I recently spoke to a group of Real Estate Agents at a firm in Charlotte. There was a pretty good crowd as their BIC strongly suggested they come, and there was no cost to them. I got heckled pretty good, and the overarching sentiment in the crowd was that Social Media was a fad, and they could ignore it because it will go away.
Now, I have already preached at length about the fact that Generation Y (all 60 million of them) will buy more homes in the next decade then all other demographics combined in this blog post, and the fact that they practically live on social networks – so I won’t go there.
The focus of this post is the fact that Social Networking is NOT a FAD. It has been around for almost 20 years. Don’t believe me, here’s a break down:
1989: IRC – Internet Relay Chat – Allowed College students to chat via internet chat.
80’s – Early 1990’s: BBS , Prodogy, and Compuserve – Share files, access news
1993-94: AOL Chat Rooms
1995: Classmates.com
1996: ICQ, and AOL Instant Messenger
1997: SixDegrees.com 1st to allow users to create profiles, list their Friends
1999: Napster – Peer to Peer File Sharing
2001: Ryze.com was launched to help people leverage their business networks.
2002: Friendster (Social compliment to Ryze)
2003: LinkedIn and MySpace
2004: Flickr – Photo Sharing
2004: Facebook (Harvard Only)
2005: YouTube
2005: Ning
2005: Facebook expanded to High School Networks
2006: Facebook expanded to Everyone
2006: Twitter
2006: Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious
I remember avoiding studying at college in 1989 because I was on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) socially interacting with interesting people on other campuses clear across the country. This was long before I ever saw my first web page on the “World Wide Web”.
So, as you can see, social networking is not new, it’s NOT a fad, and it is not going away. If you choose to ignore networks such as Facebook and Twitter, you are ignoring the largest population of home buyers out there.
Keep in mind that it does not matter whether or not Twitter (or Facebook) will be here in two years. Twitter and Facebook are just the vehicles for Social Networking. The vehicle is not important, it is the NETWORK of people you meet on these sites that is important.
If you start now, and Twitter becomes a fad, don’t sweat it. There will be something right behind Twitter, and you and YOUR NETWORK can all jump off the old Twitter bus and on to the next greatest thing. It all boils down to people. People are the most important thing, and people are the ones that will work with you, and refer you more business.
Where’s it going from here? Let’s just say that in 2 years, you will either have a smartphone, or you will be on your way out of business. If Gen Y can’t text you, or tweet you, they will find someone else who they can.
Newsflash: Email is already passé.
Gen Y is playing with their phones like we played Pong, and Pac Man. However, the games are much more advanced. You might hear them talking about BrightKite, or Foursquare. These are location based apps that use GPS to track your exact position. On Foursquare, whoever “checks in” to a location the most often becomes “Mayor” of that location. You strive to obtain “badges” as status in the game. It becomes a competition, and there in lies the “fun”.
Call it silly, call it what you want, but things are moving at light speed now, and they show no signs of slowing down. Are you on the bus, or not?
Historical Timeline Sources: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html, http://socialmediarockstar.com/history-of-social-media
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