There are a bunch of great questions coming up on the post announcing the new ActiveRain community pages. Some of the questions are easy to answer in writing, and others get a little complicated and tough to explain the answer.

We are going to do two webinars on the subject covering your questions. The first one will be Tuesday August 3rd at 12pm Pacific Time, 3pm Eastern Time. The second webinar will be held Wednesday August 4th at 10am Pacific Time, 1pm Eastern Time.

Please join me as I try to answer any questions you have about this newly launched area of ActiveRain.

Catherine, a consumer in Raleigh asked about hiring a real estate agent to sell her home. She said she'd give specifics if we wanted them, but I thought you guys might be able to give her some advice. I'm going to send her a link to this blog post, so let's give her some good solid advice and show her that ActiveRain agents are some of the most knowledgable and savvy in the business.....

Here is her question:

"Do you recommend using a full-service realty company?

Do you think it is better to use a realtor with a local company who has high-volume and high-dollar sales, or go with another top realtor who works for a national company, or go with a smaller team who work for another national company--possibly less savy about business, but sound savey about the internet."

So ActiveRain community, what say you? Can we help her out?

Shocking, huh? Rain is in the forecast for the Pacific Northwest.

July 7th, 2010 RainCamp will be making a stop in the City of Roses, Portland Oregon. Nestled near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, our neighbors to the South are no strangers to Rain, and Rain it will in the middle of Summer.

RainCamp is a full day conference packed with valuable content, presentations, and the most useful and applicable ideas and processes that you can implement immediately into your Social Media, Networking, Blogging Strategy, and Business Plan. RainCamp was created and developed for anyone in the Real Estate Industry looking for successful methods and tools to maximize and grow their online business in today's modern Real Estate Market.

Our headline speaker, Ben Kinney is a practicing real estate agent, not someone telling you what you should be doing, but someone showing you what he is doing. He's taken his business from 5 deals his first year to over 150 deals last year, only 5 short years later, using the techniques he shares with you at RainCamp.  This year he is on pace to do over 300 deals as he continues to refine these practices by innovating and continually challenging himself to find great new stuff to share with agents attending RainCamp. Have you ever wished a successful agent would show you exacly how he is leveraging social media to find new leads, convert existing leads and set himself apart from his competition? That's exactly what Ben does.....and he shares everything.

Expect to learn:

• How to use your Blog to find clients much closer in the buying process then a traditional internet lead
• How to find prospects on Facebook as well as how to use Facebook to increase lead conversion across your other marketing channels
• How to use remarkable branding to distinguish yourself from the crowd
• The history of ActiveRain and how our culture has evolved
• How to leverage ActiveRain to it's fullest and get the most from your RainMaker account
  

We hope to see you on July 7th in Portland, but you better sign up soon, because 9 of our last 10 events have sold out and we know how progressive Oregonians are, so this RainCamp is sure to be our 10th sellout.

(The venue is in downtown Portland and the first 50 people to sign up for Platinum seating will also get free parking in a garage across the street for the event.)

I'll leave you with what Damion Gettier with RE/MAX 1st REALTY of Roanoke, VA wrote to me one day after attending RainCamp DC recently:

"I put one idea to work this morning and already have a lead!  Is this possible?  I have done reasonably well with AR since starting last July but this is unbelievable."

Yes Damon, it's possible!

If you were waiting until the last minute to get your tickets for RainCamp Washington DC.....that last minute is quickly upon us. This Thursday, June 10th is our 9th RainCamp and sure to be our best one yet. Tickets are getting low, Platinum seating has sold out, and if DC is anything like our last 8 events, there will be a mad rush the next two days to secure those last minute tickets..........and if it's anything like many of our previous RainCamps, there will be people left without tickets.

We don't want that person to be you, so get signed up today if you aren't already.

One of the constructive criticisms that we've gotten from attendees of previous RainCamps is that we didn't focus enough on ActiveRain specifically. Sure, we talk about blogging and how to write posts that rank at the top of the search engines, but we never fully dived into the strength of ActiveRain. So for RainCamp DC, we've carved out a special part where we will focus exclusively on ActiveRain.

Another constructive criticism is that attendees never felt like they had a good chance to network with others in attendance. We always have a special after party, and we will do the same thing in DC, but many aren't able to stick around after and join us. So for RainCamp DC we are planning some cool networking sessions that allow those in attendance to meet the other professionals attending and make real life connections with other like-minded professionals interested in expanding their online presence as well.

