Over the course of an average day I am asked to provide oodles of advice to people, generally on subjects I am intimately familiar with.  Whether online or off, my posture is always to be blunt and not sugar coat anything.  There are practical reasons for that, of course, most important of them being lack of time to worry about phrasing.  And then there is an inherent personality trait that I’ve struggled most of my adult life with – lack of filter.  I seem to be utterly lacking the mechanism for self-censorship.  Some people are born with it, and are inherently diplomatic.  I am just not one of those people.

photo courtesy: by Bernt Rostad

Having spent quite a few years trying to trick my brain into developing that all important filter, I finally realized that it’s simply not going to happen.

I can’t bring myself to say something that I don’t fundamentally believe in, no matter what’s at stake, and that’s just the way it is.

So perceptions being what they are – I am a bitch.  I am not proud of it, but I am not apologizing for it either.  I’ll take it one step further and say that if you are looking for honest advice and opinion, it’s better for you to deal with someone who doesn’t filter what they say than someone who does when it comes to business strategy advice or marketing.  Here is why:

In any business, your prospects will have some 30 seconds or thereabouts to form an initial impression of your business, service or products on first contact.  They will have to do so without the benefit of filters of any kind, and in the largely online world of commerce and communication, you won’t know  what effect any of the stuff you throw out there will have on that all important perception of your offerings’ worth or value.

Consumers don’t tend to send businesses notes saying that something or other in your branding, message or service left them cold.  They simply walk away and go elsewhere.

If your advisers sugar coat when advising you instead of impulsively and honestly stating their reactions, you will proceed down the false trail under false pretenses.  At the end of the day, your ego will be the only beneficiary.

So next time you see me state something publicly or to you in person that you think comes off a bit harsh, it’s not done out of malice or to deflate your ego.  I am doing you a favor by putting myself into the shoes of your prospect and giving you unabashed commentary to help you navigate to the trail that is right for you, and to do so with eyes wide open.  It also saves all involved a crap load of time that we can all spend reading to our kids or sipping a nice beverage with our significant other or doing nothing at all.

I’d like to do more of that last thing some day.

For now, if anyone wants to pick my brain in any forum, by all means, but please don’t ask me to take it easy on you, or to use gentler (or smaller) words, expressions etc.  It’s too damn hard, and I’d rather spend my time helping those whose egos are not so easily bruised and who understand the value of unfiltered, honest commentary.

For the rest of it, I’d rather volunteer my time to places where it can make an actual difference.

Related Posts:

• On catering to the common, the average, the palatable by the masses at large, and raising the bar
• On building relationships that matter & why I won’t follow you…
• My relationships are not for sale – my service is…

Yesterday, I received a call from Jonathan Mabe at DS.  We talked at length about the issue and its pending resolution, but the reason for this post is to let you know that Diverse Solutions (Zillow) has been working on resolving the issue.

The first thing they’ve done (which you’ll notice at the bottom of the Control Panel login window) is made the cookie life 24 hours, meaning that the control panel will only remember you for 24 hours.  It also means that anyone you’ve granted access to will only be remembered for 24 hours.  So if you change your password, anyone still logged in or remembered by the system will only have access for 24 hours.  Now this was on a sliding expiration, meaning that every time you logged in within the initial 24 hour period, the clock would be reset, but this is no longer the case. (Yay!)

This is a fantastic first step and I’m very thankful to Jonathan for not only addressing the issue, but also for contacting us to fill us in.  As developers, we were very concerned for our clients, but what was of greater concern to us was the liability.  In short, if we can’t be locked out, we can be blamed for just about anything and no one wants that.

There are still issues:  Password changes don’t immediately reset sessions, but these too are going to be fixed.  Had the current solutions been in place, my client never would have been hacked.  The fixes, as they stand today, are enough to greatly reduce the possibility of any malicious activities on your accounts, so you can rest a little easier knowing that Diverse Solutions is making good on their promise.

Anyways, Just thought you should know.
Here’s to better days ahead. 

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• No Related Posts

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Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished members of the Board, staff and association representatives.

When the decision was made to no longer offer Diverse Solutions IDX products to your membership, it may have seemed that the 40-50 members affected would be able to easily switch to a different provider without any downtime, unforeseen expenses or loss of business.  At least I’d like to think that your expectations were that a seamless transition to a new vendor were possible and indeed painless.  I would like to briefly point out to you that it is simply not the case.

We build custom real estate websites with IDX integration as part of what our company does, and have been catering to the real estate niche at least in part for over a decade.  Over the years, we have integrated and worked with a few dozen various IDX vendors and solutions, and know what is involved in migrating from one vendor to another and the hours involved in properly integrating these products.  Specifically, with IDX by Diverse Solutions, here is what your members will be looking at in order to move to a different vendor.

