In the comments section of Bradley Bowen's recent featured post on Foursquare, Karen Parsons-Fiddler, an agent from Southern California, made me laugh out loud with her comment about not being necessarily tech-savvy.
"It took me a while to realize a friend of mine on Facebook didn't really have a farm," she said. "I was very concerned for her crops when they needed water after she went on vacation. I'm just not hip."
She's referring of course to FarmVille, the Facebook application where users create their own virtual farms, and constantly invite their friends and family to join them in this online world of pretend farming.
I simply don't understand how any of my full-time real estate agent friends have time to update these virtual farms. We are already expected to maintain a web presence with our agent websites, ActiveRain, Facebook, and Twitter accounts, on top of our real job of being a Realtor!
That's not to say that Realtors shouldn't be allowed to play games or participate in anything mindless and fun for a change, but if you want to play games you need to do one that doesn't annoy your sphere of influence. In February at Keller Williams Family Reunion in New Orleans, an agent at one of the social media panels moderated by Ben Kinney asked how to block FarmVille and similar updates from Facebook, and received a rousing round of applause. People that aren't using Facebook for gaming get annoyed by the constant stream of updates about your crops and shovels.
So the bottom line is this- even if you do have time to balance FarmVille with your busy real estate career, I wouldn't suggest playing it. You don't want your clients to think you have nothing better to do than online games.
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