Yes, we'll still be covering how to get your blogs to rank at the top of the search engines. We'll still be covering how to do the same thing for your website. Ben Kinney, one of our speakers and a Mega Agent from (the other) Washington, will still share with you how he is using Facebook to impact his business. We'll still show you some ways to utilize Twitter to reach consumers in your market. All of those things will still be covered.

We believe, with a few small tweaks, RainCamp DC is going to be our best RainCamp yet.

One question I get quite often is "what if I am very new to all of this social media stuff, am I going to be lost?"

I always answer the same......no! In fact, this is going to be a spring board to catch you up with most of your peers. It's going to help give you the confidence that your peers are using social media and blogging to close deals and have a positive impact on their business....and that you can do the same thing.

The flip side of that question is "I know it all, I'm not going to learn anything am I?" (OK, no one has ever said this to me.......but I know a few people thought that before they got to RainCamp)

I (would) answer the same thing.......then you owe it to your peers to come and share what you know because competition breeds innovation. By letting your peers know what's working for you today, that's how you will innovate to find that next thing that will carry the day tomorrow. We do these RainCamps with that in mind. We want to share everything we know so that we are pushed to learn the next tactic or technique that will lead to more business for our members.

I'll let J. Philip share his thougts with you on RainCamp NYC earlier this year.......He does a great job of reinforcing what I just said

We recently made a mistake by featuring a few posts that we believe violated our community guidelines, and by doing so we believe we harmed the reputation of this network of professionals. Our entire team apologizes for this and I take full responsibility as one of the posts was something I featured. 

As a result of this snafu we revamped our methodology for featuring posts and even added the 'suggest' button. In the future, we will make every effort to only feature posts that reflect our quest to "represent our industry in as true and professional of a light as possible".

This doesn't mean we will shy away from controversial posts or that we will stop defending our member's rights to express unpopular points of view. We don't always agree on things amongst our team, just like our members don't always agree on everything. Among our team we always strive to treat each other with respect and we expect our members to do the same. Varying opinions is part of what makes our community great. Respecting each other is what will allow us to continue to challenge the status quo and continue to refine our industry.

All that being said, our community guidelines have served us well to this point and a renewed focus on the tenets of our community are important as we choose which posts to feature. We know this, and we take it very seriously.

ActiveRain Success Means Different Things to Different People.

But every one of you is ultimately looking for closed transactions and as a result, CHECKS, from your participation on ActiveRain. On May 4th of 2010, Connie Harvey, one of our esteemed members from the Nashville area wrote a post about a recent success she had as a result of blogging on ActiveRain. In the post, she shared an email sent by one of her clients. She also included a picture of the check she earned as a result of helping this client find a home.

What a great idea we thought!

So the ActiveRain development team took her idea and ran with it and the visual version of the ActiveRain Success Story came to life.

Right now, we only have Connie's picture and story. We are pretty sure that our members will be able to help us fill this area up so that Jorgen and his team can work their magic and accommodate all the pictures and stories we anticipate our members reporting.

What do we need from you? Pictures of your checks of course. I am pretty sure that most of your past checks have long since been deposited at the bank by now. But in the future, if you would be so kind as to get a snapshot of yourself with a check you received as a result of your participation on ActiveRain, we would love it if you would email that picture to success@activerain.com

We ask that the picture be a high definition photo. We also ask that you accompany the photo with a small story about your success. Can you send more than one? We hope you do! Each picture and accompanying story will be awarded 2500 points.

Sharing your success has always been a part of how you have helped create such an amazing community and we hope that you will continue to share those stories with us. It's the fuel that keeps us striving to provide you a more powerful ActiveRain Real Estate Network.

Thank you to everyone who has helped build ActiveRain into the network it is today. In our continued effort to reward our members who have spent time, energy and heart growing our network and contributing on a regular basis, we are implementing a new policy regarding grandfathered RainMaker accounts:

Grandfathered Rainmakers who have contributed one blog post in the previous 90 days will keep their grandfathered RainMaker account. Grandfathered RainMaker members who have NOT contributed one public blog post in the previous 90 days, will lose their grandfathered RainMaker account.

