ActiveBob.....It's always Raining!

Congratulations Matt! I've had my profile up for a while now....maybe I should fill it out with some eye popping stats so someone will want to pick me up on their softball team for the summer :-)

If you have kids or grandkids in sports you have to check this out. It's a great way for little leagues to do some cool stuff with their stats, pictures, videos (I think) in a social environment. With Caleb and Matt on board I have no question it will be great!

As necessary, but at least once a week I am going to post this and place it in the ActiveRain channel under the topic 'network news' to keep you updated on what's going on around ActiveRain. I know, I know.....where the #$% was this a week ago? The apology comes later.....read on.

We did a major infrastrucure upgrade last week. As a result of that upgrade we have experienced a rash of issues. In order to alleviate some of those issues we had to make some quick decisions to triage the groups area of the site, as it was responsible for the majority of the proxy errors.

Proxy Errors

As you can see from the graph below (sshhh, don't tell Jorgen, I shared his super secret proxy error graph.....he's on a plane home to Kansas for Christmas right now so maybe I can sneak it by him. Don't worry, he'll be working the entire time he's on vacation) proxy errors are almost non-existent.

Groups

Groups were the major cause of the proxy errors that were abound last week and early this week. Some of the groups have gotten so big that our existing infrastructure for groups was no longer sufficient to support the amount of content contained in them. We made some temporary changes to groups in order to stop the proxy errors and give the developers enough time to fix the infrastructure.

• Right now, Groups are only showing four pages and are arranged by 'last comment'. That is being fixed and on Friday morning when you wake up Groups will be back to being arranged in chronological order and you will be able to see much deeper into the archives.
• Member lists in groups are still accessible, but the button has moved. To access member lists you now click on the hyper-link for the group member count. If your group has 300 people in it, the 300 will be a link you can click to access member lists. Currently you can not administrate member roles but that will be fixed Friday morning as well.

Posting to Localism

Posts are not currently feeding to Localism. This fix will be in place Friday morning. Posts that you have posted in the last week that are tagged to syndicate to Localism will feed over there retroactively once the fix is in place.

Posting to Outside Blogs

Posts are not currently feeding to your outside blog. This fix will be in place (take a guess......) Friday morning (man, I can't slide anything past you, can I?). Posts that you posted in the last week that were tagged to syndicate to your outside blog should retroactively feed once the fix is in place.

Tags on the sidebar of your blog

Right now, if you go to the tags dropdown of your blog, it's possible that you will see someone else's tags show up. In fact, you will see the same tags in the dropdown menu on every blog you go to. If you see your own tags on your blog, go to my blog.....you will see your tags on my blog as well. We call this the 'ActiveRain soulmate bug'. The person who's tags are following you is your ActiveRain soulmate and we expect that you will get to know them well and maybe make a new friend.

Any guessers for when this will be fixed? Yes......you in the back with your hand raised.......BINGO!! Friday morning.

The Apology I was talking about

I want to express a very sincere "sorry" to everyone. This last week has been a little bit tough. Our internal communication broke down and we weren't able to relay this information to you in a timely manner. Please know that the frustration that you encounter is multiplied by 1000 for every member of our team. That's not to discount your frustration because you should be able to count on ActiveRain to function properly. It's just saying that we work tirelessly to provide a product of which we can be proud and when we hit a patch like the last week our utmost concern is getting the platform stabilized so that you can utilize it. (Someone just informed me that my goatee has gray hair in it.......and I'm 100% sure it wasn't there prior to the last week)

I've never come out and asked anyone to subscribe to my blog (I just figured everyone took one look at my Shakespearian prose and immediately subscribed, hahahaha) but moving forward this will be where you can get updated consistently, so take a minute to hit that little subscribe button on the right. (Brad will attest to my HTML skills and if I was to try to pull that subscribe button in here I would be here for the next hour)

I have been pouring over posts for the last hour and there is one kind of post that just confuses the heck out of me. It's the infamous market report post. I have seen some fantastic market reports posted on ActiveRain in the last few years. There are a handful of people that I will actually stop and read a market report if they post it and I come across it. However, most of them fall into the 'very mundane' (common; ordinary; banal; unimaginative) category.

