Right now there is a small core group looking at the feasibility of a real estate bar camp in the Atlanta area.  If we can put it together, the event will be held this fall… September or October is the likely time frame.

Here are a couple of posts on Active Rain with more info about #rebcATL (that is the ‘official’ Twitter hashtag for the event).

• Should Atlanta have a reBarCamp?

• A little more about an Atlanta rebarcamp

On the second link there is a webform asking about what you might want for a rebc.  We’d love to get your feedback in order to make a better experience for everyone.  It also give you the opportunity to volunteer…  There will be lots of opportunities for volunteers from now until the event concludes… and then I’m sure planning will need to begin for the 2011 #rebcATL.

We are also putting together a FaceBook Official Page for #rebcATL.

But I’m not happy with the site conversion.  Or maybe it is that I’m not happy with the conversion tracking.  I’m not happy with the engagement.  Or maybe it is that I’m not happy with the engagement I can see.  I know that I’m not happy with the visuals… and some of the widgets/plug-ins/features…

Mostly, what it comes down to is that I’m not happy with my overall strategy. There isn’t one.  At no point did I sit down and make a plan.  It has been patchwork… and it doesn’t seem to match.  That needs to change…

Over the last few months I have managed to build a lot of great pieces.  WordPress, Joomla, Posterous, Tumblr, Flickr, FaceBook, Twitter and other services/sites and networks are all great… individually.  I’m not saying that I like all of the pieces I’ve made… just that the pieces have a lot of performance capability.  In a couple of cases, I may tap some experts on particular platforms.

I’m interested to see where everything will go…  I haven’t made the plan yet.

And that is where the next step comes in…

MindMapping.

En Vogue | Free Your Mind

I’ll be using an open source program called FreeMind to lay out my ideas for website strategy.  I have used it to put together some presentations about various subjects.  It let’s me brainstorm ideas, and then organize them into something more cohesive.  In effect, it is a ‘radial outline’.  We all remember outlining things in school.  Outlining was a great tool for organizing content, but it was very linear.

The MindMap allows that outline to become a hub and spoke.  And then the ideas on the spokes can become new hubs.  This means that it becomes very easy to see which ideas have the most connection to others…  Unlike a linear outline, the MindMap allows ideas to connect to other ideas, rather than just be a subset of one thought.

But there is another step…

Implementation.

3run – Free Your Mind

And it always involves faith.  The faith that it can be done… that I can do it (or find the right source to do it).  The faith that it will work (or that it can be tweaked to work).  Of course, the faith will be subject to measurement (analytics) and modification…  But I will be ready to step into it… into the void of the unknown.

I am in the process of MindMapping my website strategy.  I am also analyzing tools and techniques.  As the strategy emerges, I know that there will be some pain and a learning curve… sometimes it may get pretty steep.

But this is where my business comes from.

from Lane’s Active Rain blog

I just got back from vacation… Thank you, I enjoyed it very much… The family went to Disney World for a week. While there, I was experimenting (again) with Live Blogging.

Basically, using my BlackBerry, I was uploading pictures, videos and text posts to a blog throughout the day. I did take a few moments out of the fun, but much of what was included were pictures or videos I wanted anyway. And they were things I wanted to share with friends and family (spelled M-O-M).

And that kept creeping a thought into my mind…

Information is speeding…

A couple of centuries ago, news was largely verbal. It might take years for a story to reach people that weren’t local to where it happened. The news would tavel with people that saw it or heard about it and it had to wait until a person took the story to the recipient.

And then, the printing press allowed news to be printed and distributed. As fast as the paper could move, the news could move. It went from the speed of the house to the speed of the train or ship…

A century ago, electricity transformed the speed of news and events. The telegraph, and then the telephone, allowed news to go where ever the wires went… at the speed of electricity… Finally, if a story happened in New York, the news could be in San Fransicso the same day.

When that combined with printing, pictures could go around the world on the same day. Many cities had newspapers publishing twice a day… if it happened in the morning, it could be in your newsbox in the afternoon…

TV changed everything. And when the satellite truck showed up, “Live” replaced “Film at 11″ in the jargon of TV news reporters. TV cameras could capture news live and beam it all over the world. Just a couple of decades ago, this created a massive change in our expectations of news and how it would be relayed.