• An average Diverse Solutions powered site generates over 10,000 permalinks in the google index.  That means that for every search page, results page and most listings in the mls, there is a page created on the member’s website that gets indexed by google.  Additionally, these pages are created dynamically every time a new listing comes on the market.  There is absolutely NO way to redirect this number of pages to a different permalink structure.  This means that every one of your members will suddenly have Page Not Found 404 errors on all these links.  Google penalizes sites for having broken links when there are a few dozen.  When there are thousands – the damage to any page rank will be tremendous.
• Consumers of your members (i.e. potential buyers and sellers) will have created anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of saved links to search queries that they were running and favorite listings using Diverse Solutions console.  While contact details such as names and email addresses can likely be exported, the saved data, links and activities of these users is not recoverable.  This means that each member affected will have to get in touch with every person who registered on their site and recreate manually every single search link for them in the new system.  This would result in untold hours of time.
• Customizing an indexable IDX to fit with the needs of  a specific market takes an average of 20 hours of professional assistance.  Our time for something like this runs $125.00 per hour for a total of $2,500
• Creating additional custom searches and pages for each area and community takes an average agent or broker hundreds of hours over the course of the year.  This work will need to be redone in the new solution.
• Lastly and just as importantly, the learning curve associated with implementation and usage of any IDX is generally significant for both, agents and brokers and site’s visitors.  Your members will now have to plan to devote a substantial amount of their time to learning a new product and to teaching their prospects how to utilize new tools (something that these prospects were not expecting to have to go through).

Additionally, it will be only prudent to consider the merits or lack thereof of any product that the board decides to eliminate from the list of offerings to its members.  In our experience, Diverse Solutions IDX products are some of the best on the market.  There are very few IDX products that come close to offering all of the below and work seamlessly with any wordpress site (which is a recommended choice of platform for real estate in most tech circles).

• Full Fledged intuitive map search that updates in real time
• Radial search based on proximity to address, landmark etc.
• User controlled polygonal search
• Indexable dynamic page creation with proper tagging
• Ability to easily drop in listings into any bit of content via a click of a button (using shortcodes)
• Native Mobile Search that works automatically on any mobile device at no additional cost
• Native agent chat feature
• Registration and lead generation options that the agent or broker can control without additional expense
• Sleek and intuitive interface design
• Seamless integration into any WordPress theme

These are just some of the features of Diverse Solutions, and while those of you reading this may not fully grasp what this means to your members, you should at the very least go through your vendor list and look for comparable offerings at a similar price point.

I had written an Open Letter to Metrolist yesterday on my blog. Here is the link for your convenience:  http://teamhardison.com/wordpress-real-estate-site-design/open-letter-metrolist-mls-re-diverse-solutions-idx-fiasco/

I wanted to take a moment and reiterate in this email some of the points I had made in my article in the hopes that you will at the very least be equipped with enough information to properly weigh the risks of data sharing with Zillow against the benefits for your members that are currently using Diverse Solutions products, and to be frank, other members who currently still have a choice to use one of the better IDX products there are.

While your official statements seem to dispel any rumors that this decision was predicated solely on the fear of future misuse of data by Zillow, few of us in the Real Estate space believe that.  It seems that the fear of Zillow as an aggregator is indeed the biggest motivator here, and it’s understandable.  Having said that, you would do far better by your members to re-word your contracts and compliance docs so that your fears are assuaged, and should a violation occur, there is always recourse of the legal variety.  Pre-emptive strike against vendors that will have a detrimental effect on your own members smacks of the Minority Report style power play, and one wonders who the ultimate beneficiary would be.

The optimist in me hopes that you’ll do the right thing and reconsider your decision.

Sincerely,

Inna Hardison-

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Emails of the recipients: ’support@metrolist.com’; ‘compliance@metrolist.com’; ’BruceGardner@YourCastle.org’; ‘ed@integrityregroup.net’; ‘kleaston@comcast.net’; ‘jan.reinhardt@remax.net’; ‘alice@tuppersteam.com’; ‘machiele@machielemarks.com’; ‘stevenholson@msn.com’; ‘jim@jimwanzeck.com’; ‘gary@gdbauer.com’; ‘gerryf@remax.net’; ‘bobmost@rmi.net’; ‘mtrenka@condosandlofts.com’; ‘lonwelsh@yourcastle.org’; ‘mikeburns@remax.net’; ‘chad.ochsner@homesincolorado.com’

These encompass most people I could find who should be in a position to help change reverse Metrolist’s decision.  Please feel free to use any text you find here to help spread the word and help your fellow Denver agents and brokers deal with this situation.  Thank you.

