My hope is to create a place to capture some of the most interesting banter of a conference… i.e. the hallway conversations…and then invite you’all to take part. So, I recruited a partner in crime with the plan being that we’re going to stream live video conversations to Spinnio.com throughout the weekend (starting at RE BarCamp San Diego).

And if you want to take part in our conversations, I’ve set it up so you can ask questions and leave comments directly on the Spinnio page using either Facebook or Twitter. In other words, we’re not only going to do mobile video, but we’re bringing in the two most popular social networks so you can take part from anywhere in the world.

The only catch with this operation, is that I have no idea when we’re actually going to turn the cameras on… (although I expect it to be often). So if you want to be notified, make sure to follow Spinnio on twitter, where we’ll do our best to give some head’s up! (Won’t hurt to also make sure you’re following @tyr and @ribeezie since I’m sure we’ll be letting people know through those accounts as well)

And finally, if you know someone who should get some time on Spinnio (maybe you!), let me know. As I “confirm” guests for specific times, I’ll update this post!

Here’s the story.

A little while ago I was introduced to Chief Jane and we had some great conversations about what online real estate companies would be a good fit for acquiring Be Jane.   We talked through all the big online search sites (and I even introduced her to a few people I knew), but I got the feeling that the “right” home for Be Jane wasn’t with any of my contacts.

Fast forward a few months…

Builder Homesite is on a rampage. Last week,  they announced that they are running Move’s New Home channels:

“Through this new strategic partnership [with Move, Inc], Builders Digital Experience (BDX) will operate the Move.com New Homes Channel and NewHomeSource.com, the country’s two most visited new homes websites”

And then this week, I’m told that they bought Be Jane.

The idea behind buying Be Jane has to be that Builder Homesite is looking to quickly build out a portal geared toward woman… and why not.  Be Jane has a library of DIY articles and videos as well as a large female community interested in the topic.

In terms of Builder Homesite, I know almost nothing about the company except what I’ve read over the past week or so and what little I can gleam from their website.  Nonetheless, their flurry of recent activity tells me they’ll likely be a great partner with Move, where the discussion of acquisitions, partnerships, lawsuits, etc. was so common it felt like background noise after a while.

With these additional resources (Move’s New Home connections and Be Jane’s content/community), Builder Homesite is a really interesting player to watch in the home building space and potentially a great home for the Be Jane team.

However, set aside for a minute that he missed a whole bunch of influential people (which he is already revising) the reality is that a lot of people on his list just aren’t that interesting (and many border on being twitter spammers).   If you’re a real estate professional new to twitter and you started following some of those people, I can only imagine twitter would start looking like a big wasteland of crappy tweets.

However, I think a list of influential people could be a really good thing, especially for people new to twitter…  I’ve had this idea for measuring “twitter influence” within a community, and Stefan’s project finally pushed me to build a prototype.   The idea is to measure, as objectively as possible, the influential people within a twitter community.

My theory and calculations are described below, but first, here’s the list:

For those interested, here’s how I calculated the influential people within the real estate community.

Step 1: Starting with Stefan’s list, I took 10 people in real estate who were following between 100 and 1000 people AND had more than 1000 people following them.  My logic here is that I was looking for active twitter users (i.e. it’s hard to get over 1000 followers without being active) who pay attention to who they follow (i.e. they don’t “autofollow” or “mass” follow people).  I was explicitly *not* looking to start with a list of the most influential people, but rather use some thoughtful people within the community to jump start the process.   As you’ll hopefully see, the people don’t really matter much in terms of the final results, but here they are anyway: jburslem, RETomato, 1000wattmarc, robhahn, spencerrascoff, hthrflynn, JeffX, nbostic, PoppyD, ardelld. (note: Stefan’s list didn’t include enough people that matched my criteria, so I ended up grabbing a few people out of my twitter stream who did).

Step 2: Using the Twitter API, I created a list of ALL the people these 10 people are following.  At this point, everyone is just a number and I won’t see anyone’s twitter name until the very last step.

Step 3: I put all of these twitter IDs in a big list and used a pivot table to give me a count by ID #.

At this point, I have a pretty good list of people within the real estate space.  I think it’s pretty safe to say that if someone was “influential” (on Twitter) in real estate, then they’d be on the list of 4000+ people this process created… and most likely near the top since they’re likely being followed by this group if they’re influential.    However, it’s time to expand the scope way beyond these 10 people.

