Looking at my email most of it comes from the same five domains. So any emails not coming from these are automatically moved into a “tier-2″ folder for later sorting. It is a simple hack that works quite well.

As a side note, I actually get quite a bit of spam a day. I have a pair of Barracuda 600 spam firewalls that are very effective at catching 95% of them. The ones that filter through the above hack gets the rest. The one or two that beats the odds only take a few seconds for me to delete anyways.

I was lucky to have a very smart and wealthy person tell me how to do it right. I was skeptical at first but I finally made it mine to share.

This is the right order to do things:

1. Solve a problem.
2. Build credibility and respect.
3. Respect will give you power and influence.
4. Power will reward you with money.

Most people have it wrong: get money, power comes from money and respect from power. They don’t solve anybody’s problems, including their own.

Knowing the right order is just the first step. The second is to enjoy building your success.

We have six core needs for fulfillment:

1. The need for certainty
2. The need for variety
3. The need to feel significant
4. The need for love and connection
5. The need for growth
6. The need to contribute

If each step does not fulfill some of your needs it is time to make changes.

1. Solving problems – needs #2, #3 and #5.
2. Respect and Credibility -  needs #3, #4 and #6.
3. Power – needs #3 and #5.
4. Money – needs #1, #3 and #6.

Image Courtesey of Tracy O, (image)

Staying happy is the tricky part. Human beings are the only animal that thinks about the future. We spend a lot of time thinking about our happier future selves and what we need to do to become that person.

We take what we have now for granted. We choose to suffer now so we can happier later. There is a better way to live. To have happiness and spaceships, medicine and the Internet.

The first step is knowing your core needs:

1. The need for certainty
2. The need for variety
3. The need to feel significant
4. The need for love and connection
5. The need for growth
6. The need to contribute

The second step is to plan your future around your six basic needs.

Finally remember to be grateful.

—-

Photo courtesy of a4gpa (photo).

Suggested further reading:

• Stumbling on Happiness – by Daniel Gilbert
• Anthony Robbin’s Six core needs
• Man’s Search for Meaning – by Viktor E. Frankl

Here are the two sides of the discussion:

• me: Make video tours. They show a home / listing much better than photos or a virtual tour.
• Sylvia: (paraphrased) Video tours create a security risk to the consumer and should not be used. What if the video tours are used to case out a home for a robbery?

To catch you up on the discussion so far:

1. I made this comment about the minimal acceptable quality for an online listing:
   • A video walk through – HD quality, plays right off the website.
   • 10 to 20 photos, high quality. Not pics of random things. Limited view of the seller’s clutter.
   • Information: bedrooms, bathrooms, property taxes and amenities. (that’s enough)
   • User friendly / focused website.
2. Sylvia made this comment from her extensive experience on a police board
   • videos and floor plans make it easier for a criminal to case and rob the place
   • a responsible REALTOR® should never put their clients at risk

So what do you think? Discuss in the comments.

Image courtesy of ibcbulk from flickr.

Presentation Materials

• How to Really Use Social Media Keynote Slides (PDF)
• Homework for How to Really Use Social Media (PDF)

Some Commentary…

Since I started my real estate technology training workshops I realize that REALTORS® seem to ask the same questions. I get a lot of questions like this “how do I use technology fad X”?

I use ‘technology fad’ because my top three questions are usually:

1. How do I use Twitter?
2. How do I use Facebook?
3. How do I blog?

However, what I think REALTORS® are really asking is this:

How do I get more leads from the Internet?

The answer is simple.

1. Have conversations with people (twitter, facebook, blogging). This is social networking.
   
2. Provide useful information for free. Blogging is the easiest way, but you can do an old school website too.

Just give me the answer…

I was having a coffee/one on one training with Leilani Fong (web/@leilanihomes) a few days after the presentation. Leilani is a REALTOR®, young, smart and enthusiastic about taking her marketing 100% online.

The enlightening part of the conversation is when she demanded, “just tell me the answer” and in frustration I blurted out “if I answer that you’ll just ask me more questions”. Since Leilani was the second person this week to essentially demand the answer from me I finally realized that explaining how the technology works was an ineffective approach to teaching.

Most people don’t care about how the pizza is made. They want this: order, pay, eat, satisfaction. Skip the process, the history and the culture and just give me the pie.

So what they are really asking is.. what can I buy to get online marketing?

Well that is fairly easy to answer:

1. Online ads. Banner ads, Google AdWords, advertise on yahoo, on other people’s websites.
2. A web site from a real estate website builder. They’re plenty of them.
3. Hire an online marketing company.
4. Hire a web developer, a graphic designer and have them work on your web brand.
5. Hire a content writer to write and blog for you.
6. Hire an SEO company to optimize your web site.

There are lots of company’s that provide those services. I’m know they’re more than happy to have your business. If you’re happy about their results that’s value. Why wouldn’t you do it?

Well, in my first presentation about how the Internet is Changing Real Estate, I said that the net has made communication cheap. It has made it accessible to anybody not just the people with large marketing budgets. So the point of taking your marketing online is to get the same number of leads for less money. You can do it yourself.

