The Scobles (Robert and Maryam) led a fun presentation which began as 10 ways to killer blog, but ended as a way to 15 fun (and potentially valuable) tips.
It was a fun talk and Maryam’s giddy attitude was infectious with the crowd playing along with fun questions.
Out of all the sessions at the Blog Business Summit, the session on building online communities held a special place of interest for me. In many ways, I simply happened upon the community that I’ve built at RCG, so it was refreshing to hear the speakers articulating thoughts I’ve had on how to build a community. In many ways, building a community feels somewhat intuitive (i.e. respect your users), but it turns out that the details often lead to tricky minefields. In many ways, this lesson highlighted just how far behind the real estate sphere is in creating effective online communities.
The three panelists, Elisa Camahort, Tara Hunt, Betsy Aoki, have all spent time on the front lines dealing with the good and bad of building up an online community.
Tara Hunt’s background includes running the grassroots marketing of Riya, which launched with a tremendous amount of buzz. On a high level, here are some high level tips for building a community:
I’m currently attending the Blog Business Summit at the Bell Harbor Conference Center at Pier 66 in Seattle. It’s a beautiful facility (and wifi works well!).
The first session led by Jason Calacanis was a great and very personal history about blogging. If I had to summarize his talk in a few words, it would be about the importance of authenticity. With a great list of speakers, (including Robert Scoble whose blogging about Jason’s announcement of a new podcast on PodTech) it should be a great couple of days!
As I learn stuff at the conference, I’ll try to put together updates of things that I’m learning!
(By the way, I randomly sat down next to Drew Meyers of Zillow,and I’ve already ran across Paul Chaney of Blogging Systems)
UPDATE: Just noticed that Drew has a personal blog where he has a great summary of Jason’s talk.
I’d like to open this thread up to a conversation on the health of the Seattle market…
but there is a catch. I will not allow it to dissolve into a conversation about racism, liberals, RCG, or faith. If you’d like to have a reasonable intellectual conversation, you are more than welcome to participate. If you attack me, RCG, or any contributor, then I’ll happily delete your comment.
By the way, please consider this post the “anti-linkbating” post. Not only will I quickly delete any off topic comments, but more importantly, I will mark those comments as “spam”. That will allow me to ban your email, name, IP, etc. from the site after only a few off-topic comments.
Two days ago, Michael Lindekugel of Team Reba made a very interesting comment. No one ever challenged him on the merits of his argument, so I think it makes an appropriate starting point into a discussion on the health of the Seattle market:
It’s the hot topic at most cocktail parties. Is Seattle going to experience a bubble and burst? The short answer is no…..the long answer follows:
We experienced a busy market with a shortage of supply and increasing demand resulting in four or five offers and short “Days On Market
Yesterday, Russ Cofano and I gave another blogging seminar, this time in Seattle as part of Ed.con 2006 put on by the Washington Realtor Association.
[photopress:elvis_and_liberace.jpg,full,alignright]I thought the day went over really well and considering it was the first seminar we’d given to the “home town
My list is a little longer than Greg’s…
Akismet. A must for WP blogs… I’ve complained in the past how their service is somewhat of a blackhole and I can’t seem to rescue a few of the people who leave comments on RCG from the Akismet spam filter. Nonetheless, the service catches hundreds of spam messages every moment. If I didn’t have a life, I could just keep hitting refresh on my spam filter and there would always be another spam message to delete. Matt, if you’re listening... Here are the two improvements I’d like to see. (1) A way to not have spam limited to showing only the most recent 150 spam messages. Recently, I’ve had two different people leave comments who say there were picked up by the spam filter, but because my queue had already built up to greater than 150 messages, I had no way to rescue them. When I hit the “delete all” button, I only (wrongly) reinforced that these people were spam. (2) A way to rescue people who are labeled spam from deep within the blackhole of Akismet’s database. Galen, one of RCG’s contributor’s has to go “save himself” every time he posts. This sucks! (but is better than me dealing with 450 spam messages a day!)
Exec-PHP. Allows for Admin and Editors to write PHP code within their posts… Both dangerous and powerful and the easiest way to get the Archive plugin to work.
