Social Networking...

Social networking sites have been growing in popularity since the dawn of MySpace and now businesses are finding it a great avenue to promote their business. The Active Rain network is no different and that is reason I signed up as soon as I found out.

I started blogging over a year ago on my first social network site using MSN Spaces platform. My site, Goingbigger, has been doing steady search engine traffic and it has been featured on FOX Sports homepage as a Seahawk - Road to the Superbowl blog. That was the biggest publicity I have ever seen, 2000 hits a day. It was also featured by MSN's What's Your Story? homepage through Superbowl XL.

When MSN called me (Volvo didn't like one of my jokes) they said "too bad you don't have advertiser". At first I thought "yea too bad" but then I thought about our real estate website. I added a banner, did up some links, did a blog or two and pointed some links to my page and I was done. It worked good but since then the banner has been removed...it was something I didn't want to subject my friends to for too long :P

I have all subcombed to the preasure and sign up for a MySpace to do a similiar thing but not a grand scale. Once in a while I'll write a post or two regarding real estate and some things about our local market while providing a few links.

I started a real estate blog using the Blogger platform but I do not like not having the ability to check stats, Active Rain - That would be a nice addition, and the system is too friendly (too techy). I thinking about deleting it today to eliminate that content on the net.

Now the real estate industry has a plat form, Active Rain. So far I really like the system. It is well laid out with easy access for blogging, organizing blogs and adding favorites and simple access to an RSS feed. I'll get into RSS feeds at another time. The points system for aquiring a featured placement is an unique and effiecent means of getting place...it makes hard work worth it...an agent just can't buy the feature. Active rain has done a great job making the URL addresses easy to read, search engines.

The whole systems to be designed with agents in mind and to work very effiecently. My hat is off to the team at Active Rain...way to go!!

Well that is all for me today.

Toby Barnett