If I was the average Joe Plumber looking for information about housing in my home town, I can promise you that a blog post with a bunch of stats about average sales price, days on market, inventory levels and whatever other BORING garbage your MLS will automatically populate would not do anything for me. Why?

BECAUSE I DON'T KNOW WHAT THOSE NUMBERS MEAN!

You are the real estate professional (supposedly). Do me, the consumer, a favor and INTERPRET the data for me. Take those numbers and make some sense of them. Tell me what inventory level means in relation to me buying or selling a house.....why? Because I don't know the difference between 50 days on market and 100 days on market. Anybody with access to the MLS can pull those reports up and copy and paste them into a blog. Not anyone can interpret the data and make it worth me looking at.

How would you feel if you walked into your financial advisors office and he/she took out a bunch of excel graphs and said, "here you go, good luck figuring out what to buy, but if I were you I'd really pay attention to this market cap number right here". It's almost laughable yet day after day I see real estate professionals posting market stats with no explanation of what they mean.

The only thing I can figure is that you withhold the explanation in hopes that someone will be so awed by your magical statistics that they will immediately pick up the phone and call you for your expert opinion. Do yourself and them a favor and just give them the explanation while you have them on your post. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe withholding the explanation is helping drive call volume, but it seems far fetched to me. If I land on your post today, the chances I am in the market to buy today are not very high. Most likely I just started getting really interested in the market but I am still a ways off of purchasing. But if you were to give me good solid information that I could understand and present it in a fashion that made me think you knew what you were doing above and beyond you know where the control+c and the control+v button are, there is a great chance I'll be coming back to see what you think next month and the month after until I am ready to buy.

As consumers have access to unparalleled amounts of information your position as professional is incumbent upon you being able to INTERPRET that information for them.

Please Please Please interpret your boring stats for me!

(I'm sending an ActiveRain T-shirt to the next three people that send me a link to a market report post that I could actually learn something from as a consumer because the shirt says 'your personal real estate think tank' and not 'good luck trying to figure out what the *&$# I'm talking about')

(rant over.......I'm going home to start my vacation)

.......I probably wouldn't do it. But I don't want to run into her in a dark bar in New York during Real Estate Connect and have to explain why I ignored her meme. If you've never seen Teresa in a dark bar in NY, lucky you........haha.

She also asked that we immediately ban all future meme's from ActiveRain. I am seriously considering it (again, the whole dark bar and running into Teresa thing again).

So the rules of this meme:

1. Grab the nearest book
2. Open the book to page 56
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the text of the next two to five sentences
5. Dont dig for your favorite book, the cool book or the intellectual one. Pick the Closest.
6. Tag five people to do the same

**The one book that this can not be is the Bible**

I have been flying more than normal lately. Jon always gives us books to read. If Seth Godin has a new book out, you can be assured it will show up on my desk from the book fairy with a request that I read it. So the combo of lots of flying and book reading assignments make for a great pair. So when I got this email from Teresa saying I was tagged, I leaned over and opened the zipper on my bag and out pops a little Seth Godin book, Tribes.

There is another (WOW, I have no idea how I was going to finish that sentence. I just got off a 30 minute phone call with a person that we suspended for copyright violation. I don't know how many times I have to say the same thing over and over to get the message through. I must have tried to say the same thing ten different ways. I am seriously patting myself on the back for keeping my cool......very frustrating.)

Let me start over........

There is another book in my bag, but it was buried a little deeper, so Tribes was the first one I saw. I normally read historical fiction books for relaxing and 'The Alexandria Link' by Steve Berry was just underneath. Great book but like about ten other books on my shelf right now, I haven't actually finished it. Two hour plane rides never allow me to finish the whole book and I always forget them on the next trip. The airport book store LOVES ME! Ok so Page 56 then......fifth sentence......Tribes:

"First, they're not going to do the local leadership required when tribe members interact. They're going to be so busy following the playbook that they'll hesitate about engaging in the interactions that make a tight tribe such a vibrant organization. People don't engage merely to remind on another of the status quo. Instead they eagerly engage when they want something to improve. This microleadership is essential to the health of your organization."

