Social media is the big buzz word these days, the place to be or be out of business if you believe the hype.
Reminds me of the internet craze of the second half of the ’90′s.
So called experts were predicting then that brick & mortar stores would be put out of business by Amazon.com, Buy.com and other sites like them. You had to get on the internet or supposedly be nowhere.
Well that eventually proved to be not entirely true. Today, not every successful business is on the internet, although most are. Some barely use email, but again most do.
Now the experts are saying you’ve got to be on social media to survive and be successful.
The current 600lb social media gorilla is Facebook. It just passed Google as the most visited website and has recently announced more features to challenge Google’s search dominance.
Another big social media site is Twitter.
There are thousands of investors on both though, that aren’t seeing any results.
Why?
Before the internet craze, some marketing genius created telemarketing. It was effective for a few years and then got to be so intrusive they passed laws to regulate it.
The internet came along and soon after another marketing genius created spam. Again, it was effective for a few years and then was regulated to control it.
Now, we’ve got people doing the same thing with social media. Some “marketing geniuses” are spamming users of social media intentionally.
What’s scary, is all the people that are UNINTENTIONALLY using social media to spam their followers and connections.
You see, social media is supposed to be about connecting and interacting with people of similar interests.
Take real estate investors. You want to connect with people that know someone looking to sell or buy property or has money to invest.
Connecting though, isn’t the same as spamming!
We all know what spam is – the sending of solicitations over and over again.
Well, sending out the same message over and over again doesn’t make it not spam just because you’re doing it through social media!
I see so many real estate investors just blasting out their solicitations and accomplishments, thinking they’re connecting with people – but they aren’t.
Do you know Facebook’s strategy to challenge Google’s search dominance?
They’re going to allow users of Facebook to search for topics just like Google, but the results will be based on what your connections “like”.
Stop and think about that for a moment. Would you rather try or buy something that pops up on Google that someone manipulated SEO to get to the top of Google rankings,
or
recommendations of what your sphere of influence likes?
Now ask yourself, what are you doing to get your sphere to recommend you instead of spamming them into ignoring you?

Speed of Implementation
I think a major challenge that most of us have, myself included, is that we think we must learned every little detail about something before we can actually get started. I’m not sure if it’s a fear of failure or if it seems to complicated to do or maybe you grew up being told,”If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.”
The reality of the situation is that we need to know just enough to get started. Then we must immediately put it to practice in our life, relationships, and businesses. Through the act of putting this new found knowledge into play, you actually learn even more, you make mistakes that force you to continue learning, and most importantly you get the results you are looking for much quicker.
Here is an example of what I did with what I learned at the last Renegade Detroit Investor meeting. Drew and Jared gave a great presentation on building fan pages. It included how to build simple fan pages, create a landing page, implement video into your fan page, setup rss feeds, setup blogs, and most importantly, give your vanity url.
I have never done any of this before in my life. I went home that night and implemented 90% of what they told me to do. I admit I got a little stuck so I had to wait until later that day to get some help. I say later that day because I was up till 4am in the morning. Jared answered a few of my technical questions and I finished the last 10%.
At this point it had been about 15 hours since the meeting. By 9pm at night, 24 hours after the Renegade Detroit Investor meeting I had 31 fans and my vanity url which was awesome.
Check it out here:
Detroit Real Estate Fan Page
The exciting part is I already have people interacting on my fan page and asking me questions. I feel that I will get some business out of this tool very shortly. All of this happened because I immediately implemented what I had learned.
I’m not saying this to brag. Personally, I need to be aggressive with my speed of implementation because I know that if I don’t start right away, it will be the project that never gets done. This is a challenge for me constantly with all of the demands on my time.
So for me to be successful, I must have a high speed of implementation.
For those of you who missed this meeting, I did record a few clips that I posted on Renegade Detroit Investors Fan Page.
Check them out here:
Metro-Detroit Real Estate Club Fan Page
Be a Renegade,
Jeremy Burgess
The Detroit Market Expert