The Geek Spectrum

What level of Real Estate Geek are you?

GeekDom has its own pecking order.  The following is a scale of 1-10 to help you decide where you place on the world of Geeks

1. At this level you have an email address, however you print each email out and write out your response to have your assistant reply to your messages.

2. Now you respond to emails sent to you.  However, you still feel compelled to forward every joke and cute cartoon to everyone in your address book. (please advance to level 3 as soon as possible!).

3. After much chastisement, you now only send jokes that make you LYAO (see list of abbreviations) and only to appropriate recipients.  And you are now wondering about what the heck a B.C.C. is ? The lights are starting to come on for you now.  You easily navigate through your MLS system.  Embolden by the power of the internet you are compelled to buy your own domain name and buy the latest and greatest template package from a company like Advanced Access or 1ParkPlace.

4. Now, after owning a domain name and launching your website and you wait by your computer waiting for the home buying and selling mobs on the internet to beat the proverbial path to your door.

5. Since your website is an off the shelf duplicate of hundreds of other agents, you decide to invest some time into making this "internet thing work."  So you attend a training at the board of REALTORS™, you find your password information (finally) and call the tech support at your web-hosting company... who, by the way are continuing to hit your credit card each month whether or not you are getting any leads (kinda sounds like that health-club membership you signed up for). After several hours of trial and error you are starting to make your site more than a cookie cutter site, pretty or not it is starting to take on a look of its own.  Your introduction to words like html, pay-per-click, meta-tags and SEO now start to make some sense.

6. After spending several weeks modifying your site, you finally have figured out some of the cool stuff that has been built into your site.  Now you just need to get some people to go to it.  Google Adwords beckons to you  and you enter the world of Pay-per-click (PPC).  Oh by the way, by now you should now what "BCC" means.

7. Overwhelmed by the cost and perhaps underwhelmed by the response you retreat a little on the PPC and launch your organic search engine campaign.  By now you can look at html code and see more than a bunch of gibberish.  With confidence you update your meta-tags, descriptions and title bars.  And most importantly you embrace reciprocal link exchange and start posting and filling out link request right and left.

8. Realizing there is lot more to this, you either decide to hire someone to do it, stop where you are or push forward to learn more.  By now you have found cool forums like AgentsOnline.net , RealEstateWebmasters and SearchEngineForum and have gotten past the lurking stage and post a dumb question or two.  Hopefully, nice moderators like Doug Towes or Mike Dammann will help guide you to the various resources out there.

9. You now embrace geekhood, wearing it like a badge of honor.  Computers are now truly your friend and you can stare at html code without going cross-eyed.  You understand CSS and perhaps flirt with PHP and definitely are "so over frames."

10. You enter into the top-level of geekdom by realizing that even though you sell your services (for a fair honorable price) that as smart as you are, the rules change every day.  Yep, every stinkin' day the internet reinvents itself and the rules change.  Dang, what was Al Gore thinking when he first invented the internet any way?  You realize that even though others come to you for advice you must daily sharpen the axe. 

I recently met what I would categorize as a Class 10 Geek, Diane Cunningham who spoke at the MIVA Conference in San Diego.  In addition to knowing SEO inside and out, she is brave enough to teach Doctors about how to use their Palm PDA's!