So there you have it. I am 99.999999999% (maybe even higher) sure that Seth Godin would not try to come after me if I posted a picture of the cover of his book, (in fact, he would probably welcome it) but with all the crap I am dealing with around copyright and trademark violations, I am just not going to post a picture, short of Seth himself stopping by and saying it's ok. (Believe it or not, my blog was recently audited by a member who I was dealing with regarding copyright violations and she went through EVERY post I have ever written to make sure my blog didn't have copyrighted or trademarked images........I had to erase one post that was questionable.)

In the spirit of outlawing meme's on ActiveRain, I am not going to tag anyone further. Is that a fair enough trade-off Teresa?

(This one is long, but you may be glad you read the whole thing)

Over the next couple of months, I will be embarking on a project here at ActiveRain. Some of my time will be spent helping introduce our network, and the real estate industry to a new product. When Jon first approached me about doing this, my first response was...."I am not going to push a product on our members that sucks" (I'm pretty forward with Jon, I may have used a more choice word than "sucks"). Jon also reminded me that I'm not pushing it, I'm simply putting it in our members hands and asking for open and honest feedback.

I've been through Growth Leader and ladies and Gentlemen, it doesn't suck. In fact, just the opposite. It's very powerful.

So what is Growth Leader? (Here's the official version, I'll give you my version in the next paragraphs)

Growth Leader enables real estate agents seeking a competitive edge to generate a steady stream of prospects, and provides them with a powerful contact management solution that helps convert these prospects into clients.

• Integrated response-generating website that is search engine optimized with direct MLS integration.
• Powerful combination of TV, search engine & other real estate advertising to help you attract prospects looking for homes and real estate info in your area.
• Industry leading contact management solution with lead notification, automated follow-up, email, mobile access.
• Prospect monitoring tools that allow you to know what your prospects are thinking every step of the process, showing which ones are most active: how often they visit and which properties, prices and neighborhoods they're interested in.

Sounds like the next best thing since sliced bread, right? Well as Brian Brady would say, there is no 'magic purple pill', but Growth Leader is a powerful way to generate prospects and convert them to clients, and that folks, is the name of the game.

Growth leader has two parts. The first part is the integrated website and contact management solution called Vision. The second part is an advertising component that drives traffic to your site. Depending on your market, the cost of driving traffic will vary, but the traffic is exclusive to you and you control how much traffic you want your site to get.

Vision is powerful. The corporate speak above is not B.S.. The back-end monitoring of your prospect's and client's behavior gives you great insight into where they are at in the process. Every agent should have something like this on the back end of their home search site.

OK, enough about the product for right now, just believe me that it's great.......why would you believe me? Because Market Leader is going to let selected members demo the product in exchange for their feedback on the product.

This is where I come in. I'll be selecting and working with many of our members over the next 6 months and engaging them to use the product, give feedback, help develop best practices and CLOSE TRANSACTIONS (remember folks, that's the name of the game).

We have started the project and are in the beginning stages. Some members are up and running and some are in the provisioning stage getting ready to start. I want to get this product in the hands of members who will use it and implement it in their business plan, this will be the first criteria when selecting participants. I also want it in the hands of people who are going to write about it so that the word spreads. In order to achieve this, I will be selecting members that have consistently blogged on our network for an extended period of time. Since we are asking participants to write about the product once a week, I need to know that the members testing it are dedicated bloggers. A third component will be how many subscribers a member has. If all you do is blog about your listings and no one ever reads, sorry, but that isn't going to help spread the word.

Right now it's available in about 25 markets. There will be more coming and when they launch, I'll update this post. If you are interested in participating, please see if your market is below and leave a comment or respond to me directly via email (bob at activerain dot com). I will apologize in advance, because not everyone will be able to participate. If you are selected, I will send you additional information about what you will agree to do for me in order to get your hands on this great product for free for a few months.

