I had so much fun making this promotional video for Real Estate Bar Camp Charlotte REBarCampCLT REBCCLT with Lori, Debe, and Todd. 

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Check it out!

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We’re so excited that the Superior School of Real Estate is going to host the Second annual Real Estate Bar Camp Charlotte on June 11th.  This year, We’ll be in Ballantyne village.  With awesome amenities including exceptional dining, fantastic spa, great entertainment, movies, gifts, clothing, and so much more – there’ll plenty for the participants to do. 

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Not that you’ll have time …

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You’ll be too busy learning in the traditional Bar Camp UN conference format, where pitches are made and the participants decide the schedule.  You’ll have plenty of options of real estate and technical sessions to choose from. 

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Come learn from some of the best minds in real estate!  You’ll come away with fresh new ideas, a rejuvenated excitement for the job, and a bunch of great new friends. 

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Click Here for more info and to Register (It’s a free event)

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Don’t miss Real Estate Bar Camp 2010 on June 11th at Superior School of real estate.

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—– ©2010 – AmazingVideoTours.com – All Rights Reserved. Amazing Video Tours is Charlotte’s Premier Real Estate Video Provider for 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.

If you like technology,  the arts, green initiatives,  and helping charity, you need to go to a BarCamp. 

If you hate stuffy, formal conferences that cost hundreds, or thousands of dollars, you need to go to a BarCamp.

This is a video of Bar Camp Charlotte III (BarCampCLT).  The generally informal nature of a BarCamp is what makes it so special.  At the start of the day, there is no schedule, there are no speakers, and entire day is driven by the participants.  The events are (usually) free, and breakfast and lunch are provided.  All paid for by sponsors who totally “get” the concept.   

People in the audience are encouraged to pitch ideas to discuss.  After 10-20 pitches are introduced, the audience goes and votes on the pitches they would like to attend.  The pitch topics with the highest number of votes are selected, the schedule is drawn up, and then multiple sessions commence for one hour long periods. 

You’ll usually have a choice of anywhere between 5-10 sessions to attend per hour depending on the size of the venue. 

It’s informal, its democratic, its fun, its progressive, its great networking, and it’s a great way to learn cutting edge stuff. 

So check out the video and leave a comment.  Tell me what you think.  If you liked the video, please let me know by sharing it on your favorite social networking sites (lots of share icons below). 

For more info on BarCamps go to http://www.barcamp.org/ For more info on Charlotte BarCamp go to http://www.barcampcharlotte.org/

Summary:  Awesome, with a couple tiny exceptions.  You can stop reading now.  Or not!

I’ve been to my fair share of Real Estate Seminars over the years.  Star Power, Brian Buffini, BarCamps, Local MLS events, and State Conventions, so I know a good conference when I see it.  THIS was a good conference.

It was the 3^rd RETechSouth (although only my first) and it was first class.  First, the Venue.  The Gwinnett Center in Atlanta (well, Duluth) GA.  Wow – what a facility!  The Hotel was walking distance, and one did not have to stray more then 5 miles for any of the scheduled evening events.  If you’ve ever sat in traffic in the heart of Atlanta, you know why I was happy this was not in the heart of Atlanta!

They had networking events set up every night.  Night one featured a Tweetup, and I think over 100 people showed up.  The venue (@ArenaTavern) was great as were the people I met.

Night 2 was the MVP party at Wild Bills’ Crown Lounge.  Once again, a great event with Casino Tables, a Karaoke Stage, and pulled pork bar-b-que.  Night 3 was at Dave and Busters.  I can’t comment as I was on the way home as this event got under way.

But how about the Conference? 

I love conferences with options.  By that I mean you are not stuck in one large auditorium, forced to hear one person drone on for hours.  To me, this felt more like a BarCamp.  Somewhat casual, with several sessions going on at once.  You had choices.  Choices are good. 

