it on the road for a couple of months. This article gave a reason to believe I should continue these thoughts.
Although microtrends are characterized as having Personas, they can also be used in a good way. Personas should be used to model Culture 1.0 and Culture 2.0 users because they have nothing to do with the Real Estate model being used by the software user.
OK, this sounds clumsy so far. Here is an example of what I mean. Note that persona is used in two different contexts:
Persona #1 - Culture 1.0
Campaign marketing tool that sends out messages and tries to categorize responses into one of 4 pre-planned sub-campaigns. Typically these are built with “tree logic” (if response #5 is ‘yes’ then ….). Each sub-campaign is designed to meet the needs of a “persona”.
Persona #2 - Culture 2.0
Organic marketing tool that uses content to attract attention, then tries to determine the intention of the consumer. Intention is another word for collaboration in this context.
Part of this post is almost two months overdue and I’m also not keeping up with my pledge to blog more often… Anyway…
I’d like to welcome Heather Norton to the NAR staff family. Heather is the new Vice President of Information Technology Services (ITS), CRT’s sibling department. I’m very excited to be working with her. In just the short time she’s been working with us she’s been making some dramatic changes for the better with more on the way. She has an open invitation to add her voice to CRT’s blog and I hope she takes us up on it.
Heather is a people person and has been doing a lot of reading on social trends, getting things done, wisdom of crowds, that sort of thing. In her honor, I share the following link with you: GTD in Space: Seven Habits of Highly Effective Spaceship Captains.
If you want to learn good organization skills, look no further than some of the best leaders in the universe: the captains of spaceships. They may be fictional, but they have skills that translate into the real world. After all, you’d follow Admiral Adama into battle, and trust Malcolm Reynolds to have your back. Now you can learn the seven greatest leadership lessons we gleaned from watching shows like Futurama and Firefly
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to your website. CRT gets asked quite often by REALTORS ‘How do I develop my website on my own?’ It has taken me a little time discussing this concept with all ranges of REALTORS to finally understand there are some definitions that need to be laid out first before that conversation doesn’t just end up spinning some wheels and going nowhere.
First, think of a website as a car. There is the body that makes it look sleek, there is the interior that gives you the experience of the ride, the engine that runs the car, and finally the gas that powers the engine. Without the engine or the gas, the car is just something that looks good. Without the sleek body, the engine can still get it places, but it may not be something other people want to be seen driving.
Now lets apply this concept to a website: the layout, graphics, text, etc are the body of the website - it’s what people see. How the website interacts with the user (the user interface) is the interior of the website - that which gives you the experience. The foundation/software/programming language is the engine of the website - it’s what runs the show. Finally, the data is the gas for the engine. Without data, your website will just be a fluff site.
The next set of definitions are more preferential, but they help in making sure we’re all talking on the same page.
