Andy Kaufman's shared items in Google Reader

What I Learned at REBarCamp Philly

2009-05-30T05:35:11Z

Got something to say? Let us hear it in comments!

I was a REBarCamp Virgin… until Wednesday. My schedule finally allowed me to attend the wildly successful REBarcamp in Philadephia. Check out the coordinators and sponsors here. (A big shout out to Kim Wood, Bill Lublin, and John Lauber for all their hard work.)

A group session started us all off. We were all encouraged to host one of the sessions being offered. There were 6 rooms and 5 time slots so lots to choose from. Some rooms were standing room only and some had half a dozen people. I attended all types of sessions and all were outstanding. So what did I learn?

Social Media is Evolving

A Rebarcamp is truly a holistic experience that helps you focus on your areas of need.

It is all about People . . . Period

This digital divide where are meeting people online has actually created more solid and deep relationships - We are all seeking meaning, relevant connections and communities. If done properly we are accomplishing this with our social media connections. It’s all about personal touch.

Where is the Beef?

Lots of conversations on creating meaning and value and NOT on creating features and applications. I LOVED that. If we have meaningful topics to have a conversation around the conversation will continue.

Cross Platforms thriving

There are some new solutions to get connected that cut across mobile, web and live interaction. You can be on all of them or just one. Cross platform solutions will thrive.

Help me Organize . . . Please

Lots of discussion of how to organize all our feeds, posts, subscriptions, all these bits and bytes that we like to have. I call them aggregators, and I am still searching for one that is cross platform. Is it friendfeed? Is it Digg? The winner in my mind has not surfaced yet, do you know one?

And last but not least

Todd Carpenter (Social Media Director for NAR) is just the forerunner for a whole new world of social media jobs. NAR is so honored to have Todd. Will your association or company need a social media director? It may be you!

All in all, a great experience, so if there is a REBarCamp near you, you should plan to attend. It is free education and you get to hang out with some amazing people! Check out when a REBarCamp will be in your area! Click here.

REBarCamps vs. 140 Twitter Conference

2009-05-27T05:29:00Z

After attending numerous REBarCamps (REBarCamp Philly starts tomorrow) and now a part of the new 140 Twitter conference, I can make these observations: REBarCamps140 Twitter Focus Business practicalDeveloper and marketing focus roughly equal Weakness Wide variation of social media expertise from newbies to leading-edgers All things Twitter is a narrow topic. Already knew of most interesting applications Sociability Everybody knows each other, one big familySocial media more fragmented into cliques Networking Easy because everybody knows each other Easy because Twitter introductions are welcome Utility Everybody on same wavelength - common business interests facilitate opportunities Twitter and conference participant "tags" make it easy to find people with common business interests Average age 50 30 Participants No Twitter developers at REBarCamps and no real estate agents at 140 Twitter What is surprising is how well attended and vibrant REBarCamps are, and how the level of social media savvy of many real estate agents exceeds the social media experts who haven't applied theory to practice. I know many real estate social media folks get pretty bored at traditional Web 2.0 conferences. ...

Be Naked

2009-05-28T10:30:36Z

You could’ve learned this years ago by reading Naked Conversations. It’s still a worthwhile book. You should pick upTactical Transparency to go with it, actually, to understand when it’s not cool to be naked. The thing is this: if you’re going into this space of coming off-script and being social, you’ve gotta be naked. Want some tips?

How to Be Naked (and then, how not)

Be who you are, not an icon. People want the real public face of you (at least, the “best of” you).
Speak like a human. Try removing jargon and business-speak. No one says “next generation” in person.
Go where the people are. If you’re not at the face-to-face events, you’re not really committed to the larger opportunity. (This is really subjective).
Be ready to apologize. If you do something wrong, say so. (Mind you, be clear on what the legal implications of saying such might be.)
Ask about other people. If you’re using social tools to try and drive business, be a human about it and ask people about themselves, too. If you’re not participating in both ways, you’re acting like you’re using the community.
Be helpful. It’s not always about pushing your brand. Sometimes, the best way to get results is to help others be successful. Can you equip others to do their job better? Do that.
Be there before the sale. The best way to drive stronger marketing experiences and convert people into customers is to be there long before you need something from people. Sure, it takes longer, but I’ve seen lots of situations where this is what brought in the big sale over another person. If your prospect feels like she knows you, it works really well.

You don’t have to do any of this. You can just keep doing what you’re doing. But if you’re wondering why social media stuff isn’t working well for you, look at the list above and decide whether you’re giving this work the effort and intent that it requires.

What do you think?

Mike Orr and The Cromford Report

2009-05-22T18:27:02Z

Got something to say? Let us hear it in comments!

Here is a professional quality video of Mike Orr of The Cromford Report giving a talk at a Mastermind meeting I attend every month. It is about an hour long and the specific stats won’t apply if you are not in the Phoenix area. His interesting and unique methods for tracking and predicting short-term price movement will apply. If there is something better available I’ve not seen it. Click here for the link to the video.

© 2008 agentgenius.com - Thanks for Reading!
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There Are No Words To Describe The Following Part II

2009-06-02T16:05:54Z

For awhile tonight this was the #3 story on Reddit.com. Thanks to whomever is responsible for posting it there. What that means is 25,000 more people are now aware that no one is watching the Fed. Email this story to a few friends. We need for millions to see the GROSS NEGLIGENCE occurring RIGHT NOW at the Federal Reserve.

Update June 1: 22,000 more taxpayers have now seen this clip from links emailed by you, our amazing readers. Please keep it up and MAKE SURE TO SEND A LINK TO YOUR SENATORS AND CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTATIVES. Their email addresses can be found here.

Or just go to senate.gov and house.gov. We have an 'Emal This Article' icon at the bottom of this post.

This is the 2nd time I have used this headline in our 3 months and 325 stories of existence. I believe it is appropriate. He is former prosecutor, House Democrat Alan Grayson; she is Elizabeth Coleman, Inspector General of the Federal Reserve. The issue is oversight at the Federal Reserve. Watch it and weep.

Update June 4: Our newest story (from June 4) is an interview with Grayson as he discusses the immense cult-popularity of the above video and updates voters on the status of Ron Paul's HR 1207 and the attempt to audit the Federal Reserve. The clip runs approximately 3 minutes.

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For your enjoyment:

Financial Comedy Collection (50 Videos)

Financial Cartoon Slideshow

Micro-interactions Get People Talking. Thank You, Corner Bakery.

2009-05-07T16:52:09Z

This is exactly what I mean when I talk about "micro-interactions". You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to do it.

