Since this is a very short week, I am unable to update The Fools Manifesto with a game review per se. I will return next week with a review of a game that has been absorbing all my extra time lately. Until then, I thought I would recognize the holiday week by giving thanks for one of my favorite types of games ever: the pinball machine. (cue music from The Who‘s Tommy)
I have to admit, I never really gave it much thought beyond the simple joy I received from playing pinball. I wasn’t a wizard, by any stretch of the imagination. My oldest brother could play a machine for 40 days and 40 nights on just one quarter. I was lucky if my game went for 5 minutes. But I was young then, and every arcade had at least 2 machines it seemed, usually more. Whether I was in a shopping mall or a Shakey’s Pizza, I would much rather plunk my quarter into a pinball machine than into one of the various Pong clones that were sprouting up everywhere. It never entered into my young mind that there were devious and tricky pinball machine designers lurking behind the scenes, trying to tweak the games in an effort to suck all the quarters from my pocket. What a fool I was.
Even later, when the arcades were filled with Joust, Q-bert, and Tron games, I would still go back to the pinball corner and play those dusty old machines. They often cost less to play than the newer games, and they were still some of the best around. Something visceral about the steel ball impacting the flippers, the mechanical “thunk” of the targets and bumpers, resonated deeper in me than the digital images on the video screens. Don’t get me wrong, I love video games. Always have. But pinball is what got that love rolling.
With that in mind, this is an interesting article about the Economics of Pinball and the decline of the pinball machine. The author reveals some of the interesting tricks that pinball machine designers used to try to separate fools like me from our pocket change. I found it via BoingBoing, one of my favorite websites for off-the-beaten-trail news and interesting tidbits.
Photo by Kapungo
I gave four grocery bags full of books to 
We feel like a bit like a proud parent this morning as we read the news coverage about the new 
The Lure Of The Shiny Object
The sexiness of the social media space and the desire to see an immediate return on the time investment required to access it, has created an atmosphere ripe for solutions to problems that don’t really exist. Example: Tweetlister.
Tweetlister launched in May of 2009. It allows the “tweeting” of real estate listings into a user’s Twitter stream. It gives real estate agents the ability to “post and re-use as many listings as you want.”
Funny, I thought Twitter already gave them that ability.
My first response, six months ago, came in the form of a tweet. I said, “Here’s an example of a solution in search of a problem if I’ve ever seen one.” And this was all I intended to write about it. Besides, Nicole Nicolay had already done a good job of exposing the shiny object.
But it didn’t go away. This private twitter conversation, a few weeks later, should have given me a clue that this would be a very distracting shiny object. It was sent to me by an extremely bright executive from one of the largest real estate companies in America.
That wasn’t schooling. I didn’t teach them anything they didn’t know already. I just wasn’t distracted by the shiny object and simply asked a few questions to make sure there was something worth biting on the hook. But several very smart people, people I resprect and also call friends, did bite. And then they told their friends to bite. They’re still biting.
I posed the following question on the post linked above; “Your listings are probably already on your site or your blog. If you really want to automate, you could use Tweetlater (or Hootsuite or Objective Marketer or CoTweet) and set up a similar kind of schedule. Then the links would come straight to you. This just gets in the way, IMHO.” Agents could be leading buyers to their site and to their IDX search, but instead they are tweeting away and leading them to a search site they have no control over, one that is not a destination search site and one that could easily lead the buyer to another agent. And they are paying $9.95 a month for that right. I still don’t get it.
I’ve been thinking about this for six months. Why do smart people spend so much time leading people away from the sites they own? Why aren’t people employing a more focused hub and spoke approach to how they use social media? Why aren’t brokers providing more intelligent tools to help their agents?
That thinking has lead me in several directions, one of them being how the real estate virtual tour business works and how we do things at Real Estate Shows. The result of my thinking? Real Estate Shows needs to get out of the middle of the real estate transaction to the greatest extent possible. When consumers search on sites like Trulia and Zillow and Realtor.com, if they click on a link to a virtual tour, it should lead to a site owned by the real estate agent, not to yet another third party site.
How do we do that? I have a few ideas, but this post is already too long. The answer lies in being more intelligent with how our links work and becoming invisible to the consumer. More to come.
Tags: cotweet, hootsuite, objective marketer, questions, Social Media, strategy, Twitter
Posted in Blog, Commentary, Consulting, Social Media | 5 Comments »