Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Day 5 is underway of the #blessing experiment on Twitter (I don’t use my phone much on weekends, so no tweets, really), and it’s continuing to have interesting effects.  For those interested and tweet-able, I’m @cjlehi; follow me at your own risk.

One of the things that has occurred to me about this is that one acquires a certain reputation from doing it.  The rep is that I am a positive guy.  I tweet blessings.  I’m constantly looking for blessings, for positive things to communicate to the world.  I am doing this in what I lovingly call Channel Three, which is the most public of all the ways to communicate.  I am globally declaring that I have blessings and that I notice those blessings.  I am going to do this for two weeks, but the reality is that once I start doing this it is likely that I will continue, unless it absolutely does not work at all, and it’s already a bit late for that to be the case.

I will be encouraged to continue because I have staked out some ground here.  Nobody else that I know is doing anything like this; at least, the #blessing hashtag is not what you’d call overused, and nobody else on earth is numbering them off every day to keep track (at least not on Twitter).   I confess I would like to be known for being a positive person.  Therefore the odds are that this will become my thing, my schtick, my modus operandi.

Today is every bit as good as day 4.  It is officially a trend.  Time will tell if it is a pattern, or possibly even a system.  But I’m hopeful.

I’ve posted before on being positive, on being cheerful, even (although my tag cloud doesn’t think so – I have stuff on work and discipline and perseverance, but the word “happiness” does not appear, which probably ought to tell me something), and controlling my responses to the daily load of crap that happens to me, just like it happens to everyone.  Over the past couple of years I’ve made a study of happiness and positivism, reading books and blogs that focus on the subject, of which there are many.  They’ve helped, but what they ultimately have in common is that the problem is me.  Either I change, or none of it will work.

Change takes work.  If you want to change yourself, you have to work at it.  You have to spend time with the books and the people that are in the place that you want to go.  If I want to be positive and cheerful, regardless of the interesting stuff going on around me (and really, when is there NO interesting stuff going on around us?), then I have to do the work to keep looking at the bright side of things.  Because there is always a bright side.

And that leads me to the next two weeks.  I’m trying an experiment.  Since I spend a lot of time on Twitter, I am going to use that to focus on blessings.  I will be tweeting every time I notice a blessing in my life, which is probably going to explode my volume of tweets, so you might want to put me on stun for a couple weeks.  Although, you know, it might be interesting for you, too.  I have some quirky blessings to mention already.

Because this is a research project, an experiment in raising my base level of happiness, I will be periodically reporting the results in this space.  My hypothesis is that it will do wonders for me psychically, but also that it will increase the success of my physical-world ventures, which could do with some increasing, let me tell you.

Let’s get started.

P.S. If you’re into that sort of thing, you can follow me on Twitter, @cjlehi.  My tweets do not cross-post to Facebook, in case you were wondering.

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 at @chrisjoneslehi, and I’ll follow back.  You can friend me at www.facebook.com/chrisjoneslehi.

Cj

P.S. I’m thinking of changing my legal name to “Chris Jones Lehi”.  It’s just so dang much easier for people to find me that way.

Just kidding, Dad.

P.P.S. I’ll have Volume 2 of this post next week, with examples of what to do and what not to do on Facebook and Twitter, and how I think Realtors and mortgage agents can use those tools most successfully.  Stay tuned.  And for Heaven’s sake, get the opinions of some of those above that really know what they’re talking about.

It’s the name.  Really.  Twitter is doomed because it has a lame name.  Twitter?  Tweets?  Tweeters?

Silly.

Let me parenthetically add that I love Twitter, permanently have TweetDeck open and running, tweet about 10-15 times a day, and have met some of the most interesting and affable people in the world thanks to this great little piece of social media technology.  I like Twitter better than Facebook, though for different reasons. So it’s not like I’m a social mediaphobe, or that I can’t get into the technology, despite being 41 years old in 48 hours.

