Phonetag.com seems to be sweeping the real estate industry by storm. For the uninitiated, when you leave someone a voice mail who subscribes to this service, you hear a voice say “This message will be transcribed by Phonetag.com. Please speak clearly. (Beep).”The service emails transcriptions of voice mail messages to subscribers as fast as possible. Closed captioned for the “I don’t have the time to actually listen to the message” impaired. (And you know who you are). Sure, this would be great if you can’t take a call in a closing (but hey, when has anyone not taken a call in a closing?) — and I’m sure Phonetag.com is creating jobs — but it needs to calm down a bit and stress quality over quantity. This is a recent Phonetag transcription of a message I left for a client about an event later in March. Word for word. “Hi, How are you? Thanks so much for the call me invite and see that an (anti?). Sounds like a (blah?). Got March 18th in the calendar. I’m 90% confirmed that the secretary of state, make sure that is not something I’m forgetting on, but it sounds totally great and I got a down for a (Martiny?) Parks. Just let me know what time it is and we’ll lock it off. Looking forward to it and have a same task, okay? and I will talk to (Chinel?) if I could.” Now, I’m fairly confident that I speak pretty intelligibly in my voice mail messages, and would invite Phonetag to give itself an overhauling spell check. It’s a nice step beyond visual voicemail — so long as it make sense. So says Chinel.
Last week I saw “Sketches of Frank Gehry,” a cool documentary by Sydney Pollack about how Gehry does his thing. Some love Gehry, some thing his work is ridiculous. I’ll spare the super long post about the in’s and out’s of Gehry and what he does and what people think. Instead, I’ll simply offer this one quote from Gehry: “I’ll do what I do best. And if it’s no good, the marketplace will deny it.”
In late 2009, PERL founder Ken Perlmutter and I approached the folks at Conlon: A Real Estate Company to create a new partnership by combining efforts in social media. Traditionally, the lender-realtor relationship is based on efforts through advertising and at open houses — and PERL, Conlon and MC took this a few steps further by collaborating on a series of online projects, the first of which was building and launching the new Conlon blog. Their blog incorporates a design by Desme and funnels Conlon’s active social media network in a variety of spots. They’re up and running on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube — and have an ongoing radio presence on WLS. Big thanks to Ken, Benjie, Drussy and Andrew for inviting us to join in on the fun. This project was actually the basis for a presentation earlier this week at Mid-Town Tennis. Congrats to our friends at Conlon!
Our friends at Hot Coffee Coaching are teaming with Flourish studios to host a free coaching fair this Saturday from 11-4 at Flourish Studios just south of Belmont & Lincoln. Check-out the FB invite and swing on by. Great opportunity for new businesses and entrepreneurs to win a 3-month coaching package. Think you might not need a consultant? Think again. Trust us.
It’s the 50th episode of the PERL Mortgage Podcast! We started the show with PERL in the fall of 2008, in response to a growing need among clients (and folks in general) to know more about changes in our national economy. MC has produced episodes focusing on a lot of topics — and, amazingly, we’re just scratching the surface. This time around, I sat down with Barry Schwartz of PERL and Ryan Stavros of Jameson Real Estate to talk about trends in a few of Chicago’s neighborhoods: the uber-referenced Lincoln Park, up-and-comer River West, and historical Rogers Park. Sidenote: when in Rogers Park, hit the Heartland Cafe and tell Mike James we said hello. Go on a Sunday morning and enjoy “Live from the Heartland,” Mike’s weekly radio show. We in Schad were guests a few years ago and I’m not sure if it’s still on the air — regardless of the show, get the Buffalo Burger. Good times. For more podcasts, visit the PERL archives.
Phonetag.com seems to be sweeping the real estate industry by storm. For the uninitiated, when you leave someone a voice mail who subscribes to this service, you hear a voice say “This message will be transcribed by Phonetag.com. Please speak clearly. (Beep).”The service emails transcriptions of voice mail messages to subscribers as fast as possible. Closed captioned for the “I don’t have the time to actually listen to the message” impaired. (And you know who you are). Sure, this would be great if you can’t take a call in a closing (but hey, when has anyone not taken a call in a closing?) — and I’m sure Phonetag.com is creating jobs — but it needs to calm down a bit and stress quality over quantity. This is a recent Phonetag transcription of a message I left for a client about an event later in March. Word for word. “Hi, How are you? Thanks so much for the call me invite and see that an (anti?). Sounds like a (blah?). Got March 18th in the calendar. I’m 90% confirmed that the secretary of state, make sure that is not something I’m forgetting on, but it sounds totally great and I got a down for a (Martiny?) Parks. Just let me know what time it is and we’ll lock it off. Looking forward to it and have a same task, okay? and I will talk to (Chinel?) if I could.” Now, I’m fairly confident that I speak pretty intelligibly in my voice mail messages, and would invite Phonetag to give itself an overhauling spell check. It’s a nice step beyond visual voicemail — so long as it make sense. So says Chinel.
