Social Media and Real Estate, Vol. 1

I only address this topic because I can't find a lot of good commentary out there about this specific subject. I'm also no great expert; my experience with social media is pretty small compared to the Great Lords of Twitter and the Ancient Kings of Facebook. I confess this.

On the other hand, since according to Mortgage Strategy only 19% of the real-estate industry is even kind of using social media (this from a tweet this morning), and from experience I can testify that 90% of that 19% is using it badly and doing harm to itself, I thought I might at least give my opinions about how social media might be used well in a real-estate context. I am certainly using these tools better than most in my industry, and that has translated into gigs at Zillow and the Daily Herald Newspaper, so apparently my ideas do not entirely suck. Take them for what they are worth.

Here's how I got to writing this:

From Seth Jenson, a really good Realtor in Colorado: "Chris, what do you think about Twitter vs. Facebook? Do you think I need to be on both?"

Seth-

Whoo. What a question.

Facebook is a terrific way for people to connect. I'm no huge FB-er; I have about 400 friends, which is not a big number by any stretch of the imagination. I don't spend a lot of time trying to find friends on FB, or I likely could have a couple hundred more. And maybe I ought to do that. Probably I ought to do that. But it depends on what I'm using Facebook for.

If I'm using Facebook to keep tabs on people I know - my family, my close friends here in town, a few of the guys I went to HS with - then I'm doing it the right way. You can't possibly keep track of the doings of 1000 people every day. Impossible. However, if one of the reasons for you to be on Facebook is that you want people to remember YOU, well, then you might want a few more friends. You'd want to update your status at least once a day, and probably more than once. These wouldn't all be real-estate updates. In fact, most of them would be about anything except real estate, and would be only for the purpose of strengthening relationships. It is those relationships that bring the referrals that make you successful, and coincidentally, it is those relationships that make your life richer and more rewarding, so that's a happy thing. Facebook makes strengthening those relationships easier than ever, so I would definitely be on Facebook.

Twitter is very different. I love Twitter, myself. I like Twitter better than Facebook. Where I post or comment about 5x a day on Facebook, I do that twice as much - or more - on Twitter. Twitter is a research tool as much as it is a communications network. I get a lot of my news from Twitter, most of my reading material, and have most of my online conversations there, even more than email. Now, again, it depends on what you're using the tool for. Twitter can be a huge and pointless waste of your time. It can also do you harm, I think. But if you use it with respect, I think it has the potential to be incredibly valuable.

Here are some examples. I am not a big noise on Twitter. I have fewer than 200 followers. I'm following only about 100 people. I determined when I got involved that I wouldn't try to amass a gigantic following until I had some idea what I was doing it for. I didn't know enough about Twitter to know what I was doing, so I figured I'd start by following some people that DID know, namely, those that have good blogs about social media. So I followed Amber Naslund, Olivier Blanchard, Beth Harte, and some others, and learned about what Twitter could do, and more importantly, what I should NOT do on Twitter.

Then I started using the search functions of TweetDeck - TweetDeck is an indispensable tool for using Twitter - to follow mortgage news. There were some interesting conversations that came out of that, which resulted in my following Tyler Osby, Dan Green, and Agentopolis and a few others. They are doing most of the blogging and commenting about what's going on in the mortgage industry. There were two or three other topics that I thought would be good (hobbies, etc.) so I started running searches on those as well. I've acquired my 160 or so followers through conversations, not spam. In fact, most of those that are following me would unfollow if I used Twitter to promote myself ad-style. But because I blog, many of them are reading what I write, and following them allows me to read what they write, get smarter, and engage them in conversation. Again, for me it is about the relationships. It's made me better at mortgages, even though I haven't spent a great deal of time on Twitter talking about mortgages per se.

Bottom line? Yes, you should be on Facebook and on Twitter. Figure out what you want these tools to do for you, and design a strategy to get them to do that. Expect it to take time. If you do it right, it will take a lot of it, and a fair amount of work as well. Farming does.

Good luck. Follow me on Twitter @chrisjoneslehi, or find me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/chrisjoneslehi.

