Tag Archives: Tech

Interview with Mary McKnight of RSS Pieces

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[photopress:mary_mcknight.jpg,full,alignright]As the online face of RSS Pieces, Mary has quickly become an influential member of the real estate blogging community by freely giving her expertise on many technical areas of real estate blogging. She’s fun, interesting, opinionated and intelligent… What more could we ask for?

What inspired you to start blogging?

I actually started blogging years ago on a number of fitness sites because it was a passion of mine and blogging was a way of connecting with other aficionados and sharing my experience and knowledge. That’s where I developed my unique voice and my strategy for driving traffic and penning posts that keep readers coming back. believe me, I crashed and burned many times when I first started blogging. Back then, there wasn’t a manual for how to do it- it was all trial and error. But over time, I came up with a formula that worked. So, when we entered the real estate market with a blogging product, I applied the same successful
formula I used for my fitness articles.

Are there any special topics or issues that you enjoy covering?

I love anything about emerging technologies so topics covering web 3.0, the semantic web, FAOF and SIOC are what I’m interested in covering now. But my roots are definitely tutorial posts. I like writing them and I love knowing that in some way I have helped Realtors to build their knowledge base so they have the tools to grow their business. I’m a big believer in giving people the tools to build their business regardless of which blogging product they use.

[photopress:rss_pieces.jpg,full,alignright]What have you done to personalize your blog?

I always try to use a conversational tone and talk to my readers rather than type at them. I hate to be lectured or read dry technical manuals (which I read a lot of), so I like to keep my posts fun and often campy. I also like to share little bits of my life in posts so readers can connect with me directly. I find that when people feel that they know you and can connect with you they are more likely to contact you or share themselves with you. I receive the most comments and emails from posts where I share bits of my life. Here is an article I wrote about humanizing your blog for intimacy.

Do you have any favorite posts?

By far my favorite post was the meme- I loved watching that virus spread throughout the industry and beyond.

I also have a special place for each post that I penned as a guest host on other blogs because I can’t believe anyone would trust me with their blog!

My favorite tutorial posts are:

What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?

Good question. A blog has to be stellar to make my feed reader and here
are the top 5 feeds in my reader from Real Estate and Other.

Real Estate:

Other:

What tools/websites do you find most helpful in putting together your blog?

The RSS Pieces system was built by the ground up by our own staff so all the tools we need for SEO and add-on functionality are already inside the system but here are some of my favorite development and free SEO tools:

Macromedia Homesite, Widexl, NUAH, iWebTool, Zen Studio, W3C, RSS Pieces SEO tools. We also are always looking at what the power bloggers are doing and what the industry thinks is on the horizon.

How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?

Blogging is an essential component of our marketing strategy since we are a blogging company. I think as a blogging company you have to prove that your system works by making it work for your own company. I hope that our little blog does show clients and prospective bloggers that you can build success with blogging in a fairly short period of time through strategic content, a little bit of home grown marketing, quality SEO and a lot of attitude.

What plans do you have to improve your blog over this next year?

  • Implementation of the semantic web in our blogging platform so each of our blogs will web 3.0 enabled
  • Drag and drop template configuration so users can rearrange the way their sites look without having to call the developers to recode them.
  • Better online image editing and gallery management in our editor
  • Better support for people using cell pones and PDAs

What is the one tool or feature that you wish your site had?

Better support for people using cell pones and PDAs.

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?

I think the line between blogs and websites will be blurred so much that people won’t be able to tell the difference. Blogs will take on more traditional website features like listing searches and mortgage calculators. They will begin to replace their website counterparts. This is the direction in which RSS Pieces has been moving. Traditional blogs are pretty featureless by nature, more and more companies will begin to add features to their blogs so they can become their central on-line presence. Also, once FAOF and SIOC are in place, blogs, forums, aggregators and other social media sites will become more interconnected giving blogs a firmer foothold on the Internet as information resources.

I also think that natural selection will occur and as the blog population grows, weaker blogs will die off and the overall quality of the remaining blogs will increase.

Thanks, Mary, for taking the time to answer these questions!

Everyone else, feel free to leave a comment or peruse these other interviews with other influential real estate bloggers…

Let me get this straight, you will pay me if it rains???