However, going online is challenging right now for people with limited knowledge. Training out there is limited and expensive. Getting somebody else to do it for you (just give me the pie) is expensive but it’s better than nothing. The return on marketing online just isn’t there for most people. Even more sad is that the results all still suck, consumers are still unsatisfied and REALTORS® are still confused. There must be a better way.

Maybe I should throw out the disclaimer that the opinions on this blog are mine and not my employers. (heh).

Is there something better?

Yes. I’m working on it. It’s not ready yet but the core values are (alpha version):

1. 100% online only marketing. Save the trees.
2. Training. Lots and lots of training and information. We enable. We’ve embraced technology and learning.
3. Better and more information. Set a new standard for quality and quantity.
4. Open data. Reciprocity and VOWs are user unfriendly. User unfriendly sucks. If you want this listing in XML, in JSON, in ATOM, just add .xml, .json or .atom to a clean URL. If you want all of our listings, here is a RESTful API. Steal from Twitter’s API.
5. More people makes the system richer for everybody. More is more!
6. For people who believe in the same thing. Don’t worry about catering to everybody.
7. Usability. Empower REALTORS® to do their own online marketing.
8. Valuable. Price is what you pay, value is what you get. I want you get lots.

Where to get a blog?

I recommend that you go to Wordpress.com and sign up for a free blog. The sign up process is quick and simple. This will give you a chance to play around without much time or capital commitment.

About Wordpress

Since I’m much more familar with Wordpress I’ll give a run down of what to expect from this:

1. Wordpress.com blogs are free to start out. You will get a  web site address like: http://myblogsname.wordpress.com. When you sign up you will be able to choose the name for your blog.
2. You will be sent an email to verify your blogs creation. Then you will be set up and ready to go.
3. For free you will get:
   • A selection of themes (designs) to customize your blogs layout
   • Good SEO (well, alright SEO) already for your blog
   • RSS feeds into your blog
   • Excellent comment spam filtering
   • Pretty much everything you need to start blogging right away.
   • Never have to worry about servers going down, upgrading software, etc.
   • A WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) blog editor. No need to edit HTML. Similar to MS Word.
   • Ability to upload pictures to your blog posts.
   • Wordpress will add text-ads to your blog (somebody has to pay the bills)
   • Pretty awesome for free!
4. When you are ready to grow your blog or brand it some more there are advanced (paid) services
   • All the information is available here: http://en.wordpress.com/products/
   • The ones that you will most likely want are:
   • Custom web address: $15.00/year for the name, $10.00/year for the hosting. Like: http://mygreenblog.com instead of http://mygreenblog.wordpress.com.
     • Note: You can register the domain name anywhere, it doesn’t have to be with Wordpress.com. They offer it as a convenience. I suggest keeping your domains together in one place.
   • No ads: $30.00USD/year
   • Custom design: $15.00/year. You still have to pay somebody to make the custom design for you. Contact me (benwong@mostlygeek.com) if you need this.

Should you Blog?

Writing content yourself is a lot of work and it takes a lot of time. You can outsource your web hosting and the design of your blog. You can’t outsource your blog’s content, that would defeat the whole point. Before you jump in read 23 questions for prospective bloggers.

Before committing, these are the top 5 questions I think you should ask yourself:

1. Do you enjoy writing?
2. Do you enjoy reading?
3. Are you willing to learn?
4. Do you have time? To get real marketing return from blogging you will need to write a lot. Do you have 3 to 4 hours to dedicate a week to writing?
5. Are you ready to be transparent and honest?

Blogging Tips

To get you started:

1. Blogging Tips for Beginners – this is an excellent series written by Darren Rowse a professional blogger.
2. Writing for the web is different than writing an email. A List Apart (alistapart.com), has excellent articles that I suggest you read. Here’s a direct link: http://www.alistapart.com/topics/content/writing/
3. For your posts, ask a question and then answer it as your blog post.
   1. What is the CMHC fee?
   2. What is the average price of a condo in Vancouver?
   3. How to work with a REALTOR®?
   4. How can I increase the value of my home?

Image Credit: ~C4Chaos of Flickr. (image)

So it was a bitter sweet decision to stop working on TweetLens as a possible business start up. After some thought I decided the best thing is to  open source it under the MIT license. I don’t want to see the project die and there is a lot of great work (IMHO) that went into it. Letting others have a go at it or incorporate it into their tools would be a great way to keep the value from fading.

The bitter part about the decision is having to admit that it would fail as a viable business. I still believe that most of the tools out there still suck and there is an opportunity for a real kick ass twitter web client. What I don’t regret is the time spent building it because the journey itself was very rewarding.

That is the sweet part. Building TweetLens I learned more about JavaScript than I could ever imagine. Before TweetLens I thought of JavaScript as just a tool for fancy animations and AJAX. Now I realize how amazing a language it is for delivering a high level of application usability within the browser.

Combined with jQuery’s awesome event handling I was learned about event driven programming (EDP). This lead me down a path into SOA (service-oriented architecture) and a new world of possibilities opened up to me. I love thinking about how technology can be applied to enrich people’s lives.

