jonwashburn: March 2007

Two New Project Blogger Coaches

I am very pleased to announce the addition of two additional esteemed coaches to our Project Blogger competition: Drew Meyers with Zillow and Paul Chaney with Blogging Systems.

 Drew Meyers is a Partner Relations Associate at Zillow, a real estate Web site based in Seattle. Drew works on a wide range of projects and recently celebrated his year anniversary at the company. Among them were creating Zillow's neighborhood search database and organizing the Carnival of Real Estate. In addition to being part of Zillow's blog team, he actively writes about business and technology on his personal blog.

 

 Paul Chaney is VP of Marketing for Blogging Systems Group, the leading supplier of blog technology for the real estate industry.

He has been a business blog consultant for the past three years and is widely known and respected in that field. He understands at a granular level how blogs can be used as a tool for marketing communications and has worked with a number of clients assisting them in deploying a blog marketing strategy. Paul also coauthored the real estate blogging book phenomenon Realty Blogging.

These additional two coaches brings our total count to 13 and officially completes our roster.    

 

13 commentsJonathan Washburn • March 30 2007 05:00PM

Project Blogger

The goal is simple: We will be selecting 10-15 blogging coaches to each train a real estate blogging apprentice of their choice. Over the course of about 4 months, the blogging coaches will aim to develop the most successful real estate blogger they can.

The coaches and apprentices will be chronicling their Project Blogger experiences on their own blogs and the Project Blogger group on ActiveRain.

 Here are the details:

 
Pre-Season: March 12th - April 8th

      Getting the 'kinks' worked out.
      Developing the blogsite
      Hand calisthenics

Competition Begins: April 9th

       No more excuses, the race is on.

Competition Ends: July 15th (14 weeks later) - winners will be announced at Inman's Blogger's Connect

 
Judging:

Each week a new guest judge is rotated in.
Guest judge evaluation weighs 85% of weekly point scores
ActiveRain community weighs 15% of weekly point scores
Examples of confirmed guest judges we plan to invite:
* Brad Inman, president of Inman News
* Matt Heaton, CEO ActiveRain
We will be inviting some really exciting guest judges from the non-real estate blogging world as well! 

 
Scoring:

Points will be distributed to the top teams on a weekly basis. 
The team with the most points at the end of the competition will win the competition.
Each week our judges will select their top 5 teams in order of performance for the week. 
Each judges will allocate:
100 points for 1st place
80 points for 2nd place
65 points for 3rd place
50 points for 4th place
35 points for 5th place.
ActiveRain members will also be able to vote for their favorite team of the week.
ActiveRain member point allocation will conform with the above distribution.

 
Judging Criteria:

Judges and ActiveRain members will be instructed to judge the Project Blogger groups using the following criteria:

a. Degree of innovation in approach
b. Consistency
c. Quality of postings
d. The Apprentice's community involvement
e. Traffic or reach of apprentice's blog(s)
f. Documentation of experience and participation in ActiveRain's Project Blogger's group
g. Cost effectiveness of campaign
h. Improvement/progress of the apprentice
h. Business viability of approach

 
Prizes:

ActiveRain will be donating $5,000 to the winning team's charities of choice. 
The blogging coach and apprentice will each be allowed to direct $2,500 of the $5,000.
Superstardom.

Selecting An Apprentice:

Each coach will be allowed to pick their own apprentice. 
The only criteria regarding experience of apprentice is that they have not generated any business or leads from blogging before the start of the competition.


Budget: 

Each apprentice will bear the costs of their own blogging efforts.
No budget restrictions
Budgets must be published in the Project Blogger blog on ActiveRain.


The Competitors:

This is not the final list of coaches.  Some may not be able to formally commit to the competition and we may add a few more.

1. Dustin Luther, RainCityGuide
2. Jeff Turner, RealEstateShows
3. Greg Swan, BloodhoundBlog
4. Jim Cronin, RealEstateTomato
5. Teresa Boardman, StPaulRealEstateBlog
6. Joe Ferrara & Rudy Bachraty, SellsiusBlog
7. Ardell DellaLoggia, SearchingSeattleBlog
8. Pat Kitano, TransparentRealEstate 
9. Joel Burslem, FutureOfRealEstateMarketing
10. Jonathan Washburn, ActiveRain
11. Frances Flynn Thorsen, theRealtyGram
12. Drew Meyers, Zillow

P.S. THANK YOU Jim Cronin for designing the Project Blogger logo and helping to draft this post!! 

106 commentsJonathan Washburn • March 13 2007 03:52PM

Project Blogger - Meet the coaches

teresa boardmanTeresa Boardman, StPaulRealEstateBlog 

Author of the origional, St. Paul Real Estate Blog, started in November of 2005. Teresa is recognized as a top real estate blogger. She now generates most of her personal real estate business as a result of her blogging efforts. She has a loyal following on a variety of blog sites. Her internet marketing classes taught in cooperation with Keller Williams are hugely popular with St Paul real estate agents from all brands.

 

 Joel Burslem, FutureOfRealEstateMarketing

Fairly new to the real estate space, Joel has quickly secured his position as a progressive thinking real estate marketing expert through his widely read blog, FutureOfRealEstateMarketing. He recently joined Oregon’s largest independantly owned real estate company, where he oversee much of their traditional offline and online marketing efforts. 