0. Listen
1. Cut through the corporate red tape and participate (this was Corner Bakery's 4th tweet)
2. Listen some more
3. Add value
4. Keep listening
5. Repeat

(Today at my local Corner Bakery in Glenview, Il)

I say add value because Corner Bakery did exactly that. They knew enough about me to surprise and delight me with their initiation and the context they provided. I'm working out of a Corner Bakery as I write this because we are on a long road to sell our house and are regularly kicked out for showings (this is about as fun as it sounds). Corner Bakery brightened up my day just a little bit (and you have to love the free Wi-Fi). So they'll be rewarded with some new followers because of it. What they do after that, is up to them. But I have a few ideas... :-)

Best Fits for Social Media in the Sales Cycle

2009-05-11T18:10:22Z

The sales organizations of most companies have a similar way of diagramming their sales process. They make these little graphics showing a circle with five or more points along the circle that indicate a customer’s potential interaction with the organization. The points are usually labeled something like this:

Prospects
Awareness
Leads
Customers
Evangelists (or sometimes, they use this bubble for “support”)

In writing this up, what comes first? Awareness or prospects? (I think this goes in two configurations.) Person (be this B2C or B2B) is unaware of your product or service. You make them aware. They become prospects, which means you identify which of the people who become aware might actually be a good fit for your product. Then prospects who seem genuinely ready to become customers enter the lead process (where a sales person attempts to close the sale successfully). After this, the person becomes a customer/user/member and experiences the product they’ve purchased. And then hopefully, your customer has had such a great time with the product that they’re evangelists who say great things about it. Companies who are less hopeful mark this bubble “support.” Because it’s a circle, the suggestion is that we will constantly make our existing customers aware of new products and sell them these, as well.

These tools we have like blogging and podcasting and video and the use of social platforms are interesting, but to be useful to a sales marketing process, we have to look at where they make the most possible leverage and value.

Awareness

Here’s where I think the most value lies in using social media tools. Because we have these tools that let us listen for potential customers at their point of need (loosely quoted from Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun), we can find potential prospects and make them aware. We can use our podcast or our blog or our YouTube videos to build what we hope is meaningful content. We can strike up conversations on Twitter with people who might find our service or product more interesting. Awareness ranks highest in my sense of what these tools let us do.

Think about how you can get past the typical daily newspaper grind. Think about using email marketing, blogging, and basic presence on Twitter and Facebook to build relationships. It’s much better than the old method of broadcasting and the one-dimensional efforts of traditional advertising. There’s a strong opportunity here for any organization seeking to improve awareness of their offerings.

Prospects

My point on social media and prospecting is this: we now volunteer up lots of information via our social networks. If your prospects are online, they’re donating all kinds of information that’s useful in relationship building. If you want to sell something to Jeff Pulver, for instance, you’ll learn quickly that he loves music, that he loves live bands and karaoke, that he takes having fun seriously, that he travels all the time. If you’re a salesperson, you know how to translate this into openings for other conversations. You know how to pursue Jeff where he roams. It’s clear and obvious the value.

Prospecting using social networks and other social media is obvious, but are you doing it?

Leads

So now you’ve put someone into your lead cycle. You’ve decided you are going to close them for a sale (and remember, let’s use “sale” loosely. Maybe you’re “selling them” on donating to your charity, or watching your video channel. The advent of services like Twitter allow you to mind read from afar. If I’m going to hit up Len Devanna from EMC to sponsor a conference of mine, I’m sure as hell going to read his Twitter stream from the last two days and make sure his dog hasn’t gone into the hospital or that he’s not dealing with a budget cut, etc.

It also allows you to gently touch (without selling) your clients so that they keep you top of mind. Don’t talk to @elizabethhannan about that webinar software you need to sell her. Talk to her about her last few brightkite uploads and ask her how her weekend sporting outings were. It has the same effect: a gentle touch in the process of closing a lead.

Customers

As more and more organizations turn to blogging and Twitter for customer service, still others are building communities of use around their products, and promoting product discussions, member sharing forums, and more. A paid-up customer is not the end of the sales cycle, any good salesperson knows. He or she is a trusted part of your next successful sales, or at least, a referral to other potential prospects. These tools are a great way to connect with customers and keep them feeling important.

Evangelists

Social tools that promote sharing are a great way to transform customers into evangelists. Are you Sony Electronics and you’re trying to sell more GPS-enabled camcorders? Send each unit out with a piece of stationary inviting the new owner to sign up to YouTube (or even better, Blip.tv), and encourage them to use a metadata tag on all their submissions that marks them as part of the Sony family.

Nikon did this famously with Flickr, the online photo sharing site, such that any Nikon pictures uploaded showed off the Nikon logo in the metadata in the sidebar, and identified themselves as such.

If you’re not thinking of ways of connecting your products and services to the online share-o-sphere (all these various social networks that encourage interaction and sharing), you’re missing a powerful opportunity.

My Points In Closing

What is the ROI of adding metadata to someone’s YouTube account? Good luck figuring out the math on that. Do you feel in your gut that any time someone has a chance to experience yet another brand impression on your product, it’s a good thing? I do. And I feel that all the above-mentioned ideas are ways (or at least the start of ideas that I expect you to have AFTER the post) on making sense of how to tie social media tools and methods to your sales process.

Building awareness, maintaining good business relationships, communicating thoroughly, listening, and encouraging evangelists are all ways your efforts in social media will pay off sooner rather than later.

But what about you? Have you had some early success with any of this? What are some other examples you’ve seen or have practiced yourself? What’s your take?

Speaking and Presenting- Your Next Actions

2009-05-15T10:30:34Z

Want to be part of a secret club? I’m starting it today, and you’re invited. Do me a favor: darken your screen a bit. Put like a spreadsheet or something up on the screen and switch to it if you see someone else coming, or if a nosy coffeeshop person starts looking over at what you’re doing. This is between us, okay?

Presentations are important. They are a gifted opportunity, given to you by someone who hopes that you will educate and equip (and entertain!) the people who have gathered to participate. As such, I treat them as important opportunities, and I invite you to do the same, should you find yourself invited to speak in some form or another with people.

I want you to succeed. It’s my hope that some of what I share with you is useful, that you can pick it up, that you can take some of what I come up with here and run with it yourselves. I call this “giving your ideas handles.”

We’ll do three things with this post: talk about the audience, share with you my most concise advice about presenting, and give you some further resources. Let me know if you need more when I’m done.

Speaking and Presenting

Respect Your Audience

Legendary advertiser David Ogilvy said, “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.” He wanted us to treat the recipients of advertisements as important people, and I implore you to do the same to your audience. Here’s what I mean when I say that:

Your audience knows more than you’re giving them credit for. Every time.
They have come to learn something from you that they can use themselves. Give takeaways.
They have sacrificed time. Value their every minute as best you can. Trim your presentation.
Your audience wants something new. Stay fresh. They might have seen you last month or on the web.
Give them something to DO. Give actionable next steps, such that your presentation leaves them wanting to rush out of the room and do what you recommended. If you can, make it as specific to the audience as possible.
Never ever ever ever feel like you have to read your slides to me.

You ARE an Entertainer

If you’re going to command the stage (or a room, or whatever format your presentation takes), own the stage. Be as polished, as precise, as eloquent, as helpful as you can be. Here are some tips that I’ve tried to boil down tightly:

Think visually. Slides are not Word documents.
Make sure your slides aren’t more interesting than you.
Speak louder and slower than you think you should.
Dress for attention. If you’re going to own that stage, be vibrant (but tasteful).
Speak WITH not TO your audience. Get them “in on it.”
More than 7 key points is wasted.
Be as passionate as you can be about the topic. If you’re not, why will they care?