So while the project itself was a failure in its original purpose the new experience, skills and knowledge gained have a lot of value. Either way I don’t regret where working on TweetLens has taken me.

So this is the plan for the new open TweetLens.

1. Clean up the source code and throw it up on GitHub. I just opened up an account, now I gotta figure out how to use. I love learning new things.
2. Tweak tweetlens.com to be the project’s web and demo site. There is a lot of cool functionality that I built into TweetLens and it deserves some showcasing.
3. Continue tweaking the code. There’s some nifty new features and enhancements that would make it a bit more usable. I’ve been thinking of re-architecting the event model, making leveraging $(document) more as the communication channel, almost completely eliminating the call stack… well you know geek out! :)

So a new future for TweetLens and I’m going to focus more on my next projects. I got a few great ones in the hopper. And this time co-founders!

1. The glasses don’t make me sleepy. What I’ve found is that the exposure to the intensity of light matters as much as the type. For maximum effectiveness I would turn down most of the lights in my home and wear the glasses.
2. They do help me sleep better. Before wearing the glasses I would wake up several times a night. Using the glasses I sleep through until my alarm clock wakes me up. For the record I actually use a sun-rise alarm clock. This is the one I have, a Sunrise Systems Dawn Simulator.:Basically these simulate dawn and rather than a blaring alarm to wake you up it slowly brightens the room. Thus dawn simulation. I will never use a regular alarm clock again.
3. Are they worth the money? I think so. Being able to sleep soundly for hours is worth more than the $100.00!

Here are the slides and the smart board notes:

• How the Internet is Changing Real Estate – Keynote slides
• How the Internet is Changing Real Estate – Smartboard Notes (PDF)

Top 5 things  that I learned from giving this presentation to a bunch of REALTORS® and from digesting the feedback given.

1. Most people wanted to know about Twitter
2. People were curious about what a blog is rather than what blogging is
3. A lot of different skill ranges, from the sort of knowledgeable to “where is the power button?”
4. A lot of people wanted to know about SEO
5. The talk was too general and needed to focus on a particular subject

After the presentation I was giving some thought to both the feedback and the content. So these are the changes I’m going to make for next time:

• Keep the presentation and the workshop to about an hour.
• Focus more on specific topics. Blogging, Twitter, social media, search engine optimization, etc.
• Keep the classes a little smaller.
• Have better information on the Sutton Education website beforehand.

For my next presentation I’ll cover How to Really Use Social Media. I don’t think most of the people in the room really care what Twitter or Facebook is, or why it is cool (or lame).  What they really want to know is:

How can I get more leads from the Internet?

A lot of people out there basically giving out the same message. This was my message too so  I also got it wrong, and I sounded a bit like a broken record.

1. Use Twitter
2. Blog more
3. Pick a niche, blog about it.
4. SEO your website
5. Use Facebook, etc. etc.

After some reflection this is a better answer:

Use these tools to expand and interact with your network. They are not direct marketing tools.

Thinking this way gives you control over the technology instead of being controlled by the technology. Technology should improve your lifestyle. In my presentation I mentioned culture a lot. Each social networking tool has its own culture, nomenclature and personality. Even something as archaic as email. Use it if it makes your life better and only if you can adjust to that specific culture.

Otherwise it’ll just be fake to you and fake to everybody else. You’d be a social media poser and people will make fun of you (if you’re lucky). If you’re not, people will just ignore you.

Secondly, it’ll never be fun or enjoyable. If it is not enjoyable it’ll be work and then you’ll wind up with a blog with that one post from a year ago and that is worst than having no blog at all.

You’re better off having a single web page, hosted for $5.00 a year with your picture, your phone number, and a message saying: “I helped X people realize their dreams. Let me help you today.” Just update that every time you do a transaction. Done.

What I found is that the glasses do not make you sleepy. For me I credit the glasses for helping me sleep better and fall asleep much faster. Before the start of the experiment I would have a very difficult time falling asleep, usually tossing and turning in bed for hours. Then I would wake up every two or three hours, usually being able to fall asleep again in a minute or so.

There are several bad habits that I keep that the glasses do not fix. That is staying up late on the computer or watching tv. While I do start feeling sleepy around those times I can stay awake if I wanted. So I actually made a few changes to my lifestyle.

First starting around 8:30pm I would put the glasses on and leave them on until I go to sleep. Usually this is still around midnight or 1:00am. It kind of sucks having the world all yellow but you get used to it.

Secondly when my bed hits the pillow, I catch myself thinking about random things and I start counting sheep. Yes, counting sheep. I start at 100 and challenge myself to count down to 50 before my mind starts wandering. I’ve never made it to 50. Either because my mind drifted or I’ve fallen asleep. It’s cliche but it works for me.

Thirdly I made my room dark. There is very little ambient light in my room at night. In the morning I have a sun-rise alarm clock that wakes me up. These two things combined also helped my ability to sleep.

All of these things combined has made an improvement so far. The next step is to begin sleeping and getting up earlier. Will post another update when I have more information on how that is going.