Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

This is a poor man’s attempt to deal with a weighty subject that has been put through the wringer in great discussions at Amber Naslund’s excellent blog as well as, today, by David Spinks.  Among, doubtless, many others.

Those of you that read regularly know that I get criticized here.  You probably suspect, if you follow the comments section, that I allow pretty much any comment, no matter how critical.  And you would be right.  I have gotten heat for it from “professionals” that have told me that my blog should be relentlessly positive and cheerful if it’s to be a good marketing vehicle, and for all I know, they’re right.  But I can’t be that way.  I am a positive person, and I have faith that things are going to be okay.  But when I’m sad, I’m sad.  When I screw up, and someone calls me on it, I put that out there with everything else.

Maybe this makes me some sort of hero.  I doubt it.  That’s certainly not the intent.

I tend to be motivated by connection and community, and I believe that those connections cannot come about except in the presence of authenticity.  If I am not willing to be who I really am, then my connections will be false.  This is as true on Twitter as it is at the corner bookstore.  I don’t want people to think that I am perfect.  But, no, that’s not quite right.

I don’t want to present a false image of myself in order to get people to think I am one thing or another.  That’s better.  What they do think of me I want to be their decision based on real things, not my attempt to appear to be something.  This holds, I believe, for my company as well as myself.

In order to do this correctly, there are things I cannot present.  I have strong views on Coke.  I have opinions on the Red Wings.  I occasionally get red-faced discussing Hungarian domestic policy.  Some of those things are not good things to display to the general public, for a number of reasons, but mostly, I think, because that’s not a level of transparency I grant to everyone.  I restrict some things.  We all do.  This can be just fine – depending.

Depends on why.

If you restrict the fact that you’ve had an affair with your married staffer, John Ensign, because it harms your position as a vocal proponent of marital fidelity, then that is pretty much lying.  That’s inauthentic.  You are pretending to be something you’re not.  If you restrict the fact that you think abortion is murder, for another example, but you do so because you know that this is a debate that cannot be had without a level of trust among the debaters, this is not inauthenticity, it is opacity.  Opacity is not necessarily inauthentic.

For me, it’s like this – if you’re trying to be as real as possible within the bounds of what discussion you’re having, then you’re fine.  If you’re covering things up because they undermine your position, then you’re not fine.  In one binary check: is it about you, or about the community?

Authentic is about the community.  In fact, community can only exist among those that are authentic with one another.  A certain level of transparency is required as well, of course, and the more transparent the members of a community are, the deeper and more powerful will be the connections in that community.  But true transparency isn’t required for community formation.  If it were, we would all live in glass houses.  That part of the house that is glass, though, needs to be pretty clean, or the distorted view will eventually break the community apart.

P.S. This means you, buttkissers.  Authenticity doesn’t mean constant sunshine.  It does mean a willingness to tell the truth even when that truth will be hard for someone you care about to hear it.  You can be eccentric, even abrasive, and still be a part of a vibrant community as long as the eccentricity and abrasiveness is authentic – really a part of you – rather than just an attempt to get attention.  We’re not stupid.  We’ll be able to tell.

More from Twitter.  I got into it a bit last night with @curtisfinancial (Cathy Curtis) over her comment, “Kind of like the hordes of mortgage salespeople selling no income no asset loans,no money down thinking they were helping people.”

Well, I sold those loans.  I GOT one of those loans.  I wouldn’t be living in my house (5 years now) had I not got one.  And that leads me to my question: would I be better off if I had kept renting?  Would most people be better off if they had kept renting instead of buying a house?

I used to be sure that the answer to this question was no.  As I chat with people out there, though, I start to wonder.  Do a Google of “ruined lives” and “foreclosure”.  I got more than 3000 hits for that combination.  It appears, then, that being foreclosed on ruins your life.  This is something I wish I’d known before I made that (in retrospect) silly investment in Payson.

The funny part is, I don’t feel like my life is ruined.  I’m not volunteering to lose my home, here, to prove a point, but my personal toxic mortgage, which has just re-set to a much larger payment, may make it impossible for us to stay here.  I don’t think it will come to that, but it could.  Much of this is my fault, because we did what a lot of people did when we refinanced and took equity out of the home.  We had good reasons (we all do).  It’s true that even if I had that equity I couldn’t refinance, though, because I’m self-employed and report piddly to Uncle Sam on my taxes, as most self-employed people do.  So I’m stuck.

I’m a victim.

And I’d still rather, and my wife would still rather, and all my children would still rather have lived here for the last five years than have stayed in the two rental houses we lived in before this.  This is better.

Hence my question: isn’t it better to have bought and lost than never to have bought at all? Is my life “ruined” if I get foreclosed on?  Is anyone’s life ruined by this?

I’m serious.  What do you think?

I do, seriously, love Twitter.

One of the things I love about it is the ability to monitor the conversation about my company, and respond quickly when someone has a problem.  Okay, not MY company, because frankly, nobody on Twitter is talking about us.  But my industry, yes.  There is a LOT of complaining going on about mortgage people, companies, brokers, all of that.

I didn’t really have any idea.  Most of the time when people come to me they’re not complaining.  Afraid, yes.  Worried that things are bad and not going to get better.  But they don’t come into my office and say “you never explain anything, your service sucks, and the entire mortgage process makes me feel faintly nauseous.”

This is, however, how they feel.  And I didn’t know it.

I had a short back-and-forth with @mototom (Tom Parker), in which he said, in part, “Same old — daily auto-dialer calls with pre-recorded voicemail messages. Crap follow-up once you’re working with them.”  And this was worse: “But it may be impossible to humanize it. No matter what, doesn’t it still come down to numbers plugged into a machine?”

Oh.  My.

Now I admit in this space all the time that I am not perfect.  I am far from as disciplined as I would like to be, and that lack of discipline shows up most often in communication, where I don’t do as well as I should at keeping my clients apprised of what is going on.  But I hope – I pray – that my clients don’t feel that they’re not human to us.

I guess I had better ask.

No, Tom, you are not a couple numbers plugged into a machine.  You should not be treated that way.  You should never feel that way at all, ever, at any point in the process.  That you do feel that way is a terrible indictment of mortgage brokers and loan officers, and on behalf of the entire industry, let me offer you a sincere apology, and my personal commitment to do things better in the future.

So that even if we never work together, your willingness to speak out will have helped someone.

Okay, it’s not today.  But being a newbie to Twitter I have been reading a great deal about social media and branding, and trying to decide if it’s something I want to – or need to – engage in.  So far only my toes are wet.  I have 8 followers.  But 6 of them are people I didn’t know before, and all of them are people with interesting things to say and good advice, so that’s enriched my life right there.

Then I read this, and I have to say, if you’re considering Twitter or any one of another dozen or so social media, please read this first.

I’m adding Daily Axioms to my reading list, and I’m following Drew Gneiser.  I can learn a lot from this man.