I can’t comment on every session, and I won’t bore you with details on every session I sat in, but I do want to highlight some of my “light bulb” aka – Wholly Crap, THAT’s Awesome (WCTA) moments throughout the two days.

My first WCTA moment was in Gahlord Dewald’s “Social media improvement via web analytics” session.  I had not seen Gahlord speak before and I will go out of my way to see him again.  I love analytics and stats – and he delivered.  He talked about Google Website Optimizer, URL Builder, and my homework assignment for this week, which is figuring out what Gist.com is all about.  If these are foreign to you, look em up!  I know I will.

Second WCTA moment was in Jeff Turner’s “Wake up and Smell Your Brand” session.  Jeff comes from a different planet from the rest of us.  They’re smarter then us earthlings, and they see our future. Jeff is a visionary and is usually the first one to lecture about social media topics the rest of us have not thought of yet.  Paraphrased – (Your brand is not what’s on your website, its not your company logo, its not your mission statement.  Your brand is the way people FEEL when they think about your business – it’s the way your business is perceived.  How do people feel when they think about your business?) I’m sure I didn’t nail that exactly, but suffice it to say that Jeff got me thinking.  There was more – much more – you should really try to see Jeff speak for yourself.

Next, Brian Copeland and his “Leveraging Yelp to Grow Local Influence and Track ROI” Session.  Brian is a great speaker.  He has a wit and an edge about him that I think he could teach Multi-variable Calculus and make it fun (no offense to any mathematicians out there).  I had not previously dabbled with Yelp, but after seeing what Brian was able to do in his local area with it, I’m getting on board.  Wanna know more, www.Yelp.com

I had another WCTA moment in Garron Selliken’s “Empowering Your Agents to Optimize Web 2.0 Tools” session.  He clued me in to something I have been interested in pursuing for a long time, which is an IDX Solution for WordPress Blogs.  I will be definitely taking a closer look at homequestgroup.com

DAY 2

Home Run Derby – You just had to have been there!  Come next year and see for yourself

I had to hear what Jeff Turner had to say about “Transparency is for Amateurs” and he delivered.  Everyone (myself included) preaches transparency in social media.  Jeff (again) took the discussion to the next level and made it crystal clear that too much transparency in social media is NOT a good thing.  He showed example after example of actions taken by “business professionals” that were shooting for “transparency” but delivering inappropriateness.  There were no new revelations here, but Jeff has a way of delivering a point in such a dramatic fashion, he made a room full of professionals really think about their own actions. 

I had heard Pat Kitano speak at VREBC, and loved his session, so I wanted to check him out at RETechSouth.  He did not disappoint.  He’s another one of those guys who seems to have a window into the future as to what to implement now.  His session on “Community Engagement using Twitter” showed us how to use Twitter as the curator of breaking news in a hyper local marketplace.  I’ll be checking out http://breakingsfnews.com/ to investigate this further!

I went to another session with Brian Copeland to see what he had to say about Real Estate Video.  Even though I do video for a living, it’s always important to see what other people have to say on the topic.  Brian and I have very different approaches to video for real estate, but I still learned a lot.  Brian has a way of connecting with people that can only be described as a gift.  He (literally) had the whole room in tears as he described one of his accidental viral video stories.  He is truly a pro, and I’m guessin’ one hell of a great Realtor.

Next, I hung with Ginger Wilcox and Hal Lublin to see “Selling Without the Shamwow”.  Hal is hilarious and delivers the goods in a way that is unrivaled.  Ginger keeps it all on track – together, they are great presenters.  What I got from this session:  Check your sleazy sales pitch at the door, and don’t come walkin into this social media scene wearin your used car sellin leisure suit and snake oil hat. 

I capped the whole thing off with Nicole Nicolay’s session on “10 Tips for creating more meaningful Social Interactions”.  I’ve conversed with @nik_nik on twitter before, and she’s one of those (all to rare) social media super stars that has large following, and will still slow down and make time for a newbie.  She delivered in her 10 tips session.