Filosofo Comments Preview. This allows for the preview button. I wish I had time to figure out how to format the “preview” page, but I remember spending a whole evening on that one time and not making enough progress, so I just leave it unformatted. It’s ugly, but better than not having the preview option!
Gravatars. This plugin allows me to easily show the author’s photo on the beginning of every post. At one point, I tried to set this up to allow commenters to have their own gravatars (which is the more common use for this plugin), but I couldn’t get it to work with my theme.
Recent Comments. This really nice plugin lets me show the most recent comments on the sidepanel. It is highly configurable and very easy to work with. I attribute the use of this plugin to the high comment level that we get on many RCG posts because it allows everyone to easily seeing where there is “action” on the site…
GeoPress. This allows me to geocode my posts so that they show up over a map. If you haven’t seen this in action, then you’re going to have to wait a little longer. Normally, when you visit adetail page on Anna’s home search tool, a bunch of little rain drops show up that represent blog posts about that location. At the moment, no rain drops are showing up and I suspect this is because of changes to the server during my recent move and Robbie and I never noticed it was broken (until now!). It’s a very cool feature and way under-utilized by me. Note that the author mentions there is a new and improved version of the plugin here.
PhotoPress. This was top-of-the-line when I first started built RCG a year and a half ago. Since then, WP has designed a built-in photo uploaded that is better integrated with the core system. However, I’m stuck on the old photo upload program because I don’t even want to try thinking about reloading all the photos to a new system and getting everything to work. I dread thinking about the day when the PhotoPress people stop updating their code because demand has shrunk. That’s the day I’m going to be forced to hire a developer for this site!
WP-Print. Add a little printer icon next to the post and allows people to print off a clean looking version of the post. I never print articles, but I’ve heard others do, so this is meant to help save a few trees.
Role Manager. This lets me be very picky about what the different contributors can do on the site… Do I want Jon to upload photos but not publish? Do I want to give Ardell all “editor” rights except the ability to run PHP within posts? This plugin handles that kind of thing.
WP-Stats. This page provides a lot of pretty useless stats, but I installed it and have never turned it off… On the day when I decide to award free-round vacation packages to the top 10 WP contributors, I’ll use this plugin because it counts links like number of posts by author and number of comments by author.
Smart Archives. Clean, simple, smart archive.
Ultimate Tag Warrior. This this is so feature rich, I’ll never even play around with half the options on my beta site. At this point, I’ve been keeping it pretty simple and using the code to tag the bottom of blog posts and create the tag cloud in the archives.
WordPress Database Backup. A backup option without the need to go into PHPmyAdmin! Greg once mentioned that he linked my quote: “I believe real estate agents are either in marketing or broke”… Today’s version: “People running website either backup on a regular basis, or they are broke!”.
WP-Contact Form. Simple, but useful, contact form. I use it on the buyer information and seller information pages. (note: this is also the way that I monetize this blog! 😉 )
Here’s a few stories from around the real estate blogsphere I found interesting…
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Phil is obviously have some fun in Boise, although others may find his anatomy of a listing he won’t take more relevant to recent RCG conversations…
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Jonathan sends out a blogger’s prayer and some really nice words about RCG.. Thanks!
Fortunately, I ran into Ardell DellaLogia, her blog, and the Rain City Guide. Between her advice and her blog, and the larger Seattle based blog to which she contributed, I got a sense of what a blog could be – articulate, meaningful, educational. And that’s what I decided I wanted and what I’ve strived for, with mixed success.
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The xBroker is clearly and definitely over-the-top. Yet, despite the self-promotion that permeates all of his posts, I really like this guy. In emails and blog posts, he’s come across as someone who is definitely informed and wants to communicate his knowledge… There’s definitely a there, there…
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Tech alert: Greg Linden turned me on to a very interesting post by Google’s Steve Yegge, where he looks at the management of Google through the lens of the Agile programming philosophy. The story would have been good enough, but then Microsoft’s Dare Obasanjo made it better by comparing the ideas to the (failed) management structure at Enron… All three posts are worth reading (but make sure you have some time!).
