As a sign designer, I'm often asked for suggestions of good sign colors. I answer with a question: what colors do the large independent real estate companies in your area use? Avoid those. Stay clear of colors used by the franchises. Go for unique. Color is a huge factor in how memorable your yard signs are to buyers.
The biggest mistake I run across is limiting yourself to one or two colors, picked from the 12 main colors of the color wheel. [Flash back to high school art class]. Our graphic artists and screen printers have thousands of colors in their palettes. They love creating color schemes if given the opportunity. Give them the freedom of using three or four colors for your signs...ooooh, they'll be fighting each other to work on your sign design!
Look at product packaging on supermarket shelves for potential color combinations. Millions of dollars are spent on package design. You won't find too many red and black on white color schemes there.
Here's two great web sites that will give you ready to use color schemes to use for your signs and other marketing materials:
Colour Lovers Explore the latest color schemes for brands, web sites, summer dresses and even tatoos! Man, I could spend days there.
Kuler An Adobe web site (you'll need the latest version of Flash to use it). Great color combinations from a community of graphic designers. You can even create color themes using flickr images.
Finally, check out our Real Estate Sign Gallery. We've assembled over 400 of our favorite designs, many with unique color schemes.
Everyone one has a favorite program. It can be a desktop app, web service or mobile app. It's the one application we constantly turn to through out our day. My favorites are ones that mashup other services with new tools.
Here's my favs:
The Social Web Browser. Flock integrates well with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, You Tube, Picassa and web mail. It has a built in RSS reader, media stream viewer and blogging tools. Flock is built using the Firefox framework, so any FF extensions will work in Flock. Read more in my blog.
Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) is a must have for any Outlook user. Besides lightening fast searches, xobni pulls info from LinkedIn and Facebook to Contact info, profile pictures, company info, job titles. All organized. Automatically.
Snagit is a screen capture utility that lets you take a "snapshot" of anything on your PC screen. You can then send it, store it, turn it into a detailed graphic, find it later.
Seesmic combines Twitter & Facebook and gives a full control panel of your social software activity. On a single screen, follow your friends’ updates, replies, private messages and as many search terms as you want to monitor your brand. Seesmic makes it easy to reply to them and share text, links, photos and videos all in one screen.It's available as a desktop app (outside the browser), an iPhone apps and an in-browser version.
Yesterday, I posted a satirical video on 3 of my Facebook fan pages. The video was about my recent profile being disabled by FB (for having too many Realtor friends). Today, FB responded by shutting down two of the fan pages! Over 540 fans gone! Just for light heartily critisizing Facebook.
There is a limit for nearly everything on Facebook.
There is a messaging limit
There is a search limit
There is a friend limit
There is a group limit
There is a poking limit
There is a wall posting limit
What are the limits? Here’s Facebooks official non-answer: “Facebook has limits in place to prevent behavior that other users may find annoying or abusive. These limits restrict the rate at which you can use certain features on the site. Unfortunately, we cannot provide you with the specific rates that have been deemed abusive.” Real Estate industry veteran Jim Calabrese got booted from Facebook. His crime? Having too many friends, specifically friends "who share similar physical characteristics" (real estate professionals). Here’s what he had learned: The Facebook nebulous Terms of Use http://www.facebook.com/terms.php?ref=pf provides little clarity on thresholds that Facebook’s bot monitors. Yes, they use a bot to monitor your every action and to profile your friends.
There is a messaging limit. Be careful how you use the FB inbox to send messages to your friends. Send too many, or send multiple messages with similar verbage and BAM! You’re toast. Jim would thank his customers, individually, in FB messages – ie: "Dear ####, Thanks for the sign order! You can reach out to me here on Facebook if there is any thing you need. Jim Calabrese".
There is a search limit. Google, Yahoo and Bing should have no worries about the FB platform becoming a threat to their search business. If you do too many searches, using FB’s search box…BAM! Your account is history.
There is a friend limit. Facebook has a limit of 5000 friends. But many users have been blocked for a lot less. FB also measures the speed at which you add friends. Accept too many in one day and you will get blocked.
There is a group limit. It’s been rumored that FB has a limit of 200 groups that you can join. With more & more real estate groups showing up on Facebook, it really isn’t that hard to reach the limit. Be extremely cautious not to post similar messages in more than one group. Facebook will consider you a spammer.
There is a poking limit. Does anyone really poke anymore? There is a wall posting limit. Since Facebook won’t reveal how many posts/day is too much, just make sure that your posts contain unique messages. A lot of political activists have been banned for repetitive posts like “get out the vote”.
What to do before your account has been blocked: Save your friends list. View your friends list, highlight all of them, copy & paste into Word. You now have a record you can refer to, if you get disabled. It will help should you make a new FB profile, or reach out to your friends on other platforms such as Twitter or LinkedIn. You may want to copy email addresses and phone numbers, if you don’t have them outside of Facebook.
Save your links. Go to your boxes tab, select see all in the Links box. Right click in your browser and save as a web page. You can also use this method for saving various views of your friends list or anything else you think you might need.
Save your photos. Never rely on Facebook to be the only repository of your photos. Keep backups, either on your hard drive or on a free Picassa or Flickr account.
