I’m a huge fan of the Muppets ever since I watched the Muppet Show on T.V. – Yes, I know I’m dating myself.

So as I perused throught the net as the day’s meal continued to digest I found this wonderful little treat courtesy of Ain’t It Cool News.

Enjoy and Happy Thanksgiving!

This is very cool and more proof that Twitter is here for awhile.

Yesterday afternoon Google announced on their blog that they had reached an agreement with Twitter and would be including tweets in search results.

This not only gives Google an advantage in the search engine wars, but it also helps give tweets more credibility.

So no longer will your tweets and the information in them just be seen by the 7 million+ in the Twitterverse…now it will be seen by the entire world!

Click HERE to read the full blog post on Google.

I would so love to walk into a grocery store where this happens…

THANK YOU ROCHESTER!

I had the great pleasure of delivering tech training to the members of the Greater Rochester Association of REALTORS® today.

The session was held at the beautiful Locust Hills Country Club with the perfect A/V set-up for my courses.

This was my first (and hopefully not last) time teaching outside of California and I don’t think I could have asked or wished for any better.

The REALTORS® were friendly, energetic and eager to learn and laughed at all my jokes (always a good thing).

It was a long day for everyone but based on the great feedback I got, everyone enjoyed it and got a lot out of it. That’s my goal as an instructor, for everyone to understand what I’m teaching and to have them walk away feeling like they can take on this big beast called INTERNET MARKETING.

I wish all the students great success in their efforts and hope to be getting those requests for “REALTOR® Link Of The Day”.

A big thank you to Kim Northrup who helped coordinate all of this and even though she was away at the association meetings, it went off without a hitch.

Thank you too to Pat who was kind enough to give me a ride to the airport after the session.

So with that, it’s a quick turn-around back to L.A.

I leave you with the members of the Greater Rochester Association of REALTORS® checking in to the BATTLE OF THE REALTORS®

and with that I say (in a loud rocker voice)…

GOOD NIGHT!

In my daily travels I’ll run across  big electronic billboards, or small displays in the Metro station where it’s clear that Windows isn’t performing as expected. I ran across this little blip on TUAW this morning and just had to share it.

Turns out during a game this last Saturday at the brand new (and incredibly expensive) Cowboy Stadium that the displays went a little crazy and wound up displaying the following…

You can get a better look at the photo by checking out TUAW’s blog post here –

http://www.tuaw.com/2009/09/07/offensive-line-not-the-only-thing-broken-at-oklahoma-game/

or by clicking on the picture.

…and you thought Windows error messages only hapenned to you when you really needed to get a document done.

Bernice Ross has got a great and very easy to read article on some takeaways she got from the recent Inman conference.

Short, to the point and very important stuff to consider when you’re using these wonderful Web 2.0 tools to advertise you and your services.

You can take a read  at http://www.inman.com/buyers-sellers/columnists/berniceross/blogs-dogs-reruns-and-social-media.

Around 12:30PM PST yesterday Google had a pretty significant e-mail outage that lasted a little over an hour and a half.

For a heavily utilized service like Google, this is HUGE. There’s many businesses small and large that rely on Google e-mail to be functioning in order to get business done.

So now you may be wondering…How is this a great example of good customer service?

Stay with me for a sec on this…

Later in the day Ben Treynor, VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar for Google added  a post to the Gmail blog. In the post they not only accepted full responsibility for what happenned, but outlined what happenned (in the least techie way possible) and let people know what they were going to do to help keep it from happenning in the future.

It seems like so often tech companies and even non-tech companies skirt around issues and fail to accept responsibility for what they did or didn’t do. Then they fail to learn from their mistakes and repeat incidents, again not accepting responsibility or truly addressing what the core issues are.

Technology is hard to manage and hard to keep up. In my 16+ years in the tech field I experienced some of the same things as Google did yesterday – just on a smaller scale. Routine maintenance or procedures would lead to a major outage, even with lots of careful planning and back-up plans.

So the lesson for all businesses (both tech and non-tech) to learn from Google’s issue and Google’s response…

1. Plan, plan, plan and then plan some more – Try to avoid over analyzing things, but always remember that anything can and often will happen, especially when you’re least prepared for it.

