I’m hosting a free 1/2 day conference on March 12. We have some great speakers coming to Steamboat to present and the announcement goes out to the public Monday morning.

To say thanks for reading my blog I’m opening up the first 15 seats to you now (there’s only 60 seats).

All the details are here: www.steamboatedge.com

Thanks for reading and I hope you can make it.

About the Conference
What a rough few years for real estate. The way we see it, you can either continue to do things the way you’ve always done them, hoping for the best or you can embrace the new-normal and move forward. This conference is about moving forward; the future of real estate marketing.

2008: “Oh S%#t, is this really happening?”

2009: “Can we just hang on?”

2010: “Time to move forward!”

Because there are so many properties and so few buyers, marketing has become the centerpiece of any successful real estate business. At the same time, the face of marketing has changed. The “bullhorn” & “how many people can we reach” approach to marketing costs more & is less effective. It’s time to consider new opportunities to connect buyers & sellers and do it earlier & more effectively.

Buyers have more choice, more education and less time than ever before. While you may have fewer financial resources the good news is there are more opportunities than ever before. Somewhere there’s a place where these two things cross & success happens. This conference is about moving your business forward with new approaches & opportunities.

Conference Details:

March 12, 2010
8:30am – 12:30pm
Catamount Golf Club

Head over to the conference site for more details & RSVP

One of the most interesting aspects of Twitter is live search. Through the use of live search we can, for the first time, “listen in” on public conversations. It’s that ability to listen to what’s being discussed on just about any topic that makes Twitter such a powerful medium.  We can search for just about any keyword and get instant results of what’s being said right now.

So I set up a page that gives you real-time, auto-refreshing search results of Twitter real estate terms. The default results are from the phrase “real estate” and with a click of a link  you can narrow the results to Colorado & Steamboat real estate. Plus I added a search box to view the results for any term you like.

Click to check it out.

What do you think? Is Twitter being used in an effective way to engage people? If you were in the market would this be a helpful medium?

Speed is Power

“In this economy?” It’s a phrase I’m hearing over & over again. People and organizations are using this phrase as a blanket statement to say “no,” “stop,” “we can’t.” This phrase has become the catchall to stop the very thing that just might get them out of “this economy.”

I don’t buy it. It’s as if they’re suggesting this economy has a finish line and once we cross that line we’ll be in “that better economy” then we’ll move forward. Meanwhile their competitors are moving ahead. Their competitors are leaning into the problem, creating new value, new connections, making mistakes but learning from them.

We have entered an era where speed is power. Those who can move fast, innovate and answer the needs of the market faster, win. Those stuck in antiquated methods, compromise at every turn, and use the phrase “in this economy?” loose.

Two guys, Steve and Jon, invented the iPod. It took over 265 people to create the Zune.
Which do you want?

Tweet a TV tech question to @Twelpforce and get an answer in seconds from the helpful BestBuy employees.
Where might you buy your next TV?

Need it today? Amazon is offering same day delivery in select cities and Saturday delivery is standard on Prime accounts.
Where will you shop online?

HelloHealth allows you to interact with your doctor Facebook style and get medical answers quickly.
Better than “We’ll see you in a week.”

Speed is power. More so than ever in “this economy.”

Real estate isn’t immune. Buyers want help and information when they want it, where they want it. Companies, possibly your competitors, are rushing in to fill the huge hole left open by lumbering real estate giants stuck in yesterday’s thinking. You can too. You have all the tools, opportunity and leverage to make great things happen in “this economy.”

The internet, new communication channels, social media, print-on-demand, low-cost back office solutions and unlimited outsource opportunities have leveled the playing field for everyone. There’s very little uphill on the internet and 90%+ of your business is there, searching, learning and looking for a real connection to help them through the process.

So the next time you hear the resistance chant of “in this economy?” say “Yes, in this economy. We don’t have a choice.”
(Thanks to Brian Mann for the inspiration.)

But the “do-it-yourself” culture of the web encourages brokers to develop their own marketing assets. The trouble is that much of the DIY tools use a cookie-cutter template approach which often results in really poor marketing materials.

In this 5min video, longtime NPR journalist Ira Glass talks about looking for the gap between your good taste and what you actually produce.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Being self-critical is key to getting better.

Gary Vaynerchuk

I’m a big supporter of Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s a class act, unbelievably passionate about connections, transparency and cutting out all the bull-crap that slows companies and people down.

The following is an audio interview Gary gave during Inman Connect in New York. Gary gives his view on how real estate professionals can better use social media to improve their business.

MP3 download

Learn more about Gary at his site www.garyvaynerchuk.com

Get his new book Crush It:

Idea

Death and taxes were the only guarantees in life until Man invented meetings. So as long as we’re guaranteed to have meetings we might as well try to make the best of them. There’s plenty of info, tips & tricks to run more productive meetings but what happens after the meeting? How does all that stuff get done? If you’re like me you take a ton of meeting notes to keep track of everything. But after the meeting how do we process and execute on all the stuff within those notes & chicken scratch created during meetings?

A pretty typical scenario for me is to have several meetings over several days where each meeting generates pages of notes. Some time later when revisiting those notes I found that trying to interpret the action items and key points of the meeting was taking way too much brain power. I was trying to decipher page after page of chicken scratch to figure out what I had captured, what needed to be done and where I could delegate. Not good. I needed a better way.

