Having a social media presence attracts opportunities. Twitter in particular has introduced me to many people with common, shared business interests – they come out of the blue and we become close friends very quickly based on our business compatibility. Many “social media experts” promote consulting, or how to get rich quick schemes based on social media. I’m surprised to see very few leverage their experience and their social media influence to develop businesses not based on social media advice.

So… I’ve started a Mortgage and Refinance services business. I’ve been involved in the real estate industry for over 6 years as an entrepreneur, business owner and consultant. For the past 2 1/2 years, I’ve authored the Transparent Real Estate blog, and chronicled how the real estate industry should adopt the social media and make the business of real estate less murky and more transparent.

I have five reasons for starting a mortgage business:

1. Make the mortgage and refi procurement process completely transparent. I have always professed that finding and closing on a mortgage should be as transparent as buying any off the shelf product with a fixed price tag. Most consumers have no clue about the various fees (some are junk fees like “doc prep”), even hidden fees that have given the mortgage industry a somewhat treacherous reputation.
2. Provide professional, experienced service. The barriers to entry to become licensed as a mortgage broker or loan officer are fairly low, and timely service is sometimes lacking. Frankly, it’s not that simple to get a loan in this recession, and that’s where expertise and service becomes the key satisfaction determinant.
3. Create a new sales and marketing paradigm. Leveraging the lessons of 2.0, we will strive to educate the consumer about the mortgage procurement process. And we won’t contact the consumer unless they ask us to. We won’t have an email marketing campaign or aggressively spam in any way. We’ll endeavor to change the hard sell culture.
4. Launch of a revolutionary Wholesale Mortgage Rate Engine. Almost all consumers don’t realize there are wholesale loan rates. Through consulting, we advised on the development of RateWindow, a revolutionary Wholesale Mortgage Rate Engine that launched this month. Finally every rate can be fully disclosed to the consumer. We wholeheartedly base our quote system on RateWindow; standard quote engines like Bankrate and Lending Tree don’t provide wholesale quotes and sell your contact info as leads to anybody who wants to buy them.
5. Help consumers purchase a home. I believe the next 24 months will be the best opportunity to purchase a home in America because this recession will eventually bottom out.

If you are researching mortgages and refis, please visit our Wholesale Mortgage Rate Engine at http://mortgagetransparent.com/ratewindow.

Wired magazine’s article last month Twitter, Flickr, Facebook makes Blogs look so 2004 posits the “death of blogging”.

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Blogging used to be about creating content. Today’s mainstream blogs are about distributing content. The “blogs” now garnering much of the traffic – Huffington Post, Engadget, etc. – have become mass media digests.

It’s the portability of content that now matters. Online presence can be measured by where and how often your name and word show up across the Internet. The more entities distributing, reblogging and retweeting your content (including mass media publishers who use blog syndication services like Blogburst and Newstex), and the more services chronicling your activity/content (Friendfeed, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc.) the more renowned you become. And that can lead directly to celebrity, position, or just a business break.

The mainstream media now gets this. Once the principal creator of “content”, they are firing their journalists/reporters, and moving into news and data distribution. They realize they can still capture eyeballs by republishing, aggregating and delivering content and data, created in-house or user-generated. It’s not a lucrative as before, when MSM controlled the content and viewership, and charged SuperBowl rates, but then the wave of user-generated content forced their hands.

At Transparent Real Estate, I’ve postulated how blogging is changing in real estate because the objective of a real estate blog – lead generation for the real estate professional – is inconsistent with the act of writing a blog. The average real estate agent just wants to get a blog up quickly while doing as little work as possible. Now, creating exhaustive content isn’t the methodology, it’s distributing the real estate data and information that’s already out there quickly to their constituency. It makes the act of “blogging” much easier when you don’t have to write original and compelling content, something that is hard to do on a real estate blog. (Most real estate blogs discuss hyperlocal issues, which is essentially irrelevant to any reader who lives outside that real estate bloggers’ domain).

Related articles:

Is Blogging Dead?

Nine tips for real estate bloggers on the “new blog writing”

A quick graph to show how the topic of Media Transparent – media – makes for more popular, entertaining copy than the topic of Transparent Real Estate – real estate. It took only a few months. Thank you for reading both.