There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Abusing Twitter (page 1 of 1)

It’s Time To Think About…Money…Brian Brady’s Money

We’re going to take a brief break from the political apocalypse that surrounds us and deal with money.

Your Money.

I’m something of a master at listening on Twitter.  When someone says “After effects”  or “motion graphics” I’m there.  There are a dozen or so other ones that work much better, but you get the picture.  I’m unlikely to share them.

It’s what’s building Simplifilm.com (our work is here, I’ll share some good stuff sometime soon).

I have dozens running on my tweetdeck.  I pitch a few times a day.  It works.

Now, I learned something that Brian Brady better use.

The phrase “New Client,” and “New Buyer,” are tweeted a few hundred times a day.

Over hundred times – 1/3 they are Realtors pandering for Approbation.  “Look at me, I have a client.”  Most of the time, it’s a buyer.  A buyer that needs a mother frolicking mortgage loan.

What if a great lender, googled, called, and then offered the Realtor approval?  What if that lender played dumb and pretended they didn’t see things on Twitter, but had a polished, refined pitch?

Fish in a barrel.  Takes seconds to skim, minutes to sort, and needy people are forever most easily persuaded.

Also: if you have clients- shut up about them.  Marketers brag about new, unsigned clients.  I appreciate them identifying who is in the market for me, saves me the research.  (Be silent, or be better than silence).

10 Ways To Get UnFollowed On Twitter

I try to spend 30 minutes a week doing a little housekeeping with my various blogs and social media accounts.

Whether it’s simply tightening up profile bios, updating links or completely deleting accounts, maintaining an online presence for business purposes is mostly tedious boring work.

Well, until today….

Quick background – I’ve started to spend a little more time on my personal Twitter acct actually paying attention to people vs only sharing my favorite links of the day.

Generally, I’ll spend most of my time in Google Reader browsing about 50 or so articles a day and simply clicking “share” to have a few relevant links syndicated out through Dlvr.it to targeted Twitter or FB Business Pages.

However, now that I’m physically logging in to Twitter direct or through Hootsuite, I decided it was time to cut the list of people I follow down to a more manageable number.

While there are probably more efficient ways of reducing the noise by using an “UnFollow” Twitter application, I figured I’d spend a quick 30 min. scrolling through everyone I follow to see if there were any obvious profiles that I could delete based on name, photo or bio.

Not sure exactly what I was looking for, but I thought it would at least give me an opportunity to see some old faces as I scrolled through a few years of Twitter memories.

So, here are the top 10 reasons I deleted someone from my “follow” list on Twitter:

1. No Photo

Unless I knew who they were, it didn’t make sense to follow someone who was too lazy to upload some sort of profile photo.

2. No Bio

Really? I think that mastering the art of the one sentence bio should be the first thing people focus on before they worry about trying to “dominate the web” with all of the new secret magic bullet SEO strategies that are being taught by the Gurus.

Of course, I made a couple of exceptions.

I’m sure I’ve got some hidden bios online that suck, but I think I’ve always tried to at least mention my city, industry and intentions.

3. Quote For A Read more

Greg Swann is Just a Twit-Head and Other Common Knowledge

Greg Swann is dead wrong:

I say that trying to sell real estate via Twitter/Facebook is a waste of time — and it is anti-marketing even if it seems to produce some results. Why?

I’ve said it, in public.  And I’m only being mildly gratuitous.  Because it’s fun.

It is productive to be on Twitter all day long.

It’s also productive to be on Facebook all day long.

Especially in comparison to the selling behavior of the average Bullpen Agent(tm).  That’s being on facebook and twitter bitching about their lack of business and appraisal issues.

Now, listen also to what I’m not saying: I’m not saying that it’s the most productive possible use of time. I’m not saying that the ambient, distracted entitled connectivity lifestyle is something to be. I’m not saying that the way the practitioners teach it is sensible.  It’s not prudent to crow-plain about every bit of work that they do as if each ordinary real estate transaction is this death struggle that only you can close because you are $(array_honest,kind,connected,smart).

I’m not saying that I’d follow an example of any of the Twit-Lumin-ati.

I’m saying that in damn near any market, a smart agent should be getting 12-14 deals a year via twitter.

They are there, daily.

And you can snatch them out from under the entitled noses of those folks that are “pillars of the twit-munity,” with ease.   With ease.

How?

1.) Search.Twitter.Com:  This is a godsend.  This is amazing.  “House hunting” in your area “realtor” in your area.  Say hi, send ’em to a squeeze page.

2.) MarketMeSuite.Com (disclosure: they are a paying client of ours). Geotarget local people.  Autofollow and autoengage.  Make contacts and add to your sphere.  They have an auto tool that lets you quickly add and kill it.

3.) TwitterFeed.com when I used TweetSpinner to build up my account (and the ratio of bots/humans is about 4:1) I noticed that my bit.ly links got more clicks.  Others had similar results, and if you happen to be blogging and cataloguing your city brute force style, you do it.

4.) DMs.  These are where Twitter rocks.  Build relationships, make sales.  Don’t hesitate, go balls Read more

It’s 4:15 pm. Do you know where your Realtor is? A consumer’s guide to using social media to supervise your goof-off employee.

Your mortgage lender just called. The appraiser is standing outside the home you’re hoping to buy, but there is no key in the lockbox. The lender called you so that you could call your Realtor. Your Realtor in turn can call the listing agent, and then someone can get over to the house — pronto! — to let the appraiser in.

There’s just one problem: You can’t seem to get your Realtor on the phone.

Stuff happens. Your Realtor could be tied up with another client or stuck in traffic in a cell-phone dead zone. Heaven forbid, he might have been in a car accident.

But… There is another possibility…

Do you remember when you first made contact with your Realtor? Do you recall him telling you all about how hi-tech his business is, detailing his presence on all the biggest social media sites?

So: If you’re not getting your calls to your Realtor returned, where might be a good place to look for him?

How about Twitter, for a start? How about Facebook? Foursquare? Tumblr? Posterous? You might have to look in a few places, but there are only two kinds of hi-tech Realtors: The kind who work a lot and the kind who play a lot.

How can you tell if your Realtor is the kind who plays a lot? It’s easy. He’ll be leaving tracks all over the place, Retweeting jokes and commenting on Facebook photos and writing detailed reviews of burger joints and doing — and documenting — just about any activity on the face of the earth — except attending to your real estate transaction.

Here’s the sad part: Even if you’re seeing dozens of Tweets and Facebook comments from your Realtor, you’re probably just seeing the tip of the iceberg. You’re not seeing the direct Twitter posts or the private conversations being carried out on Facebook or in email.

But: If your Realtor seems to be wasting his entire day on social media sites, there’s a reason for that:

It’s because he’s wasting his entire day on social media sites.

I’ve tried pointing out to Realtors that schmoozing on Twitter or Facebook is bad marketing, so Read more

If you can’t sell, teach. And if you can’t teach? Teach e-Pro!

I don’t pay close attention to this crap, because — well — it’s crap. But you may have heard that the NAR’s most-idiotic designation, e-Pro, has been taken over by a confederacy of dunces super-nice people from Agent Shortbus (where they “pour” over everything, especially maple syrup over waffles) called SMMI.

You have to read between the lines in this press release, but my take is that the swamis from SMMI are going to teach you how to waste your days on TwitBook just like the cool kids. You might think that this is a suicidal strategy for working Realtors to pursue, but as has been discussed here lately, apparently the notion of working is one the cool kids are trying to get away from altogether.

Like this: I am told that the e-Pro trainer-training event held by the smarmies at NARdigras drew a thick slice of the most-prominent twitwits. I don’t know if they’re going to stop officially selling real estate — how would one know the difference? — in order to become full-time carriers of the TwitBook virus. The one thing we can hope is that the long-standing stench of e-Pro will arouse working agents from their TwitBook-induced stupor before they go completely broke.

And if they don’t? Crush them like bugs. This business isn’t for everyone. TwitBook is just the new bullpen, the new water-cooler around which losers can gather as they gripe themselves out of the real estate business.

Looked at that way, the e-Pro trainers in training could be doing all of us a favor: Isolating the people who won’t make it and teaching them How To Succeed At Failure.

I’ll leave you with two thoughts:

First, if you are deeply offended at seeing pompous, blustering, sputtering, know-nothing jackasses being skewered in public, please just go away. I don’t care, and I cannot imagine how anyone over the mental age of nine even could care.

Second, if you don’t want to go down the toilet in a very amusing public display of TwitBooked indolence, get your nose to the grindstone, your shoulder to the wheel and stop pretending that schmoozing with losers and Read more

If you are a working Realtor — if you list and sell residential real estate for a living — the time you spend on social media sites is almost certainly anti-marketing, doing you more financial harm than good.

Chris Johnson pulled this out of our phone conversation the other night, quoting me on Twitter:

People don’t want a relationship with you. They just want your damn services.

We were talking about real estate weblogging, but the principle applies even more firmly to the world of social media — Twitter, Facebook, etc.

The notion that strangers are seeking out Realtors in order to befriend them is absurd. For a Realtor to get invited on a getaway weekend with three people who are not old school chums would require that all the undertakers and life insurance salespeople they know are already engaged. We all know what to expect from Realtors in any sort of social setting — which is why there is an entire mini-industry of RE(education)Camps to train Realtors to resist their smarmy, deal-probing impulses on-line.

That’s point number one, neatly Tweeted by Chris — who is, don’t forget, a vendor: You are the means to your clients’ ends, not an end in yourself. Even though you might sometimes hit it off just right with a client and forge a serious friendship, in virtually all cases — including those where you make a friend — it’s the mission-critical job that matters, not your sweet personality.

And that friendship? It will seem serious to you alone. If you are any good as a Realtor, your deep, deep friendship will be invisible to everyone else. You should be much too busy to be anyone’s friend. If you make a stout effort, you can hold up your end with your spouse and kids, but, beyond that, you should expect to hear this from the people you think of as being your friends: “The only time we ever get to see you is when we’re buying or selling a house!” That is real estate in real life.

Here’s point number two: “Marketing” by social media is a huge waste of time. Selling is one-on-one, focused, time-consuming and goal-directed. Marketing, done properly, is broadcast, diffuse, time-efficient and passive and long-term in its goal-pursuit. Even if you are really doing your best to market your services on-line, if you are doing it Read more

Blood, sweat, and fears

Once upon a time, maps were marked HIC SVNT LEONES to denote unknown territory. Hic Svnt Leones means “Here are lions”. Scary. Uncharted territory is scary.

I’ve been paying very close attention to how I accomplish things: What I do and what I don’t do. Why some things are easy and I embrace them and why are somethings harder and I avoid them. I’m trying to improve my business and my productivity so it’s kind of nice useful critical to understand what makes me tick. Or tock. I need to figure out the internal roadblocks that keep me from achieving my goals. I want to recognize them immediately so I can overcome them as quickly as possible rather than letting them pile up to barricade levels.

There is stuff, for lack of better word, that I dislike doing, but when it’s up to me to do everything, and in real estate it often is up to me to do everything, I have to learn to just get on with it. I know this but still, there are things that I don’t like doing so I begin to waste my own precious time, using procrastination as motivation. An epiphany: It recently occurred to me that I would be furious with anyone else who wasted my time the way I so carelessly waste my own time.

Some of the habits I have fallen into are now clear even to me as red flags that I’m avoiding something. Twitter of course, is one example. What? Is it that obvious? Okay, so I use social networking to avoid doing some things that I find difficult. I recognize it now so I can overcome it, and that’s the thing. I once thought this was pain avoidance, but now I see it as fear. Of the unknown. As in Hic Svnt Leones. What is going to happen if I do this thing? What unseen beasties lie in wait to pounce on my soft under belly? I have a very fertile imagination and sometimes it grows weeds in the garden of the mind, but the only way to pull the weeds Read more

TweetSpinner: Making some damn sense out of Twitter

Alright kids, a quick damn screenvid.

I didn’t think I needed followers till I started seriously seeing my bit.ly links had more clicks.   That was cool.

Then I learned that those clicks opt in at the same damn rate as PPC/SEO clicks.  Even cooler.

Now…you can get LOCAL followers en masse with very little work.  Takes 2-3 months but you can build to 2,000-3000 or more.

Here’s the rapid fire video, where I just do it, share the (LEN) function thanks to Jesse Petersen.

I know, most of you won’t give a Twit, but this thing rocks, and if your pages convert can be automated.

What’s joy to a Bloodhound? Work, of course. Here’s that hard-working Bloodhound praxis applied to the problem of having fun.

I built FreePhoenixMLSSearch.com from an API that FBS Systems — creators of the FlexMLS system — made available last year. I may be the only person taking advantage of this interface. I don’t know of anyone else in Phoenix who is, in any case.

That much is cool, and the API, along with Flex’s general philosophical approach to software openness, enabled me to build a very robust search tool, much more robust than anything you can buy from IDX vendors. Still better, I can extend my search power whenever I want, building “pre-fab” searches that solve problems that might not be intuitively obvious to more-casual users.

Here’s an example: Doctors relocating to Phoenix — may their names be legion! — can do a radius search from any Phoenix-area hospital. Always on-call? You can live within walking distance. Need to be to the hospital within 30 minutes? You can search within a 15-mile radius.

My end of this stuff is all written by me, in PHP, with the code running on the SplendorQuest server. I can change the site whenever I want to, in the never-ending quest for better results.

All that is fun, and this is a big part of Bloodhound life for me, building and refining the tools we use every day — on- and off-line. Everything that I’ve worked on over the past four years is available to me to make new tools, and I’m mixing and matching that stuff all the time. The number of engenu pages on our sites is enormous by now, but the number of engenu-like pages runs to the tens of thousands. Even now I’m working out how to use ScentTrail to auto-generate an engenu-editable cloud-based transaction management site for every client we touch.

That idea — the equation of software with control — is something that I should write about. But not today. For now, Bloodhounds just want to have fun.

That image is a screen shot from Twitter. Every time someone runs a search from FreePhoenixMLSSearch.com, a Tweet is auto-posted summarizing that search. There is search-engine juice to be had from Twitter, but this is just dumbass fun Read more

#RTB (raising the bar) is #ROT (restraint of trade). If you want to do something that will actually benefit consumers and will run the bums out of the real estate business, #STFU (stop being a tweetard) and #DTFG (deliver the frolicking goods) already!

I’d have more to say about this, but everything I have to say is encapsulated in a single URL: BloodhoundBlog.com.

I was mildly interested in this #RTB (raising the bar) nonsense until I figured out that it’s just more Rotarian Socialism: Make it harder for punters to get a real estate license so that the few who make the cut can make more money with less competition. Nice.

Meanwhile, an email correspondent sent me to Twitter to search on a particular #hashmark. There were more than 30 tweets in a span of 20 minutes, from perhaps a dozen tweetards — all of them theoretically real estate professionals.

Why theoretically? Because if you’re pissing away your day on Twitter, you’re not selling real estate, underwriting loans or doing anything else productive.

And all of those clients you claim to have cultivated via social media? They can see what a goof-off you are, just as much as I can. If I were steaming by the phone, waiting for you to return my call, I would just love to watch you kibitzing with your butt-buddies around the virtual water cooler. Now that’s service!

Here’s the only standard of value that matters to consumers: #DTFG (deliver the frolicking goods)! Your clients want for you to treat them the same way you yourself would want to be treated, were you in their place.

It’s easy to figure out what to do, harder to get the job done — harder still to get it done well. But that is all that matters. And if you’re not going to deliver the goods, then you, too, are one of the bums I want to see pushed out of this business.

Whether you’re a dinosaur pissing and moaning in the bullpen down at the brokerage office or a shiny new dino.bot giggling on-line with all the other shiny new dino.bots — you are the problem.

Until you are prepared to put your clients first — all the time — you have nothing to say about raising anything. Raise your frolicking standards! And if you don’t — if you won’t — hard-working dogs like me are going to help Read more

What if Twitter and Facebook go Away – Do you have an Exit Strategy?

Chris Pearson is a pretty smart dood.  He’s the developer of the Thesis theme that I use on all of my blogs.  It’s a pretty cool premium theme…but I’m not here to pitch WordPress themes.

Yesterday I received and email announcing some proposed changes in the next version of Thesis and in this email it included a link to a Video interview with Chris Pearson.

For the first 3 minutes, most of the talk is about changes to the Thesis theme….and then it gets interesting.

He starts to talk about the future of Twitter and Facebook and poses some very interesting hypotheses.

Here’s the video (can’t embed the vid for some reason, so check it out and come back) – go ahead and jump to about 3:08 to get to the good stuff.  Then, let’s talk about it.

Chris Pearson Interview - The future of Twitter and Facebook

Ok, so Chris brings up some pretty interesting points right?  I mean, think about how massive of a push there is for the RE.net to jump into the almighty Facebook Fan Page and Twitter stream life rafts to float safely to the shores through turbulent real estate seas.

Do you think that Facebook and Twitter care how or why you contribute content?  No, they could care less.  These are popularity contests to see who can get the most groupies.  Once these communities gain celebrity status, they are finally in a position to execute on their end game…..find an investor.

What is an investor going to do?  Use the traffic to the community as leverage to sell advertising or sell subscriptions to generate revenue.  Do you think either of these sites will ask you first if it’s ok if they use their platform for this reason?

Remember when Facebook tried to change their terms of service to say that all of the content on the site was 100% owned by them and could be used any way they see fit?  Do you really think that just by changing the verbiage in the terms of service that it changes the way they view your content?

I know there are hundreds of Twitter and Facebook snake oil salesmen out there crafting the next great real Read more

“Leading” With Listings, Systematically Getting (A Few Clicks) From Twitter, And Using Some Lazy Math To Justify The Effort…

So, it looks like the Twitter.Com/229RockGlen account is generating 3-7 clicks/day back to the web page linked from the profile. I think I can see how an agent with 10 or more listings might start to see some results employing the 1 Twitter account per property approach.

I mean, why not multiply the 3-7 clicks daily by 10 and call it a potential extra 50 visitors a day, right? Or maybe 20 such accounts could yield 100 extra visitors a day.

And lets say 3% of these visitors opt in to some sort of lead capture on your site. Maybe they consent to receive your latest videos… Ok, so if you’ve got 20 listings, each with it’s own twitter account, then you could potentially generate 3 * 30 = 90… I’ve been rough with the numbers here, so let’s just call the 90, 100. 🙂

And let’s say most agents with an inventory that large could convert 1 in 100 opts to a commission sometime in the next year….Average Sales Price $200,000 …. GCI 5000?

Time spent setting up the twitter accounts – 20*15 minutes each = 5 hours….

I don’t know…

A System For Using Twitter With Measurable ROI?

I guess what I’m saying is maybe I’ve figured out a process for configuring twitter to increase sales in an almost measurable way. That is, assuming you’re confident a set percentage of visitors to your site will opt in to something…

Steps:

1. Create a Twitter Account for Each Property Listing.

2. Make sure your website in the twitter profile links back to the property or page on your site.

3. Drop a few tweets about the property. Beds, baths, square footage, “I am way overpriced..” just a few things to give the twitter account some content.

4. Use this juicy affiliate link, to fire up a Tweetspinner Account.

5. Configure Tweetspinner to automatically follow other tweeters who might be interested in your property/area specific twitter account. (For example, anyone who tweets the words “south street” might be interested in your Philly real estate listing.)

6. Wait for eventual clicks from the twitter account to your blog/lead capture Read more

The Day Realtors Figured Out A Practical Use For Twitter

So…

If you have a minute, please go follow Twitter.com/229RockGlen.

Over the next few weeks, this clever little property is going to automatically follow a whole bunch twitterers in the Philly area, systematically inviting lots of local folk to take a little tour inside.

Go ahead… follow the house to see what I mean….


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