Related Posts:

• Open Letter to Metrolist MLS re: Diverse Solutions IDX fiasco
• Diverse Solutions IDX Security Issue

According to your website: “Metrolist is the only real estate Multiple Listing Service (MLS) serving the metro Denver area. We provide a broad database of real property listings for real estate brokers to better serve buyers and sellers. Founded in 1984, Metrolist was one of the first regional MLS’ in the nation and is considered to be an industry leader.”

In short, Metrolist has the monopoly on MLS data that is submitted to them by some 14,000 members.

Your recent decision to pull Diverse Solutions IDX from your vendors list has put a very small portion of your members in a quandary, scrambling to find a suitable replacement and facing the likelihood of spending untold amounts of money and time to make this a seamless transition.  Sometimes, such decisions are unavoidable, when say a service provider goes out of business, or changes the terms of the agreement, or if the product or service become lacking.  In this case, it appears the decision was based simply on the fact that Diverse Solutions is under new ownership, Zillow, since nothing else has really changed.

Metrolist, Inc’s official response that you were simply trying to streamline the vendor list and trim it to a manageable number does not hold much water.

Your IDX vendor list contains 74 companies.  At even a cursory glance, 27 of those have absolutely nothing to do with providing IDX services of any kind.  Some of them are real estate agents or companies, photography service providers, mobile tech companies etc.  The 27 that definitely should NOT be on that list are provided for you below, for your convenience.

www.digitalmagicpro.com – photography

www.thecsgroup.net – DB design /intranet

www.adwriter.com – ad writer/landing pages

www.barcoderealty.com – mobile and qr code design

www.brianpetrelli.com – a real estate agent/or company

http://design.im-agine.com – website design company/not IDX

www.com-stock.com – mortgage solutions

grtinternational.com – can’t find site

www.goomzee.com – mobile marketing solutions

www.homeguidecolorado.com – under construction

www.pureluckmedia.com – parked domain at godaddy

http://www.lwolf.com/rms – appears to be more back end and accounting management at first glance

www.luxurywebdesign.com – luxury real estate directory by invitation only; no IDX whatsoever

www.soarsolutions.com – parked at godaddy domain

http://www.mobilerealestateid.com/ – mobile marketing platform design

http://www.neonrain.com/ – website design company

http://www.pixoinc.com – website design company

www.promarketinggroupinc.com – website design company/other design

www.re-acquisitions.com – parked domain at godaddy

www.rhythmiq.com – consulting and point of sale solutions design (according to very limited info provided on their site)

www.smarteragent.com – mobile real estate search

www.vioicepad.com – lead generation tools for call capture

www.denverhomesearcher.com – website of a real estate agent.

www.vailpromedia.com – web design, wedding photography, print ads etc.

www.vast.com – a network based service that deals with cars and real estate

www.weichert.com – yep, that’s on the list.  I’ll take a guess that they are a real estate franchise, not an IDX provider

http://www.yourfuturehome.com/ – no idea what they do as there is nothing but the company logo on their site

Of the remaining 47 vendors, I recognized less than a dozen names of IDX providers.  Plenty of web template solutions or some other full service offerings with IDX as part of it, but not IDX services per se except for very few: IDX Broker, REW, iHouse, 1ParkPlace,  Wolfnet and maybe a few others.  That’s it.

So if your decision was indeed based on the simple need to trim the fat, it could have been easily accomplished by removing all the above-mentioned providers and anyone else that does not offer a standalone IDX product.  That would have left you with maybe 20 some odd companies to contend with.

As it stands right now, you removed one, Diverse Solutions.  It happens to be one of the better known products out there and it also happens to be one of the few that work seamlessly with any WordPress site, come with their own mobile search version, provide indexable (SEO-friendly) pages, and have the financial and tech backing to keep improving their products into the future.

You claim that you are recognized as “an industry leader”.  Leadership requires understanding all the ramifications of any decision that may affect your members, no matter if it’s 12,000 or between 40-50.  In this case, you have clearly not done your due diligence.  Your flippant commentary and various offers of help for a seamless transition to a new approved vendor leave no room for doubt that those who made the decision do not understand how IDX integration into a website actually works.

Given that we build custom wordpress real estate sites for a living and quite a few of our clients are using Diverse Solutions for their IDX, I thought it might be useful for you to have at least a few basics.

On average, we spend 20 hours on customizing and integrating IDX into a client’s website.  This consists of keyword research, creation of custom search and results pages, xml map generation for each key area of a clients business, creating unique listing drops for each segment of the market and much more.  Our time runs our clients $125.00 an hour.

Once we are done, the clients that diligently work their sites will invest additional hundreds of hours into creating new links and searches for their clients and prospects and into creating context around listings data.  Each link generated via IDX gets exposure via client’s social media efforts, newsletters and posts, where undoubtedly their prospective buyers and sellers bookmark those links for future use.