Markets:

• Miami, FL - Southeast FL Regional MLS and Miami-Dade
  
• Phoenix, AZ - ARMLS
  
• Tallahassee, FL - Tallahassee Area MLS
  
• Atlanta, GA - Georgia MLS
  
• Boston, MA - MLS PIN (aka Bay State MLS)
  
• Houston, TX - Houston Assoc. of Realtors
  
• Portland, OR - RMLS
  
• San Diego, CA - Sandicor MLS
  
• Tampa, FL - Mid-Florida Regional
  
• Dallas, TX - North Texas R.E. Info Sys
  
• Jacksonville, FL - NE Florida MLS
  
• Orlando, FL - Mid-Florida Regional MLS
  
• Washington, DC - MRIS
  
• Austin, TX - ACTRIS - Austin BOR
  
• Fort Meyers, FL - Punta Gorda MLS (Now Mid-Florida MLS)
  
• Los Angeles, CA - Southern California MLS and Multi-Regional MLS
  
• Seattle, WA - NWMLS
  
• West Palm Beach, FL - RMLS Florida Regional
  
• Baltimore, MD - MRIS
  
• Chicago, IL - Midwest Real Estate Data

Please note that just because your specific city doesn't show up, doesn't mean you wouldn't be able to participate. If your MLS is represented, there's a pretty good chance you will be able to participate. Also, if your market is there, but you use a different MLS, contact me directly as there are some additional MLS's coming on board.

Make sure to check the box to receive updates if you comment as I will update the markets on this post as they come online and you will be notified that I have updated the post.

(this button below will direct you to a Market Leader Account Rep, not raise your hand to show interest in our marketing program)

 

 

 

Katerina first brought this up to me way back in January. She (and many others, but she was first) offered to help coordinate things so that it was certain we would have the opportunity to have an ActiveRain party gathering. In typical fashion, Jon and I dragged our feet on getting everything set up. Katerina was relentless (bless her heart) in making sure we got everything in order. She succeeded!!

Katerina first let the cat out of the bag in her blog on Oct. 23rd. Only she didn't let the whole cat out.......

We will be hosting an ActiveRain gathering. The gathering will be this Saturday, November 8th from 8pm-12am. Where you ask? We'll that's the tail of the cat still stuck in the bag.

In true social media fashion, you are going to have to tune in and catch the word the day of the party. On Saturday morning we will start spreading word of the location across the internet. We'll certainly use ActiveRain (most likely in the form of a comment here and on Katerina's post). We will also be using Twitter and Facebook.

(Brad Andersohn is our resident expert on Social Media. He belongs to more sites then just about anyone I know. The list of places Brad will be dropping the word will probably be longer than I would EVER care to type)

So if you will be in Orlando attending the NAR convention and you would like to come join us for the ActiveRain party gathering, make sure you get yourself hooked in somehow (at the very least, find a friend who knows how to hook in and get the word from them). I have attended a number of these parties gatherings and they are a BLAST! The thing that always amazes me about them is how it feels like a party gathering with a bunch of old friends. I never cease to be amazed when it's hugs not handshakes that are being exchanged by our members. It's a true testament to the power of ActiveRain in creating real-life, meaningful friendships.

• Plane Ticket to Orlando: $500
• Hotel Room for three nights: $276
• Bar tab: (sorry, I can't disclose this number)
• Getting to meet the people inside your computer: Priceless!!
  

You can find us on Twitter:

• Bob Stewart is @activebob
• Rich Jacobson is @activerich,
• Brad Andersohn is @bradandersohn,
• Jon Washburn is @jonwashburn
• Jeff Corbett is @jeffx.
• Katerina's is @CoachKaterina.

I don't know how you find us on Facebook but people are finding me every day and I'll bet you are just as capable as they are. Search our name and ActiveRain would be my best guess.

We have room for about 400 people and if we exceed that number.......well then it's going to be one rocking party gathering. We are really looking forward to meeting so many of you and getting the chance to reconnect with others. oh yeah.......one last thing. We are going to be there on Thursday night. On Friday and Saturday our team is going to be out and about in the convention center.......and we'll be packing ActiveRain T-shirts to give away. Make sure you figure out how to find us so you can get that free shirt, it'll serve (hint hint) you well at the Party!

 

Our network is being plagued by cut and paste content! So today we hired a new team member. Let me introduce you to Harlen 'The Copyright Crusader'.