This change is about:

• Allowing ActiveRain to focus its resources and the search engine presence of our members on those members who continue to contribute great content.
• Encouraging the members who haven't blogged on ActiveRain recently to leverage ActiveRain to reach out to the over 2,000,000 consumer visitors we get every month to the site and utilize the search engine presence of ActiveRain to increase the visibility of their personal blogs and websites.
• Rewarding members who continue to educate consumers with relevant real estate information about their markets and who engage their peers with relevant information about the business of helping people buy and sell homes.
• Striking a balance between rewarding our long term contributors and giving them a reason to continue to engage the community with their talents and expertise.

For a little background: In February of 2009, ActiveRain changed our policy regarding our member's ability to post their content for public consumption. At that point, we grandfathered any member who had ever written at least one blog post prior to February 16th, 2009. Those members were given free RainMaker accounts as a thank you for the effort they had put into helping ActiveRain achieve a thriving community.

From that date forward, any member who wanted to publish content for public consumption (who had not written one post prior to February 16th, 2009) would have to pay in order to have their content be made public, and indexed by the search engines.

So in order to keep your Grandfathered status, you simply need to post one public blog post every 90 days. For most of you reading this, who have grandfathered RainMaker accounts, this will not impact you at all. You have integrated ActiveRain into your daily and weekly routines. If you haven't posted to ActiveRain on a regular basis, now is your chance to re-engage the community and leverage the vast amount of knowledge present in the form of tens of thousands of experienced real estate professional on ActiveRain.

Starting June 24th, grandfathered RainMakers who have not posted a public blog post in the previous 90 days will lose their grandfathered RainMaker status. You will be notified when your account has gone 60 days without a blog post. This will give you 30 days to generate one public blog post in order to keep your grandfathered RainMaker status.

We are balancing the line on our communication regarding timelines. We want to give you the most up to date information and everything we know, but we want to be cautious of giving projected completion dates. Traditionally the way we try to work is to make an announcement based on factual information. Projections are dicey, because if we miss them, we lose credibility.

However, on the flip side, if we don't give projections of where we are, people generally assume the worst. In this case we are going to err on the side of giving too much information and I'm going to relay to you the internal messaging that we are getting from our development team.

1. Please be clear, your content is in no danger of being lost.
2. The final phase of our capacity increase (site speed) will be coming on in the next couple of days.
   
3. Until the capacity increase goes live we are taking measures to ensure that ActiveRain.com is most responsive.
4. You are likely to have more issue performing functions while logged in than while not logged in. This is on purpose to make sure the search engines and consumers visiting the site are less likely to get error messages.
5. A few things of which you should be aware:
   

• activerain.com is now more responsive
• E-mail notifications are generally unavailable (you can check your my home page for contact messages that have been sent)
• Users may continue to post blog entries to groups and their personal blogs. Blog entries marked for publication to an Outside Blog will appear automatically when Outside Blogs have been restored.
• Localism, comments, and Outside Blogs have been temporarily disabled to increase performance on ActiveRain.
• Hit Router is generally inaccessible.
• Member profile images may fail to appear; this issue will resolve itself over the next 24 hours.

(anyone with stock in the company that produces Tums should be very happy, as I have single handedly increased their sales substantially)

(Edited) Update as of Mid day Monday:

Good news:
* Commenting has been enabled
* All member profile images should be displayed
* Users can now sign up for accounts
* Tempest is now more responsive; you shouldn't experience proxy errors when moving to the next lead
* Tempest lead limits are functional

Bad news:
* Localism and Outside Blogs are still down while we work to resolve DNS and performance issues.
* Blank comments are unlikely to be restored
* E-mail notifications are still not functional
* Hit Router is still generally inaccessible

While we wait for the site to come back to 100% (and it will be there soon!) and when it does:

• Your content is safe. It will always be safe. It will not be lost.
  
• The comments being left that are showing blank will be restored. (not actually sure on this one.....)
  
• ActiveRain will continue to get the fantastic SEO results that it's had in the past.
• We will double our efforts to ensure this never happens again.
• Your business will remain of utmost importance to us and you will continue to get the great customer service to which you are accustomed.
• We will keep our members on the cutting edge of social media awareness and give them the best tools to succeed in any market.
• We will continue to push you to be the best blogger and real estate agent that you can be.

and we will continue to extoll the virtues of our founding principles