All in all, ripping an existing IDX from under your members’ feet will cost them thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of labor, and maybe even more importantly, credibility and trust lost with their consumers, those very buyers and sellers that they are supposed to serve.  They will need to apologize for broken links.  They will need to teach their prospects to use tools that will be new to them.  They will have to restructure their marketing and SEO efforts around a new product that may or may not play well with their existing website.

I would very much like to know how you can justify putting YOUR PAYING MEMBERS into a situation where they have to consider all of the above?

Will Metrolist provide each of the 40-50 members affected by this with a free assistant for the duration of the transition, free training in learning the new IDX of their choice, and whatever amount of money it will cost the members to integrate the new product properly?  Will Metrolist also provide each of these members with a letter of apology to their buyer and seller prospects that will help them save face and not lose whatever measure of trust they worked very hard to gain?

That would be the least you should be offering, considering the situation.

Or, a much more palatable alternative, would seem to be to re write the terms of the DS agreement with the new owner and make any corrections to that agreement that you need to feel that your data is safe.  I am sure the cost of your attorney would be far less than the amount any ONE of your members who is currently using Diverse Solutions would spend because of the vendor change.

I am not naive enough to expect a response to this, but I do hope that there is one person on your board who has the courage and brain required to actually lead, and do what is best for your clients.  Last I checked, your clients are the very members whose lives you are turning upside down for what appears to be no viable reason.

Thank you for reading.

For anyone who wants to jump in the conversation, feel free to comment here, or jump into any of the discussions on the subject:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/agentsupport/301888986536041/ (thread on the subject in the tech support for real estate Facebook group)

https://www.facebook.com/MetroList/posts/10150566601599585 - (a thread on Metrolist’s Facebook wall. Note that they appear to delete all comments that aren’t from members of that mls).

UPDATE: Here is the link to the actual letter I sent and a list of email address at Metrolist and participating associations of realtors that I sent it to: http://teamhardison.com/reputation-management/formal-letter-members-of-metrolist-board-assoc-reps/  Feel free to use anything in either piece to help spread the word and hopefully inspire Metrolist to rethink their decision.

Related Posts:

• Formal Letter to Members of Metrolist Board and Assoc. Reps
• Diverse Solutions IDX Security Issue
• The Diverse Solution Mobile Web Snafu
• To WordPress, or not to WordPress…

Not happy to be writing this post, and while it’s probably not a very big deal for the vast majority of Agents out there, this newly discovered issue could be huge for some, brokerages in particular.

Description:

Two days ago we discovered a sizable vulnerability with the Diverse Solutions control panel.  In short, changing your password may NOT prevent access to your DS control panel to individuals that have accessed your DS control panel in the past.  The problem can be seen by performing the following steps:

1. Open your browser of choice and log into your DS control panel.
2. Navigate to your options and change your password.
3. Close your browser.
4. Open your browser and visit the DS control panel.  You will already be logged in and even though your password has been changed, you will NOT be asked to login again, and you will be permitted to make changes to your account.  You will be able to continue making changes to you account without being required to login with your new password for an undetermined period of time, but we have verified that sessions may be days old.  Clients we have checked with have reported not being asked to log into DS for months.

This has the greatest potential of allowing
unauthorized access in the following situations:

1. Agents or Brokerages that employ developers or consultants to services their webs or socials.
2. Agents or Brokers that share workstations in their offices.
3. Brokerages or Agents that employ assistants that may access DS from their laptops, phones, tablets or home computers.
4. Agents or Brokerages that have changed their DS password to protect their accounts from access by individuals they’ve recently terminated or ended an association with.

Prevention:

Because of the nature of the vulnerability, there is very little you can do to prevent access once you’ve shared your credentials.  All any individual must do to continue to have access to your entire DS account is not log out.  As stated above, changing your password will NOT keep them from your account.

For those that have NOT shared their credentials it is important that you log out every time you finish with DS.  If you do not, any of the devices you access your DS control panel from become keys to your account and all it holds.

What’s at risk:

• Your configuration data.  Because DS data is what serves your website, deletion or edition of settings could render your entire web presence useless to your consumers.  Per our last conversation with DS, they do not currently have a way of backing up individual accounts, so you would have to rebuild your configuration, including any custom links you had created which could take weeks for some agents.
• Lead Data is the biggest area of risk in our opinion.  Many agents, our clients included, make promises as to the confidential nature of the data each consumer submits when they register on their sites.  This flaw may limit some agents, brokers, and brokerages ability to keep that promise.

It is important to be clear that this security issue should NOT make your data vulnerable to the general public (less if a computer tablet or phone are lost, stolen or compromised).

What has been done to date:

We have notified Diverse Solutions of the issue and are confident they will resolve it quickly, although no timetable has been given for a resolution to the problem.  As of 9:15PM Eastern the issue remains, and we thought it best to share this information with our clients and other DS users.  Again, we’re confident the issue will be resolved in short order, but we felt it best that people have an opportunity to minimize any potential issues.

