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?

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!

The Social Reef

This is a terrific storyboard that uses an underwater metaphor to illustrate the platforms and the players.

Jeremiah Owyang has a terrific blog and should be on your list of must-reads.
www.web-strategist.com

www.steamboatblogs.com

It’s far complete so if you have a blog or know of one that should be included let me know in the comments below. In watching this develop over the past few weeks it’s been interesting to see all the positive things posted about Steamboat.

I’m totally open to suggestions too (like I’m not sure this is the final look & feel).

You can also subscribe to updates via email. You’ll get an email once a day with all the new stuff posted over the past 24 hours.

Subscribe to Steamboat Blogs – What we are saying about Steamboat by Email

It’s far complete so if you have a blog or know of one that should be included let me know in the comments below.

There were other media outlets chanting predictions like “The end is near,” and “Will this be the next great depression?” Here’s a picture from an Apple Store I was in recently and, I promise, they were not serving soup:

Apple is doing really, really well. So well in fact that this past quarter Apple, that sells premium products, had their best non-holiday quarter in Apple history. So, I think it makes sense to look at some strong companies, especially companies who have either survived or thrived during very tough times. If you go all the way back to the Great Depression you can find some interesting companies that thrived and grew during that time. You don’t need to go very far because it turns out some interesting things happened here in Steamboat.

Steamboat & the Great Depression

When the Great Depression hit around 1929, about 50 percent of Steamboat businesses died. Even the main bank of Steamboat, First National Bank, closed its doors and most Steamboat residents who had all their money in that bank lost everything. These guys lost just about everything as well:

Clarence & Olin Light

These two guys are Clarence and Olin Light and at the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929 they had a very tough decision to make. They could continue business as usual and face an almost certain end or they could try to take advantage of some of the tools of the day, take a risk, do some things a little differently, modify their business and see what would happen. They choose the latter. Clarence & Olin leveraged the tools of the day to be able to market themselves and connect with customers and provide value in a way that had never been provided in this area. In 1929, they took F.M. Light & Sons on the road, bringing their products to the ranches and farmers and people in rural areas. They initially started with their own cars by filling them with products and taking them on the road to ranches and farm houses to show samples & take orders. Business took off and soon they expanded to several trucks to meet the demand.

Tools of the Day

So the point is, rather than sit in their retail shop clinging to outdated business methods, hoping things would work out, they used the tools of the day, trucks and mail, to generate new business. And so they traveled all over northwestern Colorado, Wyoming, and down into Eagle County. F.M. Light & Son not only made it through the Great Depression but they actually grew during the Great Depression. It turns out that between 1929 and 1930 their business increased by 30 percent because of what they were doing and it increased again between 1930 and 1931. By the time 1937 rolled around, and most of the country was out of the Great Depression their floor space was three times bigger than it was before the depression and their store had expanded twice.

You Have a Choice

Today we’re all in a similar position in that we can continue to do business as usual and continue to go down that road or we can begin to look at business in a different way and take advantage of the new tools of the day to connect and communicate with new businesses and new customers, deepen our relationships and grow our businesses.

Sure some of these new tools include social tools like Facebook & Twitter but these are just the latest & loudest tools. There are many others worth exploring; tools that can help manage relationships, projects & assets. Tools that can help you create better email news letters, manage your time and help you be a little more independent from the office. Here’s a graphic of every online service I use to communicate and manage business everyday:

Click to enlarge

Most are free or very low-cost so what are you waiting for?

This is IMPORTANT and you need to know about it RIGHT AWAY.

Tonight Facebook is staging one of the biggest virtual land grabs ever - the rush to claim your own name on Facebook.com.

You’ve heard of Internet Marketers claiming that the surge of traffic crashed their servers?

Well tonight there will be a server rush that has rarely, if ever, been duplicated on the Net. And you NEED to be part of it.

Right now if you want to send someone to your profile, you have to figure out a URL that looks something like this:

www.facebook.com/people/Your-Name/585946540
(That’s an inactive URL, BTW, so don’t click it.)

But wouldn’t you rather own www.facebook.com/yourname?

And this becomes even MORE important for Facebook Fan Pages (not your regular friend profiles, the pages you can set up to promote your business.) Can you imagine how devastating it would be to have someone else own your company name in Facebook?

In the past, it was easy to own your own name on Facebook, all you had to do was to spend a large amount with Facebook (think $50,000+ per month) or be a huge celebrity, and it was yours.

But starting tonight at midnight Eastern US time (that would be 9:00pm Pacific time) you can claim your name as a facebook URL. Plus, you can claim names for your business pagestoo.

But here’s the catch – it’s first come, first serve. Imagine a couple of hundred MILLION people all try to grab their name at the same time, and there will be some interesting server shenanigans occuring.

Here’s what to do.