Step 4: Now I took EVERYONE who was being followed by at least 8 of those 10 people (45 total) and looked at ALL the people they followed.  Because some of these people were following thousands (sometimes tens of thousands!), this turned out to be a huge amount of data… although it all fit nicely in an excel spreadsheet, so I kept going.

Step 5: Starting with a base of people who were being followed in step 3 (4000+), I did a count to see how many times those people were being followed in the HUGE lists that were created in Step 4.  (The idea here is that if someone was “influential” they would have at least shown up in the 4000+ IDs that were generated in Step 3 and now I was just counting how many times they showed up within this list of 45 people)

Step 6: I then sorted this list and based on the number of followers that any given ID had, I gave it a “peer” ranking that is simply the total number of followers divided by 44.  A peer ranking of 100% means that out of the people created in Step 4, 44 were following that person. A ranking of 91% meant that 40 were following that person.

Step 7:  I sorted the list, used Twitter’s API to reverse lookup people’s usernames (and real names), and copy-and-pasted the results above.

It’s also worth noting that I *could* take this list further and displayed the “top 100″ or “top 200″, in which case we would have caught some great names that just didn’t make the cut (David Gibbons, Joel Burslem, Hilary March, Ben Martin, Susie Blackmon, Kevin Tomlinson, and Stefen Swanepoel come to mind), but I had to stop somewhere, so I decided to stop at 50 (although since 7 people tied for 50th, there’s actually 56 people on the list!).  Nonetheless, if there’s interest, it’d be pretty easy to expand the list…

Final thoughts

What I really like about this approach is that it’s completely determined by our real estate peers.  Like it or not, there’s no better indication of your twitter influence than the “vote” your peers give you when they follow you… and while a “total” follower count is meaningless in terms of influence within a group, if you look at the “influentials” in a relatively objective way (as I’ve done here) and track who they are following, the result is a very non-spammy, highly influential group of people within the real estate twitter community.

My Facebook Page

This is one of the most active communities I have going right now.    This is where I start conversations by sharing links that I find interesting from around the web.  Become a fan of my page follow along!

Ventura County Star and Socially Wired
This is not only one of my favorite consulting projects I’m working on, but also where I’m starting to post all of my “social media” type posts. If you’re interested in talking social media strategy, then join me over at the Socially Wired blog where I not only talk about social media strategy, but I’m describing the progress of implementing a social media strategy at a regional newspaper. As I’m JUST starting to ramp things up there and expecting a lot of posts on using social media to drive business in the very near future!

Rain City Guide
Always my early love, the Seattle community on RCG is as strong as ever. But not only that, I recently teamed up with some folks from M Realty to add a rock’n home search tool to the site. If you haven’t checked out RCG lately, definitely head over there to see how we continue pushing the boundaries of what a local real estate community website can be.

Spinnio

This is my “entertainment” start-up where I’m hosting Facebook conversations with interesting people in the movie industry that’s gotten out of control lately. In the month or so since I launched the tool, I’ve hosted conversations with directors, writers, actors talking about movies like The Stoning of Soraya M, Food Inc and Humpday.

Our next conversation is with Ric O’Barry of The Cove on Tuesday!  Definitely consider joining us and become a fan of the Spinnio Facebook page to get updated about movie events, news and stories!

More?
For you following along at home, here’s a summary of the big projects I’m working on and where you can find me:

• Quick social media strategy updates: My Facebook Page
• Social media strategy (generate biz, journalism, etc.) posts: Socially Wired
• Real Estate social media strategies, tools, etc: Rain City Guide
• Movie and Entertainment Interviews on Facebook: Spinnio

And of course, I love to banter on Twitter, but keep your expectations low for anything of value out of me over there!

Facebook, Facebook, Facebook
And I might as well make it easy for you… You can follow along with another of these projects right from this post!

Thanks again to all the people who joined us on today’s radio show.

Lani gave a great overview of this week in real estate and then we quickly dived into a conversation about the status and future of RE BarCamps with people such as Stacey Harman, Matt Fagioli and Todd Carpenter.

