I'm really not

Lately there have been a lot of discussions about Social Media Gurus, Real Estate Mavens and other assorted Influential People. I have seen lists and lists, and while there is some agreement in who should be included, it appears there is more discord when it actually comes to the choice.
I was speaking with @joespake, and we decided that the word Guru is hugely overused. We propose that these people be called Real Estate Jedi, since they are really leading the vanguard of change in a firmly established Empire.
Now- how to choose this list of Jedi? I suggested on twitter that a small fee would weed out the riff-raff and less serious, and maybe buy me a Big Mac meal as side benefit. We had a few takers:

• @andykaufman wants his money in escrow until he sees his name in print
• @tomallen1965 is willing to extend me $2 credit to his Cort stores
• @billlublin wants to be in the top 5- will pay cash. Cash is good.
• @rerockstar thought $5 would get him the Number One spot- think again. This isn’t REO.
• @mattdollinger confused the hell out of me by talking about financing the $2 over 30 years

And @jsheehan200, @propertynut, @CatherineGrison, @agent21 and @aPlaceOnTheLake weighed in on the discussion. @mayaREguru took exception to the dismissal of the word guru, and offered me $10 by DM to be left off. They win spots (except Maya- I bought pizza with the payoff) just because they engaged me and each other. Actually, “just” isn’t a good modifier. Engagement is what it is all about- in real estate, in social media and in life.
I think the big #fail of the other lists is that no one was asked if they wanted to be included. Being included means mentoring a bunch of neophytes whose stats aren’t great, who may pull you down in the rankings of some programs, and who likely will pester you with questions like, “What does RT mean?” “I need to spend HOW much time blogging?” and “Hashtag?”
So- this is what I am suggesting. I already have the first few for my list. Who else wants to be included?
Criteria:
• You have time to help new users
• You believe that various avenues of social media are actually valuable to Real Estate and business as part of a complete marketing program
• You are online and you tweet more than 20 times a week outside of DM (that’s only 4 a day, for crying out loud, with weekends off- correct me if I am wrong, @mattdollinger)
• You don’t score more than 30 on TwitBlock (www.twitblock.org) or you have a good reason for it, Britney
• You promise to not refer to yourself as a visionary, guru, illuminati, or demigod, recognizing that Jedi will do.
Add your name below and let’s see what we come up with.
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I was fascinated by this portion of Minority Report. How far away are we from iris or retinal scanning, with advertisements specific to recent/favorite purchases on our credit cards?

Theoretically, we are just about there. You can buy email lists based on all sorts of criteria; cookies track our online browsing history. Many sites can do a capture of all sorts of information- it just depends upon how in depth you want to get.

Twitter, with its open structure, has startled me by allowing rapid and focused responses to what I had considered random comments. I would expect that if I made a remark about, say, Comcast or sex that it would either affect the quality of my followers, or cause follow up from the company in question. But should you expect a quip from a beer company if you mention a brand by name? If I speak about housework, should I expect to be sent links to cleaning products offered on Amazon?

It begs the question: Exactly how sanitized/generic does one have to make a conversation so that it will fly below the marketing arm of the twitter population? And IS sending someone a marketing link actually effective? Is anyone making enough money from this to justify the negative reactions of their followers, who will “vote with their feet”?

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If you look at blip, I have something like the start of rockstar stats. I have over 5000 followers-  frankly I don’t know why- and I only watch the blipstreams of 194 people.

It wasn’t something I set out to do. I just followed my friends, watched my favorites, and added new ones when they @HeyAmaretto’d me and had a good-looking playlist.

Because of the interactive nature of blip- songs are posted, commented on, and given “props”- maybe there is less chance of a completely automated posting, even though less information is requested of users there. You post your user name, location and pic, and that is basically it. Your music says the rest- together with your commentary.

But on blip I have a secret identity. When I just feel like listening to music and not interacting I go there as my alter ego- not often, but when I am tired and unable to be a good friend. And many other people that I know have secret identities too.

Multiple personae on social networking sites is prevalent. Some do it so that they can screen their actions from their employers, who are watching social media sites more and more. Some do it so that they can say whatever the hell they want, without repercussions from their more conservative followers. And some, I suspect, do it when they want to speak more privately while on an open social forum without risking DM fail.

