Pondering the Value of the Active Rain Daily Drop

Pondering on the Value of the Active Rain Daily Drop

It’s been many years since I have seen the Active Rain Daily Drop, though some of my staff mention that they have seen it more recently than I have seen it.  Perhaps it got dropped from my email feed somehow over the years.

Either way, in the thousands of emails I receive each day I have not really noticed it’s absence.

So when a fellow Rainer mentioned that she had not received the “featured posts/daily drop” email in a while, I got to pondering on the subject. 

ARMS ActiveRain Member Support , mentioned in his/her reply to the Question, “Anne, I suspect you mean the Daily Drop/ActiveRain news emails?  There's been some staff rearranging and I don't think anyone has picked up that responsibility (yet)”.

This got me to wondering how important it was to dedicate a staff person to producing these daily, since I seldom agreed with their choices, or the featured posts choices in the past anyway.  Always seemed extremely biased toward a select few close friends of theirs, and seldom feature worthy.

The question at hand, was the Daily Drop worth continuing?

However this like all good questions, got me to thinking….

Pondering and reflection on my early days with AR.

Back in 2009, at the Wisconsin Realtors Association convention we had a speaker who recommended a dozen social media sites that all real estate professionals “must” join, and thought I did not buy into the premise, I did immediately sign up for all of them.

Some of these are still thriving, and most have been long ago forgotten, as is the nature of an emerging industry or trend.

Facebook sucked up a lot of my time in the first few years, finding new friends, reconnecting with old friends, and generally wasting valuable time.  It took years before I started to understand how it could be of value to my business, and now it is likely part of the mix that brings in the most business of all of them.

LinkedIn did not take up much time, however I was impressed a year later when I was talking to a respected forestry colleague, and he mentioned how much he enjoyed reading my posts on LinkedIn.  Perhaps this one is worthwhile, at least for a more professional segment of my market.

Twitter, other than a pretty little bluebird as their logo, did not inspire much confidence it it’s value to me or to the rest of the world.  However, years later I would revisit it solely as a source of sharing other posts in an attempt to create more sites for G to see my posts.

Active Rain was one of those wait and see sites, I signed up right away, yet saw little value in is for a long time. I signed up in 2009, yet never left a comment or a post until 2012 when I started seeing a reason to dedicate some time to this world.

As I was gearing up for 2012 I saw a need to get some fresh updates to my website on a frequent basis and tasked my admin with posting a new article each week to the site and I would frequently forward emails to here with articles or ideas.

Then one day as I was looking for material for her, I noticed the Daily Drop and that changed everything.

Since 2009, I had been receiving the DD and often ignoring it as I do with most emails in my daily triage of spam, promotions, and other stuff seeking out the few emails that are important and timely to running the show.  Once in a while I would click on a suggested article from this, most of the time I would just ignore it as I did not see the value in wasting time on this diversion that was clearly taking up too much time for some of my colleagues.

Then that fateful day when Eureka’s lightbulb went off and I realized that AR could be of value to me in my pursuit of greater SEO for my website, as well as possibly networking with more professionals.

All this from the continuous mosquito like buzzing of the AR Daily Drop.  After three years of bugging me it finally got my attention.

For the next few months, I started clicking on the links, reading the articles, wondering why and how others were so freely vomiting so much into their articles and comments.  Yet knowing that I needed to do this too if I was to generate traffic and interest in my web presence.

Finally on April 1st of of 2012, did post on AR, and may have even commented on a post or two.

By the end of April, and the following months I had shot out close to 90 posts or reposts and exploded my online presence, at least to the audience of other AR members.

Of course, all these posts were hidden from the public, which was okay since I was still uncertain about sharing much of this with my colleagues and clients.  And I was not sure about the value of dedicating my time, and certainly not convinced in the value of dedicating $50 in hard earned cash per month in order to make these public.

Those early months were my training ground, teaching me how to write again, (I used be good at this and wrote for our college newspaper while earning a degree in PR), how to get over my shyness and leave feedback on others posts, and really getting me out of my shell.

Though my posts were all “members only “, those few articles that were worthy of sharing with my colleagues and clients could easily be copied and shared directly on my website or another blog site where the public could see them.

In the end, the daily drop may not be of much use to an active AR member, it does however serve a purpose, a mission to continually buzz in the ear of a starting out blogger, or to remind an experienced blogger who has fallen away from the habit and needs to get back in the game.

Debe Maxwell, CRS, and many others feel it should keep going as well.

So, my vote is to keep it going and unless AR wants to be one of those forgotten social media ideas, get someone assigned to posting daily drop right away, and never let it be forgotten again.