We are a community of PROFESSIONALS! 99% of you understand that. Harlen has been brought on to ensure that  the 1% who are bringing the rest of us down are dealt with. He has assured us that his relentless pursuit of justice for the holders of copyright protection will be unmatched. He has guaranteed to crush copyright infringement in 30 days or we don't have to pay him (can't beat that). How you might ask? well............

Every time you submit a post on Activerain you see this:

 

Some of you choose to ignore it. Some of you think that since you have gotten away with it before, you will continue to get away with it. You will not. Today, on his first day on the job, Harlen suspended the accounts of four members who had previously been warned about this type of behavior. One member had over 150,000 points. That's a lot of time wasted copying content and trying to pass it off as your own. Please, Harlen implores you, do not be the next person this happens to. He will be hunting content to the far and wide reaches of the network and running that content in Google to find the original author.

If you see someone copying content, leave a link to this post in their comment section. Warn them about Harlen and his 'Copyright Crusade'. Because if Harlen sees it before it's pulled down, the first offense will be a two week suspension. No questions asked. (Harlen thinks this is really lenient. Read that image above again.......it says "Posting copyrighted material without permission WILL result in being removed from ActiveRain")

The second time will be a ban from the network. Harlen has guaranteed this garbage will STOP!!! Plagiarism is polluting a network that thousands of people have poured their heart and soul in to making stellar. Harlen promises you that plagiarizers will no longer leave their mark on ActiveRain.

We have something very special here at ActiveRain. Your participation here is not a right, it is a privilege. By abusing that priviledge you are making yourself, and more importantly, the rest of ActiveRain look very unprofessional. Our community guidelines say: ActiveRain is a place where real estate professionals can network with their peers and discuss industry insider topics. It is also a public forum where consumers can pull back the curtain and see what the real estate industry is really about.

Do we really want consumers pulling back that curtain and seeing plagiarism, stealing and dishonest gaming? Harlen does not!!! Harlen believes that we all learned about plagiarism in elementary school. He remembers his fifth grade teacher Mrs. Robinson sending him to the principals office when he copied a passage from Marcus Valerius Martial without citing it:

"Why, simpleton, do you mix your verses with mine? What have you to do, foolish man, with writings that convict you of theft? Why do you attempt to associate foxes with lions, and make owls pass for eagles? Though you had one of Ladas's legs, you would not be able, blockhead, to run with the other leg of wood." - Marcus Valerius Martial

Here is a great resource for what you can and can't do: The wise advice of Lenn Harley

(This is not a joke, even though it is kind of funny)

 

We have some talented writers here on the staff of ActiveRain (present company excluded). Between the staff, you'd think we would be able to come up with a succinct 'About us' description; something that really nails the essence of the community. Alas, after hundreds of drafts, thousands of red pen marks and way too many hours spent trying to nail the perfect 'About us', we have decided to solicit your help.

At the bottom of every page on ActiveRain is the 'about' link. The introduction on that page gives everyone who ever wanted to learn about our community their first introduction to who we are. You can imagine why it's so hard to nail it. What ActiveRain is about to you may not be the same as the person with whom you are battling for first in your city. In fact, ask twenty different people and you are likely to get 20 different answers.

We need you to help us write the 'about us' language for ActiveRain.

You can find the current 'about us' piece here at the top of that page.

The winning selection will agree to let ActiveRain have the rights to the submission and we will use it not only on the about page, but in lots of stuff we do in the future.

The winning selection also gets:

1. 5000 ActiveRain points
2. Two ActiveRain T-shirts
3. A Localism Jacket
4. Our love and adoration
5. A free yearlong sponsorship of a community on Localism
6. A free pass to kick off anyone else on ActiveRain that you choose (OK, this one is a joke.......but too good to resist)

A few things to consider:

• All entries must be submitted by Wednesday October 8th at 11:59pm Pacific Time.
• We are looking for something between 150-200 words (2 paragraphs). The more succinct the better.
• All entries become the property of ActiveRain (I'm not a lawyer, but the idea is we want the right to use the stuff you write)
• Entries should be sent to bob at the name of this website or through the contact link on my ActiveRain profile page

 

Last week we added Jeff Corbett, known to many of you as 'The X Broker', to the team here at ActiveRain. We are very excited that Jeff accepted our offer to come on board and take over the the Business Development and Operations duties here at ActiveRain.