Do you have a secret identity? Why?

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I wanted to post a few things coming up that some people had asked about:

Oktober 10: Oktoberfest Tweet-up in Maine- Smugglers’ Den Campground, Route 102 – Southwest Harbor, Maine, to be exact

Horny Goat Beer

Next we will be in Delaware:

October 13: Maya, Lesley and I are honored to be one of 12 chosen to present at Ignite Wilmington. We are working on our presentation now for that- we will have 5 minutes to say what we want, and anyone who knows us will realize that that isn’t a hella long time.

October 14: The next day, we will have a booth at the Delaware Association of Realtors Convention. We will also be presenting our 3 hour CE course from 2-5 then and on

October 15. After the second presentation of the course, TwitterQueens are organizing a tweet-up at Fire and Ice at Dover Downs from 7:00 PM until whenever. Thank you so much, @DoverDowns!

At the end of the month of October, Lesley and I will be presenting about twitter to the Greater Boston Association of Realtors. We have a couple of other things going on in the month that will not be open to the public. Starting to get busy!  Hope to see you at least at one or the other tweet-up!

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We were on the Social Media Edge Radio show yesterday. I say “we” because EVERY SINGLE MEMBER of the show was a TwitterQueens except Ken Cook, who became one halfway through. Lesley, Maya and I all spoke, and the audience was studded with group members. More listened to the recorded show at night, and I think it is safe to say that we all had a great time, and shot out some information at the same time.

One question that was posed was something I have heard before. “What do you do with TwitterQueens once you are signed up?”- and it’s a good one. It’s like, “What do you do with twitter after you have signed up?”

What DID you do with twitter? I know that at first I took it for its word: when it asked what I was doing, I answered. I treated it as a location update. Probably Gerry “RealtyMan” Bourgeois was most influential in changing the way that I looked at twitter. Although I had figured out that it could be used as a means of connection, he showed me how widespread the conversation was and introduced me to many of the people who are my friends now. If I had not made that connection with Gerry, my experience with twitter would have been very different.

So how does this translate to TwitterQueens? I would start 3 ways.
1. On twitter itself we use the hashtag #twitterqueens to contribute to the conversation. Follow that.
2. Check the blogs for not only the treasure trove of information that they contain but to connect with the individual that is writing about what you are interested in. Which leads to the third way…
3. Contact people who are of interest to you. Contact blog authors, contact other people who look interesting. Contribute something interesting to the blog so that they have a reason to contact YOU. Get together face to face with those around you.

And spread the business around the base. Know someone who wants to buy a house? Ask who is the best agent in your area. Want to throw a party for the girls? Paula Eramo- @rapturemassage- will bring a chair massage to your party in MA. Need a Facebook page designed for you? Mike Mueller does that. If I were, for example, a Virtual Assistant, I would post something about everything a virtual does to make life easier for the business person and put in links to satisfied customers. You will be building a book of business with a connected intelligent group of people.

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TwitterQueens

From Mike Mueller’s blog/website:

If you missed the show today – they were great! You are not completely out of luck though.  You can listen to the archives.  Just go to the Facebook Page, become a Fan, and click on the Archive Tab.areweconnected.com, TwitterQueens on the radio show, Oct 2009

You should read the whole article.

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September 11, 2001.

I was at school teaching. Meg, then 16, was in high school. Jenny was just 3, and at home with her dad, while I was at work teaching art at the same school that my other two children- Peter and Becca- went to.

I remember crowding into the pre-K classroom with other teachers watching footage as the WTC was obliterated. It seemed unreal, and honestly I don’t think I processed it.

The uncertainty continued with the anthrax scare. Five people died because of that.

This was the thing. Now we speak about the attack on the World Trade Center, and on the Pentagon- of a striking out against globalism, the United States, and the Bush regime. Then, we did not have any sort of framing to put it into context. We didn’t know what was happening next- or even what was happening then. The information that we received was fraught with assumption and speculation, most of it contradictory.