When you’re done in the Control Panel…  LOG OUT!
Try not to give out your password unless it is absolutely necessary.

Update:

There are some statements strewn around the net that would lead one to believe that the issue described was an isolated case involving one Diverse Solutions client.  This is blatantly inaccurate.  The issue as described is something that affects every single client of this IDX provider at the moment.  We were told that there would be a fix for this system-wide at some point this week.  We will be keeping a close eye on this and let everyone know if and when the issue is indeed fixed.

Related Posts:

• Open Letter to Metrolist MLS re: Diverse Solutions IDX fiasco
• Formal Letter to Members of Metrolist Board and Assoc. Reps
• The Diverse Solution Mobile Web Snafu
• To WordPress, or not to WordPress…

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’ve gotten yourself to the point that you’re ready to throw your computer out the window.  If you haven’t started your DS mobile integration yet and have landed here, you’re one of the lucky ones. 

For those not in the know, Diverse Solutions took a different approach than most other IDX providers with their mobile system.  Rather than having an app with an agent ID (ensuring that your visitor is using your IDX and not everyone else’s), they didn’t do an app at all.  They went full web with their solution, so there are no downloads, and no additional steps needed to get your client the tools they need when they’re standing in front of a home.  This isn’t to suggest that it’s better, or worse than an a downloadable app.  It’s just a different approach.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is this:  It’s been largely understood that to use DS’s mobile agent, you need to load a script in the head of your site.  Once done, any mobile visitor to your site will be redirected to your new Mobile Search application, which is all well and good, but what if your visitor wanted access to something other than a search?  What if they wanted to review an article, or grab a PDF?  What if they’re a seller trying to review your service offering?  In this case, yeah…  You’re pretty much screwed with a header script solution, and it’s not what we recommend at all.

What do I need to think about when coming up with the proper solution to this issue?

Here it is, in a nutshell…  How “mobile” do you want your site to be?

1. Keeping in mind that the vast majority of mobile devices can browse the web just as well as any desktop computer, we’re not talking about a mobile compatible site.  We’re talking about a mobile enabled site, which offers your mobile visitors a completely different interface and eliminates the need for pinch-zooming and double-tapping to make your content readable on small screens.  In many situations, these sites include mobile specific settings that automatically scale your content for the device it’s being viewed on and it can be a very nice thing to do for your visitors.  iOS introduces an additional layer to this model.  “App Mode”.  On Apple devices you can save a site to your home screen and iOS will make a nice little button using the homepage of your site and simply open Safari to your site whenever that button is touched, but with App Mode your site is loaded as an application of it’s own with no Safari tool bars or options.  You can also load up standard iOS app splash screens which will be loaded from the web every time your app is executed.  It can be a great landing tool, but keep in mind, even this, changes what you have to think about when designing your mobile user flow.
2. You can forgo the options above and have your visitors experience remain exactly as it is on your normal website.  Yeah, they’ll have some pinching and zooming to do, depending on the device they’re using, but they’ll be familiar with the interface and know their way around for the most part.

With option 2, you don’t need that evil header script.  All you need is to be sure your users know that your advanced search (your DS SearchAgent iframed search) is also a mobile search.  Yep!  That’s it.  That wonderful little page that’s being iframed in from DS on your site is, in itself, loading that header script, so if you visit it from a mobile device, you will be redirected to DS’s web based mobile search app, and when you’re visitors are done using it, they can just click the back button to get back to your site, which is my only pet peeve with the DS (Zillow) mobile web search app.  You have no way of directing your visitor’s back to your site (less the back button) once they’ve landed themselves in it.  But this issue is made even worse when you implement it within iOS App Mode.

Option 1 is a great option too.  Its downside is that you’ve now got to consider your content on an entirely separate plane.  Depending on your site, you may even need to have multiple pages, allocating some specifically to your mobile site, which can double the required edits and cause other issues.  Note that I didn’t say posts.  If you’re on a WordPress site (which I hope you are) posts will never need to be duplicated for mobile considerations.  This would only be an issue for pages, and even then, only some of the time.

Headwaythemes, for example, used leafs as a means of placing your various types of content, so Headway’s pages (up to version 2.X) wouldn’t be supported by most mobile theming plugins.  This is one example of where you may need mobile specific pages.  There are others, but you get the idea. 

Aaaaaaanyways…If you’re still on board with a true mobile enabled site, your DS Mobile integration works in much the same way as it goes with option 2, above.  The nice thing about doing it this way is that you’d generally be relying on a separate navigational structure for your mobile site, so you could build in specific menus for your mobile visitor, again, making it easier for you to get your visitor to the search they needed.  There’s no dual purpose menus that react differently depending on what device a visitor is using.  You actually have some degree of control.

