Even if you don’t know how to turn on a computer, you’ve probably heard something about social media and social networking. We want to help you leap in and take advantage of this great opportunity to build your client base and supercharge your business.

5 steps and 15 minutes to Social Media Success

Step 1: Identify Your Audience!

Like any good marketing campaign, you need to start with an audience in mind. Think of your “average” customer, or the clients that you love working with. Think about that person’s age, income level and educational background.. Have someone in mind? Here is a chart showing social networks and the demographics that they are most popular with.

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Chances are that your “perfect customer” is on Twitter or Facebook. Facebook has recently reached 500 million users worldwide. That is about 10% of the entire world using a common tool to connect with one another. The more important number for us is the 125 million of those users that live in the USA.

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The Shakespeare Festival is still going strong in Ashland Oregon, but I often wonder what “The Bard” would write about the comedy of errors going on in Washington DC. Ben Bernanke made his second appearance today to talk to the “Apple Dumpling Gang” about the state of our economy.  In one day, Ben’s vision of the economy has gone from “doom and gloom” to “hey, things aren’t all that bad”.   Maybe he needs some Prozac ?  If not Big Ben, then the markets do for sure.  Yesterday was a “down day”, and today…..well the Dow is up over 200 points.

Think about it this way, the intrinsic value of the companies that make up the Dow can’t have changed that much in a 24 hour period.  If a company is worth a billion dollars, it doesn’t all of a sudden lose 5% or $50,000,000 in value in 24 hours.  Did their products lose that much in value?  Did their real estate holdings drop that much in one day?  Of course not.  But watching the markets, you would think that they did.  So, what’s my point?  The market is scared and is just as likely to believe that the sky is falling (from Big Ben’s testimony yesterday) as it is to believe that everything is all rainbows and prancing unicorns (based on Ben’s testimony today).

We talked about it yesterday, but the impact of the new FinReg (Financial Regulations) placed on the Ratings Agencies has already begun to show up. If you recall, now that Ratings Agencies can be held liable for inaccurate or misleading information, newly issued debt will no longer include their “official” ratings. In short, the three major ratings agencies no longer feel comfortable rating issuances if they can be sued if they “miss” on a bond rating.  Another way to look at this is to compare it to car shopping.  It’s sort of (in a very simplistic way) like saying that if I take advice from Consumer Reports on a particular car, and if that car turns out to be a lemon, then I can sue Consumer Reports?  Well, that’s silly.  Shouldn’t I test drive the car first? Shouldn’t I look under the hood? Shouldn’t I have my mechanic look at the car?  Well, large investment banks that buy these bonds have skyscrapers full of analysts, attorneys, and traders that review these transactions………but now the ratings agencies are liable.  Don’t get me wrong, I think that (in many cases) the ratings agencies missed the mark on quite a few bond issues over the last few years, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t want them doing their jobs……………and the new FinReg is causing them to step out of the market to protect themselves.

Case in point, last night Ford Motor Company pulled back a financing deal because they could not get a printed rating on the debt offering. Rumor has it, that there are a number of other bond offerings that are being scuttled because of this.  We will continue to follow the fallout from this part of the new FinReg.  We will also begin to see how this impacts mortgage financing.  No matter what happens, it will be interesting to say the least.

Since “they” say that a picture is worth a thousand words, I recommend that you check out this article (especially the graphs) from The Big Picture – it speaks volumes. Now, remember, recoveries and recessions never happen in straight lines, so trend-lines could tell the whole story or be completely useless.  In this case, I think the trend lines tell a very cautionary tale.  Many of the traders that I know have “gone to cash” as they are very concerned that we are not done with an overall decline.

Which brings us to the biggest surprise of the day – we are going to agree with Bernanke. He said yesterday that the economy is “Unusually Uncertain”. At this point, hindsight needs glasses to see well and foresight is running into walls left and right. With government intervention doing a number on our financial reports, we can barely see our proverbial hands in front of our faces. Next up to bat is the Unemployment Extension bill which, politics aside, will make it even harder to see the trend, since at this point a jobless recovery is about as likely as BP making a good public relations move.

The next few months will see a slight decline in housing numbers, but I personally believe that we will see a slight upturn in the fall and then another drop during the December-February months.  Also, keep an eye on consumer savings rates.  A big increase will signal a scared consumer and project less movement of housing inventory.  A drop will indicate a more comfortable consumer and a possible increase in housing activity.