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If you live in Seattle you will understand what I am talking about here. We had a client flying in to relocate to Seattle and with the weather we have been having, they have already had to cancel a home buying trip already. So watching the forecast the past week we decided this would be a good weekend to come buy a home in our beautiful city.

They flew in Friday night and we double checked with our local weather hero Walter Kelly (Q13) to make sure it would be ok for Saturday. About noon on Saturday we came to find out the 1000s of web sites out there that were predicting for mostly sunny skies all weekend were WRONG. Not only did we not have mostly sunny skies (like we did on Sunday) we had snow. That combined with the cold snap, our roads were not incredibly safe for driving all over the city. We did make it around and were able to make a joke out of it and were laughing about the fact that the weather ‘pros’ may very well be for pure entertainment. No matter what anyone says, it seems like there is never a 100% guarantee (actually, not even 75%).

Not only was it difficult for us to get around, but some the houses we were showing had tenants who had to leave while we showed. I started to think about my obligation to the client if we would have been snowed in and could not drive around. Of course I could not be held liable for what WE all felt was a good weekend, but you want to keep your customers as happy as you can.

[photopress:weatherbilllogo_sml.jpg,full,alignright]Then came as an answer to any agents prayers (or person with a wedding, outdoor BBQ, garage sale, etc), Weatherbill; a Web 2.0 launched today. They essentially are creating a market for that which cannot be controlled… weather. Their site puts it best and says, “WeatherBill sells Weather Contracts to eligible buyers. Weather Contracts can be used to protect your business from adverse weather conditions, by paying you when those adverse conditions occur.

Interview with Jim Cronin of The Real Estate Tomato

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[photopress:jim_cronin.jpg,full,alignright]This past summer Jim has came out of seemingly nowhere to quickly become a leading voice in teaching agents how they can use blogging technologies to better market their business online.

With a flair for fun (he has a tomato theme after all!), Jim is always entertaining and has become a daily read for many of us in the real estate blogosphere…

What inspired you to start blogging?

I have been in the online real estate marketing industry since 2000 and have always made an effort to keep an ear to the ground as to what actually works. I started my first real estate marketing blog in mid 2005 as a platform for a potential book. Two posts in, I lost my drive. Then I started to realize that I was getting the majority of my own news from blogs; baseball, politics, entertainment… it was all being read on independent blogs. Suddenly I felt that without my own blog, I was falling behind when it came to utilizing the internet as a marketing tool. In late June of this year (2006) I jumped in with both feet, determined to be heard. Never looked back. In fact it has so consumed me that I started a business to consult others how to leverage the business blog as the ultimate online marketing tool.

Are there any special topics or issues that you enjoy covering?

I found my topic niche just as I started to gain a consistent audience, or was it the other way around? It has always been my style to educate, and once I had a grip on why I was gaining readership and search engine success, I was compelled to share it. In turn this changed the landscape of the Tomato’s content, and I chose the path of “real estate blogging consultant”. This choice has helped me separate myself from other great real estate bloggers whom I admire so much: Sellsius, FutureOfRealEstateMarketing, RainCityGuide, Bloodhound to name a few. I still enjoy uncovering a new web 2.0 tool, breaking some news, or picking on the bigger media types (read: RISMedia, NAR etc), but I most enjoy delivering an article that examines the real estate blogger’s concern or challenge and (hopefully) provides some solution.

What have you done to personalize your blog?

Every stitch you see on the Tomato was placed there by me. I have considered redesigning it many times, and in fact have done so in Photoshop, but like the emotional letter you write and never send, the effort itself has been satisfaction enough.

[photopress:realestatetomatobannersm_1.jpg,full,alignright]Do you have any favorite posts?

I am proud of all the educational pieces I have done in the ‘blogging advice‘ category, but there are two posts that, for me, stand out more than any others. The first post I ever wrote, on that first failing blog appears in its original form on the Tomato – It’s called Understanding Your Audience. I feel that this is a subject that anyone marketing their business needs to master. This particular article won’t apply forever, but its concept will.

The other post I can’t ignore is titled ePro Is A Tinfoil Badge. This piece my first attempt at “stirring the pot”. The results we fantastic. Half my audience loved it the other half wanted me hanged. I really feel that it represented the catalyst for my success; I was able to engage the audience that agreed with me and those that weren’t so sure.