I like this Apple “Web App” idea!  Any issues with that?

I thought you might say that.  Yes.  Yes there is.  Remember how I said there’s no Safari navigation when you build a web app?  Yeah, that includes that magic back button you need to get back out of DS’s mobile app.  In other words, once a visitor has clicked on the mobile search option, there no way to get out of it, less closing the app all together.  Worse off, a mobile app is designed to work just like most iOS apps.  If you close it on a specific screen, you’ll be on that screen when you open the app the next time.  So you’re completely trapped and have basically cut your consumer off from all the content you work so hard to create for them… but there is a solution.

JUST FIX IT!

When I first saw how DS put this solution together, I was pretty miffed.  I didn’t like the implication that they could trap my clients in their search interface.  It wasn’t what I indented when I build my sites, and I didn’t want to have to jump through hoops to keep it from happening.  But now that I’ve had a moment to look at it from all it’s various angles, I’m convinced they did it exactly right, less the absence of a prominent link back to my client’s site in the header of their app. THAT still needs to happen!

The solution to this snafu is to build your site in Web App mode, but have your link to the DS mobile app open as an external asset or an external link. (depending on what mobile theming framework you’re using)  Truth be told, this is the correct way to do it anyway and I believe Apple actually required it in the past when calling an external asset, but they don’t at the moment.  (Shame on you Apple 

What this does is force your Web App Mode site to open the DS link in Safari, entirely separate from your app.  Your site remains open, again, as a separate application, but task switches to safari with DS’s mobile search loaded.  Once they’re done with their search, they can close Safari or even switch back and forth between your App and mobile search as needed.

For an Example of option 2, you can visit Homesville Real Estate of Austin, TX from your desktop and then your mobile phone.  If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, there will be a small pop-up letting you know you can add it to your home screen if you like.  Follow those directions to see what that looks like, and how mobile searches are run from that environment.  It’s not a big enough pain in the butt to avoid and certainly warrants some consideration.  Again, it can be a great extension of your brand and depending on how you structure it, it can be very helpful to your clients.

Additional Resources:

• For more on Diverse Solutions and their IDX product, pay them a visit.  For the specifics of their WordPress IDX Plug-in product, have a look here.
• If you’re running a WordPress site and are looking for a great mobile theming plug-in.  Please don’t go cheap.  We recommend (and no, we’re not asked to, or compensated to) Brave New Code’s WPTouch.  Hand’s down the best product out there and worth every penny, as are most things those guys do.  =)
• As we’ve implied, there other other things to consider when looking at mobilizing your site, including the theme you’re currently using and how your data is structured.  If you’re not knowledgeable about these things, it’s best to hire a professional to help you.  It’s generally a good idea to start where you left off and talk to the folks that developed your current site.
• You’ll need some imaging done for your mobile app.  Be sure your have all your brand assets available before you get started.

Related Posts:

• To WordPress, or not to WordPress…
• Open Letter to Metrolist MLS re: Diverse Solutions IDX fiasco
• Diverse Solutions IDX Security Issue
• Headway Themes finally addresses long standing issues
• Real estate website design – same tools, different results. Before and after.

I wasn’t born here, and so my English was very much learned, and not breastfed.  I have spent many of my early years in this country keenly aware of my foreignness, and at times, I still allow myself to feel a tinge of insecurity at my accent, which sounds far too harsh to my inner ear.  But maybe precisely because this language was not something I could ever take for granted, I feel a special affinity for people who have a gift for articulating an idea or telling a story well, and am still much more likely to indulge in an old classic than a hastily thrown together how to manifesto on any subject.  My reasons are of course my own, but I do think that we are all becoming a bit starved for those frown-worthy “big” words.  I also think that how we communicate affects how we think, at least I find myself incapable of separating the two.

So to me, there is something to be said for eloquence in speech and writing, especially in the day and age of communicating via hashtags and foursquare check-ins.

One well-placed word will resonate with me in a 140 character twitter update and will likely make me delve into a person’s profile.  At the very least, I’ll be intrigued enough to pause and think, and pausing for anything nowadays is the rarest form of acknowledgement.

We race through the tricks and tips and gadget reviews, swallowing gigs of information daily all in an attempt to either make our business or personal lives less labor intensive.  We push for maximum efficiency in all things and yet we seem to gain far too few moments that call for reflection, for pause, that aren’t tainted by the immediate desire for the next paycheck or an artifice of some sort.  If I am being completely honest, I think we invest far too much energy, time and brain power into spitting or consuming nuggets of wisdom in ever smaller and more digestible bites, and at the end of the day, my fear is that we are creating less astute readers in our audiences, less savvy business partners in our clients, and fewer and fewer real relationships and connections that matter on a level real friendships do, or ought to.