So what were the tiny exceptions that I mentioned way up in the beginning of this post book?  The only bad part (and it was very small) was that there are still some speakers that just don’t get this format.  A couple sessions seemed like infomercials where the speaker was only interested in showing off their wares, and the teaching was secondary. 

The good thing is that with so many sessions going on, you can bail out of a session that degenerates into a sales pitch.  With this casual format, as long as you are polite, and quiet about it, I don’t see any reason to not get up and go find another session that is more about the education than the pitch.

So that’s it.  My experience in a (not so) nutshell.  Hope you liked it!  Special thanks to Brad Nix and his RETSO crew for putting on such a great conference!

  ————- ©2010 – AmazingVideoTours.com – All Rights Reserved. Amazing Video Tours is Charlotte’s Premier Real Estate Home Video Provider for 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.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”  – Ferris Bueller

In this rapidly changing online marketing world, things are happening faster now then ever before.  Not since the advent of the website has online marketing been so revolutionary.  With fast pace comes all the bad stuff that goes with it including a crop of self proclaimed experts trying to charge you for services.  Right now, the Google search phrase, “social media expert” yields over 1.4 million results.  

How in the world do you select a good social media consultant with results like that?  Can someone please explain to me how you can be an “expert” in an emerging field?  I’m not aware of any sanctioning body, educational curriculum, or designation as of yet.  Is there one?  I’d like to know as I certainly don’t know it all.  

The catalyst for this article is the web designer of one of my video clients.  It took them 2 weeks to figure out how to embed a YouTube video on my client’s website.  When I went to go check them out, I was surprised to see that they were, “Social Media Experts”.   Their marketing tool was a PDF that you could print out to call them.  They had no Blog, no Twitter account, no Facebook Fan Page, no LinkedIn account.  They had absolutely zero commitment in social media for their own business, but they felt qualified to charge YOU to help your company with social media. 

Later that same day my phone rang.  The guy told me that my measly number of Twitter followers was never going to get me any business, and he could get me 20,000 followers in 2 months for $500.00.  I checked him out.  He had 24,500 Twitter followers.  He had tweeted 50 times over 5 months.  Every tweet was spam – “I’ll get you more followers, check out www……….com”.  I told him to take me off his list. 

So here’s the lesson.  If someone calls you and tells you, for example,  that they know how to get you 20,000 followers on Twitter, RUN, don’t walk, run away fast.  Additionally, the number of followers *they* have on any social network is not a designation of ability.  There are 3^rd party Twitter programs that will automatically build you up to 20K followers in a short period of time. 

But SO WHAT!  Having a bunch of hollow followers will not increase your sales.  Know one thing, Social Media is a marathon, not a sprint.  It takes time (read that, a lot of time) to build a lot of followers that actually care about what you are saying, and will help your message go viral by re-tweeting, re-posting, or sending more traffic to your site. 

So how do you select a Social Media Consultant?  Check THEM out.  Look past their advertised number of followers and see what they actually have to say.  Are they engaging, or just spamming the networks with their sales pitch.  A good Social Networking strategy for business has a 90:10 ratio.  You give 90% to get 10%.  Some would go as far as saying it’s 95:5.  Are they giving, or just taking?

Social Networking is about transparency.  Consumers want to know who they are dealing with.  The number one rule for marketing this decade is trust.  How do you build trust?  By generating content on an ongoing basis that is interesting, engaging, and original.  When you make it clear to your audience that you know your stuff, they will keep coming back to see what you have to say.  Over time, this builds trust, and trust generates real followers, and real followers will become clients. 

So, is the social media expert that just offered to charge you $XXXX doing this for their own firm?  What are they blogging about?  What are they saying on Twitter?  On Facebook?  Would you want to follow them?  Are they even there?  It’s a litmus test, if they can’t prove they understand social media for their own business, how are they going to help you?

