An Open Letter to Active Rain Staff and a FEW AR Members
A few of of you may have noticed that we have mostly been INACTIVE on Active Rain for the last three months. A few may have not noticed and some of you may have been glad! lol
But we miss the Active Rain community and decided we still want to participate but first wanted to share why we have been inactive.
We are big fans of Active Rain University and watch most of the webinars and many from other social media and general webinars for Realtors.
We feel that the Active Rain staff and a few AR members are not true to what the consensus advice of these webinars teach in at least three categories.
- Spend most of your time prospecting and working leads and limit social media time to 30 minutes per day.
- Meet and greet people and network - belly to belly is still one of the most productive methods of business generation.
- Use video and sound bites - people today are overwhelmed with information.
So we have tried to follow these guidelines and at the same time participate in Active Rain "cloudbursts of you", meet-ups, and other contests. Unfortunately, we have not been awarded points on several occasions because our activities did not meet the Active Rain Staff or a few AR members guidelines. So we wanted to illustrate a few of those in hopes that AR staff might "practice a little more of what they preach".
But before we do, we want to address "it's not about the points" crowd. Yes, that is true. But our points system is a good pseudonym for our Google Juice. The more posts, the more creative the posts, back links, etc. the more we rank in points and will also rank in Juice. So it is about the points.
Addressing the three points above will hopefully outline our frustration.
1. In reference to point number one....Many of the contests on Active Rain have a 300 word minimum. While there are topics that may deserve a 300 word post and we certainly don't advocate posts so thin on content to be useless; a well written 300 word post will often greatly exceed the 30 minute time limit a day. There is even a contest floating around requiring a 300 word post every day of the month! Unless the post topic deserves it, 300+ words also violates point number 3 - be brief!
2. Now, let's move on to point number two. Meet ups are a great activity and work very well in large cities where there are enough active AR members to get a group of 6-12 people and network together. But Ocala has fewer than 6-12 AR members who even use Active Rain on a regular basis. A meet up of ONE person would not be much FUN or very PRODUCTIVE.
So when I was vacationing 1400 miles from home last Summer, I went out of my way driving an hour to meet another AR who also drove an hour out of her way to do our own "meet-up". We thought the AR staff might give us credit. But did they? No! Because it was not a "scheduled" meet-up during the meet-up month! So sharing a glass of wine with some some members you already know in a large city qualifies more than a meeting of two AR members from two different states.
3. And last, but not least, point number three.... Likewise a "cloudburst of you" was not recognized because the 5 tweets were substituted with 5 Vine video tweets. Vine is Twitters new 6 second video. Read again point 3! People are overwhelmed with info from all media sources. Video and especially short videos are the choice of the majority these days.
So once again, Active Rain staff, you might want to "practice a little more of what you preach".
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