For those of you not familiar with Jeff, you can read about him and some of his thought provoking opinions on his personal blog, thexbroker.com. Jeff has years of industry knowledge under his belt having previously run his own home building company, mortgage brokerage and real estate brokerage. Most recently Jeff developed a transparent wholesale mortgage rate and pricing engine (there's no short and quick way to explain something that brings this much transparency to an industry that needs it). The most recent project brought him face to face with most of the real estate technology leaders that are shaping the future of technology in this space.

Those of us here at ActiveRain have had the pleasure of getting to know Jeff over the last few years and Jon felt like he was a great fit for our team. In addition to liking Jeff personally, he brings a diverse skill set that compliments our current team as well as fills in some gaps.

On a personal level, all the guys (and Claire) here at ActiveRain get along really well. We hang out together outside of work and we genuinely like each other. Keeping that continuity in tact was important...........the fact him and Jon sport similar hairdos didn't hurt either.

(........I have choosen to forgive Jeff for being a Buffalo Bills fan only because he grew up in Buffalo. We have agreed that he will not mention the shellacking his Bills gave my Seahawks as everyone knows our top four receivers were out and if we got them at full strength we would destroy them)

So stop by Jeff's post and welcome him officially to the ActiveRain staff.

We recently made a change in the architecture of our site. I'm sure you have seen the new channels feature. If not, you can read about it here. In doing so, we also made some decisions about the site structure in order to get better search engine results for the fantastic content you are writing. One thing that we did, that has had a few of our members asking questions, is add 'no follow' tags to the tag links. We have also added 'no index' tags to the tag pages.

Why the heck would we hide the tag pages from the search engines you might ask? To drive more traffic and create a better user experience.

We have a lot of content on the site. We are constantly trying to find new ways to get your content to rank higher in the search engines. With the advent of Channels and topics, we now have a more direct structure for search engine spiders to find and index your content. Internal site link structure is an important component of search engine optimization. The more focused you can make the internal link structure of the site, the easier it is for the search engines to index content.

Prior to channels and topics, tags were a way that similar content was housed. Our tag pages stunk in the search engine results. There is no other way to put it, they just plain stunk. We have some tag pages that house hundreds of articles about a particular topic and yet never returned search engine results or traffic to the site. In recent tests of certain search terms, your particular blog post on a topic or just your blog page will return results in every instance and the tag pages for the exact terms you were tagging with do not show.

Our tag pages appeared to google and other search engines as search results or a directory of results. Google doesn't like pages that act in this manner. If you were to look at a tag page, you will see that the content is truncated and only snippets of the content are displayed.

The new topic pages act much more like a living blog with fresh, fully displayed content about a particular topic. The structure of the channel and topic pages make a much more fluid path to you content, allowing search engine bots to access and index your content easier. It is our belief that the long tail results for these topics page will far outweigh the traffic driven by the tag pages (which won't be tough, since the tag pages stunk, remember)

At the same time, leaving the existing tag structure in place to be indexed points the search engines in too many directions. We want to focus the traffic and the results to one area; an area that is better able to be indexed.

The tags still serve a purpose for the readers of your blogs. They organize content on your blog in an easy to find format. If you have ten blog posts about the home buying process, you still want all ten of those posts tagged with 'home buying' so that consumers who find your blog will be able to access similar content you have written on subjects.

There is a TON of information out there about search engine optimization. Everyone has an opinion of what works and what doesn't work. This is our opinion. If you don't like it, feel free to leave your comment here.......or better yet, get the heck off my blog, go build your own site and give it your best shot to get the kind of results we are getting for 111,000 people , many of whom don't know SEO from SEC. (That was a joke.......kind of........if you've read this far, my editor (Jon) felt you deserved a joke......and he might have suggested heck over a different word).

Here is a video that talks about 'content categorization for SEO' from the brains behind SEOmoz. If I haven't put you to sleep yet, then Rand does a better job of explaining on the whiteboard some of the thinking behind this concept.