 

 Jim Cronin, RealEstateTomato

Raised in a "real estate family', Jim has been a emarketing consultant to real estate agents since 2000. During this time he has helped over 1,000 Realtors develop their online presense.  He is best known in his role as the Author of the Real Estate Tomato blog. 

 

ardell dellaloggiaArdell DellaLoggia, SearchingSeattleBlog

Ardell was first widely recognized for her blogging efforts through the Seattle real estate blog, RainCityGuide.  She is now one of just a handful of real estate sales agents who derive a majority of their business through blogging. She started her career in real estate in 1990 and has been licensed to sell in five states.

 

 Joe Ferrara & Rudy Bachraty, SellsiusBlog 

"We are the Founders of Sellsius Real Estate, an enhanced real estate classifieds community aimed at helping promote real estate professionals and their business.  Our backgrounds are in real estate brokerage and law.      We run a little blog party which some people seem to like.  We try to inform and entertain.  Some may want to label us blogging experts, but we're not---we're just like you.  We have been fortunate to be recognized by our peers and that's enough for us."

 

pat kitanoPat Kitano, TransparentRealEstate 

Pat is a regular speaker and commentator on real estate industry and technology issues and is considered a Transparency Advocate.
Since graduating from Cal Berkeley (Geophysics) and Columbia University (MBA), he's been involved in four competitive industries - films, investment banking, internet technology and real estate. I live with my nuclear family in the best American city after New York, San Francisco.

Dustin LutherDustin Luther, RainCityGuide

As Director of Interactive Marketing at Move, the company behind such real estate websites as REALTOR.com and Move.com, Dustin works to both build tools and drive implementation of tools that better enable community to be built up around real estate topics.

 

 Frances Flynn Thorsen, theRealtyGram

Frances is Managing Editor of RealTown.com. Fran has been a REALTOR for 22 years; she has been blogging since January 2005 and presently publishes 10 blogs, including The REALTYgram Blogger. Prior to becoming a REALTOR she was a magazine editor in New York City and worked at several publications including The Ladies’ Home Journal, where she was Production Editor. She is a member of the National Assn. of Real Estate Editors and the National Assn. of REALTORS and a founding member of the Web Women Giving Cicle. 

 Jeff Turner, RealEstateShows

Jeff Turner is the President and Founder of RealEstateShows.com. Over the past twenty years, he has been both a successful entrepreneur and a senior executive in a large corporation. He lead his last entrepreneurial effort, J.J. Grace, Inc., to the Inc. 500 fastest growing companies list. Jeff earned his bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Grace College (Indiana) and a Master’s degree in Educational Psychology from Ball State University (Indiana). Jeff is married to Racquel (Rocky) and they have six children. (That is not a typo.)

Greg SwanGreg Swan, BloodhoundBlog

A Realtor and the Designated Broker for BloodhoundRealty.com. He is an Accredited Buyer's Representative, a Certified Buyer's Representative, a Certified Residential Specialist, an E-Pro Internet Certified Realtor and a Graduate of the Realtor Institute. He speaks frequently on real estate issues and writes a weekly column for West Valley sections of the Arizona Republic. Greg spent many years in hi-tech print and direct-mail advertising production and web-site development before becoming a Realtor. He is a mumbling Latinist, a stumbling applications programmer and a bumbling poet.

jonathan washburnJonathan Washburn, ActiveRain

At a mere 28 years of age, Jonathan has distinguished himself as a new media entrepreneur. An industry veteran with over 10 years of real estate sales and management experience, he was an early pioneer in the online real estate arena, founding WhyNotOwn Real Estate, one of the first internet brokerages. After selling the business in early 2004, he simultaneously founded Brio Realty and cofounded ActiveRain. Jonathan is married to Serenela (Sara), his high school sweetheart.

 Drew Meyers, Zillow

Drew works on a wide range of projects and recently celebrated his year anniversary at the company. Among them were creating Zillow's neighborhood search database and organizing the Carnival of Real Estate. In addition to being part of Zillow's blog team, he actively writes about business and technology on his personal blog.

 

Paul Chaney,  Blogging Systems Group

Paul has been a business blog consultant for the past three years and is widely known and respected in that field. He understands at a granular level how blogs can be used as a tool for marketing communications and has worked with a number of clients assisting them in deploying a blog marketing strategy. Paul also coauthored the real estate blogging book phenomenon Realty Blogging.


27 commentsJonathan Washburn • March 13 2007 03:23PM

ActiveRain Success Stories

I would like to gather the best ActiveRain success stories into one post. I would like to limit the success stories to examples of business being generated as a result of ActiveRain. Since ActiveRain is so new, I do not expect the stories or quotes to be only of closed business; good prospects will also count. This post will be linked to from the index page of ActiveRain. 

I will look to the comments on this post for references to success stories or quotes to populate this list.  As we are made aware of new posts or comments we will modify the body of this post.  If you have a short success story feel free to leave it in the comments below.  

Any non success story / comment will be deleted from this post. 

After a week or so, I will delete the above text from this post.

Success blog posts:

 

Success quotes found in the comments of ActiveRain blog posts: 

"I have been here for two weeks and I personnally like the very simple-easy to navigate site. I blog, I comment, I go to work. I have already received 2 referrals from this site and a whole lot of great information to build my business! Thanks AR---your the best.." Stephen Lucket

"I can personally attest to a 35% increase in production and a 300% increase in online inquiries from my involvement there."  Brian Brady
8 commentsJonathan Washburn • March 02 2007 07:59PM