As always, thanks for checking us out and please pass us on to anyone that could use some insight from us.

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Follow us on twitter for current news, advice and market status updates.

Have a question or something to add? Leave a comment or send us an email

Geoff Boyd – PrimeLending – Clackamas, OR

You may have noticed that we have been less than prolific with our updates recently – besides several side-projects that have been eating up time normally spent blogging, our social media jack of all trades, Aaron Jones, temporarily deserted his post to spend some time getting to know the new addition to his family.

We have just managed to wrangle him back into his chair, so please join us in watching for sleep-deprived typos and 3am “I’m up so I might as well” tweets.

You have to admit – the kid is pretty cute!

And, for those of you who are interested, here are the stats

Date: 7/11/2010
Length: 21.75″
Weight: 8lb 12oz

Here are some great links to get you started.

Housing Market Data for Portland, OR

Barry Riholtz (The Big Picture) Interviewed about the Housing Market

House and Senate Pass Unemployment / Homebuyer Tax Credit Extension

Pending Home Sales drop 30% month-over-month

This is about as good (bad?) as it gets, folks.

Rates are back to all-time lows today. The recent dip in stocks has helped drive Mortgage Bond buying, even at rates that would have been laughed at 5 years ago. Don’t expect rates to move much further down, because we can already see diminishing returns setting in. If you have been waiting for the right time to buy and you are positioned to make that leap, now is the right time. The housing market is full of opportunity for buyers, many people are (almost) literally giving away their homes through short sales and even banks are looking at ways to get rid of their foreclosed-upon REO properties.

One of the classic indicators for mortgage rates are treasury bond prices. At these low levels, we see how shaky those ties are, as treasury bonds are still being pushed higher on international and domestic concerns, while mortgage rates seem to have bottomed out.

Holden Lewis over at Bankrate wrote today in his Blog that the Bankrate Rate Survey showed an all-new low for rates.  Check out that article (and some shameless promotion of his Twitter account) here.

Do you Feel Stimulated Yet?

We are finally getting to see the “real” state of housing, as reports roll in for purchases during May, the first data we’ve had in a while that was not colored by the new homebuyer tax credit – I’ll give you a hint, it’s not pretty.

When Bloomberg News surveyed 36 different economists, they predicted a month-over-month drop of 4% – 25% in pending home sales. If you read through the links above, you know that the actual drop in pending home sales was 30% – which shows that, even this far into the recession, the calculations that economists use are fairly worthless is predicting reality.

I’m seriously considering writing a book entitled “accurately predicting economic factors in a recession” – it would only be 1 page, and that page would say “keep calculating until you get a negative result, and then double that negative result”.

The long-term effects of the homebuyer tax credit are as-of-yet unknown, but we do know that it has not been a magic bullet for the housing market, and that it has been an excellent source of income for inmates.

Jobs Report Due Tomorrow – Do we even want to know?

Here are the basics. Earlier this week, ADP released their National Employment Report for June, which showed a gain of 13k, much less than the estimate of 61k or May’s 57k gain. Today we see that jobless claims are up to 472k, again worse than estimates and worse than the previous months number.

So, the best data we have shows that we lost about 250,000 jobs from the first phase of the census operation ending. The government will continue to employ a skeleton crew of census workers to complete wrap-up operations, but for most areas, the initial push (and most of the jobs) has ended. This means that to break even, we need to have created a quarter of a million jobs. Its not going to happen.

But, how much are we going to miss? The general consensus that I’ve seen (which is optimistic in my opinion) is only 100k-130k jobs lost. That means that 120k-150k jobs were created to “soak up” some of the census losses. Can we be pleasantly surprised tomorrow morning? Sure we can; its entirely possible that a bunch of phantom jobs will swoop in and boost the market. More likely, we will get a pretty negative report tomorrow and, moving into the weekend, we will hear a lot about double-dipping and economic uncertainty

But where do we go from there?

For the market, we are going into a 3-day weekend. This means a lot of time for sentiment and inertia to build up one way or another. If we go into this weekend after a week of bad news, its likely that we will move into Tuesday riding a wave of uncertainty and see some level of fallout from that.

So, until then, we will cross our fingers that jobs are going to come back and, with them, some sense of stability in the economy.

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Follow us on twitter for current news, advice and market status updates.

Have a question or something to add? Leave a comment or send us an email

Geoff Boyd – PrimeLending – Clackamas, OR