@PaulRevere: The what are coming? Is this really you?

Over at #PDF09 (it's a new-media conference), there's lots of hoo-hawing over how world-altering Twitter and other social media are. I agree with all of this, but I have a caveat and a caution.

Caveat: the more possible sources of information, the more face-to-face contact will matter.

Caution: do not confuse your Facebook friends and your Twitter followers with people that will help you when it matters.

See what I mean?

Alec Ross said at PDF09 that Paul Revere would simply have tweeted instead of having to ride. Maybe he's right. But the genius of Revere was not that he communicated, but that the people in so many villages and towns knew him and trusted what he said. And let's not minimize this, either - a tweet is great, but a real man on a real horse riding through your town is a lot more attention-getting, and a lot more mobilizing. Revere wasn't interested in people knowing that the regulars were out, he was interested in people acting on that knowledge.

More timely: Iranians were tweeting and Facebooking and YouTubing like crazy, but the potential for revolution was only made real when they marched.

I believe that we're pushing over a very real threshold here with Twitter and other tools of social media. In most ways, I'm not really qualified to talk about this. I'm a mortgage guy, for Heaven's sake, not a consultant with Radian 6. What I know about Twitter and Facebook and FriendFeed and all that is just what I've observed myself and learned from an admittedly limited experience.

But in another way, I'm well placed for observing the effects of these things. I live in a small town, my office is less than a mile (2 stop signs) away from my home, and my life is interwoven with many of the little businesses that line Main Street. I know people that are well-versed in social media but not integrated into the place they actually live, and others that are ignorant of SM, but who have a vibrant place in the local community. I see the relative power of those personal, physical connections every single day, and with all due respect to Alec Ross, who is a much smarter guy than I am, I think that Paul Revere might still have chosen to ride.

This has lots of business and personal implications. My business is already ephemeral - nobody ever sees any of the money that changes hands in a mortgage transaction - and the electronic media I use for communication can only do so much to advance the relationships that I depend on for referrals. It's certainly easier for people to tweet me or email me a referral, but I've found that it's more likely that they'll give me one on the phone or in person. I become the product my company sells, and raving fans rave more often in the physical presence of the thing they're raving about.

As previously stated, I love Twitter and I'm an evangelist for social media. I think it is immensely powerful. But I do think we're running the risk now of having the engine revving at incredibly high speeds, but the clutch is engaged and the car is not moving. There are scads of information out there, more than ever before, coming at us at an impossible rate, yet our lives, the things we are and do, remain bounded by the same 24 hours and the same willingness - or unwillingness - to act.

RateWatch - Local Boy Makes Good!

Market: As noted last week, rates have been drifting higher, but today has seen a reversal in the bond market and I would expect that we would get some of last week back. We're up about 35 bps, which is geekspeak for "about half of an eighth of a point" when lenders get around to giving it back to us. We've been frozen at this level all morning, so I don't think there's any real news making this push.

Analysis: We had a good-sized selloff in bonds last week, but honestly people, it's not as big a deal as CNN says it is. The MSM always trumpets a move in bonds - either direction - as a Sign of the Apocalypse or a Vision of the Rapture, and you just have to tune that stuff out. If the market moves dramatically, so that we're talking about a move of .25% or more, the big news will be something else, and any move in rates will be drowned in it, except here, because on RateWatch rates are all we care about. Seriously, there's no way Maria Bartiromo is watching the FNMA 4.0 30-year bond for indications of how the latest pirate attack affects your refinancing prospects. That's what I do.

If the talking heads are talking mortgages, that means there isn't any significant news moving things, which almost certainly means that the movement is tiny. Amplified and outsized by newsmedia, but it's a tempest in a teapot.

Tidbit: You can follow me on Twitter now (@chrisjoneslehi), and I got my first big hit today when @alphaconsumer, also known as Kimberly Palmer of US News and World Report, blogged about rates and points and cited yours truly. Kudos to @dellojoio (Enoch Chapman) for turning me on to the possibilities of social media. Utah mortgages may never be the same.