At around 8pm, I woke up from a late afternoon nap to see that Ardell still had over 30 posts to write and I got a worried… So I took a Newcastle out of the fridge and started writing. I figured that should it become necessary, I could pass along a few extra posts to Ardell… (Greg’s not the only one with a competitive streak!) But she obviously didn’t need my help as she has just made it to 100 on her own! Awesome stuff!!!
Congrats to both Greg and Ardell… You’re both amazing.
However, because I hate to see things go to waste, I’ll go ahead publish the mini-blog posts I was going to pass along to Ardell. My intention was only to write a few “filler” posts, but…
1) I believe Greg when he says he could hit 135 in one day… The man in an animal!
2) Speaking of jobs! Give this man the full-time job as the Open House blogger… With articles like this fun one on an whimsical (artist) house and timely articles like this one on the number of NWMLS price reductions. Steve has come a long way in a few weeks since he asked me how to get some traction to his blog.
3) I steal a lot of “Rain City” traffic, so here’s my chance to give back:
4) Greg points out this post on the Trulia Blog… Considering all the work that Sami and Pete have done to bridge the gap with the broker community, I’m surprised they let that post slip through…
5) In search of a snippet…
6) Kris turns a strange day into a great 12-step program for blogging… However, note that most 12-step programs try to ween you of addictions while Kris is trying to give you one. You’ve been warned.
7) Review of the Bloodhound Blog… Nobody, and I mean nobody, feels more comfortable calling real estate B.S. when and where he sees it. With a fluent style, a quick wit, and a massive quantity of writing under his belt, the man has become addicting.
8) How to discuss Marlow’s recent post about Trulia’s expansion without sounding self-serving??? I put together a Excel spreadsheet that examines not only how many listings each service has, but also how many “accurate” listings each service has for one zip-code (98117) in Seattle. The results highlight a bunch of interesting things like (1) Redfin’s zip-code search is broken (i.e. a search on 98117 returns results for other zip codes like 98203 and does not return all the homes that Redfin has with a zip-code of 98117), (2) Realtor.com is missing more than a few Windermere listings (I was surprised when Marlow mentioned this, but the results pan out), and (3) Trulia has a long way to go before they are comprehensive. If someone wanted to take this data and add one more zip code in some other part of the country, I’d love to post the results. Maybe a Bay Area agent can take this on since all the sites in question have operations there!
9) One of the things I most admire about Ardell is that she focuses on the service (and then delivers a rebate). While it Bill’s approach makes for great blog posts, focusing on the “discount” doesn’t work for me.
10) I still haven’t made sense out of what it means to be part of a “Christian Real Estate Network”, but the guy does some great real estate blog posts… I like his latest on ways to learn about your competitor’s website is another doozy… although he does miss out on the most obvious trick, which is to use technorati to see who else is linking to them!
11) Interesting to see the competitiveness of the rental market…
12) I’m not sure who, but someone once said… “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” That’s the theme for these blog posts!
13) However, I must give credit to Jim for his excellent post on “why blog?”
14) Jay makes a bunch of valid points when he says it is time to “raising the bar” on becoming a real estate agent… Since stricter requirements would serve to keep out additional competition, I’m assuming that most successful agents would agree.
15) Tom echos this point, andapplauds the Governator’s move to require more education for California agents…
16) Merv continues to deliver with his price trend analysis… If you’re looking for good ways to display real estate data start with Merv!
17) Then go check out Mike’s Altos Research blog because he makes price trend analysis easy…
18) While just about anything is possible, tracking my net worth based on my home’s zestimate and MyYahoo stock tracking performance is going to far for me… and then making a button for the whole wide world to see? No thanks!
[photopress:realty_blogging_book.jpg,full,alignright]19) The real estate blog marketing book is available for pre-purchase on amazon… I spoke to these guys while they were writing the book and will be curious to read it!
20) Thinking of amazon wish lists… This four bedroom home in Malibu is currently on the market…
21) They are easy enough to find, but Hanan alerted me to this ironic clip of Bush…
22) “Seller will pay 6 months of mortgage payments“… (I’m all for good incentives, but is this loan fraud?)