Am I a Social Media Expert?  No!  But I do practice what I preach, I don’t think I know it all, and I attend many conferences every year with some of the country’s best speakers to continuously learn more.  I don’t call myself an expert, and I’m not a trailblazer who spends every waking moment online trying to figure out what the next big app is going to be.  I’m in business to make money, so I stay where the people are, and I don’t stress out about what I might be missing – it’s not sexy, but it works. 

There are many good resources out there that can help your business succeed at Social Media.  The purpose of this post is to warn you that, like many other things, for every good 1, there’s 10 out there selling snake oil.  Caveat Emptor – Let the buyer beware.  In the case of selecting a social media consultant, it’s NOT all in the numbers.

Facebook has over 350 Million plus users.  And if that is not amazing enough, how about the fact that 50% of all users log in on any given day.  The Facebook Statistics are pretty mind blowing, here are some that are directly related to why you should have a fan page for your business

• 350 Million Users
• More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
• Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans
• Average user has 130 friends on the site
• Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
• Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
• Average user becomes a fan of 2 Pages each month
• Average user is a member of 12 groups
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3^rd largest in the World

Don’t forget that when someone “Fans” your page, or participates on your page, Facebook puts a notification on their wall.  Then their friends see it and can interact, and so on.  This creates the opportunity for viral marketing with very limited effort on your part.

Some things to keep in mind are that you are not allowed to use your personal Facebook account for commercial purposes.  In addition, your personal Facebook account is limited to 5000 friends.  Facebook fan pages are not limited.  Also important to know is that content on a Facebook Fan page is indexed by the search engines (this is good for you BTW).

One thing I like so much about the Facebook Fan page is it allows you to differentiate your business message from your personal message.  I’ve always said, “my updates for my mom, and my updates for my clients are vastly different.”  I never felt comfortable putting out my business message on my personal account.  The Facebook Fan page eliminated this concern.  Just a couple other differences, Facebook Fan pages allow larger photo at the side, and Fan pages are customizable via Facebook Markup Language.

 In the video you will learn:

• Basic step by step instructions on setting up your page
• How to add Content
• How to Promote to your existing followers
• How to Promote to everyone else
• How to Promote via Paid Advertising
• How to Get a Shortened vanity URL for your FB Fan Page!
• How to Get Facebook Fan Page Widgets for your External Sites to send people to your FB Fan page.
• See an example of a Customized FB Fan page made with Facebook markup language

I hope you will learn a good bit from the video.  If you do, please share this article by clicking on the various Social Media Sharing Icons at the bottom of this post.  Thanks so much!

Please Join My Facebook Fan Page by CLICKING HERE

 
Share  

————- ©2010 – AmazingVideoTours.com – All Rights Reserved. Amazing Video Tours is Charlotte’s Premier Real Estate Home Video Provider for 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 just followed you, and I don’t blindly follow people.  That means you went through some level of screening process.  It might have been just a quick look at your last 20 Tweets to see if you have anything interesting to say.  Or, it might have been a deeper look – including a look at your bio, perhaps even your website, and a glance at your Followers to Following ratio.

So if I end up following you, you just passed a test.  I invested time in you.  The LAST thing I want from you is an instant DM Spam message with a sales pitch.  This is your one way ticket to getting UNfollowed. 

You need to realize that Social Networking has the word “Social” in it.  Not “Auto Networking”,  ….. Social Networking.  Try spelling it out loud, S-O-C-I-A-L ….. You get the point.  Or do you?

The people in the screen capture to the right didn’t.  I blindly followed 100 people with a test account to illustrate a point.  Almost 50% greeted me with auto DM  spam.  #Justsayin

Times have changed.  The days of cramming your sales pitch down the throats of others is over.  Instead of Auto DM Spamming someone as your very first “connection” with them, why don’t you send them a message with a personal touch.   Refer to them by name, or something on their website.  This way they’ll know you actually invested time in them, and not just the typical, “Thanks for following me, I look forward to your Tweets.”  You are better off sending nothing at all, and engaging them later. 

