Social networking maintenance made easier
I've often professed that the real estate professional's physical network is migrating to online social networks for a number of reasons:
- Ease of using networks to develop referrals
- Ability to virally network quicker and more efficiently through other contacts' networks because you know who they know
- Party game- like online environment breaks the ice in business relationships
Google, the world's 300-pound internet gorilla and rankled by Facebook's success, stepped up to trivialize Facebook with its recent announcement to create an open social networking standard. By procuring the immediate buy-in from many of the non-Facebook networks including MySpace and Linkedin, Google solves the problem of network fragmentation and makes networking easy to maintain.
I generally spend only 5-20 minutes responding to Facebook and other network inquiries as if they were email replies... and best of all if I'm busy, I ignore them. Unlike email, there seems to be a protocol that allows one to delay responses on these networks up to a week or so without ill will because there isn't as much churn in these communications as email, and one can see which messages have been responded to.
Here are some links that explore the new paradigm of social networking that seems to have flipped on last week:
Why Google turned into a Social Butterfly - NY Times
Open Facebook API vs. Google Opensocial - Mark Cuban - Facebook is still the gold standard.
What OpenSocial means to Real Estate 2.0 - Drew Meyers, Geek Estate
There is no question that going forward the sites you mentioned will become more popular by the month as social media sites become more and more popular. I use all four of these sites regularly. They are still very much untapped though by most Realtors. All of these groups are going to grow exponentially.
Reply to this
Social networks are still relatively unknown to the real estate community because the average of the user of the social networks is about 1/2 that of the average age of Realtors. However, I think I read recently the fastest growing segment on Facebook are the 40+ crowd.
Reply to this
Excellent story, social networking is an excellent platform for Real Estate Players.
Reply to this
I understand that social networking can be a powerful tool for real estate agents, but I don't quite understand how the open source will work. Does this mean that all of my posts from several different social networking sites could appear on one page of my website? Like a two-way RSS feed? Maybe the implementation is still in the works. I'm just trying to wrap my head around this new concept.
Reply to this