Tonight at midnight US Eastern time, login to Facebook then go to http://www.facebook.com/username

You will see a form that will give you several suggested usernames, and the ability to choose your own. Either choose one of the names suggested or type in your own.

Repeat this process for any Facebook Fan Pages you administer, though there are three catches: first, your page must have over 1000 fans prior to May 31st 2009, you can’t claim something generic like travel or insurance, and you can’t claim someone else’s trademark.

In fact, if you have a registered trademark, I suggest you go to
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=username_rights
right now to prevent others from grabbing your name.

If someone else has already has your name, get creative - add a period, or a dash, shorten it, lengthen it, or slap a number in there somewhere.

That’s the drill. I’ll be there at midnight, and I suggest you be there too.

At a minimum all these things had to line up: inexpensive video cameras, video codecs, hosting, searching, sharing, editing, the opportunity & desire for people to post the initial vids.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So the question is, what’s available in your world that can be mashed-up to create something completely new and interesting to your audience? I bet if you spend some time exploring you’ll find something of value that’s worth sharing.

As so much of successful marketing moves away from canned, corporate-speak, towards authentic conversations it might make sense to look at opportunities and content that already exist.

The Rocky Mountain News is publishing it’s final edition today. They are done.

We recently launched WeLoveSteamboat.com, a community user-generated content site about why we love Steamboat, for Wild Horse Meadows. I have been amazed at the traction and interest the site is getting. Over the past few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to meet with Steamboat business owners, community leaders and other interested parties to introduce and discuss the site and how they can participate and benefit. The response in these meetings & conversations has been 110% positive, enthusiastic and appreciative. People are excited about the opportunity that they can participate in the story of Steamboat. They are excited that a resource is being created that they can share with friends on FaceBook and others around the world. We even created free, branded WeLoveSteamboat.com video widgets for businesses to add to their site which gives them instant Steamboat content.

So as the Rocky Mountain News publishes it’s last edition today I’m sharing this terrific article about the future of media.

Article:

February 19, 2009

Clinging To The Past Is Not A Strategy

Posted by Adam Singer in Opinions, Randomness

How do you feel about Viacom suing YouTube for a billion dollars?

How about the RIAA pushing ISPs to hand over user data?

What about the Wall Street Journal editor claiming Google devalues everything it touches?

And now Hulu Hollywood pulling content from Boxee?

In each of these cases (and throngs of others), these organizations only succeed in:

* Destroying their public image with an onslaught of negative publicity

* Demonstrating how out of touch they are with our world

* Positioning themselves as companies clinging to a past that is no longer a reality

* Slowing down progress in an ultimate, inevitable transition that can’t be legislated or sued away

* Turning their back on tools which enable a profitable and prolific future that can actually makes their users happy

* Branding themselves as draconian

* Standing on the wrong side of the future media crossroads

The future of content does not belong to those who try to lock it down, sue, or otherwise impede the direction of an open information society. We’re pretty much already that, and it’s a beautiful world for companies who organize around making content open and accessible.

Unfortunately those in the previous guard making the decisions can’t see beyond their myopic view of the past world they built empires on top of. That world doesn’t exist anymore, and no amount of lobbying can put the genie back in the bottle.

The never-ending parade of drama we see every day of battles between old media and technology are difficult to read because the new tools around us are so exciting and enable so much. Not in terms of piracy, in terms of possibility for everyone to have a voice. We have given birth to a long tail of influence, authority and content – which has been enabled to thrive due to technology that old media would be happy to see go away. The truth is, everyone can thrive here, but the problem is those with power have grown complacent and can’t view a world where they are not king.

This is creating much more than a PR nightmare. The music industry is in big trouble right now because they ignored the shift. Print media is suffering the same fate. Hollywood is making similar missteps. And, as history repeats itself, the reality is none of these industries are as permanent as you make them out to be in your mind. Media has always changed with technology, usually with a fight. Scribes were put out of work with the advent of the printing press, the telephone killed the telegraph, video killed the radio star. You know the story.

Allowing the natural flow of society to shift to the most efficient forms of media and communications due to advances in technology is the path we must take to improve our world at the macro level. Creating unnatural barriers in an attempt to block advancements in technology merely because it disrupts a business model is doomed for failure. Embracing the shifts and building businesses around them is the logical move.

Long term, the examples above won’t even matter. We’ve built a world of citizen-powered media, and many smart organizations within industries are diving in and providing professional level content in an open format and profiting quite well from it (it can be done). Right now it’s a bit disjointed but if you’re a part of this you can literally taste the future of communications. I’ve said this before and I stick with it: it has never been a better time to be a talented content producer of any type.

While equilibrium is reached and the big players take a scorched earth, ignore the past strategy – you have a tremendous opportunity to quietly build something amazing that thrives in an open-information economy.

Please visit Adam’s terrific blog at www.thefuturebuzz.com.

It seems there might be some room for improvement and/or an opportunity.