So if your goal is a million followers (and it shouldn’t be, but that’s another post altogether) try Engaging people, try interacting with them.  Do something nice for someone else and stop thinking that everyone is interested in your message (read that, “sales pitch”)

So check me out.  Put ME through the test.  If you think I have something interesting to say, Follow ME, and hopefully, I will follow you back.

————- ©2010 – AmazingVideoTours.com – All Rights Reserved. Amazing Video Tours is Charlotte’s Premier Real Estate Home Video Provider for 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.

Your Twitter background is part of your “Branding” (especially if you are using Twitter for business). You have the opportunity to continue the branding from your website and/or blog to your Twitter Page.  Remember, if you Tweet a lot, 1000’s of people will be checking out your Twitter page.  Make it count! If you are a business, make it mandatory!

If you’ve ever tried uploading a background for your Twitter page, then you know how hard it is to get it just right.  The real question is, how do you work your photo around the Twitter Interface to look good on both sides?

If you haven’t tried it, you will be surprised at how counter intuitive it is.  It’s not just uploading a photo.  You have to consider the following things:
 

• How large should your photo (background) be?
• What screen resolutions should you optimize for?
• How do you get your background to properly border the Twitter foreground and look nice?

The good news is that after several hours of trial and error, testing different screen resolutions, and finding the exact dimensions of the key areas, I wrote everything down. All the answers are in the video.  I hope you can get your background up in just minutes, whereas it took me several hours.  Please email me if you have any questions!

————- ©2010 – AmazingVideoTours.com – All Rights Reserved. Amazing Video Tours is Charlotte’s Premier Real Estate Home Video Provider for 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.

What could possibly come on the heels of Social Networking apps like Facebook and Twitter?  Well, they are already here.  You just might not know about them yet.

Got a smart phone?  Go get one – because the next NOW wave is Location Based GPS games.  What???? …   Games that use your GPS location as a primary factor.  There are dozens of them out there as you can see here. But the ones I want to talk about are the ones that are all the rage right now.  I’m sure there are others, but I want to highlight 2 of them. 

Brightkite (which is NOT new) is the first one I heard of.  You download the app to your smart phone and “check in” when you visit a certain site like a bar, restaurant, Home Depot, or anywhere.  It’s social because you can follow people and they can follow you.  You can build a network, post updates, pictures, and the like.  You can, “Get to know people around you”.

Now, Foursquare really takes it up a notch.  Foursquare turns location based GPS into a competitive game.  You get awarded points for visiting each location.  The counter re-sets every week, so no one player can just dominate over time and make it boring for everyone else.  But there’s more…

Foursquare stiffens the competition by awarding the prestigious honor of being the “Mayor” of any location to the person who visits there the most.  But Foursquare takes it up another notch by awarding “Badges” for your first, 10^th, 25^th, 50^th, etc. check in.  You can also get badges for going out 4 nights in a row, or visiting 4 stops in one night.  There are many more badges, I just have not seen them yet. 

Can you imagine how a bar, restaurant, or other business might use this to their advantage?  If I owned a bar, I would Tweet that whoever checked in the most during a certain month would get X number of free drinks (for them and their friends) the following month.

Consider the fact that Foursqure can automatically post your “Check-ins” to other social media sites like Twitter ……. Just imagine having 50 Gen Y’rs all competing to visit your venue as many times as possible during a month, tweeting about it, and competing for the honor of most visits – and the coveted prize of free drinks!  What a marketing opportunity. Think of all that FREE publicity!  It is for this reason that I see Foursquare getting bigger and bigger and not going anywhere for a while. 

So get on, start playing, and have fun.  And if you are a Shop owner of any kind, you could be using Location Based GPS games such as Foursquare as part of your marketing plan.

