Listen for 5 minutes and you won’t want to turn it off.

(Click here if you can’t see the video.)

Learn more about Gary here:
http://garyvaynerchuk.com/

And if you love wine go here:
http://tv.winelibrary.com/

Hope to see you there!

Where: Sotheby’s office on Lincoln (Between Beaujo’s Pizza & the Chinese place downtown)

When: This Friday, 6pm till??

(Click here if you can’t see the video.)

Tapes. It turns out that fans were recording the live shows and passing them around the college dorms (remember pre-internet). Inevitably some would get sent to friends at distant colleges and so the music spread. What got all this started was the band manager who not only allowed taping of live shows, he encouraged it. The way he put it, “I stopped thinking like a record exec and started thinking like a fan.” Pure awesomeness. That one simple act of thinking like a fan led to a marketing breakthrough that otherwise never would have happened.

“I stopped thinking like a record exec and started thinking like a fan.”

We’ve seen similar approaches that have lead to success in other industries:
Crocs - By not thinking like a shoe company they invented a huge hit.
Apple - By not thinking like a phone company they created the iPhone and revolutionized the industry.
Dr. Jay Parkinson - By not thinking like a traditional doctor, he’s taking primary care to a whole new level.
On & on…

So what if you stopped thinking like a real estate pro and started thinking like a the people in the market you are trying to reach? What of you took the DMB approach?

Less about you, more about me. Less out-dated headshots, more well crafted information that helps me make a decision. Less BS market reports and more stuff that I want to read. Less spam, more permission. Less focus on commission more focus on value. Less money in print and more money creating amazing online content.

With so much of real estate spewing the same crap just because their competitor is spewing the same crap there is real opportunity to connect with the right people and grow your business by thinking like them instead of thinking like a realtor.

This is IMPORTANT and you need to know about it RIGHT AWAY.

Tonight Facebook is staging one of the biggest virtual land grabs ever - the rush to claim your own name on Facebook.com.

You’ve heard of Internet Marketers claiming that the surge of traffic crashed their servers?

Well tonight there will be a server rush that has rarely, if ever, been duplicated on the Net. And you NEED to be part of it.

Right now if you want to send someone to your profile, you have to figure out a URL that looks something like this:

www.facebook.com/people/Your-Name/585946540
(That’s an inactive URL, BTW, so don’t click it.)

But wouldn’t you rather own www.facebook.com/yourname?

And this becomes even MORE important for Facebook Fan Pages (not your regular friend profiles, the pages you can set up to promote your business.) Can you imagine how devastating it would be to have someone else own your company name in Facebook?

In the past, it was easy to own your own name on Facebook, all you had to do was to spend a large amount with Facebook (think $50,000+ per month) or be a huge celebrity, and it was yours.

But starting tonight at midnight Eastern US time (that would be 9:00pm Pacific time) you can claim your name as a facebook URL. Plus, you can claim names for your business pagestoo.

But here’s the catch - it’s first come, first serve. Imagine a couple of hundred MILLION people all try to grab their name at the same time, and there will be some interesting server shenanigans occuring.

Here’s what to do.

Tonight at midnight US Eastern time, login to Facebook then go to http://www.facebook.com/username

You will see a form that will give you several suggested usernames, and the ability to choose your own. Either choose one of the names suggested or type in your own.

Repeat this process for any Facebook Fan Pages you administer, though there are three catches: first, your page must have over 1000 fans prior to May 31st 2009, you can’t claim something generic like travel or insurance, and you can’t claim someone else’s trademark.

In fact, if you have a registered trademark, I suggest you go to
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=username_rights
right now to prevent others from grabbing your name.

If someone else has already has your name, get creative - add a period, or a dash, shorten it, lengthen it, or slap a number in there somewhere.

That’s the drill. I’ll be there at midnight, and I suggest you be there too.

In this 20+ min presentation, Jeff Jarvis offers interesting insight into how to listen to the conversations your customers are having and benefit in the new world of Google.

(Click here if you can’t see the video.)

BRITE Conference on Vimeo.

Like it?

Get Jeff’s book here:
What Would Google Do?

Click to see a bunch more Jeff Jarvis on YouTube.com

Presentation Slide Download (19mb)

Click to view in this browser.

At a minimum all these things had to line up: inexpensive video cameras, video codecs, hosting, searching, sharing, editing, the opportunity & desire for people to post the initial vids.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So the question is, what’s available in your world that can be mashed-up to create something completely new and interesting to your audience? I bet if you spend some time exploring you’ll find something of value that’s worth sharing.

As so much of successful marketing moves away from canned, corporate-speak, towards authentic conversations it might make sense to look at opportunities and content that already exist.

This blog is now part of the NEW Altera site.

Meanwhile we’re still finishing up some last minute details on the site. There’s interesting stuff ahead for this blog. Thanks for reading!
Jay