image courtesy of Brad Coy
Although Andy did his best attempt to sabotage my attendance to REBarCamp, I made it. It was an incredible event, but for those of you who couldn’t make it (or were attending one of the other excellent break-out sessions), here’s what I got out of it.
Schwag
I know this is all what you really care about. The laminates are awesome, great design, great idea and a great icebreaker. So happy I scored a killer t-shirt too because I think I may have packed a little too light. I scored a killer pen/flashlight/level courtesy of RMC Vanguard. Yahoo! provided some tasty mints. Okay, fine, you don’t care about the schwag…
Social Networking Session
The first break out session I attended was covering Social Networking. Big surprise that Teresa Boardman and Jeff Turner had lots to say 🙂 I know the people I was sitting with were all very interested in learning more about how exactly Teresa and Jeff use Flickr as a social network. I’m on there, but not very active, but after learning a few of the tips and tricks, I’ll definitely be spending some time. These were the recommendations I took away:
- Create an uber-group for your listing photos with sub-groups for each individual listing
- Take TONS of local area photos since that’s what the general public is going to be most interested in
- Tag, tag, tag! People will find your photos via search and good tags are the best way to find them
A couple of stories I heard were of people taking pictures at conferences and their Flickr photo sets showing up higher in Google than the conference web site. Perhaps we can do that with REBarCamp…
General Discussion
Next I met with Reggie, NikNik and Chad from MyTechOpinion. They did a very brief product pitch for MyTechBase.com, which is a new real estate product and service directory. Think DMOZ, but covering all the various products and services for the real estate industry. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll be able to help out in building the directory. Then we had a great general discussion about the evolution of marketing in the real estate industry.
Blog Networks
In this session, we discussed group blogs and networked blog sites. I see brokerage networked blog sites as a great recruiting tool because many new agents I encounter would love to get into blogging, but desire a bit of help getting started, so having a company provided solution could be great.
Guerrilla Marketing
Mark Eckenrode hosted a great Guerrilla Marketing session covering a ton of free/inexpensive marketing tactics that can complement any current marketing you may be doing. We discussed setting goals and making your path to accomplish that goal as easy as possible. It was definitely a bit of information overload, so I’m hoping Mark will give even more details on his site.
My Conclusion
REBarCamp was incredible. It was a great way to spend some time getting to know a ton of people and have great, more intimate conversations about all things real estate technology and marketing. It even looks like REBarCamp Texas will be happening October 22nd! I look forward to hearing about more of these and working on getting one close to home once life settles down.
Thanks to everyone who made the event what it was.