What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?

I mention real estate blogs I like all the time, and most of them are probably covered in your interviews… so here are a few personal favorites (non real estate) that I consider the cream of the crop.

Soxaholix. Above and beyond the best sports blog, evah! It is a peak into the Red Sox fan psyche through the dialogue of clipart characters. Hart Brachen (pseudonym, Heart Breaking, get it?) masterfully weaves Boston Red Sox culture and news with pop culture and literary reference into a fabric so entertaining that I actually miss his strip on weekends. In fact it is so good that Yankee fans are actually jealous.

MichelleMalkin. Simple design. Powerful. Attentive. Reactionary. Every political blog should learn from her command. You don’t have to be a republican to recognize her wizardry.

Gizmodo. Gadget Pr0n. ’nuff said.

What tools/websites do you find most helpful in putting together your blog?

iStockPhoto, Wikipedia, Technorati, BlogJet, docs.Google.com, Photoshop, Toshiba, Firefox, Jim Beam and Sonos.

How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?

It is everything. 100% of my business has come from my blogging. In fact, blogging has eclipsed what I did for a living from 2000-2006.

What plans do you have to improve your blog over this next year?

Where do I begin?… Let’s just say that the education we deliver will be bigger, better and more comprehensive than ever. In addition, we look forward to showcasing more guest authors that recognize the Tomato as their personal soapbox for expressing their knowledge of embracing technology as an effective marketing tool.

What is the one tool or feature that you wish your site had?

Number one item: Comments email notification. It is ridiculous that TypePad blogging platforms do not offer the “notify me of new comments” functionality with their software. This is nearly a deal breaker. I have been able to ‘work around’ many other TypePad deficiencies (trackback weakness for example) but this one just drives me crazy. Maintaining the conversation that develops in the comments is crucial, and to not offer it as a standard blogging feature is just ridiculous if not stupid.

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?

The unfathomable amount of content that is generated because of this (gold)rush to blog will persist longer than you and I, no doubt… but in 3 years the blog will no longer be the tool that “gets it done”. TheVlog (video blog) will be the most effective marketing platform for real estate. As the internet, television, Xbox, music, etc. merge into one console, and we sit 15 feet from the flat screen with remote in hand, browsing through channels/websites/whatever do you really see us reading? Video will be the most effective form of marketing (it already is, duh), and learning how to embrace it on an independent basis (like the blog) will be crucial to real estate agents in 2010.

Thank you Jim for this interesting insight! 🙂

Want more? Here are the other interviews I’ve done to date:

Faster than fast, Quicker than quick, Ka-chow!

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While spending quality time w/ the Cars addict in my family (the 3 year old who says “I wanna see the race car movie Daddy”) got me thinking about something that moves faster than Lightning McQueen, the relentless march of high technology.

A couple weeks ago, Real Central VA, had a link to an interesting NAR Center for REALTOR Technology survey on what agents/brokers plan to spend on technology.

Some of the more interesting findings were

  • 95% of agents use digital cameras
  • 90% of them use cell phones
  • 77% of them use PCs
  • 71% have web business sites
  • 60% of agents have IDX search features on their web site
  • Sites with IDX listings generate more leads than sites without listings.
  • 30% of agents spent more than $2000 on technology in 2005
  • Less than 15% of those participating in lead generation programs are satisfied with the results.
  • 67% of agents want their broker to expand their technology offerings.
  • 84% of agents want the MLS to expand the technology and service offered.
  • Most internet leads come from broker web sites or agent web sites
  • Realtor.com was the 3rd largest source of internet leads
  • The Internet is the third most important source of leads (after referrals and repeat business), it is surprising that the majority of agents spent less than $500 to build or maintain their website, and that a super majority of brokers (67%) spent less than $1,000.

The net take away for me was that agents and brokers have an appetite for technology second only to MindCamp attendees, and yet the vast majority of them probably spend more money at Starbucks in given year than they do on their web sites! Given the importance of internet leads, the effectiveness of broker / agent web sites in capturing them, the disappointing effectiveness of lead generation problems, and appetite for more technology it seems to me that the industry on a whole is seriously under investing in technology. There are exceptions of course, but it seems that real estate tech spending is going to have to trend up. Otherwise the tech leaders around here, both inside & outside the industry (RedFin, John L Scott, CB Bain, Zillow, Trulia, etc) will increasingly make real estate professionals look like real estate amateurs.

