Concepts of How To Use Some Major Social Networks

Hey there!

In this post, I'm going to link to several posts that describe how to use some of the major social network sites. The are good overall starter points and you can really benefit from taking a brief look.

eHow - How to use facebook

bNet - How to get started using LinkedIn

The following link is a little different. It shows how one journalist uses twitter for his profession.

twitter - How it's used for journalists

As you might guess when you read and review these websites, there are many ways to use social networking. How can one figure it all out?!



I am distilling these different general purpose uses and refining them for the real estate professional. We'll be conducting training classes, but more importantly, coaching solutions to help you implement social networking and get a positive return on your investment (ROI) of time, effort and money. For more information, drop me an email at jim@perceptiveinsights.com.

Also, take the opportunity to join the Real Estate Insights Social Network. There, you can post questions, create forums for areas of interest that are important to you. Right now, it's an experiment. I'd like any and all comments or suggestions on how to make the network something that real estate professionals, real estate consumers and real estate activists can use.


Best,

Jim Herrera
______________________________

Subscribe to my blog and podcast at:
http://www.perceptiveinsights.com

And follow me at the following networks:
http://profile.to/jimherrera
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jbherrera
http://jbherrera.myplaxo.com
http://twitter.com/jbherrera

How to Manage Your Social Profiles and Create Virtual Business Cards

Just a really quick post about managing your social profiles. In my class, "Let's Get Social", I mention some tools that will help people manage their social networks. Here's an article in Mashable that has links to those sites as well as some more information that would be useful.



Of course, if you have any questions, please drop me an email.

Best,

Jim Herrera

______________________________

Subscribe to my blog and podcast at:
 http://www.perceptiveinsights.com

And follow me at the following networks:
 http://profile.to/jimherrera
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jbherrera
 http://jbherrera.myplaxo.com
 http://twitter.com/jbherrera

Social Networking with twitter

For those of you who aren't familiar with twitter. Let me briefly explain what it is and how it might be useful for you.

According to wikipedia:

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Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, or through applications.

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Rather than a full-blown blog, like this one, twitter enables you to send important business information to your clients or business contacts on a consistent and steady basis.

To start, you and your contacts need to set up a twitter account. Don't worry, it's not that difficult and it's free. Simply go to twitter.com and sign up. Once that's done, you ask your business contacts to do the same.

After you and your contact have done so, you can "follow" each other. Then, depending how you've set up your account, you and your clients will be able to automatically get each others' microblogs - "tweets".

It takes a little practice and patience, but twitter is a great way to stay in touch. I use this to stay in touch with MLSListings clients as well as people interested in how to use social networking for real estate.

If you're interested in obtaining a larger following there's a new service I'm trying. It's called tweetgetter. I just started using it myself and its starting to work already.

If you'd like more information on how to use twitter for real estate connect with me at any of the social networks below.

Happy tweeting!

Best,

Jim Herrera

______________________________

Subscribe to my blog and podcast at:






And follow me at the following networks:











A Home Is NOT an investment vehicle.

Hopefully, this doesn't turn into a screaming rant. But I needed to get this concept into the blogosphere.

Point 1
Traditionally, single family home real estate was NOT meant to be an "investment vehicle". Single family homes were meant to be ... well ... homes! Places you live in for 10, 15, 20, even 30 years. That was the tradition. That's how mortgages were originally designed.

Point 2
Most everyone has forgotten the lessons learned from "greed gone wild" of the late 1990's dot com boom and bust. Do you remember? During that time people wanted so desperately to make easy money that they were willing to drop almost any amount of money into almost any type of dot com company.

Wall Street experts were quick to point out all the problems with investing in these untested technologies. "Sure they're cool," they said, "but as you're unsophisticated investors. You'll lose everything. You should leave the investing to the professionals."

Well, guess what, this time around with the real estate bubble, we allowed the "professionals" to create these new types of investments. And as we eventually discovered, these real estate securitized investment vehicles were built upon the same type of bogus promises that the dot com companies used in the late 90's. Only the stakes were MUCH bigger. When the dot com bubble burst, individuals lost their money. When the real estate bubble burst, EVERYBODY is losing. ARGH!

OK that was a screaming rant. Sorry. Let's go back to basic here.

Back to Basics
If we look at real estate as a home - not a highly volatile stock investment - a different picture is apparent. Pricing for residential real estate have risen at a steady, NORMAL price increase. For example, let's look at the San Jose DMA. Here you can see a steady 4% increase in price over time. (Source: Zillow.com)


And, as we begin 2009 and move forward, the prices of housing will undoubtedly rise, albeit at a similar steady growth rate.

Additionally, homeowner equity is continuing to rise as seen in the graph above. (Source: Zillow.com)

As real estate professionals, educate your clients about this. A house is a home that builds equity over a long period of time. A house is NOT an investment vehicle with a 12% year over year return on equity.

If you're in the Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Benito, Monterey or Santa Cruz counties, your REALTOR(r) associations should be able to help you with these statistics. MLSListings, the MLS is always ready to help as well.