Some more advice

Own the Crowd With Better Speaking

Make Better Presentations- The Anatomy of a Good Speech

How to Start Speaking at Events

What else can I help you with?

Photo credit Geoff Livingston

Running List of the Five Eras of The Social Web

2009-05-01T16:54:25Z

This week’s post on the Future of the Social Web has created a tremendous amount of discussion –and I’m thankful for all the voices that chimed in. I’m going to create this post to track the eras as they appear, obviously this is going to take a few years, but hey, I’m not going anywhere.

Keep in mind that there’s a difference between an era starting, vs becoming mature, so read how I denote the differences below.

Running List of the Five Eras of The Social Web
For details on this report, access the high level blog post, or if you’re a client, access the full report on the Forrester site.

Era of Social Relationships (started 1995, matured in 2003-2007)
This era is mature.

AOL, 1995

eCircles, 2001

MySpace, Facebook, Twitter

Era of Social Functionality (started 2007, matures in 2010-2012)
These are prelimnary examples, but are not examples of maturity, as we’ve not seen true useful utilities to improve business.

Facebook’s F8 Platform, May 2007

Google and partners Open Social, Nov 2007

LinkedIn’s business platform, Oct 2008

Era of Social Colonization (started 2009, matures in 2011)
These are prelimnary examples, but are not examples of maturity when your entire digital experience is social.

Facebook Beacon, Nov 2007

Facebook Connect, over 4000 sites, like SFgate, Techcrunch, May 2008

Facebook’s Activity Feed, April 2009

OpenStack’s OAuth and OpenID, thanks Matt Savarino

I reviewed Get Glue which is a meta social network that aggregates social reviews from your friends –regardless of location.

Facebook has agreed to support OpenID, May 2009

Era of Social Context (starts in 2010, matures in 2012)
This era is certainly not in maturity, but we can see some early examples of demographic scraping.

There are no current examples

Era of Social Commerce (starts in 2011, matures in 2013)
These are prelimnary examples, such as Techcrunch’s crunchpad, but it’s not a true example of a crowd created, spec’d product.

There are no current examples

As you see examples, please leave a comment, describe why you think it belongs and which era, I’ll credit you as appropriate.

cluetrainplus10 - Links Subvert Hierarchies

2009-04-30T19:07:09Z

I’m part of the cluetrainplus10 project, where I was asked to write about Thesis #7 Hyperlinks Subvert Hierarchy. It’s in Chapter 5 of the cluetrain manifesto. It’s funny, because in a way, I’ve already written about this when I talked about building a small powerful network.

This thesis, which deals with the hyperlinked organization, is a way of suggesting that orgs restructure and break out of being silo-driven. It also reminds us that there is a web of connections, not individuals standing out of context or connectivity. Ten years after the manifesto was written, I feel that the businesses currently weathering the storm of this economic downturn are those who have taken this idea into the organization and executed on it.

Successful freelancers think this way. They consider the world as a web of resources that they can tie together in different ways to make projects happen. Gathering resources into a useful configuration is how the web functions. Businesses can take advantage of this train of thought by considering how to build their executions from a project-minded perspective, and by considering non-employee business relationships to be part of the resource chain.

I’m torn when I write all this. I’m inclined to say “we’re already doing this!” But I’ve been to several large organizations over the last many months, and they’re not. They’re still operating from paradigms that were cast together in the 1950s and 1960s. These, coincidentally, are the same businesses that are having a tough time in the current economic situation.

If you think of your business as a collection of “what you need to accomplish” versus “what processes and resources you have,” this kind of thinking starts to make sense.

The picture in this blog post doesn’t exist on my servers. I’ve put it there via links. The links in this blog post, which point you to resources like the online text of the cluetrain manifesto, are pointing you to resources that don’t existing on this website. I’ve built a compilation of resources that I needed to pull together to tell this story exactly the way businesses can build projects out of multiple resource sources to accomplish a goal.

Has this changed in the 10 years since cluetrain was written? Yes. I’d say that many people have learned to build on this paradigm, at least in the forward-minded companies, and that others will follow.

Twitter has an ecosystem of businesses that prove this. Facebook integrates with several other platforms. Google Maps allows thousands of mashup projects that exist outside of hierarchies.

We think this way. It’s exactly the way humans are wired. We build resonance this way.

And now you. What do you find? What will you link to? Where will the next wired projects take you?

This is part of the cluetrainplus10 project.

photo credit Jared

Building Social Capital

2009-04-29T14:57:04Z

Stop by and share some comment love this weekend!

Image courtesy of @missrogue and creative commons.org

Question: What do you call someone who joins communities, adds friends, and then uses social media tools to promote only his or her own interests?

Answer: A community freeloader. Don’t be one.

The little Q&A above is from the book “The Whuffie Factor” by Tara Hunt, and expresses in a simple form one of the key themes of her book, and a central concept of social media, the idea of social capital.

What is Social Capital?

The concept of social capital is not a new one. In fact the concept is as old as the phrase “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”. It is the idea that as we do things for others we build capital , and as we ask them to do things for us, we withdraw that capital.

The obvious business examples of social capital are ever present. The tickets to the sporting event a vendor gives out is directed at obligating the recipient. On a more subtle level, the person who picks up the check and gives you a free lunch or dinner obviously expects you to feel obligated to him in some manner. The sponsors at our association events or ReBarCamps hope that they are building capital with the participant, as indeed they should.

The idea that we owe someone when they lend us money, pick up a check, or give us something for free is not deplorable, and the obligation to feel the debt is only what we make it to be, but having a sense of who is doing what for whom is really important in social media and in real life.

Gratitude is an Attitude

When someone builds their social capital by helping you, or you help others, the expectation of some reciprocity is implicit. That doesn’t mean that they expect you to respond to them immediately or in like kind, but it does mean that on some level we expect the other party to the event to feel kindly towards us, or our product or service.

All of us have people in our lives that run to pick up a check, or help out when we need them, or pick up something when they come to dinner, and we (hopefully) value those people for themselves, and for their contributions, but we also have some of “those people”. And you know who they are.

They are the ‘takers’. The people that never reach for the check, or wait to see if someone else will. The ones that borrow stuff and never return it, or ask for favors, when they are hesitant to return them. These are people with little social capital in their lives, and when they try to make a withdrawal, they often find they have nothing to withdraw. And obviously, when they make requests, we either don;t fulfill them or do so grudgingly.

So What do We do?

Everyone wants to be perceived as one of the good guys. We want to think that others are willing to help us if we ask them. And We all know what the right things are to do. On some level. Maybe Mom or Dad or that special Aunt or Uncle showed us when we were young. But Tara Hunt does such a good job listing some of them that I wanted to give you just five of them;

Volunteer at Events
Help others promote their events
Introduce people for no personal gain
Share your work process with others
Offer to help someone new

And stuff to avoid? the lovely @Missrogue gives them to us too;

Promoting endless events
Only being interested in promoting the work you do and in your company
Keeping secrets and being closed
Continuing to ask for favors without thanking people or performing favors
Expecting people to go to your events when you don’t go to theirs

Let me Help You Get Started

At ReBarCampLA Andy Kaufman introduced a game called Akoha during his presentation on Social Media. The motto of this web site is “Play it Forward”. The game consists of a set of cards that give you missions like “”Thank Someone”, “Invite Someone for Coffee”, “Make Someone Smile”, “Send Drinks to a Couple in Love”, or ‘Give Someone a Surprise Gift”. When you give someone a card, they go to the website to enter the details, and they earn points in the game. When you confirm the mission, you get points as well. Now, not only do you get to do good, you get to play a game with your friends. Go check it out, find me and make me a friend.