To bring this back to business, if we are told that we must speak to our site visitors as if they were in sixth grade, we will inevitably attract the audience that functions on sixth-grade level.  If you are selling skateboards, movie tickets or video games – sixth-grade vocabulary level might make sense.  But if you are selling real estate, for the sake of examples, how many sixth graders are currently looking to buy or sell a property?

The advice dished out above to speak plainly, if you will, is often predicated on the supposed existence of an “average person”.

I have yet to meet one of those apparently ubiquitous life forms.  There is nothing average about anyone I interact with, and if I had to describe each person I know via my online or off line relationships, that description would be unique to them.  We might or might not share a similar vocabulary, but I wouldn’t dream of expecting any party to a conversation to change the way they speak for my benefit.  To me, that would over-step the very bounds of a relationship.  Even more importantly, I might just get offended if someone appears to have calculated my grade-level in advance.

I find it ironic that some of the people pitching above referenced advice are also pitching the virtues of being transparent and authentic, and that they don’t see these as mutually exclusive.  Would we not all be better off mastering our various crafts on our terms?  And if we must measure the successes or failures of each endeavor or effort, lets measure things that matter, and cater our presentations, including the words we use, to clients we are actually trying to attract, instead of the masses at large who supposedly make up the androgynous average-ness that cumulatively outnumbers actual people, prospects, clients and friends.

My bit of advice, for what it’s worth: use big words or little words but stop ‘grading’ your online communication via something as useless as a Lexile score.  It’s impossible to build relationships under false pretenses, no matter how many tricks you have up your virtual sleeve.  The words you throw into the universe are the only thing people who don’t know you will connect with or not.  So choose your words wisely, but for reasons that matter.

None of these include the number of syllables or frequency of use by an average person, whatever or whoever that might be.

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In no particular order, here goes:

Squirticus - newest volunteer addition to ha media staff

• Thankful that my dad made it through the heart attack largely unscathed.
• For Squirticus, the street kitteh who walked into our home over so many others to choose from, so that we can enjoy this curious, soft, squishy addition to our family.
• For so many accidental friendships that seem to have just happened via all sorts of channels.
• For all our clients for their support and patience and for always having our back.  We hope that we’re worthy of your loyaltyJ
• For the little one’s new-found love, the string bass and the Flagler Youth Orchestra
• For a random post on FB that lead us to discover Cupcake Malbec
• For the #PWE3 girls
• For every day we spent watching the kiddo learning to skim board in the Atlantic, and for every plate of fish & chips devoured at the Golden Lion
• For the few really good movies we got to see and even for the bad ones.
• For all the moments of peace shared with the family
• For the hugs and kisses from the boys that came unbidden
• For gloriously sweet strawberries from our garden
• For the lickiest dog that ever lived, Mr. Jack-Jack and for sweet Bruno-bibbles, the chicken-shit.
• For not having to apologize too much, for having cried relatively little, for having laughed some, and for all of us getting through it with a bit of our optimism intact.

Happy Thanksgiving, peeps…

What are you thankful for?

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Jeff Turner (@respres), who most of you probably know as that really smart bald guy in California who runs Zeek and a bunch of other things, was kind enough to hand me a copy of Dashter that so many of my Twitter friends have been talking about for weeks now.  Here is a little illustration of what this thing does:-)

For one thing, it allows you to curate Tweets from within your WP Dashboard – which is rather nifty methinks:

Dave Cole – @HeyDaveCole
And the winner for “most unique #dashter testing tweets” goes to @innahamedia #unicorns? #froglicker?

Had to start with a tweet with my name in it, of course.

Thomas Cunningham – @homesbythomas
@respres Good Evening Jeff. What’s all this #dashter I hear spoke of lately? Something you’ve created? I’m sure it will be a success!

dashter wp plugin rocks

See – I pulled this one from that nifty little search tab that allows me to search for any hashtag or topic and pull up recent tweets on the subject – it’s kind of like organizing your tweets the only way that makes sense:-)

Teri Conrad – @TeriConrad
Freak!! RT @innahamedia: This is a test. “blalalbhasldjfasjdfljas;dfjalsdjf aweorjkdm #froglicker #unicorns are cool #ilikecheese

And this is the tweet that @HeyDaveCole decided was weird enough to warrant my first curated tweet at the beginning of this article… Took me literally 2 seconds to pull it up.

innahamedia – @innahamedia
Twitting exclusively via my site today – THANK YOU @DashterWP cc:respres

I lied. I got some dm’s and so ended up having to respond the old school way, via desktop app. Except for that, though, today I followed all my @mentions and convos via the dash of my site. Pretty amazing tools there. I no longer need TweetDeck (which I’ve always rather hated). I can quote, reply or do most of anything else I would need to do from right where I spend most of my day:-)

As cool as curation is, I spend most of my time with Dashter playing with my Relationships and my Stream.  The combination of the two is to me what makes this plugin an invaluable tool to anyone who blogs.  Here is basically what it can help you accomplish.  In the relationships tab, you can zero in on any profile and get full details, like this:

Teri is cool - follow her:-)

But the ultimate beauty of Dashter is that I can add interests (as tags) to any user’s profile.  So I added a few to Teri’s – stuff I know she is interested in, and then visited my Stream (where Dashter basically puts a collection of your blog posts).