And then came blogs… The internet really took things to the next level. Even with cable and satellite TV, there are a limited number of channels. And there are a limited number of satellite trucks and live feeds. Maybe there are a few dozen, maybe a few hundred… But the news had to be defined by someone else.

No longer was news defined by someone else…

My family going to Disney World wasn’t cranking the dials at CNN… but, my mom wanted to know what was happening. An rebarcamp in Raleigh or Atlanta or Dallas isn’t bringing out the Fox News satellite trucks… but, there are agents all over the country that DO want to see what happens. Of course there are thousands of examples…

The point is that there are LOTS of things that are news for someone.

A long time ago we counted on someone visiting to tell them about it. Then there was a phone call or a mail with some pictures. Then there might have been a blog post that day or the next where they could see the pictures from the event.

Technology now allows us to broadcast… EVEN LIVE from devices like our mobile phones. We can write posts, add pictures and videos. We can narrate. We can comment.

the question is… “How can we use this?”

Live, from Lane in the field…

Lester and Sylvester at Dino-Rama in Animal Kingdom

But it isn’t the only platform.  In fact, before there was Posterous, there was Tumblr.  And they are very similar.  Similar enough that many think that Posterous took direct aim at Tumblr when they introduced their platform.

There are some things that Posterous has done VERY well… to start with, the emial post capability of Posterous is amazing.  I’m not going to run over all of the options… it is another post… but let’s just say that you can upate any combination of Flickr, FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, your own blog and/or Posterous with one email.  In fact, I would say that Posterous is one of the best syndication tools available.  With just a couple of clicks from your mobile phone, you can syndicate content all over the web…

Tumblr has moved the other direction.  It is a great aggregation tool.  You can pull in content from 5 or more sources to one place.  That is a very nice option.  It is one of the best aggregators available.  But there is something else that Tumblr does better than Posterous (although there is erosion there).  That comes down to “the look”.  Tumblr has great theme options.  Posterous has made their platform (kind of) compatible with the Tumblr themes, but they aren’t quite there yet…  yet.

The bottom line is that both platforms are pretty cool.  They both do much the same thing, but they do it differently and with different strengths and weaknesses.

1 : to subject to or manage as a syndicate
2 a : to sell (as a cartoon) to a syndicate or for publication in many newspapers or periodicals at once; also : to sell the work of (as a writer) in this way <a syndicated columnist> b : to sell (as a series of television programs) directly to local stations 

— syn·di·ca·tion \ˌsin-də-ˈkā-shən\ noun

— syn·di·ca·tor \ˈsin-də-ˌkā-tər\ noun

source

Syndication is another part of a solid social media and social networking strategy. One of the biggest pitfalls of social media and social networking is maintaining a presence in many locations.  It can be a serious time suck.  Updating a bunch of site individually could take hours…  Even just keeping up with all of the profiles could be more than many people could handle.

Luckily, there are some tools that can make life WAY easier.  Posterous, AtomKeep and FriendFeed are three that come to mind…

Since we recently talked about FriendFeed, as an aggregator, we can start there…  It is unique, in that it both aggregates AND syndicates on multiple platforms. Through FriendFeed, you can make a post from Twitter show up on FaceBook, and dozens of other sites.  You can also have posts or activity from other sites reflected onto Twitter (or where ever… Twitter is used as an example).  Bringing in the data from a bunch of sites is aggregation, while putting the collected information out to a bunch of sites is syndication.

AtomKeep is unique in that it is designed to only handle one aspect of your social media presence… your profile.  Through AtomKeep, you can write the profile once and then syndicate it out to many sites.  Updating can be done in one step, rather than individually updating dozens of profiles…  There are limitations, since the least flexible platform rules all others, but it is a great way to handle to platforms on which you are least active.

Finally, the new kid on the block is Posterous.  It also has an aggregation capability, but the cool part is that you can email anything to Posterous and have it automatically routed to the appropriate sites (on which you participate).  Pictures to Flickr, FaceBook and Twitter.  Videos to YouTube.  Blog Posts… you get the idea.

The key to maiing effective use of social media and social networking is to be efficient.  Getting your message out to multiple platforms in one step is part of that efficiency…

However… Another aspect of an effective social media presence is INTERACTION.  Don’t just spam your message all of the time.  Remember to spend time interacting on the sites to which you are paying the most attention.

from Lane’s Active Rain blog