Go out and do well by doing good - its fun and fulfilling!

© 2008 agentgenius.com - Thanks for Reading!
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Confidence and The Next Move

2009-04-26T16:50:08Z

I write from time to time about confidence. In the past, I invited you to be sexier. Confidence is also how one gets to speak at conferences. It’s a pretty important piece of what gets you to the next level. Here are some thoughts.

Confidence is About Small Successes

When Christopher S. Penn and I launched PodCamp, neither of us knew how to do what we did. We just figured it out. A lot of sweat and effort went into creating a conference, even an unconference. But we did it. And that success carried both of us to new levels. It made us feel capable of doing more than what we might have felt before. It gave me the belief that I could figure out pretty much anything, given enough time.

If you’re interested in doing/being/trying something new, can you find ways to make a project, execute the project, and appreciate the small success that comes from it?

Confidence is About Risk

We face moments in our lives all the time when risk is the gating factor. Do we dive off the bridge like our friends, or just stay put? Do we seek out that mortgage we can’t exactly cover? Should you quit your job, even though you’re not sure where the next check will come from?

Confidence is about taking a risk and seeing it pay off, or taking a risk, failing, and moving on from the failure.

Want a crash course in risk? Go to a skate park. Watch skateboarders try different things. They risk their safety for increasingly difficult tricks, often in front of a mixed bag crowd of supporters and detractors. It’s a lot like a microcosm of the risks you might take in life.

Another note about risk: most times, people are a bit more comfortable taking risks they know others have taken and accomplished. It’s those “jumping when no one has ever done it” risks that raise the bar. The thing is, that’s where the biggest reward comes from.

Confidence is About Support

If you haven’t built your own social network (I don’t mean software; I mean people), you don’t have the kind of support in place that I’m talking about. Most people only exist within the social networks that are given to them: coworkers, neighbors, church members. That’s not what I’m talking about.

By building a small, powerful network of your own, one that isn’t comprised of people who passively relate to you in some form, you’ll find the kind of support you want.

I count people like Becky McCray, Jon Swanson, Rob Hatch, , and Britt Raybould amongst the list of people in my small powerful network. Becky’s a small business expert from Oklahoma. Jon’s a pastor in Indiana. Rob’s a junior high school friend from Maine. Whitney came to the first PodCamp (and is now the mother of all PodCamps), Britt’s a business communications pro from Idaho. I have others, too. But do you see the point? These people aren’t in my obvious circle. They’re not in my geography. And they all support me more than I can say.

Confidence is About Eliminating Excuses

I can’t say this enough: language matters. Count the number of times you use negative sentences in a day. “We don’t have this. She’s not doing it the way we want. I can’t do that because they’re not letting me.”

I worked long and hard at turning all my language around to the positive. I’d say, “It would be great to find a way to get this. I’m hoping we can help her execute more the way we’re thinking. I’m working on removing some roadblocks.”

If you talk yourself out of things, it will always work.

Confidence Is About Setting Goals and Making Commitments

It’s pretty hard to be successful if you don’t decide what makes you a success. How do you know if you’re winning or failing if you don’t have a sense of what that means? We tend to think of “happiness” as a goal, but that’s like saying “clouds” are a goal. Happiness is an emotional state that passes through us, not something we can really hold on to from day to day. And it’s also not exactly accurate to what you’re saying.

Does happiness mean that your bills are paid? Then that’s a financial goal.
Does happiness mean that your family is happy? Then that’s a relationship goal.
Does happiness mean loving your job? Then that’s a career goal.

And if you don’t put some kind of solid words on paper that show both the larger goals - “work for myself by age 40″ - and the goals that will get you there - “attend more BarCamps and other entrepreneur-focused events” - you will have a much harder time reaching those goals.

Confidence Is About Believing In Yourself First

This isn’t always easy. We all have rough days. If you don’t learn how to build your own self-esteem, it’s going to be much harder to build up your successes. This is the book on Self-Esteem that did the most good for me. I moved from Covey’s 7 Habits book on to this, and after I’d done what this book recommended, my life changed in all the ways you now observe.

It’s not about other people. It’s about you. Believe.

What About You?

Any questions? Any thoughts? Any other tidbits for folks as to how you achieved confidence? Let’s talk about it.

My Ten Commandments of Social Networking

2009-03-29T16:25:19Z

1. Thou shalt not spam thy friends.

2. Thou shalt not be LinkedIn with coworkers, for LinkedIn has replaced most job sites for recruiting. Social network with thy coworkers around the large container that dispenseth water.

3. Thou shalt think twice before being Facebook Friends with coworkers, clients, and prospects. And definitely think thrice before posting photos and videos of thee in that club in Cancun with the beer bong.

4. Thou shalt not network under a corporate name, for silly rabbit, social networks are for humans!

5. Thou shalt be thyself as much as possible on social networks, for if thou art false, it shall be evident, and thy friends shall un-friend thee with the quickness.

6. Thou shalt help thy friends in appropriate networks meet and help each other as much as possible, for that is the whole point of doing social networks at all.

7. Thou shalt unsubscribe from any social network that thou hast not updated in the past thirty days, for thy time is not unlimited.

8. Thou shalt refrain from ad hominem attacks in debates that inevitably arise in any social networks worth a damn, unless thou truly means to simply trash and flame another person.

9. Thou shalt venture outside thy circle from time to time, for a social network that ceases to grow might be one that is headed unto death.

10. Thou shalt have fun on thy social networks, for all work and no play makes Jack a psychotic murderer who freezes unto death.

-rsh

Posted in Amusing Odds and Ends, social media Tagged: social networking

Real Estate Brokerage Is Rocket Science — NOT

2009-02-20T22:47:51Z

Show of hands. How many real estate brokers/agents reading this were recruited by M.I.T.? Crickets. Yeah, thought so. Me neither. I can spell technology. I’m not a TechnoGeek by anyone’s flimsy definition. Folks who know me are laughing at the thought. My blog? I know how to write posts then click the publish button.

I realize the online community by nature is composed of a far higher percentage of technologically gifted people than the population in general. Really, I get that. But they talk to each other so much about how wonderful this app is vs that app, they don’t realize the Gomer down the hall who’s making half a million a year by physically farming, or God forbid, calling people on the phone, avoided more in income taxes last year than they grossed.

Don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are Geekoids. That’s what they do — help guys like me. If they studied what I did for a year, they still wouldn’t know half of what I’ve forgotten. Same with me and what they do, except I could study into my next three lives and still fall short. This isn’t about right or wrong. This is about how much you want to earn, and how you’re gonna skin that many cats.