Of course, we followed it up with an equally entertaining conversation about cougars. Diane Guercio was instrumental in defining some cougar related items…

Want to be informed about our radio show? Become a fan of our Facebook page and/or follow us on Twitter for regular updates on upcoming shows!

• Thoughts on a new theme for RCG?

And no doubt about it, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the redesign!

Probably the only thing I haven’t done well with my speaking is spend time reaching out to regional and state REALTOR organizations to let them know about my experience speaking about social media and blogging activities that generates business. That’s where you come help!

If you know someone looking for an experienced speaker to engage an audience around social media and/or blogging topics, please don’t hesitate to send them my way.   If they want more information, you can send them directly to my speaker’s page or my speaker’s bio that summarizes my experience in a more print-friendly form.

No surprise that my presentations have evolved over the years (anyone else remember the bloginars I used to give with Russ Cofano in the summer of ‘06???).   My current favorite to give is a three-part presentation that discusses how agents can  (part 1) engage on social networks, (part 2) create a local website or “hub”, and (part 3) use their social networking activity to drive traffic to conversion points within their hub…

By the way, just a few of the speaking gigs lined up in my near future include:

• Wisconsin REALTORS Association Annual event
• Real Estate Connect in SF
• NAR conference in San Diego.

If you’re going to be at any of these, I’d love to connect!

Thanks to the Ford team, good timing with WordCampSF and the help of some friends (@ribeezie and @dingman), we got to make the Big Sur trip a reality!

[By the way, if you want to skip directly to the photos, consider checking out this photoset that Jonathan Dingman created. I'm gonna use more than a few of his photos below, but there's nothing like seeing the whole set!]

The trip down the coast started on Sunday afternoon when we left San Francisco… We stopped off in Santa Cruz, where we took a walk through downtown and to the pier where we saw all kinds of great stuff like nesting birds and relaxing sea lions…

From Santa Cruz, we headed to Asilomar, which I’m tempted to not even mention because it’s simply my favorite place to stay in the Big Sur area and I’d hate to see it get crowded! It’s a conference center in a State Park on the beach with reasonable prices (sounds impossible, huh?). If you’re planning to stay in the area, then Asilomar is only a hop, skip and a jump from attractions like Pebble Beach Golf Course and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The most memorable moment from our stay came during an evening stroll along the beach when we found a stranded baby sea lion late… (the photo is blurry because it was taken at night with my blackberry, but it’s the best photo I’ve got!)

From Asilomar, we headed south and stopped off many, many times to take photos of the coastal views…

We also took a short hike to McWay Waterfall, and while the waterfall’s size was a bit disappointing, the colors of the water and surrounding mountains were amazing!

Another great detour was our hike to the bottom of the Ragged Point Beach… If you look REALLY closely, you can see @ribeezie and me on the beach in this photo. (or check out this zoomed in version)

We ended our adventure along the coast with a stop off to see the elephant seals at a beach near San Simeon. These animals are HUGE and so darn awkward on the land… and yet so much fun to observe.

For those of you who are map-inclined, here’s a map where I identified some of the highlights:

View Big Sur Trip in a larger map

And finally, for those of you curious how the Mariner Hybrid held up… it was awesome! It was an extremely smooth ride, got great gas milage and gave us no issues whatsoever. The only funny parts of the car had to do with me getting used to a hybrid… Things like the engine revving up to high RPMs when heading up hills and turning off when stopped/going slow surprised me at first…

Overall, I’d like to think we pushed the car a bit by taking it down the Big Sur coast and the whole experience rocked. Thanks again to@ribeezie, @dingman and the people at Ford who helped make this trip happen! I had a blast!

Just finished up a ridiculously informative (and fun!) show with Jonathan Miller and Matt Heaton as part of the latest RE:RnD radio show. In the beginning, we took a real deep dive into macro-economic issues that are facing the industry and then focused in on how agents can use this knowledge in their business. You can listen to the show via the widget embedded in this post!

It’s been a lot of fun to team up with the notorious rob on this project… I’m not sure what you’all think, but I’m having a blast bantering with him and enjoying teaming up with him to dive into real estate issues. We already know the topic for next week, but I’m going to hold off announcing anything until we get a chance to get some speakers lined up. What I can say however, is that it’s going to be fun!

And for regular updates on our shows including announcements about future guests, become a fan of our facebook page: http://rernd.com/