It's Not Technology You Should Be Worried About, It's the People

Last night at our MnREIA meeting we hosted the topic on using technology to simplify their real estate investing.  Over the course of the last year and a half we, like many other real estate businesses have been diving into the deep end of technology learned and came to some realizations that weren't apparent from the get go.  I'm just going to be running through some reflections here, but before that I went to instill one point.

"Technology shouldn't be put before people."

I say this because Zig Ziglar is quoted with the notion that emotion triumphs over reason.  Personally I hate this reality, but in working against I've come to realize it's true...  Doesn't mean for a second that reason does that reason has no place because reason is what sticks around after that jolt of emotion fades.

Twitter

Twitter provides an excellent example of emotion getting the better of a lot of people and reason winning out over time.

Back when we first started on twitter we thought all we had to do was follow a bunch of people to become popular and then a certain amount of them would automatically follow back, boom increased following!  We were excited and that emotion cost me an entire week of hardcore twitter following.  By weeks end the excitement of a high twitter count dissolved when we realized we weren't getting any quality traffic from it...  we weren't getting retweeted... just zilch.

After doing some considerable reading on the topic and running it through my own reasoning battery it was obvious, reasonably obvious...

During my quest for followers I totally overlooked the people part of the equation.  Excitement got the best of me and it completely sent my twitter account far down the wrong road.  If I would have considered the people equation it would having been glaringly obvious that I wasn't targeting a real group of people.  There are so many people with multiple accounts doing exactly what I was doing, or worse yet doing exactly what I had been doing and then orphaning their account.  Bottom line, I was only wasting my time because I forgot the people and I neglect to think of twitter as a tool, that it was a purpose all it's own.

Terrible idea...  To touch base here there are 2 points:

1. A tool is meant to serve a specific purpose or need, not the other way around.
2. Don't over look the people element, if I would have looked more at who I was really following I wouldn't have wasted a week learning this lesson.

Fortunately reason has been gaining ground and there are now a couple honest to goodness ways to make use of twitter:

1. Using it as a newsfeed by using keyword searches, hasttags, and selective following.
2. Broadcasting your feed to twitter followers who take advantage of way #1.
3. Communicating with friends and/or your network in real time i.e. "Lo-so" networks like foursquare.

Now assuming everyone is following these reasonable practices you get to think in a vacuum, all safe like...  But even though this new online world is unfolding at an alarming rate that doesn't mean that the audience you think is there is really there yet.  Today there are still social media 'gurus' selling people on the idea that I initially took so if these 'gurus' are still rolling fown that wrong road while selling others on it then the audience is something we have to be overly aware of as our reasoing unfolds.

A simple way to look at social media

When you look at networks like facebook and Twitter it's important to keep in mind that what makes your experience, which should be inline worth a particular purpose, is who YOU follow/friend.

As a real estate investor I suggest that others create a facebook account specifically for real estate investing *period*  Do not friend your sister, children, or a single non real estate friend because then you will open the door to getting friend requests from their friends who are friends of friends.  This happens you are on your way to having an inefficient account because you will get a mixed stream of updates.

If you simply friend/follow people directly related to your industry, such as fellow REIA members who aren't part of your real life social group, you will have less clutter on facebook, not waste time sorting through misc. updates.  When your Facebook account has a soul purpose it is most likely to succeed and when you're aiming to succeed in real estate it is more than worth the second account. 

In either case, you make tool (twitter/facebook) work for you by the people you follow/friend.  Put people before the technology and build up from there and you'll be able to reason out own direction for the better.

Thanks for reading!