I’m in the business of investment real estate. You a broker/agent? What business are you in? I’m not gonna belabor the point of hours spent on activities you’ll claim are directly related to your bottom line. The only thing related to your bottom line is closed escrows. The rest is what makes you feel good about doing what you were gonna do anyway. And for the record, if messin’ around with the hi-tech part of your business floats your boat, more power to you. But pulllease stop trying to convince yourself and others it’s time well spent. Write that speech, print it, put it in the crosscut shredder, then spread it on your lawn. Before long you’ll have the greenest grass in town.

Let’s bring the dirty little truth about hi-tech in real estate out in the open once and for all. For 98% of the agents out there using online/hi-tech approaches to increase their bottom line, it’s a giant FAIL. That’s not a criticism of those approaches whatsoever. It’s a fact though, and everybody knows it. You and I can walk into any real estate office in the country worth its salt, and I’ll bet roughly 9 out of 10 times the #1 producer will be getting their business through mostly offline activities.

Repeat — If taking care of everything related to hi-tech in your real estate operation puts a smile on your face, good on you as Greg sometimes says. Frankly, I only have to spend one dinky paycheck a year to have my favorite gaggle of geeks do for me that voodoo they do so well. For the record, I also don’t service my own car, make my own clothes, or grow my own food. What a rebel.

If I take this I gotta do everything myself logic and apply it to say, baseball, I guess it’d result in players making their own bats and gloves. Extreme? Not any more than tellin’ me I have to do anything other than what folks pay me good money to do. They pay me to increase their net worth, allowing them to retire well. They require me to know about tax shelter, exchanges, financing, and the myriad other related areas of knowledge necessary to do what I do well. The next prospect who leaves me because I don’t take care of my hi-tech needs myself, will be the first.

And yes, many of my clients are generated by my online efforts. Also, most of last year and the first month of this year was spent increasing my firm’s hi-tech ‘footprint’. We’re now virtually paperless. We act as our own server for our various databases. And when I say, ‘act as our own server’ I mean there’s a lonely little computer sitting in the corner serving its little ass off. We don’t do squat. If there’s a problem, we ‘call the guy’ — the same guy who showed us what buttons to push.

More power to those now rolling their eyes, thinking how wrong-headed this all is. Frankly, happiness is infinitely more valuable than how much money you earn. So if that’s the tradeoff for those spending so much of their time away from pro$pecting and belly to belly meeting$ while dealing with their tech needs, I salute them — it’s a trade heavily weighted in their favor.

When my son was young I spent 15-20 hours weekly with his sports activities. I knew what it cost in dollars not earned, but the payoff in terms of time spent together was a no-brainer. We make these sort of choices all the time, don’t we? What value do I assign to having been in the dugout for 98% of his baseball games from the time he was 8 ’till his sophomore year in high school? I can’t, it was priceless, as are the memories.

My NCAA baseball umpiring schedule used to take a minimum of eight hours a week away from my brokerage endeavors, sometimes 16 — and that was just the games themselves. There were the meetings, ongoing training, umpire camps, preseason tournaments, and post season. Can’t tell you how much I enjoyed it. Even though at the time I had three full time assistants, I was finally forced to decide: Serve my clients with the quality they’d come to expect, or take fewer of them. There was no wrong way to go from my viewpoint. The level of service and more importantly the quality of results delivered to clients wasn’t gonna change either way. I chose, for various business and personal reasons to walk away from umpiring. Though I still miss it like crazy, using 20/20 hindsight I can honestly say it was the right move.

By adding 500 extra hours a year to my business, the majority of which was spent prospecting in one form or another, my income increased significantly. Furthermore, I’d never have been able to expand my firm to several states had I remained an umpire.

To those who haven’t stepped away from the keyboard to evaluate what’s generating closed escrows, I conclude with this: We’re all different. If you honestly believe your income is higher with you spending time changing your own hi-tech oil, then continue along that path — it’s obviously working for you. On the other hand, if you think putting yourself in front of 50 more serious prospects a year might be more productive for your bottom line, AND that would make you happy, you may want to modify your approach.

Ultimately it’s all about how many skinned cats YOU want to hang on the wall. Nobody cares how they were skinned. We all decide how we’re gonna skin our own cats, and how many we’d like on our own wall. Let’s stop kiddin’ ourselves though about the relative productivity of time spent on various tasks. My ongoing assumption is that those insisting on spending so much of their time on the hi-tech needs of their operation are doing it because they expect to earn quite a bit by spending that time.

Does this make any sense?

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Obama’s housing rescue plan won’t rescue housing, but it will delay the eventual recovery of the real estate market

2009-02-21T14:37:22Z

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

Obama’s housing rescue plan won’t rescue housing, but it will delay the eventual recovery of the real estate market

President Barrack Obama came to Mesa Wednesday to announce his new housing initiative. The location made for good political theater, given that metropolitan Phoenix is one of the hardest-hit real estate markets.

The president promises millions of refinanced or renegotiated mortgages, at a price tag of $275 billion. The putative beneficiaries are homeowners, who may be able to negotiate their monthly payments down to less than 30% of their monthly incomes. But it is the lenders who will cash in, if the Obama plan works.

How’s that? Obama is hoping to shove a floor under still-declining home prices. Lenders will take a hit on millions of reformulated mortgages, but the hope is that this will save them even more money, in the long run, by stemming the rising tide of foreclosures.

In other words, the Obama plan is a price-support scheme. The market argues right now that homes are overpriced — which in turn suggests that the available supply of homes substantially exceeds existing demand.

That’s important. Prices for premium-quality homes are very low, and interest rates are still hovering at historic lows. Mortgage money is easily available to owner-occupants, and Fannie Mae just loosened its standards for rental-home investors. Even so, the number of homes being offered for sale at current prices still exceeds the number of buyers willing to pay those prices.

In reality, prices need to continue to drop until demand matches or eclipses supply. It wouldn’t hurt to convert some housing to other uses, or simply to tear it down altogether.

But forcing an arbitrary floor under prices is unlikely to have happy consequences. Despite his rhetoric, Obama’s plan can only reward our economy’s wasteful grasshoppers, at the expense of its thrifty ants. A price-support will serve to delay recovery, since it will do nothing to solve the supply and demand problem. And, as the worst of all foreseeable consequences, a price-support plus the $8,000 tax credit from last week’s stimulus bill could fuel new building — adding even more supply to an already over-built real estate market.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

Putting The Brand to the Test

2009-02-17T16:00:43Z

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A big move

This week marks a move for me - professionally and profoundly personally.

I’m moving to a new company - joining forces with other like-minded (but not too like-minded) Realtors in my market. Following the lead of the perennially-referred-to Kris Berg and Jay Thompson, yet with a twist, I made the decision to leave Century 21 and be part of a new independent firm.

It’s exciting and daunting. Leaving a comfortable situation where I have enjoyed healthy success for a different, somewhat unknown, adventure is equal parts stupid, bold and intimidating.

The trend away from the “big brands” - at least in the social media/blogging space - has been building steam for the past several years.