————- ©2010 – AmazingVideoTours.com – All Rights Reserved. Amazing Video Tours is Charlotte’s Premier Real Estate Home Video Provider for 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.

Why did I do this?  Only because VREBC represents a collection of some of the best speakers in the country on topics like Social Media, Social Networking, and General Real Estate Technology. 

If you don’t know what a Bar Camp is, you should.  Visit http://www.barcamp.org/

If you don’t know what a Real Estate Bar Camp is, you should.  Visit http://rebarcamp.com/

And, if you don’t know what a Virtual Real Estate Bar Camp is, you should.  Visit http://www.virtualbarcamp.com/

For those of you that do know, here are the sessions I attended and my personal selection of  quotable quotes from each of the speakers.  For each of the speakers, I included at least their Twitter ID so that you can learn more information about them. 

 9:15AM PST: Brad Inman – What Is Inman News Predicting?  @bradinman

Brad Inman – “Social Media represents a new way for agents to network and build community”

Brad Inman – “heavy emphasis on dissemination of Real Time Data”

Brad Inman – “Dive deep into social media, do it aggressively – Blog, Twitter, Facebook”

10:15AM PST: Tara Jones – Media Marketing  http://www.reelproductionstv.com/

Tara Jones: “If you don’t have video on your site, you are missing out”

Tara Jones: “Sites with video retained consumers 70% longer than those without”

Tara Jones  ”Video is not still pictures being moved across the screen”

Tara Jones: “Always plan ahead for your video of a home tour”

Tara Jones: “Have a professional image in everything you do”

11:15AM PST: Darin Persinger – The 7 A’s To Building Your Business Online & Offline   @darinpersinger 

Darin Persinger, Re Social Media – “Give more then you get. Give 80% to get 20%. Be approachable”

Darin Persinger: “Appreciate the people who read your site; blog; tweets, be sure to thank them”

Darin Persinger: “Be authentic, be the real you” 

12:15PM PST: Jeff Turner – The Lost Art Of Listening    @respres 

Jeff is a true Social Media Rock Star.  I had the pleasure of meeting Jeff at REBarCampCLT last Summer.  Jeff taught me how to use Twitter.  He taught me how to LISTEN.  It was during a conversation with Jeff that the little light bulb went off in my head and I GOT social media.  Anytime you get a chance to hear him speak, drop everything, and Listen!   

Jeff suggested using (and gave an overview of) Tweetgrid.com (http://www.tweetgrid.com/) to help you “Listen” to the conversation on Twitter.  Additionally, using http://www.tweetgrid.com/irc to follow the conversation.  Awesome tools.  Obviously, he had more to say, but you need to hear him for yourself. 

1:15PM PST: Jay Thompson – Write Right, Right Now. Get Your Blog On!   @phxreguy 

Jay Thompson about Blogging – “Write with passion, your readers will know if you’re writing for Google” 

Jay Thompson: “Blog consistently – be real – be authentic – be transparent – be YOU”

Jay Thompson:  “No one Realtor can please everyone.  Get over yourself” 

Jay Thompson: “Blogging takes time! Stick with it! Don’t give up after a year or 2″.

1:15M PST: Mark Madsen – 7 Strategies For Connecting w/ Agents Online w/o Looking Like A Stalker @Mark_Madsen 

Mark Madsen – “Use Google Reader, its a game changer” 

Mark Madsen – “Don’t comment on other people’s blogs just to spam your link”

2:15PM PST: Jonathan Rivera – How To Leverage The Power Of Social Media In Real Estate @Real_TechGuy 

Jonathan Rivera: “Check out Seth Godin, Meatball Sundae” 

Jonathan Rivera:  “Make your blog the centerpiece of all your social media, and make sure all your Social Media accts link to your blog”

2:15PM PST: Rob Hahn – Social Media Heresie   http://www.7dsassociates.com/

Rob Hahn – “The same rules apply. If you won’t do/say/act it in real life, don’t do it on Social Media”

3:15PM PST: Pat Kitano – Innovative Community Engagement Strategies @pkitano 

 Pat Kitano – “Provide a service to the community, recognize them, make them happy, respect them”

Pat Kitano – “Twitter is an open network, community engagement is faster in open networks”

Pat Kitano – “Community engagement is more powerful than marketing cause it positions you at the hub of your society & attracts people to you”

Conclusion:

What a great, informative day! A huge thank you to @RETomato and everyone else who made #VREBC happen. 