So where are your tech dollars going in the next year? How much do you plan on spending? How will technology change how and where you use your marketing budgets? More Zillow, Craigslist, and Google ads, and less paper-based ones?

NARdi Gras Blogging

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[photopress:nardi_gras_eventlogo.gif,full,alignright]The folks over at the Center for REALTOR Technology have made it a bit too tempting, so I’ve decided I’m going to blog the NARdi Gras!

Please join me over on the new blog platform on Move.com as I take over the site with a Mardi Gras theme for the next week. 🙂

By the way, if you are attending the convention and plan to blog, let me know! I plan to keep an extensive list of bloggers covering the event!

Also, I’d love to keep track of all the real estate technology products that are going to be announced at the event, so if you’re releasing something, let me know. I already mentioned my first product announcement yesterday (when I said that Top Producer recently unleashed a blogging tool available to any of their clients for FREE!!!), and I’m sure there will be many more to come over the next few days!

Flaming for Ardell

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There’s definitely a tech bent to today’s list…

  1. Starting off with Niki’s interesting take on the Reply.com launch. Niki runs Homethinking, a site dedicated to letting users review agents. I had a chance to talk with him at SF Connect over a beer (or two or three) and got to learn a fair bit about his site. It is definitely worth checking out as there is a lot to the backend of what he’s doing and it is not necessarily what you might fear (assuming you’re an agent!).
  2. Inside Google talks about a fun press release from Intermedia that talks to the snarky discussions that Galen and Robbie have been having around online office applications. Tech blogger Om Malik gives his reason for not using google’s new service.
  3. Others are asking if Google services are joined too tightly? I’d be really curious to get Robbie’s take on that.
  4. Thinking of Google, Ardell, does it help that Google could could be adding 1000 people in Bellevue? (via Greg)
  5. I’m not the only one thinking of Ardell… I noticed someone trying to start a flame war on Craigslist over Ardell (look for the post title: “Get the feeling Realtors read from a script?”)… It was great to see a few people come to her defense and unlike so much of the stuff over there, the flamewar never materialized.
  6. I’m all over microformats, so I was glad to see someone write this post about understanding microformats for the non-technical web professional or marketer. Most relevant to real estate is the hListing format currently being deployed by Edgeio.
  7. Watch out when Greg’s talking about rethinking everything. 🙂
  8. Also, considering Greg’s opinion on hosted blogging platforms is not exactly private knowledge, I thought he might enjoy this comic from Chris Pirillo…
  9. The blogger from from hismove (a christian real estate network???) points out an interesting chart from the NY Times displaying the inflation adjusted home prices in the US since 1890.
  10. Not only are the For Sale By Locals people ready to launch, but these people are serious about going international. Interestingly, they will be launching their official site at a conference in Bolivia. Their temp site looks really bad in firefox, which doesn’t bode well for them in my mind, but considering the massive activity on their blog as of late, I’m definitely interested in seeing what they produce.

Real Estate, Technology and Transparency

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[photopress:transparent.jpg,thumb,alignright]I’ve been running two experiments, trying to find the true meaning and value of transparency in the real estate transaction. I’ve taken all of the things I have known forever, and added the things I’ve learned in recent months, and combined them into a Transparency Model using email.

For as long as I can remember, agents will tell each other things that they would never say to a consumer. Same with most ancillary service providers. We can talk to each other point blank and in short hand and with a clarity that has pinpoint precision. But when talking with the consumer everyone starts being guarded, balancing telling the truth with trying to get their business, and saying what they “know” the consumer wants to hear. Falling into what I call (and hate) “script mode”.

I’ve been having some conversations with agents, while copying “the outsider”…the owner. The other agent didn’t realize I was copying the owner at first, and was responding directly to me without hitting “reply to all”. That was a good thing, because it was quick, it was spot on info, and it was very good and valuable info.

