This story was brought to my attention today and it really made me smile. Yes, before any of you say ‘Nancy!! What on EARTH were you doing reading The Mirror????” I would like to say that I actually know Peter personally, and the news can be verified by him. It’s a case of a tabloid telling it as it actually happened! He sent me the article to look at…via Twitter (naturally enough).
Anyway, the point is, when a tool can be used to bypass the not-inconsiderable expense involved in selling your house through an estate agent, then there clearly is something to that tool. It isn’t just serving a purpose, it is changing how things are done. I would like to remain a little level headed about it though – people have been bypassing estate agents and selling their houses on Ebay for a while now, so it isn’t the actual bypassing itself which is the great thing. It is the medium he used.
I would like to point out, however, that to undertake a transaction such as this one, you need to:
a) be a trustworthy person with a decent reputation (I can vouch for the fact that Peter certainly is that)
b) have built an audience which you have some rapport with and who you trust
and
c) (perhaps this is just me, but) be doing it genuinely, not because you are actually an Estate Agent in disguise hoping to bag a decent commission (again, I know Peter certainly isn’t that).
As Peter himself said to me, they got sick of waiting for nothing to happen with the estate agents (more than a year they waited, so it’s not like they were being impatient) but the final straw came when the agent (who hasn’t managed to achieve anything to that point) announced that their fees were going up to cover for the recession. Peter’s thought? It shouldn’t be me who pays you for bad times, and he turned to the community he has built and trusts. Is this evidence of community being recession proof? Perhaps, or perhaps it is just smart thinking.
I will continue to maintain that Twitter is a tool which requires authenticity and trust. I don’t want to see it go the way of MySpace where it becomes little more than a bland sales channel. If we can prevent against that, and keep using it for the conversational tool that it is, then fantastic stories like this continue to arise – Peter, I hope you truly enjoy a pint or two with the money you didn’t have to pay in commission and fees. Your ingenuity is brilliant. You deserve it!
I was delivering training last week to two fantastic women who were reasonably new to social media, but who were keen to learn and spent the day questioning and exploring. I love doing training sessions like that one because I absolutely love helping people to really understand what social media is all about and how it relates to them. But I also like the fact that it forces me to go back to basics with much of the material and question everything that I have been doing over the years.
I was alerted to an interesting comment which appeared on LinkedIn by a colleague of mine recently which was a brief but characteristic tirade from a Twitter Naysayer. I won’t quote it word for word as I regret to say I haven’t got a link to the original comment so it wouldn’t be fair. However I can give you a general gist of the comment.
Tiger Two spends most of its time and energy training and teaching people how to use online communication tools. We write courses, we give seminars, we offer demonstrations, we do training sessions and we offer private tuition. We don’t do this because it is going to offer us the biggest profit margin. In actual fact, we do it because I truly believe in the power of education over rules and in empowering people to do things themselves.
At the end of last year, I read 
There are many predictions about for 2010 and one of them is that publishers are all going to at least experiment with putting some of their content behind a paywall over the course of next year. Rupert Murdoch has been the most vociferous about this, but many other publishers are looking at similar models. I have already commented about how I don’t believe Murdoch’s ploy will work, but then it is no secret to anyone who knows me that I really don’t regard any of the ‘journalism’ (I use the term incredibly loosely) in The Sun as ‘quality’ and I have serious doubts about the rest of the rather biased Murdoch press (and I make no apologies for that view). So I for one won’t pay.
The
“Hi. I’m new to social media, but I am really excited to be here. So, to start, why don’t you have a look at my amazing widgets for sale for you at a discount price if you buy within the next 20 minutes at [insert link here]”