2. Work the problem…not the people – Focus on getting things working and back to normal, don’t start pointing fingers. If it’s up to one group or person to resolve then work with them. Offer them your help, support and encouragement. When I was in I.T. my immediate supervisor Tim Johnson and our OPs group VP Rick Shumacher were great about just letting me work the problem. They stood back and let me do what I needed to do, the whole time letting me know they were there if I needed them.

3. Keep people up-to-date – You don’t need to overwhelm people with status updates, but don’t keep silent. Nothing induces more fear or uncertainty and  lack of confidence than not knowing what’s going on.

4. Let the dust settle – Once the issue has been taken care of, let things settle, let people get some sleep and then debrief on what happenned. Sometimes the situation may not even be totally over and some additional things need to be addressed before a really good debrief can happen.

5. Work the problem…not the people – No, this isn’t a mistype, or a cut and paste mistake. When you debrief focus on what happened and what can be done to prevent future issues – not who did what and how idiotic it may be.

• Mistake Makers – If you made a mistake then admit your fault and let people know what you learned from it to avoid doing it again. Admitting to mistakes will carry far more weight than trying to hide a mistake you made. Trust me, eventually people will find out.

• Mistake Maker Managers/Supervisors – Work with your staff to help them avoid making the same mistake. Remember what it feels like to make a mistake and the courage it takes to admit you made one. This is a learning experience for everyone.

6. Final update – Update everyone and assume group responsibility for what happened as well as what steps are being taken in the future to avoid the same issue. DO NOT LAY BLAME ON AN INDIVIDUAL – this is the biggest way to kill someone’s drive and determination to do better.

7. Put it into practice – Take everything you’ve learned and actually put it into place. Nothing looks worse than having the same issue happen again because no one bothered to implement what was learned.

For my REALTOR® readers -
All of this can apply to all of your transactions as well. In fact the one thing that’s most important is keeping your client apprised as to what’s going on. The one thing we keep hearing that is important to buyers and sellers is that they’re kept up to date, even if there is no new news.

When you have issues learn from what happened and apply them to your future transactions. Maybe you’ll need to switch vendors, maybe you’ll need to change how your staff interact with customers, maybe you’ll need to change how you do things.  Don’t let bad transactions fall by the wayside…there’s a lesson to be learned in all of them.

As far as Google goes I have even more confidence in them, their services and their products. I love how they handeled everything and while it was in inconvenience, this stuff happens. What matters is how they handled the situation and what they’re doing to avoid future problems.  GO GOOGLE!!!!

Facebook finally released their updated iPhone app and it’s incredibly slick and cool. I’ve gotten to play with it for just a bit and am looking forward to putting it through its paces this weekend. You can get it on iTunes HERE

Yelp! just released a new version of their iPhone app that includes an easter egg feature called Monocle  which creates an augmented reality view of the information. It is one of those features that’s a jaw dropper…I can’t wait to see the augmented reality technology implemented in other iPhone apps. MacRumors has a great little piece on it HERE

Of course, let’s not forget about the My C.A.R. app available free to the members of the California Association of REALTORS®. You can read more about it at my previous post HERE.

Want to be able to reach out to your customers or members  with your own iPhone app?
Contact us at support@rebsonline.com and we’ll contact you with information on how to get your very own real estate iPhone app.

In many of my classes I highlight how buyers and sellers:

1. Want a ton of quality information on the real estate market.

2. Don’t want a hard sell.

That’s where Edutizing comes in. Edutizing is basically advertising you and your experience with quality information on the real estate market. By providing them with the latest greatest info you’re helping prove why you’re the REALTOR® they should be working with.

Want to learn more about Edutizing? How about for FREE?

Check out the brand new white paper just released by the good folks at the WAV Group:
http://tinyurl.com/edutizingwhitepaper

Want to learn even more about edutizing and get a chance to network with your fellow REALTORS® at Inman?
Register for “Gain the EDUTIZING Edge” pre-Inman session on Tuesday, August 4th – http://tinyurl.com/edutizingedge