This post has absolutely nothing to do with mortgages, sales, or marketing; but it is being posted in our Top of Mind Networks Mortgage Sales and Marketing Blog anyway. It is, however, relevant to a post Mark Green did a while back on proofreading tips prior to sending out a letter.
It was recently pointed out to me that an email correspondence we sent out for a client had a misspelling in it; ‘deductable’ instead of ‘deductible’. In accordance with Mark’s 5 tips for proofreading your copy, the email was read by multiple people, read backwards, and done one sentence at a time. However, nobody noticed the misspelling. When this was brought to my attention the first thing I did was check the MS Word template used to create the email, and sure enough there were no red squiggly lines under ‘deductable’. For me, that is litmus test numero uno. I know, you should never put too much weight on Microsoft’s spell check; but the common consequence of that is using one correctly-spelled word instead of the word you intended… but if a word is flat out misspelled it is usually pretty good about alerting you of that. I then did a Google search for ‘define deductable’ and found this link from allwords.com.
So my question to the audience is this, is deductable actually a misspelled word? I am not sure if this brings up the discussion of “what makes a word correctly spelled?” or “who officially decides how a word is spelled?”, but I certainly recall the old saying of ain’t ain’t a word… but that now has its own Wikipedia entry.
David Orsini is Vice President of Top of Mind Networks and oversees the CRM division of the company. David specializes in building systems that help mortgage professionals maximize their relationships with their client base without having to lift a finger.
Last week I posted an article about the loss of productivity our office (and more specifically me) experienced after upgrading from Office 2003 to Office 2007 with a Microsoft Exchange Server. This post is to serve as the yin to that post’s yang.
There was in fact a pretty large learning curve associated with the upgrade, especially with Word and Excel. I feel I had become pretty darn efficient with both of these programs, and familiarizing myself with a new console proved to be kind of annoying. But I suppose some of that can simply be chalked up to simple resistance to change.
So last week I exposed a lot of the problems that can occur with an upgrade like this. Now I want to concentrate on the reasons to make such an upgrade. I can make the statement with no exaggeration that my email efficiency has at least doubled. I can check/send email from home, work, my mobile device, or any computer for that matter and all of my inboxes are in sync. If I send an email from my phone, MS Exchange adds that email to my sent items folder, so I no longer have to worry about what emails I have and have not responded to. I literally used to CC myself on all emails I sent from my phone just so I would have record of that sent email. This annoyance is no longer necessary. The same holds true for webmail (accessing email on the go via a web interface). This used to be just as clunky as phone email. Now with the MS Exchange internet interface I can access my email from any web browser with 90% of the functionality I have with my actual install of Outlook.
The annoyances of using the old webmail and the old cell phone email were so bad that it really kept me from doing any sort of actual work outside the office. I only responded to what I considered emergency emails. Now I am confident that I can be just as efficient in clearing out my inbox from the comfort of my own couch while my wife watches reality TV as I am sitting at my desk at work. And as a business owner that is huge for me. I have seen the light and honestly don’t think I could go back to ‘regular email’.
And the absolute best part is that since we are on an Exchange server now I can add my SPAM rules on the server level, not on the client level. In other words I can create rules that mark emails as SPAM before they even get downloaded to my inbox (and in turn synced with my phone). Another crutch I used to have with working on the go is that I got triple the amount of SPAM as I did regular email. So sorting through the SPAM to find the 1 or 2 actual emails on my phone was unbearable. I don’t think I have received a single piece of SPAM email to my phone since the change.
So for those business owners, branch managers, and IT guys out there; if you want to give a pretty solid boost to your employees in email efficiency I highly recommend giving MS Exchange a shot. You will get pushback up front, but they (like me) will see the light after only a few days of using it.
Shey, you are the man; thanks for making this happen!
David Orsini is Vice President of Top of Mind Networks and oversees the CRM division of the company. David specializes in building systems that help mortgage professionals maximize their relationships with their client base without having to lift a finger.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday week our entire office upgraded from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007, and also upgraded from ‘normal email’ to a MS Exchange server. This transition, like many, had its hiccups. First and foremost spell check no longer worked for me. And when you are as horindus a spellar as I am, spell check is an absolute must. It turns out since I was on Word 2003 that spell check feature no longer worked for Outlook. So I had to upgrade to Office 2007 as well just to get that feature working again. And when you do as much work as I do in both Word and Excel, this upgrade came with a huge loss in productivity as none of my menu commands are in the same places they used to be. Plus our entire sales force lost access to our ACT database. Fortunately this is a short term problem since we are launching our own killer Contact Management System in January.
The color-coded follow-up flags in Outlook also no longer exist. There is a new concept of categories that I had to get used to in order to arrange my inbox by type of follow-up action item I had. And if that was not enough, I now also had duplicate contacts and a duplicate calendar. And when I first booted up my machine I had about 27 Outlook reminders going off… some of which were from months ago.