Here is what I got:

Now my twitter knows Teri a LOT better

Dashter went through my post tags and matched them to any of my Twitter buddies, and then matched those to my posts, based on context I had just created with a click of a button.  See, I know that Teri and Michael (@ProfessionalOne) are both interested in the subject of #socialroi – so they were recommended this post.  I like that.  Instead of just tweeting my stuff at random or manually to one person at a time, I can see how any of my drivel connects to anyone in my Twitter space and share only what I think is of interest to them.  Better conversations indeed, Jeff.

So there you have it.  There are a bazillion of other really cool features in Dashter, and quite possibly stuff I haven’t figured out yet.  This post only addresses what jumped out at me over the last few days. Your mileage may vary.  I think this plugin will encourage better engagement, lead to better conversations, and hopefully will not be something that compulsive spammers would choose as their tool of choice – it’s not very spammer-friendly.  But if you are in the social game for more than immediate conversion, I think this plugin is definitely worth every bit of the money it’ll cost and every second invested in the learning curve.:-)

One caveat: of course being so new that it’s not out yet, there are a few things that are not yet addressed.  Most important of these to me is the ability for multiple bloggers on the same site to have their own Dashter, so their tweets are connected to the appropriate handle.  I am told multi-blogger Dashter is in the works:-)

Full disclosure: I suck at Twitter, so not sure I tested all I was supposed to test.

Oh, almost forgot.  If you work for the FTC and read this post, I am not being compensated for writing it in any way, less that I was given a FREE copy of Dashter.  The gift was not in exchange for a glowing testimonial or some such.  Gosh, I really need a standard disclaimer. Basically, there is nothing here that anyone should want to sue me for.

#unicorns #froglicker

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A bit of a back story, and a minor confession of sorts, if I may:

Our 19 year old, who last year got accepted into a pretty prestigious ocean engineering program at Florida Atlantic University decided after a really lousy freshman year that he wasn’t ready for school yet.  He couldn’t find the motivation to work towards something that was still as blurry as retirement in his head, and something that he realized his heart wasn’t really in.  He plays jazz piano and writes poetry.  He is not mechanically inclined, and although he’s always been decent in math, he never liked it.  In short, after the initial thrill of venturing on his own, he lost his will to work for something that was not important enough on its own terms…

image courtesy www.absolutads.com

If he stuck it out, he could have possibly made a reasonably decent engineer, but I feel that he would have been cheated of something in the process, which brings me to where my little company has been and what we are trying to recover from.

I love what I do for a living, but only when I do it exceptionally well.  The same goes for my better half and design arm of our little outfit.  After creating so many brands, logos, postcards and websites, and strategizing for so many different markets and personalities, we both found ourselves staring at our respective screens, blankly, and being rather unwilling to hit the keys (or Stylus in Jon’s case).  Being behind on the few projects during this creative blackout, I turned into a lousy boss, attempting to extract from my partner, who is by nature a perfectionist and for whom design is an art, a shippable product.

I’ve half assed a few blogs and bits of advice in various places for much the same reason.  I just felt that as uninspired as we both were, we needed to keep working, and so we did, or rather, we tried.  To put our clients at ease, none of it affects you, less maybe having to wait a bit longer for your various projects to be finished, but there was an unexpected lesson in all of this for yours truly: at times, we will just need a break to regroup, to feel inspired again to do great work, and we may be late in finishing one thing or another as a result, and that’s the worst that can happen, and that it is ok, if only because we are not going to sacrifice on the other more important aspect of what we do, the work itself.

A paycheck alone is an amazingly lousy motivator, at least for Jon and I, and no bonus or ability to make more money if only we worked faster would make up for being uninspired.  Our kiddo may have indeed made a reasonably good engineer, but he would have never been great at it, no matter how many hours he’d have to devote to it, and even a promise of a 170K salary upon graduating was not motivation enough, nor could it have been.

And so it is with us and this little business we birthed years ago. We started it because we were passionate about what we do and had a pretty great combo of skills for the tasks at hand.  We wanted to do great work, not just for the paycheck, but selfishly, because that makes us feel good.  That’s what keeps us digging and searching and creating.

So with humble apologies to my talented perfectionist husband and partner, from here on out, I am going to do my very best to worry less about the timelines and more about the work that we love and the passion that drives us to do it well.  In the end, I think our clients will understand…

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