23) The Inman Blog follows up on Trulia’s post where they asked a few real estate professionals to predict the August numbers… It seems no one really knows what’s going on, and if they do, they sure aren’t letting you know in a blog post! 😉
24) As usual, if you want the real scoop on the numbers, turn to Jonathan.
25) The group at Inman also wonder if the people over at Freddie Mac have their pulse on the Latino culture… I’m not holding my breath.
26) Jonathan is also wondering where are all the foreclosures… interesting stuff. I think there are a lot of bubble bloggers that are ampted up and ready to pounce should these trends ever change. I wonder how long they can keep up their intensity before their bubbles deflate… 🙂
27) Speaking of numbers… Peter over at the Business Week blog does an excellent job explaining one example where housing numbers have been so obviously manipulated…
28) I always like reading a blog posts from Sandy, but I just wish that she kept her posts short-and-sweet as oppose to long-and-infrequent.
29) Joel points out an unorthodox use of Zillow’s data… I haven’t looked through their API documentation, but do they insist that you add their name/logo when you use their data? How about refelcting them in a good light? Interesting stuff.
30) Now that they clog up our inboxes, real estate leads are a legitimate business [link removed]… On any given day, I literally get 100s of spam and my guess is that over 3/4 or them are real estate related. Thank you google for putting together such a good spam filter. I wouldn’t be able to handle the email I get to my blog email account with the filters on Outlook… I think I would just give up on email!
31) Elizabeth Razzi says that we should get to know the neighborhood before we buy a place. Not exactly brilliance, but it serves as a good reminder that there really are some intangibles that require more than an aerial view of a property!
32) Cherokee is looking for information on the Snoqualmie area… Pak gave one answer, but I’m sure there are others who could help! 🙂
33) The Seattlest gives hogwash a rave review as a fun for the whole family.
Hogwash – An Improvised Tall Tale For Small Children
Runs Saturdays at 2 p.m. until October 28, 2006
Historic University Theater, 5510 University Way NE (University District)
$10, Reservations – 206-297-1767
34) I like Rory’s approach: “I assert that a Real Estate Agent’s expertise and professionalism should be visible in their service and knowledge of the housing market and inventory. Their expertise should never be based on a carrot and stick ploy to drip feed clients MLS information.
35) Do you get comfort knowing that the home of the NAR president is lingering on the market? 🙂
36) If you’re curious, I’m going by the code name “tyr” in the Inkling Market set up by Keven Boer. At this point, I’m down… It seems more and more people are voting for Greg… Will a last minute spurt of posts from me help out???
37) The title may be a mouthful, Creative agreement may enable advantageous use of otherwise unavailable homesite, but Marlow points out a great example of the benefits of getting creative!
38) Welcome to the neighborhood…
39) When Shaquille O’Neal makes a $1B real estate investment, that’s a great story!
40) Claudia lets us know about the renevotations that hurt!
41) David organizes another fascinating (and colorful) post on the connection between home life and healthy aging…
Waking up this morning, I was pretty impressed to find that Ardell is already at 22 posts in the 101 Challenge… At that rate, she’ll make about 60 posts today if she doesn’t slow down!
And then I noticed Greg is at 50. Wow! Someone needs to spike his coffee with some sleeping pills! 🙂
Ardell: If I may… it is time to pump up the quantity and not worry about quality! You’re at the perfect stage to write about 50 filler posts: simple, short, one link-type posts. And then end the day, finish up with some high quality Ardell classics! 🙂
My current host has pissed me off… I’ve been using InMotionHosting for quite a while and I used to brag about how great they were because their tech support was awesome. But I think they must have had some major cut-backs or something because their service has gone way downhill recently and now I’m looking for a new host!
What did they do to upset me? There are two things.
All this leads me to search for a new host!
I don’t need to much from them other than the knowledge that they will be able to host a WP blog and that their technical support will be able to answer some pretty basic questions on an infrequent basis. And if you get a bonus for recommending me, all the better!
(and if RCG goes down later today, you can be pretty sure that it is because I haven’t had the time to switch over hosts just yet… But rest assured that we’ll be back up as soon as possible!)