My friend Roy Kelley ask me to share my insights into RainCamp from last week. For me personally, it is rather like picking up those rare and treasured books that no matter where you turn to, you will find something of value. RainCamp is much the same way. It does not matter where you are in developing your marketing and business plan, you will always find something useful when you attend RainCamp.
From day one of joining ActiveRain, it has been ActiveRain that provides me the leading edge technology and information to sustain my business. It was no different this past week. So for my friend, Roy Kelly, here are the specific points that were beneficial for our team. Please realize that I've been here going on five years and while life is always speeding up and those that are new learn faster, it does take time to build infrastructure and a pervasive Web presence.
BEN KINNEY--TEAMS--I've been making an effort to develop a team for the last several years and it remains to be an elusive model for me. People and their lives are always changing and so keeping a team together becomes a challenge. Another dynamic to teams is that your focus has to shift from that of tailoring your business to suit yourself to one of focusing on the skills and experience of your team members. It is a shift that is important to pay attention to.
In my past years at Apple, I was responsible for building cohesive teams and held accountable for our 
production goals. I met and exceeded our goals. I do have some experience with team dynamics.
It is important to always be looking to learn and to find those things that continue to change the field and give us new insight into how things may improve or produce a better result. Ben Kinney hit the nail on the head for me as he described these same issues with his team and how he's evolving a new team concept. It was a "Cosmic Hookup"for me and very valuable.
It validated for me personally, that I am operating on that fringe of the field where new things happen and exciting results occur. Putting my own spin on Ben's insights would be that you are matching the skill set and experience of your Buyer's agents with an infrastructure to help them function and be successful. He has further delegated team duties to a Showing Agent, and a Listing Agent. For me, it was some break through concepts on how to keep teams together and happy. The basics of this process are familiar to me from my work at Apple.
Ben, even goes so far as to provide you with the personality types and the ideal matches for the various functions. It hit home for me and is something that I want to put my attention on. I will be taking the IMSD designation that Ben is offering. I was interested on several levels. The team element but also on lead generation. Bob Stewart goes on to say that this designation goes into great detail on every level of Ben's model including scripts, marketing, lead generation and just everything needed to be a dominate factor on the Web. I'm signed up and I am excited about the integration of this great information into my business plan for our team.
CHRIS ALSTON--FACEBOOK--Chris Alston gave a comprehensive overview of FaceBook. I knew most of it and I'm teaching a FaceBook class on Tuesday. It is always great to hear from our Coaches and Inspirational Speakers their perspective. Some of the basics yet important points were that you have to put some attention on your "Friends" daily. You have to visit and comment. You should fully develop your profile and have it be active prior to getting a Business Fan Page going. Get some coaching on how to turn your Fan Page into a professional element of your business. Jo Barnes is my coach for Facebook and Social Media in general. I highly recommend her. She provides you with the coaching on FaceBook for free and how to set up your Business Fan Page with templates and the code for it all. I do subscribe to her coaching so that we can stay up with all the latest FaceBook changes. One thing to know about Facebook is that it is constantly changing. This is why I subscribe to Jo Barnes and her services. I simply don't have time to track it all down and keep up with it. FaceBook is fun and some people like it better than AR. I am too expressive and enjoy my photography and writing here in the Rain. Chris did a great job on FaceBook for us all.
DEBE MAXWELL--WORDPRESS BLOG--Debe Maxwell brought us a look at her very successful Workpress blog. David and I have developed several (too many) Wordpress blogs for our niche markets. I will be retiring or putting into storage a few of them for now. Debe's number one point was that you have to keep current with your blogging and maintaining your site. You can't let it go stale and it is an important point to be made. I am not sure if you will be able to watch RainCamp or not. I hope so. Debe was so on target with her advice on many points.
The natural evoluation in growing your Web presence after you have a great blog going on AR is to develop a Wordpress blog and to have them dance together. Debe's point is that they are mutually effective in linking back to each other and providing a solid SEO source that Google and the search engines like. It is a very effective duo. We have taken that a step farther and created several. I can decide to own a given subject on the first page of Google. If I target short sales or HUD for instance, I can with the long tail own the whole page. A word of caution on the concept however. Debe's advice to keep current information and attention on your blogs is where a word of caution must be noted. It does become hard to manage multiple blogs and give them the attention that is required. I've spread myself too thin and will be correcting that gong forward.
Well, this is for my friend Roy Kelley. I hope that I have not taken away or hurt in anyway the information from these great presenters. I would be limited to my own perspective and hearing what I needed to hear. I really did not think anyone would be interested in my own narrow view of how RainCamp benefited me personally, but you can't say no to good friends. I hope it is useful in some way.
Have a wonderful day and be happy!
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