I began trying different note taking methods then it hit me. Why not apply the same visualization techniques used in design to the note-taking process? Why not give some context to the notes by adding graphical elements to the information? To put it simply, I began adding home-grown contextual icons in the side margin of the pages to show specific aspects within the notes.

The productivity results have been huge.

I developed  simple icon drawings to use during meetings. The productivity results have been huge. I can pick up week-old meetings notes and at a glance know just what I need to do. No more reading & interpreting chicken scratch. The icons are so simple anyone can draw them. The method is to add them to the side margin as you’re writing the notes. The basic codex looks like this:

Click to enlarge:

Schedule a Meeting

Idea

Important

Question

Email to

Create or Action Item

Research

Check Into

Figure Out

Schedule

 

Here’s a before and after example:

Click to enlarge:

Before

After

 

The example on the left has no context of the written text whereas the eye can easily focus on specific actions with the example on the right.

I can scan the notes and figure out what sort of action needs to take then cross off the icon as I complete the items.

This may not work for everyone but it’s helped me get better control of the information overload and my hope is that it might help you too.

In this short video Dan Pink brings some insight to the topic of compensation. Much of what we thought about what motivates & drives employees to perform well turns out to be wrong.

Watch this 18min video to find out why.

(Click here if you can’t see the video.)

Tactic Treadmill

If  you want to improve your fitness you have a lot of options and one of them might be a treadmill. The thing about treadmills is that you do a lot of work, spend a lot of time & energy and you don’t really get anywhere. As soon as the treadmill stops, the value stops.

You also have a number of choices to improve your business. It turns out there’s been one very popular choice I call the “tactical treadmill of business.” It looks something like this: You need customers so you place an ad in the newspaper. After that runs for a while it’s time to place an ad in the quarterly magazine  (where  it takes an enormous amount of time to get the ad  just right). Along the way you do a little direct mail trying to connect with people in your “database.”  As soon as that’s done it’s time to advertise in the newspaper again. And around and around and around it goes looking something like this:

Click to enlarge

If we plot the value of the Tactical Treadmill versus time we get a graph that used to look something like this:

Value vs Time

In the past, using the Treadmill had some certainty of a return but now there are two big problems with relying on the tactical treadmill of business.

First, when the treadmill goes away so does the value. When cash is tight and you spend less, the value is much less. Hop off the treadmill and all the value disappears. All that stuff is now in the landfill.

Second, many of the key elements that the treadmill depended on have changed. Advertising costs and response rates are going in opposite directions; ad rates are going up & response rates are going down. The number of information channels are going up at the same time our attention span is going down. At my house, for example, TV shows don’t start at 7:00 p.m., they start at 7:20 because we record them, skip the commercials and we’re still done by 8:00.

When the treadmill goes away so does the value.

Successful businesses have abandoned the Tactic Treadmill and are focusing their efforts on creating new value and connecting with customers in more meaningful ways.

As you look to the new year how about a different approach? I’d like to suggest an approach that gets you off the tactical treadmill and results in a graph that looks something like this:

Get off The Treadmill

The hard part is this approach isn’t worth very much when you start. But over time it has the potential to outperform the tactical treadmill and won’t be subject to the same downward forces as traditional media.

If you can begin to leverage some of the new opportunities of today, you’ll start to grow and develop marketing & permission assets that don’t go away, don’t diminish over time and continue to provide value as you move forward.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be posting a series of articles on ways to do this.

- How to listen & why it’s the best thing you can do now.
– How successful companies are realigning their business to satisfy customers.
– The biggest change traditional media wishes you didn’t know about.
– Why the new stuff isn’t the old stuff.

Thanks for reading!

Download

Here’s a new e-Book that’s flying around the interwebs and for good reason. Over 70 incredible business people & authors have come together to create an e-Book of short but powerful essays.

As most of us begin to think about New Year’s resolutions this is a terrific primer to that process. For example, I read the whole thing then printed out certain essays that were  most impactful to me.

I promise this will help you think in ways to help you & your organization move forward.

The PDF is free & you can view it in the embedded Scribd player below (click “Full Screen”) or you can download it here.
Inside you will find articles by such writers as:

Chris Anderson
Martha Beck
Seth Godin
Chip and Dan Heath
Tony Hsieh
Ariana Huffington
Anne Jackson
Mitch Joel
Guy Kawasaki
Tim O’Reilly
Daniel Pink
Tom Peters
Dave Ramsey
Tim Sanders
Gina Trapani
Gary Vaynerchuk

What Matters Now

Paul Reinarz

There are plenty of communication tools for real estate professionals to choose from but there are few that are made specifically for real estate and even fewer that are taking advantage of Web 2.0+ technology.

Rezora is just that;  a new online communications tool designed specifically for real estate that allows brokers to easily communicate with clients in a way that’s personal & relevant.

I got to speak with one of the founders of Rezora Paul Reinarz about the new service. Give it a listen.

Questions? Email Paul

(Disclaimer: I have no investment in the company nor any financial relationship with Rezora.)

Get this interview in iTunes:

Press the green button to play: