At every technology conference I’ve been to in the last year, I’m told that I HAVEto be on Facebook to promote my business and that I NEEDto be friending every prospect in the world to have them follow me.

I’m not WRONG, I just have a different opinion of the mainstream. Facebook has been such a personally wonderful experience for me. I got on to re-connect with old friends. I was very shy about it for the first year, not posting my picture and not really ever updating it. But after losing my brother and my step dad last year, I found a new appreciation for how important friends and family are, and the need to connect with those that were important to me. So I added my picture and within weeks was re-connecting with family, and friends from middle and high school. What a great experience it has been!

Anyone who has been on Facebook for a while knows “that person” who does nothing but update about work. “Closed another deal today”, “Have important meetings with important people because I am SO important”, yadda yadda yadda. And what do we do with those people, we hit the ignore button.

Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand the delicate balance of the need to post light on business and focus more on engaging others, and letting a little personality come through, but here’s the thing. My best friends and my potential prospects are a completely different audience. Plus I have Twitter, LinkedIn, my blog, ning websites, my website, AND the real world for business.

Yes, I know you can create subgroups in Facebook, but that seems like such a hassle to me. Every time I post (and I post more from my phone then my PC) I have to remember what the groups are what and who’s in what group, etc. Forget that.

Having said all that, I still “behave” on Facebook. I don’t engage in anything that I wouldn’t say or do at a face to face networking event. But I do post pictures of my kids on FB, and it’s fun to announce your excitement about leaving town for vacation for a week. But if I don’t *really* know you – do you need to know that my home will be empty for a week?

Here’s another concern about Facebook that I don’t have with any of the others. Anything my friends post on my wall can be seen by potential clients. (Once again, restrict with permissions – but I think we beat that horse already). Come football season, my buddies get a little colorful with their posts. I don’t do this but my potential clients don’t need to see it.

My solution is simple. I use Facebook for FUN and LinkedIn, Twitter, ning.com sites, my blog, my website, and the real world for business. Once you understand Twitter, you’ll see that it’s a better vehicle for business than Facebook anyway. The same goes for LinkedIn.

To those who say I HAVE to be pimping my wares on facebook to everyone who will friend me, isn’t it enough to be using those other mediums for that, and just keep Facebook as a simple place to get away from it all?

Having said ALL That – I do think it is a good idea to have a Facebook Fan page.  From what I can see with limited investigation so far, it is completely separate from your personal account, can have a different set of “friends”, and allows you to keep personal personal, and business business.  I plan to check this out more in the coming months. 

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©2009 – AmazingVideoTours.com – All Rights Reserved. Amazing Video Tours offers photography and full motion video marketing solutions to Realtors, and other individuals with property to sell, lease, or rent. A departure from the old fashion 360 Virtual Tour, Amazing Video Tours takes online property marketing to the next level.

At this point, the vote is unanimous. If you are in the business of prospecting for new clients, you need to be on social networking sites. Having a small business myself, I have been tuned into sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others. The complaint I hear from more business professionals than any other is, “I don’t have time for all that social networking stuff”. Well the pros all agree, you need to make time. But how?

I want to share my solution. Like thousands of other busy professionals, I signed up for Twitter last year and did nothing with it for a long time partly because I didn’t have the time.

Well recently, that all changed when I bought an iPhone . The iPhone has apps for Twitter (I like Tweetdeck), Facebook, and LinkedIn. They are pretty close to their desktop counterparts so there’s no additional learning curve.

You’re busy, yeah – we get that. But are you too busy to click an icon and write a quick Face book update or tweet while you wait for your next appointment to show up? How about when you are watching TV. According to Nielsen Media Research, Americans watch an average of 4 hours of TV everyday. How sad is that – but that’s another blog article. Bottom line is – you can do this stuff, even during the commercials.

The truth is that we can all carve out a few minutes here and there to stay connected. The pros advocate carving out an “hour of power” each day for social networking, but I tend to disagree. Being social is all about being part of the conversation and that’s where a few minutes here and there throughout the day makes more sense to me.

The iPhone has made this a reality for me. All it takes is 3-5 minutes to catch up with FB and your “Tweeps” to have an ongoing dialog throughout the day. That way you don’t have to dread doing a huge data dump at the end of the day (when your contribution to the conversation may no longer be relevant).

So, if you continue to make excuses for not participating, you might very well want to consider an iPhone. As said in this blog article, it’s not so much of a phone as it is a laptop that fits in your shirt pocket. It’s worth every penny.

Oh – and where did I write this article? In front of the tube while watching a show that wasn’t worth my time anyway.

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©2009 – AmazingVideoTours.com – All Rights Reserved. Amazing Video Tours offers photography and full motion video marketing solutions to Realtors, and other individuals with property to sell, lease, or rent. A departure from the old fashion 360 Virtual Tour, Amazing Video Tours takes online property marketing to the next level.

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©2009 – AmazingVideoTours.com – All Rights Reserved. Any use of video, including reproduction, modification, distribution or republication, without the prior written consent of Amazing Video Tours, is strictly prohibited. Amazing Video Tours offers photography and full motion video marketing solutions to Realtors, and other individuals with property to sell, lease, or rent. A departure from the old fashion 360 Virtual Tour, Amazing Video Tours takes online property marketing to the next level.

Ok, so as a Realtor, it’s getting drummed into your head over and over …. “You need to be on SOCIAL networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn”. So, I think Facebook is the easiest to conquer. Twitter made sense to me after I got Tweetdeck, and now I am trying to figure out LinkedIn.

I have been on LinkedIn for years. I added my old boss and a bunch of people from my pre Real Estate and Video days, and ……. [crickets chirping] ….. [Yawn] …….. Every now and then I would get an email telling me that so in so has connected with so in so. Big Deal. What’s so SOCIAL about that?

Recently, I discovered a new world (for me at least) on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has a “Groups” component where you can conduct a search for groups that are of interest to you and join them. For example, I’m sure that not only can you find many groups about real estate, you will be able to find groups about real estate in your local area.

Once you join the group, it gets SOCIAL. First is the Discussions. You can add a discussion, or comment on someone else’s discussion topic. Very interactive – very SOCIAL. But every group has a “News” page, a “Job Posting” page, and the ability to add subgroups for overly complicated topics that need to be broken down.

Best of all is that when you participate in these discussions, you connect with another whole set of people that you might have not met on Facebook, or Twitter. Then you “Link” to them and follow each other.

Beyond that, LinkedIn has a heavy business networking emphasis, and members of these “Groups” get together for real life gatherings. Talk about a chance to prospect to folks you would have otherwise never met.

I’m sure this is just scratching the surface of what’s available on LinkedIn and I in no way claim to be an expert. But, it took me years to get in there and discover “Groups” so I wanted to share it with you so you would not wait so long.

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©2009 – AmazingVideoTours.com – All Rights Reserved. Amazing Video Tours offers photography and full motion video marketing solutions to Realtors, and other individuals with property to sell, lease, or rent. A departure from the old fashion 360 Virtual Tour, Amazing Video Tours takes online property marketing to the next level.

I’ve never owned an Apple product in my life. I am as “PC” as you can be, so you can imagine my reluctance to venture into Steve Jobs world for the first time. But boy, am I glad I did.

What made me do it? One word, VIDEO. I’m in the video business and the iPhone 3G S “does video”. For me, that means hosting videos on the phone, not taking videos with the phone. It’s so often that I’m at a party, or networking event and people ask me what I do for a living. When I tell them I produce real estate video virtual tours, they are intrigued and want to see. I used to hand them a business card, but I know that after the initial interest of the conversation wore off, few of them ever made it to my website.

But now…… Now I can SHOW them, right then and there…. on my PHONE! It’s crystal clear, proper 16×9 format, and the audio is actually really good. It’s funny, I think they won’t be interested, and then they watch the video all the way through. If a picture is worth 1000 words, what’s a video worth? To me, it’s indispensable.

But the iPhone 3G S is about so much more. The new phone has made Twitter a reality for me. Even with TweetDeck on my laptop, I rarely made the effort to log in and see what the latest Tweets were about. But now, it’s a no brainer. I can keep up with the latest tweets, and I can tweet from anywhere. Same for Facebook.

The phone has enabled me to participate in Social Media like never before.

It has a decent camera and shoots video too – Facebook updates have never been so much fun. And the internet – the phone is light years beyond my old phone. It doesn’t just rely on the cell network for the internet. If you are anywhere near a Wi-Fi hotspot, it gives you the option of hooking in at Wi-Fi speeds, which at home and at the office (and Starbucks) is blazing fast.

You know the commercial, “yeah, we’ve got an app for that”, and it’s so true. From productivity to games to “wholly cr@p, it does THAT?” (check out Shazam). Occasionally, I have to pry it out of my wife’s hands because she’s playing Sudoku on it. And my kids ……The Fast & the Furious ….. forget-a-bout-it. “Hey – gimme back my phone, it’s NOT a toy” (snicker).

Want more? Email, weather, sports scores, stock quotes, maps with GPS, voice recognition, calculator, ipod, web browser …. I could go on and on and on, but I’ll spare you. For a busy professional, I think it’s a great tool – practically rendering your laptop obsolete.

Only one major drawback for Realtors, there’s no infrared so unlike Palm phones, this one won’t open lockboxes. That’s a major inconvenience, however, I still feel that the good far outweigh the bad for this new toy, I mean essential business device.

You can make calls on it too…… imagine that

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