With this in mind, I have asked the last four or five buyers I have met if they knew the name of my company. One guessed Coldwell Banker, the other four had no idea. And that’s the point.

Fast Company said earlier this year in an article titled The Brand is You:

… being CEO of Me Inc. requires you to act selfishly — to grow yourself, to promote yourself, to get the market to reward yourself. Of course, the other side of the selfish coin is that any company you work for ought to applaud every single one of the efforts you make to develop yourself. After all, everything you do to grow Me Inc. is gravy for them: the projects you lead, the networks you develop, the customers you delight, the braggables you create generate credit for the firm. As long as you’re learning, growing, building relationships, and delivering great results, it’s good for you and it’s great for the company.

…

No matter what you’re doing today, there are four things you’ve got to measure yourself against. First, you’ve got to be a great teammate and a supportive colleague. Second, you’ve got to be an exceptional expert at something that has real value. Third, you’ve got to be a broad-gauged visionary — a leader, a teacher, a farsighted “imagineer.” Fourth, you’ve got to be a businessperson — you’ve got to be obsessed with pragmatic outcomes.

So - it’s time. Onward and upward.

This new opportunity gives us the opportunity to help define an agenda based on our company’s standards -

- No (single-agent) Dual Agency - this is Part 1 of my as-yet-undefined master plan - If we can get the buyers in our community asking other agents to defend Single Agent Dual Agency, then maybe, just maybe we’ll make progress eradicating this vestige of sub-agency.

- No agent with less than three years’ experience

- Must be Brokers within six months of coming onboard

- A focus on technology without losing focus of the fact that people buy houses.

Finally, a tweet from a fellow Charlottesville resident and entrepreneurial business owner -

“The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.” — Rupert Murdoch

I’m curious though - who else is taking a similar leap right now?

* I almost selected this photo for the heading.

Image Source

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Multi-layer Brand & Social Media

2009-02-06T22:04:28Z

Last week, I had an opportunity to attend an extraordinary meeting with some of the most senior people at NAR, on the topic of social media. I have to thank Jim Duncan for putting the meeting together, and of course, I am grateful to the leadership at NAR for being willing to listen to a bunch of blogger types. I finally got the chance to meet Jim in person, and it was absolutely fantastic to meet and converse about social media, web, real estate, and marketing with some of the best and brightest in our industry.

Quick shout-outs then to: Dale Stinton, Frank Sibley, Mark Lesswing, Pamela Kabati, Hilary Marsh, and Keith Garner from NAR. And to my fellow realestistas Jim Duncan, Ben Martin, Jay Thompson, Joe Ferrara, Eric Bryn, and via telephone, the redoubtable Benn Rosales, a tip of the ole hat.

However, this is not a post about that meeting. It is, rather, about a concept that was brought up that has really intrigued me: multi-layer brand, and how that interacts with social media.

Multi-Layer Branding

The notion is that all working realtors (or REALTORS, more precisely) have what one might call a “multi-layer brand” and that this will have enormous impact on social media (indeed, on all marketing efforts) for real estate services.

Let me illustrate:

Multi-Layer Branding, Badly Illustrated

So the idea here is that every single REALTOR has multiple brands.

First, they are a REALTOR, a member of the National Association of REALTORS. Presumably, this distinguishes them from the non-REALTORS, who I understand are referred to as “licensees”. Those non-REALTORS are nonetheless real estate brokers and agents, fully licensed to help people transact business.

Then they are often members of large franchises or networks, such as Coldwell Banker. Again, this distinguishes them from people who are not CB agents and do not carry the CB brand.

Then you have brokerages — in our industry, many/most operate under their own brand name as an extension of the franchise brand. (Those that are not franchised operate under their own brand.) So presumably, being with Coldwell Banker United is different from being with Coldwell Banker Joe-Blow Realty.

Next tier down may be either Teams or Offices. Now this brand is trying to distinguish the realtor from others who are not part of the “Jill Smith Team”. It’s trying to say, “Sure, those people are also CB United REALTORS, but we’re better/different because we are the Jill Smith Team.”

And finally, you have the agent’s personal brand: “That Joan Cartwright is a real expert, and so friendly too!”

As the graphic attempts to illustrate, brand awareness (or breadth of brand) is higher towards the top and drops as you go down the layers. More consumers have heard of REALTOR than have heard of Jill Smith Team. Conversely, and interestingly, brand value (or power) is lower towards the top and higher towards the bottom. For example, you may be referred business because you’re Joan Cartwright, super-agent, but only rarely (if ever) will you have a consumer say, “I’m giving you this listing, because you’re with Coldwell Banker, instead of those Keller Williams people.”

Hey, I got another follower on Twitter!

Born of Marketing, Growing Up on Social Media?

What I find interesting about this is that the multi-layer brand is the inevitable result of past marketing strategies focused around mass communications media.

It is much easier — and more effective — for national organizations to leverage TV, radio, and national print campaigns to create a national brand than it is for a local agent team to do so. In fact, it probably makes no sense for Jill Smith Team to buy a Superbowl ad, but it may very well make a lot of sense for NAR to do so.

Since traditional marketing had a more-or-less direct correlation to the amount of spend, awareness is inevitably tied to size. At the same time, over the past decade or so, the erosion of brand value not just for real estate brands but for almost all brands has been accelerating as consumers become more and more networked, and more and more skeptical of advertising. As the Wired article says:

A study by retail-industry tracking firm NPD Group found that nearly half of those who described themselves as highly loyal to a brand were no longer loyal a year later. Even seemingly strong names rarely translate into much power at the cash register. Another remarkable study found that just 4 percent of consumers would be willing to stick with a brand if its competitors offered better value for the same price.

And,

The single biggest explanation for fragile brands is the swelling strength of the consumer. We’ve seen a pronounced jump in the amount of information available about goods and services. It’s not just bellwethers like Consumers Union and J.D. Power, established authorities that unquestionably shape people’s buying decisions, but also the crush of magazines, Web sites, and message boards scrutinizing products.

Hinted at in the Wired article is the growing power of “social media”. New-school web-heads might look at “message boards” and laugh at it as being so Web 1.0. But Facebook is really just a message board, which are in turn just a prettier face to the old Usenet newsgroups. Plus ςa change…

One of the observations I made about social media at the meeting is that no matter what else social media might do, it definitely does one thing: bypass traditional media. Brands that were born from traditional media, and sustained by traditional media plays (like mass advertising and PR) need to look at social media with some care and even trepidation. Because social media allows other players to bypass traditional media, one of the implications is that the higher-awareness brands (whose value is already weak) start losing awareness to boot. If you’re a consumer getting most of your information from Twitter, blogs, and Facebook, you may never have even heard of Keller Williams as a brand. You’re certainly not going to have any impression or emotional connection to the KW brand.

The Challenge

The conundrum of the higher-awareness brand owners then, such as NAR, is what to do about social media. There are three available strategies:

Alienate
Ignore
Embrace

Alienate

An organization (such as NAR) can try to alienate social media. It can prohibit its members from blogging, from using Twitter to talk about the organization, and the like. It can leverage its power in traditional media to denigrate these “upstart know-nothing bloggers”. Traditional news organizations have tried taking this tack in the past, with disastrous results.

