Hand signals and social media. Don't get rear ended!

Remember the good ole days when you could use hand signals if your brake lights or blinker when out? Try that now, let me assure you that those who are of a younger generation do NOT know what those hand signals mean. They think you are waving, cooling off your arm, or are just nuts, or they smack into the back of your vehicle as you are slowing down to make that turn. 

I lost my right turn signal late yesterday afternoon. Of course I had places to go, people to see and there was no chance of fixing it until this morning.

Do you have ANY idea how difficult it is to make only left hand turns and arrive at your destination? Just sayin...

This got me to thinking about how we practice real estate "these days". I was at a meeting yesterday where the guest speaker, an agent out of Manhattan from Prudential Douglas Elliman, was talking to the dumbstruck group about social media.

"How many of you have websites?" All the hands gleefully shot up in the air and waved excitedly. My, everyone was so proud of their websites.

"How many of you have NON Prudential owned websites?" Me and one other lonely gentleman kept our hands in the air. Although he had just purchased his website and it was not up and running yet, someone was working on that for him. 

"And how many of you are blogging?" Yep, it was only me.

Then he spoke about Facebook, you could see eyes glazing over and the quite whispers in the back of the room became louder and louder, talking about the state of the market, about weekend plans, anything to keep from having to talk about social media.

The speaker was very patient, as if he seemed to understand that the average agent wants things to be the way they were. They don't want to have to build a website, understand SEO, they certainly don't want to blog if they even understand what blogging is, AND there is no way they want to hear about Facebook and Twitter.

As I was trying to get to my destinations while only making left hand turns, lamenting the fact that hand signals are certainly a thing of the past, I realized that many agents are probably feeling the same way about real estate. But times have changed, those that don't understand, who don't move forward with the times will find themselves getting rear ended as they wave their arm out the window trying to let everyone know they are slowing down trying to make that right hand turn.