I am a huge technology geek and typically love having the latest and greatest gadgets. But when messing with your ‘day to day’ stuff, it is important from a planning perspective for all offices to be cognizant of the very sizable learning curve and loss of productivity you may receive from your employees in the short term. On the surface it may make sense to make a change like this during a holiday week; but my devil’s advocate theory to that is that when your employees return to the office after being gone for 6 days, they kind of need to play a little catch up anyway. So maybe large scale upgrades like this are better suited for midnight Thursday night on a normal week, that way everyone at the office has had the week to prepare for the change and make sure they are caught up with their current workloads.
David Orsini is Vice President of Top of Mind Networks and oversees the CRM division of the company. David specializes in building systems that help mortgage professionals maximize their relationships with their client base without having to lift a finger.
LinkedIn has long been a successful tool for users to build their online, professional identity. Notice that I stressed the word professional. The status update is a relatively new feature of LinkedIn; and in my opinion has been a very useful tool for starting discussions… up until now that is. LinkedIn is in danger is causing people to tarnish that professional identity with SPAM.
I think LinkedIn totally missed the mark with their Twitter integration. The idea in and of itself is not a bad one. And I think if this new integration was used properly it could prove quite useful. But when setting up the integration you get 2 options: either include all tweets or all tweets including the #li or #in hashtags; and my gut tells me the vast majority of users will select the include all option. So now each Tuesday when I get my LinkedIn updates email I will gradually get less and less use out of it. I typically pay attention to each and every status in this email, and it has been invaluable to me in keeping up with my friends, colleagues, and clients. In fact just last week this very email is how I found out our client, Brian McRae, just landed a spot on the St. Louis Fox affiliate talking about the new Homebuyer Tax Credit. But in the coming months I will see less and less useful updates like this one, and more updates like “@mortgagecrm great article on #mrev” and have no idea what they are even talking about.
And the truth of the matter is that a tweet serves a different function than a status update (LinkedIn or FaceBook). A status update is typically way more descriptive in nature. Any outside party looking in should be able to read a status update and have a pretty solid idea of what the author is talking about. Whereas a tweet is by in large more chaotic in nature; often times containing dynamic information such as a comment directed towards another user or a link to another website. Tweets are also very commonly simple syndication of new blog posts or automated messages. The bottom line is that a large percent of the time if you look at a single tweet by itself you will have absolutely no idea what the author is talking about. And I really don’t want these messages in my LinkedIn email updates. LinkedIn would have been better off either forcing users to select the #li #in option (or at least making it the default option), or just displaying the Twitter feed on that user’s profile page vs. making the latest Tweet the user’s status.
David Orsini is Vice President of Top of Mind Networks and oversees the CRM division of the company. David specializes in building systems that help mortgage professionals maximize their relationships with their client base without having to lift a finger.
Google announced a few updates to Google Reader last week that I thought were interesting. For those of you who are relatively new to the blogosphere and do not know what Google Reader is or how and why to use it, please read here for the Benefits of Using Google Reader. Anyway, last week Google announced the addition of the new Explore section for their Reader application. One of the features of this new addition is the Popular Items sections. In the spirit of the #trending topics functionality that Twitter provides, Google Reader now uses algorithms to track well-liked images, videos, and pages from the internet and order these items to help you find popular content. This does not always find you content related to your other feeds, but in my limited use of this feature I have already found some off-topic, yet very interesting things.
Another feature that has apparently been around for a while that I never knew about is the Recommendations section. This was tucked away somewhere that I never bothered looking at, but they have now moved it to this new Explore section. This section uses your Reader trends and even web searches to generate a list of feeds that Google and their infinite wisdom think you might like. Using this functionality this morning I actually found a really cool blog that I will now follow.
Google Reader is a killer application for anyone looking to stay in tune with what is going on and the latest trends in their industry. And with this new functionality it just got better. I typically spend about 30 minutes to an hour a day going through my list, and now I can get even more out of that time.
David Orsini is Vice President of Top of Mind Networks and oversees the CRM division of the company. David specializes in building systems that help mortgage professionals maximize their relationships with their client base without having to lift a finger.
Mark Green Interviewed For Piece On OpenForum.com Mark was recently interviewed for an article on OpenForum.com about the value of joining industry associations. Click above to read how Mark describes putting a lot of time and effort into building relationships within his associations and really trying to make a difference in the industry.
Top of Mind Networks Featured REALTOR Magazine’s 2009 Buyers Guide Top of Mind Networks’ closing gift, the Address Stamper, was a featured closing gift on the Realtor.org Closing Gift Buyer’s Guide in the Top Closing Gifts for $50 and Under section. We easily made the price threshold at only $10! There were no gifts in this section for less than that!
Mark Green NAMB State Of The Union With Jim Pair As most everyone already knows, Mark moderated an emergency State of the Union webinar with Jim Pair regarding impending legislation that will affect all originators, bankers and brokers alike.
Did You Know - Top of Mind Networks Leadership as Contributing Authors on High Profile Industry Blogs Did you know that Mark Green and David Orsini have been consistent contributing authors on the following industry blogs?
David Orsini is Vice President of Top of Mind Networks and oversees the CRM division of the company. David specializes in building systems that help mortgage professionals maximize their relationships with their client base without having to lift a finger.