Follow me on Twitter

 Previous Blog Article – 10 Technology Tips For Realtors in 2010

————- ©2010 – AmazingVideoTours.com – All Rights Reserved. Amazing Video Tours is Charlotte’s Premier Real Estate Home Video Provider for 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 recently spoke to a group of Real Estate Agents at a firm in Charlotte.  There was a pretty good crowd as their BIC strongly suggested they come, and there was no cost to them.  I got heckled pretty good, and the overarching sentiment in the crowd was that Social Media was a fad, and they could ignore it because it will go away.

Now, I have already preached at length about the fact that Generation Y (all 60 million of them) will buy more homes in the next decade then all other demographics combined in this blog post, and the fact that they practically live on social networks – so I won’t go there. 

The focus of this post is the fact that Social Networking is NOT a FAD.  It has been around for almost 20 years.  Don’t believe me, here’s a break down:

1989:   IRC – Internet Relay Chat – Allowed College students to chat via internet chat.

80’s – Early 1990’s:    BBS , Prodogy, and Compuserve – Share files, access news

1993-94:   AOL Chat Rooms

1995:   Classmates.com

1996:   ICQ, and AOL  Instant Messenger

1997:   SixDegrees.com 1^st to allow users to create profiles, list their Friends

1999:   Napster – Peer to Peer File Sharing

2001:   Ryze.com was launched to help people leverage their business networks.

2002:   Friendster (Social compliment to Ryze)

2003:   LinkedIn and MySpace

2004:   Flickr – Photo Sharing

2004:   Facebook (Harvard Only)

2005:   YouTube

2005:   Ning

2005:   Facebook expanded to High School Networks

2006:   Facebook expanded to Everyone

2006:   Twitter

2006:   Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious

I remember avoiding studying at college in 1989 because I was on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) socially interacting with interesting people on other campuses clear across the country.  This was long before I ever saw my first web page on the “World Wide Web”.

So, as you can see, social networking is not new, it’s NOT a fad, and it is not going away.  If you choose to ignore networks such as Facebook and Twitter, you are ignoring the largest population of home buyers out there. 

Keep in mind that it does not matter whether or not Twitter (or Facebook) will be here in two years.  Twitter and Facebook are just the vehicles for Social Networking.  The vehicle is not important, it is the NETWORK of people you meet on these sites that is important. 

If you start now, and Twitter becomes a fad, don’t sweat it.  There will be something right behind Twitter, and you and YOUR NETWORK can all jump off the old Twitter bus and on to the next greatest thing.  It all boils down to people.  People are the most important thing, and people are the ones that will work with you, and refer you more business.

Where’s it going from here?  Let’s just say that in 2 years, you will either have a smartphone, or you will be on your way out of business.  If Gen Y can’t text you, or tweet you, they will find someone else who they can. 

Newsflash: Email is already passé. 

Gen Y is playing with their phones like we played Pong, and Pac Man. However, the games are much more advanced.  You might hear them talking about BrightKite, or Foursquare.  These are location based apps that use GPS to track your exact position.  On Foursquare, whoever “checks in” to a location the most often becomes “Mayor” of that location.  You strive to obtain “badges” as status in the game.  It becomes a competition, and there in lies the “fun”.

Call it silly, call it what you want, but things are moving at light speed now, and they show no signs of slowing down.  Are you on the bus, or not?

  Historical Timeline Sources: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html,  http://socialmediarockstar.com/history-of-social-media