For real estate, at this stage of the game, I believe that trying to alienate and denigrate social media would just make an organization look out of touch and stuck in the past.

Suffice to say, alienating social media is not recommended as a strategy.

Ignore

You can try to pretend that social media doesn’t really exist, or if it does, it’s not something to be taken all that seriously. While not prohibiting involvement, you can choose not to promote involvement either. Have a website, even a blog, but don’t expend a lot of effort beyond that.

A variation on the theme is to do social media as a ghettoized niche of marketing. Far too many companies that have “social media” also have “corporate communications” and “public relations” and so on. Only those people who work in “social media” are allowed to be the voice of the organization, and blog posts have to be approved by the Director of Social Media or some such.

The trouble with this is that “social media” is just a channel; that isn’t really important. What is important is the attitude that makes “social media” work — the natural, authentic, human voice. When you have segregated social media into a small corner of the overall marketing effort, then what you are really trying to do is ignore it, hoping it’s a fad that will go away.

Depending on the organization, this very well may be the ideal strategy. If you’re Apple, for instance, I don’t know that it pays for you to let your people blog freely or twitter away. So much of Apple’s brand image, and therefore its power, is a creature of traditional media that is tightly controlled by some very talented marketing people. Why mess with it? Sure, have a blog; but make sure it’s controlled. Have an Apple Facebook page, but make sure that it’s tightly controlled. If traditional methods are working, then why mess with it?

Embrace

The final strategy is to really embrace social media as an organization. The challenge here is that social media at its heart is not a tactic, but a culture. It means adopting Cluetrain principles of lowering barriers to communication between the people within your walls to consumers, interest groups, and stakeholders outside of those walls.

Social media isn’t just a corner of marketing; it becomes marketing. Corporate communications & PR are subsumed into the social media culture of openness and authenticity. There ain’t nothing to spin, if your culture is about openness and honesty, is there? Everyone from the CEO down to the janitor become voices of the organization, for good and bad. There is no “funnel” of engagement into the organization, anymore than there is a “megaphone” of the Corporate Voice out to the public.

Understandably, this state of affairs would make most marketers and most corporate executives extremely nervous.

Let me see that detailed marketing plan for a second...

Enter Chaos

As if wholesale organizational cultural change were not nerve-wracking enough, now we add multi-layer brand effects to the mix.

If a higher-order (in terms of awareness) organization starts to engage in social media — meaning, relaxing the barriers between its people and the public — what impact does that have on downstream brands?

So for example, say Coldwell Banker really embraces social media. All of a sudden, you have corporate executives from CB national blogging openly and freely about real estate, about brokerage, about what’s going on inside 1 Campus, and so on. They’re providing a lot of direct interaction with consumers, agents, and whatnot. They start going on Twitter and engaging with individual agents of CB, even individual consumers.

While this may be wonderful, there will be a sort of a “flattening effect” that takes place. The national Coldwell Banker brand starts to be defined by the open conversation that takes place directly with consumers and with agents.

So if you are the director of marketing for CB United, what does that do to you and your plans for the CB United brand which you are trying to differentiate from other CB-branded companies?

What if you’re Jill Smith, and you’re trying really hard to enforce a certain way of doing business in an effort to differentiate yourself from the rest of the CB agents out there? What if your strategy was to use social media to convey to your clients that you “get it”, that you’re “authentic”, not like those other CB agents? And here comes CB corporate essentially granting that brand image of authenticity to all CB agents by virtue of their social media efforts.

While this impact of top-level brand on lower-level brand has always been in place for any multi-layer brand, social media exacerbates the problem because of its global reach, combined with direct interaction. Jill Smith Team can overpower traditional media in its local market by focusing the ad spend in local channels, and public relations strategies focusing on local publications. But with social media, it takes the same (low) effort for the local consumer/agent to follow @jillsmithteam on Twitter as it does to follow @coldwellbanker.

And Coldwell Banker’s blog is likely to have far higher SERPS on various search engines, and have huge multiples of readers/subscribers than Jill Smith Team’s blog.

Now what?

Many Questions, No Answers

One of the reasons why I wrote this is that I have no answers. It’s a new area, a new conundrum. The amount of spend — higher but broader at the top, lower but more concentrated at the lower end — has little impact on social media. Conversely, those lower-down on the pyramid can get completely swamped and silenced by those higher up.

I’m sure there’s a way out of this maze, and that we’ll all figure it out together. But right now, there are far more questions than there are answers.

I have a feeling that the solution will involve something like a cascade of value via cascade of content, with a coordinated — rather than a commanded — social media effort from the top-down, bottom-up, and in-between. The solution might involve one or more of the layers simply atrophying away to meaninglessness as openness becomes the norm, rather than the exception.

We’ll be returning to this topic in the future. In the meantime, what are your thoughts?

-rsh

Posted in Brokerage Issues, Getting On The Cluetrain, Interactive Marketing, Real Estate, So-Called Web 2.0, social media Tagged: branding, multi-layer brands, NAR, social media, Twitter

Thirty-three touches from the cloud: Seriously seeking CRM

2009-02-07T21:42:16Z

We need a CRM solution, and it’s making me crazy that we don’t have one. We wrestled with REST for a couple of years, but we never got it cranking on all cylinders, and it lacks features I don’t want to live without. Chris Johnson raves about Heap, but I’m not sure it’s everything we need.

I need help, it’s true enough.

What I want:

Cloud-based. I don’t want any proprietary apps running on dedicated hardware. I want to be able to do my CRM business from any web-enabled computer and any iPhone anywhere.
iPhone empowered, therefore, of course. Needs to integrate with Contacts, iCal, etc., and it needs to sync periodically through the cloud.
Email-based data entry. Heap can do at least some of this. What I would like is to be able to have a form on a web page produce an email that is mailed to my CRM, with that email initiating a sequence of events: Create client record and initiate a particular set of sequences of follow-up contacts. These should be selectable by the email received: Investors should be subscribed to different campaigns from sellers or first-time home buyers.
Jott-able. Heap does some of this, also.
As tightly-integrated with Google Apps as possible. For example, I want the calendar to be the Google Apps calendar.
Action scripts or event scripts or whatever, as automated as possible, ideally already scripted with the text already written. By now we’re talking about the “33 touches” idea from The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, but I want as much of this as possible to happen automatically and hands-free. As above, there will be different “8×8″ scripts for new clients, and possibly also different “33 touches” scripts, but, once these are assigned, I want for them to proceed “untouched by human hands.” Agent 360 seems to be well-equipped in this regard.
Action scripts that require real live human action should create to-do lists for the affected team members.
We own our own data. That means we have the ability to move our data off in a usable format whenever we want, and our data is never shared with anyone else.
Simple to use, with no time-sinks. A CRM that require a full-time staffer to implement is a CRM that won’t be used. We already own some of those.
I’d like for it to be affordable.

So what products should I be looking at? Does anything like this even exist?