Getting a message to your database is all about one thing, breaking through the clutter. If your client never reads your message then it was a waste. Web 2.0 is, by design, a highly transparent communication tool. Even though you can generate highly personalized communications based on information your prospects, clients, and referral partners make readily available about themselves; the actual communication generated from your social networking sites shares some of the same non-personal flees as email. It is so easy, so cheap, and sometimes so automated that recipients of your communication just don’t give it too much thought; that is one of dozens (if not hundreds) of pieces of communications they will receive in this manner that day. Don’t get me wrong, Web 2.0, social networking, and email drip campaigns should be very important tools in your marketing mix; but what I am saying is that sometimes 1.0 is better.
Now more than ever companies are cutting back on direct mail marketing because of the hard cost associated with it. And even those not cutting back are still using the standard windowed envelopes with bulk mail, which is the cheapest option. Why not be the one sender in that day’s batch of mail to do it the right way and break through the clutter? A very professional looking, ivory colored envelope with the address printed directly on it (no address labels) and an actual first class postage stamp will do just that.
(actual envelope looks better I promise, had to size it down to fit the post)
A professional letter that is the very best looking of the 4-5 envelopes I get in my mailbox on a daily basis has a much higher chance of getting read than one of 70-100 marketing emails I get on a daily basis. In fact, each time Top of Mind Networks sends a letter to a prospect of ours we even ask them, “I bet this was the first letter you opened today wasn’t it?” That is the key to getting your marketing message across, be the first letter opened that day. So while we would never recommend that you not utilize email and social media in your day to day marketing, we do highly recommend that you also attack your database the old fashioned way and break through the clutter.
David Orsini is Vice President of Top of Mind Networks and oversees the CRM division of the company. David specializes in building systems that help mortgage professionals maximize their relationships with their client base without having to lift a finger.
This is an awesome video someone shared with me over at Broker Outpost. If you don’t have a good website, a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook page, or a blog; YOU NEED TO WATCH THIS VIDEO. I am obviously a big proponent of social media and the statistics shared in this video even shocked me. Enjoy!
David Orsini is Vice President of Top of Mind Networks and oversees the CRM division of the company. David specializes in building systems that help mortgage professionals maximize their relationships with their client base without having to lift a finger.
One of our goals at Top of Mind Networks is to be your database. I think once our new Contact Management System is launched in the next 90 days that will become more of a reality. That being said, in order to be your single marketing database we often need to consolidate multiple databases into one. And since sometimes different database and CRM systems store their data differently, combining them can become problematic.
In the scenario I am covering today, we have one Excel spreadsheet that has the contact’s first and last name in one column. And if there is a spouse (co-borrower) name it is also stored in that same column. In order to have a clean database we need all of that data stored in separate columns (ie as separate fields). That way when addressing a letter or email you can address it as “Dear Joe,” vs. “Dear Joe Smith” when using your marketing database/CMS. Separating these values from one column into multiple columns is not very straightforward, but in the video below I have given my best effort at illustrating how we typically accomplish this. Hopefully this helps!
If you are having trouble viewing this video or would like to see a larger version so it is easier to see please click here.
David Orsini is Vice President of Top of Mind Networks and oversees the CRM division of the company. David specializes in building systems that help mortgage professionals maximize their relationships with their client base without having to lift a finger.
I was reading this article on Duct Tape Marketing this morning and got to thinking how realtors and mortgage professionals could put this strategy to use for them. This article describes how local business owners can use the Google Local Business Center to add their business to a directory within Google.
I am sure you have all seen search results from Google that look like this image, where they list out certain businesses that match your criteria and show them on a Google Map. This directory is how that comes to be. So the old saying goes, “Real Estate Is Local”, so why not use the tools Google is giving us to make our business more easily found by local people who are searching for it?
And if anyone is utilizing Google AdWords you can now link these to your Google Local Business Profile and have your physical address show up in the Ad based on the address of the person doing the searching. Check out Local Extensions for more information.
Based on your profile, Google will also show you some cool analytics. Within the dashboard you can view how many people clicked on your profile, what keywords they searched for to get them there, and you can even see their physical location if they searched for driving directions.
This profile also allows you to add more than just your company name, phone, and address. This is also another great spot where you can add a back-link to your website or blog and embed some additional keywords. I have not attempted to measure the SEO benefits of this, but I can assure you it will not hurt. All things considered, this is just one more tool you can use to help people find you. It takes about 5 minutes to setup and you are done. Other than checking your analytics from time to time you really never have to touch it again.
David Orsini is Vice President of Top of Mind Networks and oversees the CRM division of the company. David specializes in building systems that help mortgage professionals maximize their relationships with their client base without having to lift a finger.
David Orsini's RSS Feed
Google announced a few updates to Google Reader last week that I thought were interesting. For those of you who are relatively new to the blogosphere and do not know what Google Reader is or how and why to use it, please read here for the 
I am sure you have all seen search results from Google that look like this image, where they list out certain businesses that match your criteria and show them on a Google Map. This directory is how that comes to be. So the old saying goes, “Real Estate Is Local”, so why not use the tools Google is giving us to make our business more easily found by local people who are searching for it?