There’s always something to howl about.

Sane People Don’t Comment on Real Estate Blogs, You Don’t Need 1,000 Facebook Friends & Other Valuable Lessons Learned From 3 Years Slinging Stuff Online

The real thing that pissed me off about the well intentioned jackals at Agent ReBoot was not what was explicitly taught: it was what was implied.  Somehow you need oodles of traffic to be successful.  Somehow, you need oodles of Facebook Likes.  That somehow all being able to be at the center a tepid and tense noisy murmur was what it takes to be Real Successful in Real Estate.

And I’ve made the mistake too.  For a long time, I thought it was simple math: converting a tiny percentage of mostly indifferent people would scale.  You would LinkIn a bunch of people on MyTwitFace and voila! Winning!

So you take every friend request you can, and you add the pople you connect with, as force of habit.  If someone has 6-7 friends in common, you add them too.  Winning.

You fire up a blogpost or two,pass it along and your new friends and strangers dutifly comment something often indistinguishable from the stuff that winds up on the wrong side of your akismet filter.

“Nice post, you laid it on me.”  they dutifly say. And you in turn go through the WP dashboard to their sites.  “You make nice post to, I love to hear you on this topic! ” It’s all about the dofollow, baby.  Getcher linkbacks here, and on to the next one.

Winning.  You have a metric to measure: friends, contacts, twitbacks, clicks and raw traffic.  Woot.  Winning. You’re winning that game, the war for comments.  You’re marching your army of 12,000 Twitter Bots, 2100 indifferent Facebookers, and another few hundered people that are still shuffling around the empty halls on LinkedSpace.  Duh, winning!

Bad contacts- just  like bad money –drive out good contacts.  You had a Facebook full of300 friends, coworkers and neighbors.  You were connected to these people.  You were warmed when you saw the pictures they posted.  Now?   You have 300 of your friends.  But now your Facebook had been “improved” by the 700 Realtors from across the country, the 200 vendors that follow them, and just recently a herd of zebra showed up.  Now, instead of the people you love and know, you also get to follow the exploits of a bunch of middle aged philandering conference goers, their pains and passions.

This churns up activity for you.  Fills your status with activity, likes, and loves.   You must seem really popular and successful!   So the people that liked you before, that were receptive are now desensitized to your messages.  Your signal to noise ratio went to hell, and there’s no need to tune into anything that you say.  After all, it’s readily apparent that you’re very popular.

But hey, you’ve got the hordes now.  And you can’t bear to unfriend them, can you?  That would not be nice. And remember, we have to be nice.   The hordes may turn on you!

Here’s a hint: without looking, go here: http://www.facebook.com/friends/edit/ click “All Friends”.    Go through that page.  IF you don’t know who they are or where they are from?  Buh-bye.  Be ruthless.   Do it 3-4 times.  Tedious work.

Then call the people that are left.  Apologize to them for being a sales-douche on Facebook, and get on with looking at kid pictures and playing the “thank God” game with all your ex girlfriends.  When you do, you’ll have better relationships, more friends, and

Indifference doesn’t scale, it spreads.  To you.  You become indifferent about your community, you muss stuff, they become indifferent to you.  When you allow a FB page to have the folks you’re utterly indifferent to on it, then the next thing that happens is that you miss buying signs, status updates of people that are interested in getting help.  You become innured to your real connections.

Being connected with everyone is like being connected with nobody.    Winning!

From the hip: Six ways to change Facebook for the better..

  • If the other person is a Realtor, and you are at less than $25,000 in GCI from referred/referring business in the last 12 months?  Ditch ’em.  If you have more, it’s a judgement call.
  • If the other person is a Realtor’s-hanger-on.  Ditch ’em.  Even if you’re a Realtor.  (Ahem.  I haven’t solicited any new F.I.R.E. business this year to my knowledge)  I’m all about video these days.
  • If the other person is a drag, in any way, ditch ’em.  Life’s too short.
  • If the other person is a stranger, either meet ’em or ditch ’em.
  • If the other person has more than 3500 friends, ditch ’em unless you know you’re special.
  • If you haven’t talked in a year, talk or ditch ’em.

Less is more.  Win!