Sometimes the consumer doesn’t know the right questions to ask, or they are just not in the same conversation with us. So we end up “communicating” with the consumer out in left field on some irrelevant tangent, while trying to focus on the real issues all at the same time. Owners tend to fall back into the past, remembering when and why they painted that wall bright purple when their daughter was 10. She is now grown, married and has children of her own. We’re trying very hard to say get rid of that purple, but they’ve lapsed back in the time machine and are standing in the room with their ten year old daughter. When they finally come back and realize you are in the room, you end up saying “yeah, love that purple!”.

By letting the owner watch two agents email back and forth quickly about their home, they “see” the real issues at hand. Very much like that photo up there, it’s as if they are looking through a two sided mirror where they can see us and we don’t see them. If they can’t comprehend it at the moment or if they just can’t take the mental picture of their ten year old out of their head, they can come back later and read it again and again. They absorb the information in small doses, and eventually “get it”.

I remember one owner way back when, who came up with a brilliant idea “in a dream” nine months later, that was exactly what I told him to do, on the first day I met him. He just wasn’t ready to hear it at the time. Too much going on that night. By using email, he can revisit and address all of the ideas in smaller doses.

Email is scary sometimes, because you are putting some hard facts “on paper” that we, in the past, would only say, but not write down. But it introduces a higher level of transparency, because the consumer can go back later and read it again and again. Different people absorb different things each time they read it. I just received an email from a seller in answer to an email I sent maybe ten days ago. She read it ten times before coming to a satisfactory conclusion. Then she emailed me…she’s about 80 years old 🙂

I am going to try, with my “Ardell & Oxford” real estate talks, to bring this “transparency” to RCG. To talk to an agent, woman to woman, pretending no one is watching us talk. NOT about the industry at large. NOT about how agents feel about the industry. I want to talk to an agent about a house and what the seller needs to do to get it sold. I want to talk about a buyer, and why they are or are not being successful in their quest. I want to talk to another agent the way we talk to each other, while everyone else is watching and learning.

Contrary to what Dustin said, it really wasn’t hard for me to find someone who will do this with me, as agents do this with me every day, always have. Now finding someone willing to do it with me live and in your face on RCG, well yes, I have found someone. But that was pure happenstance. Let’s run with it and see what happens. I should have her set up by the end of the week, if not sooner.

We are the “innovators”. Let’s kick transparency up a notch. Instead of asking others what that means, let’s create what it REALLY means…as only we can. Not because we are smarter…just because for some reason, we seem to have the cajunes to make fools of ourselves in open view 🙂 Speaking for myself, of course.

Addiction to technology can be damaging to your mental health

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Yesterday’s list of ten stories was fun to write… So in cleaning out the 400+ unread stories that had accumulated in my feed reader, I came up with these ten stories for today:

  1. I’ve had countless people ask me about how to set up a wordpress blog, so I was glad to see Matt point out that CNet now has a video that details the steps of setting up a WP blog. It’s a simple video, but that is appropriate since the instillation of WP is simple. However, if terms like “FTP”, “domain” and “web host” don’t mean anything to you, then skip over this video and go straight for a hosted blog like blogger or wordpress.com.
  2. Technology bloggers are so much more advanced in their blogging problems that they have to worry about things like the Echo Chamber. Since linking is still a novel enough concept in real estate, this is not really an issue within the real estate blogosphere. None the less, advice like “say something original once a day” is good stuff that we could all benefit from.
  3. I include the next article only for the last paragraph: ‘Employers provide programmes to help workers with chemical or substance addictions. ‘Addiction to technology can be equally damaging to a worker’s mental health’. (It’s one thirty in the morning as I type this, I obviously need help.)
  4. In an effort to separate addiction from hype, Seth Godin reminds us that “just because people know who you are doesn’t mean they’re going to buy what you sell… the best way to succeed is to have a really great product.”
  5. In relation to real estate technology, I can’t imagine why anyone with $17M would think that Reply.com is a good idea… How do they justify the business model that they are going to allow anyone to make an offer on any house? From their CEO: “every home in the country is for sale – for the right price!” The idea seems like a fun exercise for a graduate level economics course, but an actual product??? I don’t get it. Please feel free to let me know in the comments if I’m missing something…
  6. Also, Joel points out that Reply’s product is not likely to make Glenn very happy since he’s working on a similar service and even taken a patent out.
  7. More web technology that seems misguided to me: I can think of plenty of people who are in search of a good blog, but I can’t think of any other blogs that are in search of a good blogger…
  8. And then sometimes, people take misguided to such a different level that I start to doubt my own sanity. How smart do you have to be to refuse $1M? (Really! What does he know that I don’t???)
  9. Barely on topic… There is an interesting house that was recently (re)listed in the NWMLS. Turns out the owners were not doing a good job showing the house from 1000 miles away, so they took it off the market while they reorganized their efforts. During that time, a friendly conversation on staging turned into a full-on listing for one RCG contributor. So far, the owners have been blown away by the difference that this one woman can make in preparing a listing for sale. If you saw the place before, please considering checking it out again because the changes are phenomenal. A neighbor said she barely recognized the inside of the house.
  10. On a related technology note, I found out that the previous listing was “live” again because it showed up in my feed reader based on a listing feed I created for my zip code from Robbie’s fantastic Zearch tool. Anyone in the Puget Sound area can use this tool to be easily updated every time a new listing shows up in their zip code, city, neighborhood, etc.

