Noodlin’ around with Social Media

by Cathleen Collins

Realtor, Staging Consultant

Author website

Teri Lussier loves Twitter so I’ll give it a shot

That was my “Hello World” last night on Twitter.

At the 2007 Star Power conference in Phoenix I learned about Jott, the safe and legal way to text message while you’re driving; so when I noticed Greg using it to send himself a reminder, I signed up, too. This is a tool that has really come in handy. When my dad was still alive he would tease my eighteen year old niece and me about text messaging. He couldn’t understand why anyone would prefer something so clumsy over simply using that cell phone to talk. But there are times when text messaging is more appropriate — for example, when the timing of your message might be an inconvenient interruption for the person who you telephone. You may want to connect with someone in a more passive way. You’re not disturbing them like you might be doing with a phone call, but your message is more intimate, direct, immediate than email. My dad was right… texting manually can be clumsy, tedious. And what do you do when you’re driving? Here’s where Jott is champ. I hold down the J key on my Treo, tell Jott I want to jott Cindy Client, say “please call Cathleen when you’re free to talk,” and hang up. My voice is transcribed to text and that’s sent to Cindy Client’s phone as a text message.

I know I’m behind the times… as long ago as last month blogs were abuzz with the cool ways the cool people at the NAR convention were mashing up Jott and Twitter and Utterz and WordPress. And here I was, like my dad when he was questioning texting: Why use Twitter? How will that help me, my family or my business? Since last night, when I signed up on Twitter, I’ve connected in a different way with people whom I’m already reading and feel kin to by blogging. And I’m not sure yet whether this Twitter-difference is better. It’s not as though I’m going to save any time by reading a 140-character version of their full-length blogs. And I haven’t found a single non-blogging friend who Tweets, so I don’t expect this to help me stoke the friendships that I already neglect way too much without having added another Social Media toy to my life. So for me for now, Twitter is a matter of faith.

Then while I’m tooling around in the Web 2.0 world, why stop at Twitter? Jott had just emailed me:

Joining in the Jott Link fun are our friends at Mosio, Xpenser, Gumiyo, and Vitalist. They offer amazing services, and now they’re even more accessible to you with Jott.

Being in an ADHD mood, I had to go out and explore these. Like the rest of the social media phenomena, you can sign up for all of these for free for now, at least with basic features.

Mosio will let me ask any question on any subject from my cell phone and expect an answer a la Ask the Audience or Phone a Friend lifelines on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Now if this delivers what it promises, I can certainly see value in it. But Mosia is in Beta, and when you sign up you are nudged to be available to answer the questions that people like me are bound to be asking when out in the world. Questions inspired by hearing a song on the radio and wondering who wrote it, or by getting a call from Mom, who wants help with filling in her crossword puzzle… you know, important things. So the jury’s out on this SM, too.

Xpenser sounds like something I really will put to use. It lets you create expense reports on the fly. While you’re out running around running up expenses you can Jott your way into Xpenser and record your business expenses while you’re incurring them. So during that dead time between ordering those Eggnog Lattes and taking them to the table where my client is sitting, I can make an Xpenser note rather than a mental note of this expense being related to business, as compared to a Starbucks stop for just Greg and me.

Then there’s Gumiyo, which I really wasted my time on last night. I know this will be anathema to Eric, but I like broadcasting our listings as broadly as possible. Gumiyo promotes itself as “Connecting Buyers and Sellers.” So, if there is a buyer out there who is using his phone rather than a Realtor, the MLS, Realtor.com, craigslist, Zillow, Trulia, a lit-up custom sign, or open houses to search for his new home, then I had better get my listings onto his phone! I signed up for the free version of Gumiyo and entered the details for our listing at 901 W Willetta.

The process took me way too long, and I’m the queen of shortcutting tasks like this. I use iClip on my Mac to store details about each of our listings, each in its own Clipping Set. So I thought that I already had everything I needed to easily set up this listing. But the site was kludgy for me. It kept failing to accept my photo uploads if I included captions. I tried several times until suddenly all the photos showed up at once, many duplicated for each time I had tried to enter them. The detailed description of the house didn’t show up the first several times I entered it. And when I would try to save my work I’d get bounced back to the login screen. After about an hour of struggling with something that takes me 60 seconds in craigslist, I finally got the listing posted. But Gumiyo stripped out any mention of the home’s custom website, price or our phone number wherever that information shows up in our copy. So the copy for this house on this mobile site can be nonsensical in places.

Go to for more details, and to see many more pictures of this home’s beautiful features:

Well, that doesn’t make sense…
I read a little further and figured that I could keep this information in our listings by enrolling in the $9.95-a-month GumiyoPro, which will let me link to my website, get calls directly from prospects, plus get nifty pdf, “preprinted templates” that I can send to my own printer to create lovely black and white flyers promoting the listing number on Gumiyo.

I just can’t justify spending any more time or money on this one. There are 12,756 active MLS listings in the city of Phoenix. And how many more houses are being sold by owners? On Gumiyo, twenty listings total are returned when I set the search criteria for any house within ten miles of Phoenix. Gumiyo promotes itself as being so easy to use that you can create listings from your phone. Not only is this not worth pursuing as a real estate lister, but it’s not even worth going back to fix the gaps Gumiyo created by removing the information it wants to sell.

So that leaves Vitalist for me to explore. Vitalist is a task management tool. This is the third task-list partner that Jott has linked up with. It looks like a good solution, but it will require some research to see if it’s the best solution. And even then, is it better than the system I have set up in MS Outlook? And even more important, where do any of these fit in with REST, which is what I shoulda been working on when I got distracted by Jott and its new partners.

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