But TWITTER?  Geesh, it’s like a name my 7-year-old thought up.  I seriously think that the name itself is stunting its growth, and making it the butt of jokes.  A couple days ago, the US Secretary of State joked that she “wouldn’t know a twitter from a tweeter”, and this was not only acceptable, it was funny.  Ha ha.  The most important communications medium of the nascent (and apparently declining) Iranian Revolution, and the US Secy of State thinks it’s funny to joke about how she doesn’t know anything about it.  This is like “M” joking that she never reads any of the gobbledygook in the intelligence reports.

I bet you $10 that if it were called “Zip”, and we were all “zipping” because we are “zippers”, or something a bit less…kindergarteny…than “Twitter”…there would be far fewer jokes about it and more people taking it seriously.  How seriously can you take “tweeting”?  I mean, I’m an evangelist for this technology, and even I feel silly when I’m explaining it to people.

Okay, so “doomed” is a bit harsh.  I think Twitter has a long life ahead of it, despite Internet gurus pronouncing it moribund because it doesn’t have a 100% participation rate.  I think it’s a fantastic business tool, and I’ll keep using it no matter what it’s called, and I will not be alone.

But part of me will always wonder how much the name of the thing is cooling its growth.

@TylerOsby asked a question this morning on Twitter – “how long do you work every day?”  Apropos of this, I also read an article this morning by Tim Ferriss, who wrote The 4-Hour Work Week, about how he works, um, 4 hours a week.  Obviously.  But anyway, what I found was that I could not give a straight answer to Tyler’s question.  I’ve had trouble with this for a while, and it’s getting worse.

On the surface, it seems simple.  You work when you’re working, and you aren’t working when you’re not working.  Oh, if only.  Here’s an example: right now, am I working?

I don’t know.

The blog, in general, is a marketing vehicle to let people know that I have a certain level of expertise in mortgages.  I do.  In fact, I’m very good at them.  I’ve been doing them a long time, in several capacities, and I understand them well from many sides.  But the part of this blog that establishes that credibility is primarily the RateWatch segment, which I love, but which this post is not.  So is this post work or not?

Um.

There’s so much more.  In 20 minutes, I’m meeting with Nathan Larsen from Classic Books and Gifts to talk about a really innovative book contest we’re putting together.  There is practically no chance that this contest will pay me any money, though it is about 90% certain that I’m going to be headmanning it.  It will take volumes of time and some money.  Is the meeting work?  It will be benefitting the bookstore.  It will employ (eventually) many people.  It has lots of outgrowth possibilities that could make many of the people I know better off.  It’s also fun.  So what is this meeting?  Work?

I’m going out to garden at some point today.  Is that work?  I spent half an hour reading articles this morning and some of those led to this post.  Was that work?

I know there’s all this fancy talk about balance these days, how to balance your professional and personal life, how to balance family with work, how to keep your different compartments separate and weighing about the same.  Perhaps it’s just me, but I find that philosophy so stupid my eyes cross.  I can’t for one second separate all the different parts of my life.  Practically no activity that I engage in has no spiritual component.  Practically every activity has some family aspect.  When I’m with my family, much of the time, my phone is on and on my hip.  Am I working?  I’m on call.  Isn’t that working?  On the other hand, when I’m sitting in the office, often I’m discussing the Jazz with my brother.  Is that working?

Much of what I do every day produces no direct financial benefit.  Nearly everything I do EVERY day produces some indirect financial benefit, and the part that doesn’t produces other kinds of benefits in friendships, quality of life, larger vegetables, and suchlike.  It’s not a job, that’s for sure.  But isn’t “work” the thing you add to the universe to stop it from going straight to crap?  Am I not ALWAYS working?

I need help here, obviously.

So I told Tyler that my first communication with the outside world happens between 6:30 and 7am, and my last communication between 6pm and 11pm, depending on the day, which was true but not what he asked.  He responded that that was a long day.  I replied that everyone’s day is that long; mine just has more in it than most people’s.  I got the sense, though, that that wasn’t very satisfying to him.  It wasn’t all the way for me, either.

Can you help?