Realty Barcamp St. Louis First

Attending a conference is powerful.

Energy oozes from every speaker. Flashing before your eyes ideas come and go up on a screen. Overwhelming.

Making that experience better is what barcamps are all about. Attendees become participants; some even become discussion leaders. You are the star.

Realty barcamps are no different.

Organized by local Karen Goodman, #REBCSTL, is a St. Louis first.  Known as a ReBarcamp, events like this are the second largest type of barcamps across the US. Exciting times the Midwest jumping on the conference 2.0 bandwagon.

Why did I go to a ReBarcamp?

Being invited certainly didn’t hurt. Karen wanted to give me a chance to contribute and shine at the same time. How could I pass that up? It turned out to be a learning experience for me as well.

Focusing on blogging, social networking, and leveraging the web, made this a great fit. Approaching it from the realty point of view, gave it new context and opened my eyes. At heart realtors are small business owners, making getting social networking and blogging right a bigger impact than to big business.

Did I learn anything?

The session I learned the most in was lead by Eric Stegemann. Eric reviewed one lucky attendees site. Reviewed is putting it mildly. Beginning with top of the page, and what loads and is visible first, Eric tore apart each element.

Key to this tear down was bouncing it against visitor expectations. Do perspective buyers and sellers really need the Flash driven image display? What is the first thing they look for? Your number, price lookup, and more.  The page Eric worked over didn’t have any of the key elements ‘above the fold’. Fail.

Another thing was the content.  Realtors often contract out to have a site created or their firm provides one.  These are ‘stock’ sites with the same content every other realtor gets. Functional but  worthless to search. Likewise, not an eyeball grabber.

More lessons were learned.

Final thoughts on #REBCSTL

Substitute coffee, craft, or clothing shop and all the content of #REBCSTL would apply.

Setting up your first Twitter account? New to Facebook? Never blogged? This conference covered all of the 101 you needed to get started.

Need connections? Barcamps, and this one in particular, was all about introductions, story sharing, and ultimately new relationships.

Finally, Realtors are people too.