Confessions of a RE Twitterhead

by Teri Lussier

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

There have been several interesting conversations going on in my small corner of the blogiverse lately. One was a comment to a Bloodhound post I wrote eons ago. Someone wanted to know if blogging really works for lead generation. Well sure it…Wait. What?

I forget how small the RE.net world is. It’s tiny. I thought everyone knew that blogging works, when in reality only bloggers know that blogging works and probably most people still don’t know what a blog is. It’s hard for me to keep that in mind, and frankly I find myself living in two seperate worlds- the Web 2.0 world and the other world. My conversations and connections in the 2.0 world move quickly, almost instantly. It’s as if, Shazam! You now have made a connection to someone you didn’t know ten minutes ago. Now that person is going to connect you to this person and Shazam! Another person and fifteen minutes have passed.

When was the last Inman Connect? Late July? Much of the discussion was how amazing it was that people could connect quickly through blogging. You all know this is true because you are here on the Bloodhound Blog, in the RE.net world. The truth is that in my nonRE.net world, people don’t know this and I can’t explain it to them, and I’m not sure they care, and that’s the tricky part for me. How do I gracefully move between the two worlds?

Another interesting conversation took place on Daniel Rothamel’s Agent Genius post about Social Media. The comment stream is from bloggers who are wondering if Twitter works in terms of usefulness. It’s so interesting to me because I’m having that same conversation here about blogging and my reaction is the same: Well, of course Twitter can…Wait. What? The fact is that no RE Twitterhead has yet to get a lead from Twitter, but why couldn’t it happen?

If like-minded people move toward each other, and find each other, which I know to be true- after all, we are all busy, we have to pick and choose who we spend time with, how much time do you make for people you don’t like? Wouldn’t it be nice to find like-minded people quickly? To connect in that Shazam way?

I talked to some fellow RE Twitterers yesterday and spilled the beans about my experience on Twitter, so I thought I would share it here as well. I started to Twitter about a month ago. I don’t use the instant updates so I don’t get constant chatter in my phone. Twitter is there when I choose to tweet, and not there when I don’t. I’m not a slave to Twitter, but like I said before, it appeals to me. It’s not unlike being at a party with multiple conversations going on and you are free to jump in and add to a conversation or not. It’s mingling on a large scale, but it’s fast, really fast.

When I started Twittering I followed RE.net folks that I knew well, Maureen McCabe being one, as well as a few I didn’t know at the time, but wanted to see what they were doing with Twitter: Steve Groves, and Andy Kaufman, in particular, but mostly I followed well known geeks or news services. But hey, I gotta eat, and I’m not as dumb as I look. What I really wanted to find were Daytonians. I starting putting key search terms into my tweets, “the weather in Dayton Ohio is cold” or “Open House in Dayton Ohio” and a corresponding blog post url.

Well knock me over with a feather. A Twitterhead in Dayton was tracking tweets with the words Dayton Ohio and picked up my tweets and began following me with a “Hey I’m in Dayton too, isn’t that cool?” Uh. Well. I’ll get back with you on that. If you are a woman, this is sounding tres creepy , isn’t it? But as I started reading this guy’s tweets I realized that he was simply a Twittering geek, connecting to another Twitterhead in the same city. Shazam. He had been tweeting for awhile so he was connected to other local Twitterheads. Now in Twitterland, it’s perfectly acceptable to start following someone for no reason at all, and it’s flattering I suppose to have someone follow you. You can see who someone else is following and you can click over to see if they are interesting and if you are like-minded, you follow them. No big deal. Or you read a tweet by someone you are following, in reply to someone you don’t know, and that conversation looks interesting. So you click the link to see what @whoever is all about, and you follow them, they follow you, and now you are connected to more people in Shazam speed.

At this point, if you are thinking that Twitter sounds like weirdo MySpace freaks, think again.  Think about what it really is, or could be- it’s viral marketing. Not convinced? I don’t blame you, but consider this: Within two weeks of being followed by one Dayton Twitterhead, I was sitting down to lunch with 4 Dayton Twitterheads. Now that’s some serious Shazam!

I’m never satisfied with what is. My mind is always looking for what if. One of the Twitter-ers I follow is called Lunch 2.0, and this is why I spend time outside the RE.net and inside the Web 2.0: Lunch 2.0 describes itself as: “A social phenomenon referring to a migration of web 2.0 company employees to other offices around Silicon Valley, sharing lunch and conversation.” That’s what I was doing with the local Twitterheads. Now my mind is moving on this. How can I apply this to RE? I could host my own lunch 2.0 where I bought lunch (pizza, yum) and pitch my business. Would that be successful? I think it could be if done correctly. You are connecting with like-minded individuals, and you are giving them something for their time. Will I try it? Not in the near future, but someday sure why not. Actually, I’m hoping someone else will try it first and let me know how it goes.

I really enjoy Twitter, and I’m trying to find a way to make it work for me. It’s connecting me with like-minded people here in Dayton, it’s a very real and fun way for me to move gracefully between the Web 2.0 world and the real world, and it’s four people sitting down belly to belly within 2 weeks of connecting online…You can debate whether or not it can work if you would like. And while you are doing that, I’ll be tweeting.