What to do if you get a warning from FacebookStop. Stop. Stop. Don’t assume that Facebook has made an error. If you get a pink warning message, make note of what it was you were doing and by all means curtail that activity (accepting friends, messaging, posting, etc) immediately. Give your profile a 3 day cool down. You can try to email FB about the warning, but don’t expect a direct answer.
Pause your Facebook ads. If your ads are running and Facebook disables your account, you won’t be able to monitor your spending.
Your Fan page or Group. Make a friend an administrator, so you have a way to maintain your business content.
Change your status. A message like “I just received a warning for Facebook. In case my account is disabled, please know that I haven’t un-friended you.
Update your notification settings. Check all the selections for notifications and send it to a free email. These will be valuable if you try to rebuild your profile.
What to do if you get disabled by Facebook
Send Facebook an email. Facebook has a special email for these situations: disabled@facebook.com. But don’t write them just yet. Cool down for awhile. You are at the mercy of a customer service rep that probably handles hundreds of disabled accounts per day. Begging has been known to help.
Ask you friends to intervene. Certainly, Facebook doesn’t want to lose other users. Ask them to email on your behalf. Just be sure that they include the email you used for your FB login.
Start a FB support group. If you get nowhere and Facebook informs you that your account has been permanently disabled try having a friend start a group like: Free Jim Calabrese - Get him back on Facebook
On Friday, July 24, 2009, Real Estate industry veteran Jim Calabrese got booted from Facebook. His crime? Having too many friends, specifically friends that share a similar physical characteristics (real estate).
We enjoyed being in Jim's network. His posts were relevant and informative. He is certainly not a spammer and deserves to get his Facebook account back.
Today’s real estate professional needs to stay connected to many social networking platforms. It can be overwhelming trying to keep track of all your login credentials, media files, contacts.
Marketing and participating on the web has become more than search marketing. Our client base is becoming more involved in the social web. They look to their online friends for recommendations.
Flock aggregates all your social web accounts and services. You only need to launch the browser and you’re instantly logged into and have access to all your accounts. It also brings together all your friends into one unified sidebar. From there you can view your Facebook friends, your twitter followers and the people you have a connection with on Digg, Flickr, Picassa, MySpace and YouTube.
It provides media streaming from all the above sources and you can choose which of your sources that you want to include in your media stream. Flock also provides access to your web mail (Gmail & Yahoo Mail), your Delicious bookmarks and RSS feeds from your favorite blogs.
If that’s where it ended, it would be worth the install, but there is so much more. The power of Flock is the ability to drag and drop between your social spaces. Like a blog story and want to share it with your friends? Simply drag it to your people and it’s done.
Flock has sidebars for My World (a dashboard similar to IGoogle), People (aggregated from all your sites), Feeds, Web Mail, a pretty decent favorites tool, Accounts and Services, a very powerful web clipboard, a blog editor and a photo uploader.
If you like using toolbars and add-ins, Flock has you covered. Because it’s built on Firefox, just about any plug-in can be added.
Flock needs a lot of screen real estate. If you have a widescreen LCD, you’re set. It looks great on my 24″ widescreen!
Ordinances usually start as well intentioned responses to improper use of temporary signage other than real estate signs. The law must treat all content equally; so these policies can affect the real estate industry negatively.
This is a story of a group of Realtors who banded together and challenged a potentially restrictive sign code.
Our village was updating their zoning code for the first time in decades. In the past, political signs where not posted even though there wasn’t a law prohibiting them. This particular year a few candidates challenged the village’s “unwritten law”. Since the trustees were rewriting the zoning code, they proposed requiring a sign permit for ALL temporary signage.
Their thinking was that individual homeowners probably wouldn’t foot the $25 -$35 permit fee to post a campaign sign. But, certainly, Realtors (and home sellers) wouldn’t object to such a small fee considering the thousands of dollars in potential commissions. WRONG!
Our local board decided that a few of the brokers with offices in the village should meet with the mayor and village administrator before the public hearing on the matter. The officials explained that they didn’t consider realty signs a problem, but they had to treat all temporary signage equally. The village trustees would vote on the issue at a public meeting that week.
Over 250 brokers and agents and countless number of their listing customers descended on a public hearing room that seats 40 people at best! The Realtors made their case:
Signage is one of the most effective forms of advertising a house for sale – in the case of a FSBO, it’s probably the most effective method.
Restricting signage might have Equal Housing ramifications and certainly free speech implications.
Informed the trustees that, as members of the largest trade association in the country with 1.3 million members, they would oppose the new code and that NAR would support them in a legal battle.
Explained that as a trade group, they had the means to control improper sign usage by their members.
The vote was unanimous. The trustees decided against temporary sign permitting. Certainly, it was the unique ability of Realtors to work together that made the difference.
I was thinking of creating a Travel page with pics and stories of the many places me & Judy have visited. But there is one special place in Southern Louisiana that we go to, not so much for work, but for play. It's our version of Grandma & Grandpa's Vegas. So, this page is devoted to N'awlings, LA. I'll be scanning pics and posting "dis n dat" soon.
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
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