UPDATE: After playing with the service, Joel goes so far as to give Reply.com the 3-finger salute.

10 Great Conversations

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Just for fun, I started recording notes on real estate conversations I enjoy following and I decided that when the list hit ten, I’d hit publish:

  1. David Smith has a great (no wining allowed) article about the housing bubble. I only wish David interacted with the real estate blogging community a little more because his stuff is great but easily missed…
  2. Continuing on the bubble topic, Dan Melson puts on a great effort describing why renting really is for suckers (and what yo do about it). For me, this is a great example of why real estate professionals should not write about the bubble (David Smith being the exception! 🙂 ) It reminds me of the “fool“ish investment advice so popular in 1999/2000 that said it didn’t matter what price you bought a stock at as long as the company was good, you would make money in the long-term. Here’s my problem with this argument… If rents are cheaper than the interest payment (i.e. both of these being the completely sunk costs) and home prices go down slightly in the near future (which doesn’t seem inconceivable for selected markets in the country), then no amount of number juggling will replace the fact that if a potential home owner would be best served waiting to buy until the prices bottom out. I realize there are more than a few “ifs” in my statement, but my goal is not to say that it is a bad time to buy, only that a blanket statement “it is always a good time to buy” falls on deaf ears.
  3. On a related note, it is timely that the NYTs notes that rents are rapidly rising across most of the US (with Seattle being a highlighted area!).
  4. Greg shows off his custom signs. I think these are brilliant marketing moves and every agent should look for ways to market themselves through their listings. Beautiful stuff…
  5. And talking of beautiful ideas, Claudia Wicks mentions a very simple marketing idea ($1.50 simple) that could go a long way… There’s a beauty in simplicity (and it reminds me of an idea that Anna and I were batting around a while back…)
  6. And if you really want beauty, Fraser Beach takes staging to a new level by hiring actors (beautiful ones!) to play house during an open house…
  7. It takes a certain level of confidence to have fun with your previous mistakes. (Kris is clearly a confident agent and I like that!)
  8. ActiveRain is getting some hype from both the Real Estate Tomato and the Future of Real Estate Marketing. I definitely think that Matt Heaton is onto something interesting, and he doesn’t get particularly phased by either Greg or Joel, which I think is a great sign.
  9. Because I’ve been there…
  10. Greg (Linden this time!) creates a list with (nearly) all the Seattle start-ups and their associated Alexa rankings. It is a list that is definitely worth checking out as you might be surprised at the massive activity within the Seattle start-up community! For those interested, the rank of the real estate sites were: Zillow (976), Homepages (21,720), Redfin (22,117). RCG was not included in his list, but we are ranked at 75,844. You might also be interested to know that despite the fact that we’re not ranked as high as some of the other sites, our reach is right up there with HomePages and Redfin. (not bad for a site with no paid staff and $120/year hosting fees!). And since I mentioned ActiveRain earlier (and they are based in Kirkland), I think it is interesting to note that they are seeing awesome growth in the number of pageviews that is blowing away all the local real estate sites save Zillow. Considering their Alexa ranking is only 108,655, they are obviously creating a sticky user experience.