Social media can have a dark side, what happened during the Active Rain seminar, was the Dark Side. I feel that I have a strong love for Active Rain as many of you here do as well. To see the site presented in such a bad light it can cause a tarnishing of the brand. I was not planning on attending the session except Jeremy with Active Rain and Jason Crouch were planning on attending. This came from the Real Estate Tomato chat room. I figured if they felt it could be of value to them, then I should show up.
I hesitate to write this, I know your not supposed to be negative or critical of other people or presentations. I'm certainly not going to point out there name, but it was the weakest presentation I have seen on a webinar. A few pointers going over this.
This was a Rebar camp. People are expecting a little bit more than a normal conversation. This is a fairly sophisticated audience. Maybe you haven't been to a Rebar camp before, I attended the one in Denver. I was blown away by the quality of the speakers and the information. I actually had a presentation last week on Social Media. I was copresenting with Josh Dorkin, of Bigger Pockets. I was going to let him do most of the talking. I'm ok with it, but not enough to call myself an expert ... yet. Josh had a family emergency and I had to step up to the plate. I had 13 people in my class and I did ok. You would of done ok with that presentation for the type of audience I had. This was a little basic for them
I'm a business partner of Constant Contact and I had an opportunity to present at the Virtual Rebar Camp. I make this point to say that I passed because I felt it was over my head. I use Constant Contact myself and I know it's a great product. (Full disclosure I am an authorized business partner.) I'm very confident in my speaking abilities, and I have taught over 10 public classes this year. I contacted my Constant Contact representative and wanted to see if they were available that day for the event. They weren't. I passed simply because my inexperience in being able to do an interesting webinar.
Know your audience. I will say that my experience with putting on webinars is zero. Listening to webinars I've heard a lot, but 
I'm not a junkie. You have got to realize that Active Rain is not always warmly welcomed or perceived by the Realtor community as the place to go. People perceive it's all just Realtors talking to Realtors. They ignore all the consumer success stories there are to many good and smart people here on Active Rain to say this site is not worth your time.
Why are you talking about the points. I know it was because it was on one of your screenshots, but talk about the right things. I've had two people refered to this site. I think I've invited four. Your story is you don't have anybody who has accepted, but you've sent out over 50 invitations. THIS IS NOT A GOOD STORY TO TELL.
You didn't talk about the extra google juice or credibility that Active Rain offers. I want some of that. I'm not sure if I've got it or how I'm going to get it, but I know the answer is in here. I even bet that I have that site bookmarked. I'm pretty sure this wasn't even addressed.
As far as the actual presentation, raise your voice. One of the great things I have going for me, which most good speakers do is that I can talk loud. I can present in front of a room of 50 people with no microphone and people don't have an issue hearing me. You were the quietest speaker of anyone that I heard that day.
Make it visually interesting. You can see in my other blogs that I wrote in this series I did a poor job with pictures. I think this one has the best chance of being read. Thus I added pictures. Your presentation was a PDF file with poorly scanned images of Active Rain screenshots. Again, this is why I wanted my business partner to be there to present. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that you could of got somebody from the Active Rain staff to present with you. Think how that gets you in their good graces.
The result of the call? The dark side of social media reared it's ugly head. I'm not sure how many people were on the call at the start. I'm going to potentially guess 300. It was conferencing software so it would make a beep whenever anyone would join or drop off. Let me tell you there were people dropping off every few seconds. It was torture to watch and listen too. I like love this site. If I was not familiar with this site, I certainly wouldn't be rushing over here.
This is the dark side of social media. You have a customer of your product, the presenter. They clearly love the product, they are featured in the area they work. They even seemed like a nice person. A social media expert? Someone you want representing your product to a group of several hundred targeted prospects? This is an interesting quandry. I used this time to listen and get caught up of some of my projects in the real world.
Interesting dilema to me, what do you think?
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