Last night I had the opportunity to speak to a well-accomplished group of appraisers in Seattle. Typically, they bring in speakers that are in their industry but last night they decided to branch out and bring in someone who can talk about social media.
Here’s a few key takeaways from my interaction with the audience:
- Not everyone is using social media—that’s still true today. For those who don’t use it, Facebook still is most prominent followed by LinkedIn.
- The conversation around keeping your personal life separate from your professional life prevails in many mainstream audiences. That’s even more true in industries where social media isn’t a regular part of the day at work.
- If you think you don’t have the time for social media, then you really don’t. You shouldn’t pursue it. Find people within your organization who are good at it and who want to do it to broaden their network reach. If you don’t have a staff, find a volunteer, a student, an intern. Leverage them. Get them to help you.
Following my talk, I had the chance to connect with Ryan Lundquist who uses social media quite a bit. He is an appraiser in Sacramento, Calif. who I found just by searching for “appraisers” on the Internet. He has done a great job in building a network while developing quality content for the greater community.
He and I connected on Twitter, and it turns out that he did a similar talk at his local appraiser forum last week and heard many similar things to what I heard. He says that it is an interesting industry that is “behind the ball, really” in the social media world. He sees lots of opportunities for appraisers, but few people in his industry realize its full potential.
In fact, he went ahead and developed a blog post around the topic that is worth reading. Have a look.
Got you interested? Want to read further? I wrote an article on this last year, about Twitter and its uses, in Knowledge Leader magazine, a publication by Colliers International.
In short, Ryan feels, and I concur, that business is about connections. Ryan is online to connect, which influences his business growth and net-relationships. And it’s working.