karenaltes

Note: I originally wrote this as a guest post for the blog Spin Sucks

A few years ago, as manager of the student outreach program for a trade association, I suggested that if we really wanted to reach college students we needed to be on Facebook. I now run the association’s Facebook fan page, Twitter feed, YouTube channel, and LinkedIn group, and I have learned the reality of the adage “be careful what you wish for.”

Wednesday, I attended a day of education presented by Association Forum of Chicagoland and the Institute for Credentialing Excellence entitled Social Media and Its Value for Credentialing Communities. It was an interesting day and, like most education events, I found some things valuable and some things less so. That said, here are the top ten takeaways that I brought home from the presentations (in no particular order):

I'll admit, this isn't the typical post for this rarely-updated blog. But it was either post this here or at my knitting blog, and that wouldn't really make any sense at all. Plus, I figure I have a lot of real estate contacts nowadays, and maybe they can learn something from this.

"What a great time to buy!"

If I hear this phrase one more time, I just might scream. I know people mean well when they say it, but let's just talk a little about what it means to be a buyer in today's market*.

Well, it's been many moons since I've posted on my website. I have the usual excuses of an exceptionally stressful work and home life lately.

But it brings up a good subject to talk about - finding a way to create a successful, regularly updated blog. A lot of the run-of-the-mill social media advice suggests that a person/company should start a blog. Blogging, they say, helps you to brand yourself as an expert in your field.

This is especially challenging for associations. The staff of an association are often not practitioners in the industry they represent. While I know a lot more about real estate management than I ever did when I started working here five years ago, I still am not in the business on a day-to-day basis and thus do not have the knowledge to write a regular blog about topics in this industry myself.

I've observed some frustrating Twitter behavior of late. (Then I remembered, "Hey, I have a blog! I can blog about it!" So here we are.) I love Twitter. Really - I think it can be an incredible source of knowledge, humor, networking, and more. But I think Twitter has its limits, and just because you can clumsily do something with it doesn't mean you should. Some examples: