REBar Camp Report

First of all, I have to say WOW what a great conference to be at! The fact that the entire thing was free was awesome in the first place, plus you didn't have a bunch of sales pitches about products. But the best part of the whole thing was the attendance of so many agents who are all eager to increase their online presence. Unfortunately I was only able to attend the last few sessions of the camp, but the information disseminated was excellent. I also feel like I missed a HUGE marketing opportunity for EZ Posting! There were so many agents there that could have used my service and I had such an opportunity to make more contacts, I am honestly a little disappointed. But, we learn from our mistakes and move on to the next thing.

I did have the chance to meet a few new agents as well as match some faces to the names that I read about in the Phoenix real estate blogosphere; so that alone constitutes a success for me.

I appreciated the classes and learned a bit about the Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and the rest of those Web 2.0 things. But, I have to say that I still disagree that these venues are productive BUSINESS applications. I have no doubt that they are wonderful ways to update people on you life and perhaps even meet some mutual acquaintances via the web. These are all things that are good. But I can't imagine myself sitting down and tweeting to find new clients or making friends on Myspace to significantly improve my online presence. If you listened close enough to the speakers at the conference who spoke about these social networking sites, you could pick up on the fact that these sites are a way of life for them. They expressed it in no uncertain terms; "we love twittering and facebook because they are fun and useful sites, not because we try to draw a lot of business from them". Which is great! I don't think that you should really try to use those sites to spam people and make a million useless friends. Use those sites to update people about your life and what you are up to, not to make some huge marketing campaign.

So my advice to real estate agents (and any professional in general) is as follows: Use social media as something that YOU like to do. Don't waste your time trying to figure out how to make the greatest tweet or make the best Facebook page to get a dozen new clients; just make sure that you are being the best realtor that you can be and people will come to you.