Category Archives: Identity Management

Are you a listing agent?  I sure am not.  Rather, I am a marketing agent.  I don’t list property.  I create strategic marketing plans.  I directly influence the sales process on behalf of sellers. The word “listing” completely devalues the work of an effective real estate professional.  Anyone can list property.  A minimum wage worker can list a home for sale.  My assistant can list a home for sale.  Heck, a computer can most likely list a property for sale through an automated system. A … Read More »

As review sites like Yelp grow in popularity, so does the need for real estate agents to be cognizant of how that can affect their business. Many agents are reluctant to have this level of transparency, yet this is a reality of today’s web 2.0 and not likely to go anywhere. Consumers have been empowered with platforms on with to voice their opinions and give a (sometimes unjustifiably) high level of trust to reviews. Sites like Zillow, which happens to have the lion’s share of … Read More »

 With everyone wanting to maximize our ‘social graph’ when it comes to either building our real estate business or our personal brand, sometimes that can come with a price: privacy. Being that most everyone reading Geek Estate is on Facebook in some capacity, I wanted to share this with you tool with you – Facebook Privacy Scanner. Like it or not, with critical mass comes targeting. With targeting comes spam and with spammers come fraud. To that end, with the slew of recent facebook privacy … Read More »

Kiss Your “RSS” Goodbye! Ok, so I’m hosting “The World’s Best IRL Meetup” for VREBC (Virtual REBarCamp) yesterday in Costa Mesa w/ The talented Ms. Stacey Harmon (and a Cameo appearance by Everyone’s Tech Guy, Loren Nason) when during a break in the action a fantastic, intuitive, spontaneous discussion breaks out! (that’s why we do the IRL Meetups for VREBC, so people can talk to other people, instead of “Vegetating” in front of their laptop in Jammies!, but I digress)…so anyway, Stacey answers the very … Read More »

Speaking of online reputation management for real estate professionals, there was a comment by Simon Salloom (more likely an SEO firm on his behalf) on my post about reputation management that I found troubling and quite contrary to the advice given in my presentation. I’ve since edited out the comment, but here it is in its entirety: Good thing you have done here, Thanks! Simon Salloom LA Times: Southern California home prices and sales improve in November Southern California’s real estate industry, decimated by the … Read More »

Here is my Online Reputation Management presentation from #vrebc today if you’re interested. If you have questions regarding managing your online reputation, please leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them all. Thanks to everyone who attended my session. RepMgmt-VREBC It was definitely a new experience doing a presentation to an audience that I could neither see nor hear with my own two eyes and ears, but live and learn! Thanks to Jim Cronin and the Tomato gang for organizing … Read More »

A couple of months ago I was using Twitter search and discovered Deed Street.  Deed Street is an open micro-blogging platform which offers aggregation of real estate Tweets using the “^” tag on Twitter.  The site, which was launched in September, requires a user to either login using their Twitter account or to simply post on Twitter using a specific tag or dual “^^” tag.  Side note, although the correct name of the (^) tag is a Caret, I’ve read that the founder Doug Lazovick … Read More »

I thought this video from Matt Dollinger was worth sharing — the takeaway is to “FOCUS” on what really generates business for you and not get sucked into spending unnecessary time and effort on tasks that don’t lead to real business. Paralysis by Analysis – The story of Web 2.0 from Matthew Dollinger on Vimeo. [via YouFactor]

In college, and for a couple of years after (including the first 6 months I worked as a licensed agent,) I was a bartender.  It was a pretty cush job – working ~25 hours/week and meeting interesting people who had to be nice to you in order to get a drink.  During happy hour, you’d see the regulars, and strangers would wander in.  Conversations were had.  And I had one rule:  No politics or religion. Seriously. There is no faster way to alienate someone you … Read More »

How do you keep track of ALL the social networking sites you’re currently on? Are you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, ActiveRain and others?  Do you have online profiles scattered all across these continuously growing WEB 2.0 platforms?  How many are you on?  How many are out there? Here’s a great solution to managing all your online sites and anywhere else you may have an Internet presence. Retaggr.com allows you to create a profile, add any Social Network site, add custom links to your websites … Read More »