Bush was not accurate on a lot of counts in this speech, and we know what was orchestrated after. But he was right about the feeling of chaos. We began closely watching the news, hesitating when planes went overhead, wondering if we should open mail- just because the deaths seemed so random.

We become acclimated to a certain amount of death around us. We know when we get married that one spouse will likely outlive the other. When we conceive a child, we pray and pray and pray that ours won’t be one of the small percentage in this country that doesn’t live to adulthood. But we can live with it. When it seems that the tables are tipping- that the statistics are moving in a different direction- the fear that death will strike your home is pervasive.

So that is what I remember the most. The day itself was strange and unsettling, and the only thought that I had was, “What will happen next? Should I pick up my daughter at high school? Should we be together?” It was after, when you were wondering if the plane overhead was being piloted by a copy-cat who wanted to cause more turmoil by flying it randomly into a school- that was when the nation was affected, I think.

It isn’t something that I like to remember.

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ShadyCat

In response to Mike Mueller of areweconnected.com:

This is in regards to the post by URLesque. I have no problem with the objectification, personification or any other -ation of cats for my amusement. Cats do little enough by way of amusing anything else; why not have them contribute, at least through manipulation of their photos, to the collective happiness of the human race?

I mean…really.

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I love fractals. I think what I love is that you look at them and you see a pattern, and you think you see all of it but when you zoom in, there is a whole ‘nother world. Sort of like Horton Hears a Who . Or how I imagine infinity to be.

Because honestly? I am so rooted in the here and now that when I explore fractals, I can almost feel my mind unbuttoning- in a good way.

Or it reminds me a little of those movies that start with a shot of Earth from outer space, and drill down and down until you are looking at a baseball being clutched by a little boy. It creates a sense of spiritual vertigo, being yanked out of the here and now like that. Because whether we take each day as it comes or are worried about the future, this moment is all we have. Being locked in one moment of eternity makes it damned difficult to understand the whole package.

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I got an unusual call today. It was from another Real Estate sales agent.

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When I first started in the business, I got calls several times a month, particularly after I picked up a large listing (which never did sell). I used to get recruited often, as did many of the agents in my office. Even with signs of a problem with home sales, I still heard the old saws, “People have to live somewhere,” and “real estate doesn’t lose value,” and brokerages hadn’t begun the triage process.

This calling-to-recruit activity is much less prevalent now. Everyone is more concerned with mere survival, and I know it is on everyone’s mind, the question: “What is going to happen after this new buyer incentive is gone?” Sales are up, but right now we aren’t measuring apples to apples, and foreclosure activity is showing no sign of abating.  Offices are cutting non-producing agents- or thinking about it, anyway.

So the call- I was surprised. The agent said on my VM that he wanted to ask me a couple of questions. Fair enough; I called him back.

No recruiting. What he wanted to was if a particular REO site had ever been productive for me, as far as me getting any listings there. He was very nervous. He was out of my territory, and he had done his homework (I had seen his website and he had obviously done some research), so I pointed him down a couple of paths that had worked for me for listings. We chatted a while, and he told me that he planned on going to an REO conference next month. I knew that was the Five Star Conference, and had heard good things about it and told him so.

I didn’t hand him any closely guarded secrets or magic bullets, because I don’t know of any. I was just friendly. And when I said goodbye I could hear the emotion in his voice. I was apparently the only one who had answered his questions. Ever.

You know, I have been asked by agents about bank-owned property, and really- it’s a different animal than resale. You really need some kind of set-up to deal with it. And at least one of the companies that I had been working with has gone under, leaving me to eat the electric bills and unpaid cost of snow removal. I see ads sometimes that make bank-owned look like the easiest money in the world- no weekend hours- but that’s balderdash. You have 10 properties and they need a monthly status report on the same day, and you get a call for 4 BPOs at the same time, you get it done. If the people asking me are unprepared and looking for an easy 9-5 job, they should find something else.

But otherwise, we all have to help each other. That’s what I like about twitter and some of the other social media sites- you shoot out a question, and someone will answer you.

So, for the people who have answered my questions since I hae been in the space- today was for you. I tried to pay it forward. And the agent that I spoke to today will too.

It’s the difference between surviving and living.

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