Further notice:

If you are signing up for Heap, I’d appreciate if you would use this link. I will get credit in Heap’s affiliate program. We’ll donate the affiliate fees to charity, but with each new sign-up, I will gain clout with the developer. As always, I’ll be sharing every new idea I come up with, but if we can demonstrate that wired real estate professionals are a significant portion of the user base, we stand a much better chance of getting needed product upgrades in a sprightly fashion.

Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, technology

Putting Out the Right Message

2009-02-12T19:09:50Z

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I was in Chicago last week teaching part of a social media training session, and my section was all about how to start your blog, how to go from nothing to something.

So I spent a good deal of time figuring out the right approach to the session - I only had half an hour, so there was no way we could go through minute technical details. Instead, I thought about business planning as it relates to starting a blog, the various decisions one would need to make to wind up with an effective, business-generating blog.

Once you get past the pick-a-platform and what-domain-do-I-use sort of decisions, the rest is really all business planning. Right?

At that point, I’m deciding who I want to reach, what kind of audience I want to attract. Because whatever kind of information I put out there - both in terms of content and style - that’s what I’m going to get back. I very firmly believe that. So really, I ought to be spending a good amount of time thinking about who I want to attract and do business with, and what kind of information that person wants to see.

After all - it’s not about what I want to be, it’s about what they want to see, and how well their needs can be met via my site.

And all of that reminded me of my favorite line from a talk I gave at REBarCampNY, from a book called Always Be Testing, which reminds us that:

Every individual actively makes a choice to come to your website. They arrive, task in mind, prepared to participate. Behavior is voluntary, participatory, and goal-directed. Save for those who land on your site by mistake, your visitors are already interested in you and are there for a reason. And they are completely in control of what they will or will not agree to experience. If your visitor refuses to take the next click on your site, your dialog is over. It is essential to remember you are always one click away from goodbye.

I absolutely love that. My visitors are voluntary participants and show up already interested in me. And it’s up to me to make an environment where they want to stay. Otherwise, it’s my fault that I lost them if they click away.

Given all of that, how vital is it that we spend a good amount of time in our desired site visitor’s shoes, thinking about not only what that audience would want to see, but how they would expect to see it - and where they might want to go next? These people make a choice to come to our sites, and they show up already interested. Just as we would tailor an appointment or social gathering to fit the anticipated crowd, we should be doing the same thing with our sites.

It’s my content that draws them in. And it’s the content that will make them stay, given the right design. So the first decision I make isn’t what pretty theme to use. My first decision is about my content. Because until I know who I’m trying to attract and with what kind of information, I have no idea how to present that information. Right?

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Taking your Online efforts Offline - Part III

2009-02-02T22:35:45Z

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One month after Inman Real Estate Connect, most of us start forgetting what we learned and go on with our routine. A post like this one that tells you about my presentation may sound like any other Yada Yada Yada…..but listen up - you may get something from it.

Part I of this series talked about rewarding your sphere with your online influence and it reminded you to keep it real.

Part II talked about being creative, branching out your blog and creating a brand that makes an impact and is remembered.

In Part III I want to talk about taking all those efforts and actually focusing on F2F (Face to Face) meetings that will strengthen connections and make your efforts tangible.

Easier said than done

Tweet-ups are HOT now and someone somewhere is trying to arrange some kind of Twitter get-together now. Let me tell you that it’s easier than it looks and it doesn’t matter the size of the group either. With the help of TweetDeck I have managed to group my Twitter followers into different categories and this helps me follow different types of conversations at the same time. I have my local followers, I have my close Twitter friends and I recently created an architecture group to follow even another type of conversation. (Rick does think I’m crazy, just in case you were wondering).

So one night I posted a photo of a mojito on TwitPic and a local follower said, “when are we having mojitos, Ines?” - one thing lead to another and we arranged a Miami Mojito Tweet-Up 3 days later. 10 people showed up and we had a quaint but very powerful get together at a local bar in South Beach.

What’s amazing about this small event is that I felt so much closer to each one of these individuals. Their tweets were meaningful, I went out of my way to re-tweet and pay more attention to what they had to say and our relationship was strengthened. This applies to any F2F type of interaction. From this small tweet-up I received a call to participate in the local social media events, to participate in a case study on the use of social media for business and was even featured in a business directory in the UK….and the best part is that we enjoyed mojitos and had a great time!

F2F can be achieved from any of the social media outlets - think of individuals with like-minded interests and make it happen.

No Face to Face Effort is too Small

The next type of F2F interaction without actually sharing the same physical space is video. Although we are seeing more people use video today than we were seeing 6 months ago, I cannot stress how important and how easy it is to use video on a day to day basis. There are so many platforms out there that make this possible and you have no excuse NOT to use these. Here’s a few: Seesmic, Skype, Facebook, TokBox, EyeJot….please go take a look, you will be surprised how easy it is to use these.

Jeff Turner was telling me a few months ago how surprised he was that Facebook Video was so underutilized - I began following his lead and leaving Happy Birthday Video Messages and from one message to a Venezuelan friend from my childhood I actually sold a vacation home here in Miami…..that easy!! Video happens to reinforce that connection when actual F2F is not possible. (I personally don’t know what I would do today without Skype…..we video chat with people from all over the world….a truly amazing tool).

What are others doing?

Linda Davis from Eastern Connecticut Real Estate Blog and who has had a well established real estate business sends a newspaper to over 6000 homes in her market area. Because Linda’s customers are not web savvy, her blog provides content for her newspaper.

Linda was the same person who said in the last Bloggers Connect in San Francisco, “If your Real Estate Business sucks, blogging is not going to help!” - ( I *heart* Linda).

Our own Mariana Wagner, with powerful on-line as well as off-line marketing, incorporates some traditional methods with technology. She has a newsletter that pimps out her blog, she still does door knocking in her neighborhood, has neighborhood picnics and if you haven’t received or at least seen a “@MIZZLE sticker”…. then you should consider removing the rock from over your head.

St. Paul’s only Teresa Boardman could not be left out of my presentation. If you know anything about T, you know that she loves photography and will find her with camera in-hand at all times. Teresa has managed to document the whole city and gets called by her community to use and display her photos. In addition to that and with the use of Flickr groups, she goes on “photo walks” and achieves F2F with like-minded individuals (or at least people with the same passion for photography).

Joe and Rudy accomplished the ultimate F2F event ever with their Blog Tour USA in 2007. To think that they actually toured the US and met hundreds of bloggers from all over the place. I personally felt a connection when they came to Miami and was so glad we got to spend quality time together. I’m not telling you to go tour the US, but I am telling you there are no boundaries.

And finally - Agent Genius Extraordinaire himself, Benn Rosales. Benn admitted to me that he uses no print media at all. His efforts vary from coffee socials small in scale and he uses social media to help others and in return they often pay it forward.

It goes back to the concept of using your on-line influence to help others without expecting anything in return. The ultimate goal for anyone using the Internet and Social Media to market their business is to achieve some sort of real, live connection. Social Media is about keeping it real, about being genuine and about not having a hidden agenda. Transparency has reached a new height and you will be outed if your motives are contrived.

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