Trying to bring myself up to speed with things around real estate blogosphere I have came across across the RSSPieces announcement that Mary McNight, the founder and (now former) Chief Marketing Officer of RSSPieces “is no longer part of the day to day operations of RSS Pieces”.
During last week I have e-mailed Mary once or twice and never received a reply. Very unusual of her, since in the past Mary would respond to my e-mails rather promptly- at times within minutes.
On her Active Rain blog Mary wrote briefly that her relationship with RSSPieces went south. Evidently many of the Mary’s social medial accounts where hijacked, but she is on they way to recover them.
So will the pieces at RSSPieces stick together now that Mary is gone? From the comments on RSSPieces appears that they might already be falling apart.
I personally never was Mary’s client and our paths would not have crossed if I was not interested in Internet Marketing and Blogging. Needless to say Mary has my respect and support. Mary had build a strong and respectable profile for RSSPieces. She is well known and respected in various circles of this wonderful new media we call blogging. It is hard to know what really happened and what Mary is planing for the future. Real Estate Radio USA is interviewing Mary today, so I am looking forward to that interview.
I am certain though that Mary will have no problem to be successful no matter which direction she decides to take. RSSPieces on the other hand will have to struggle and really step up a bit, especially now that many of the clients are disappointed and confused.
photo credit: TankiJust a few days ago I have welcomed first guest blog post on Go Beyond MLS. I have been asking in private few of my colleagues bloggers to contribute to this blog at their spare time, but today I open my invitation to all my readers.
There are a few conflicting opinions about guest blogging in general. And it may not be something every one should consider. I will write about my stand on quest blogging at a later time. If you think you can benefit from a guest post on my blog please contact me through the contact form on About Page.
Every guest post on this blog will be formated in a similar way as was Wayne Harriman’s post. You are completely free to choose the subject of your post as long as it is related to real estate or real estate marketing. Ans yes, you are most welcomed to write about your listings and link to them from your guest posts.
Friend, husband and fellow REALTOR® was unexpectedly hospitalized read more
I the recent weeks I have been recipient of generosity of many people (most of them I have never met in my life). I am in particular thankful to real estate bloggers for their generous contributions to my defense fund.
I am not sure how I missed that Charles Richey has been diagnosed with Guillain-Barre Syndrome but I will be heading to donate to the fund as soon as this article is finished and goes live. I hope you can do the same.
You can read more about Charles Richey Fund here. Apparently only 35% of money needed has been raised so far, and it is my strong believe we can do much better.
Mortgage Calculator WidgetI would like to take this opportunity and thank the owners of MortgageCalculator.Ogr for advertising on this blog. MortgageCalculator.org offers free motrgage calculators for your website or blog and you can install the calculator in seconds by simply grabbing a piece of code and pasting it into your website’s template. On the right is an example of the mortgage calculator in action, and if you prefer you can have this calculator in a form of WordPress Plugin.
NOTE TO MORTGAGECALCULATOR.ORG CREW:I would strongly recommend changing/adjusting CSS file for your javascript widget. Apparently the “div” containing the logo image in the calculator is named “header”. Many WordPress themes as well as other websites already have CSS values named “header” this can be very frustrating to users whose websites background images are code through CSS. I have not tried your WordPress plugin, but I am guessing it may have similar problem.
The easy access to the internet and freely available publishing tools offer wonderful opportunity to just about any one to get your word out there, to establish your brand, to grow your business, to promote your charity and even find your love.
These same tools combined with anonymity can become a real nightmare. A lie aimed at destroying your reputation can quickly, some times in days, propel to the top of the search engines for your own name. It takes much longer to clean up the mess. In fact, the vicious postings on Yahoo! Answers that I was subjected to back in February are still cached by search engines even though Yahoo! Answers had deleted them long time ago. Although they no longer appear on the first page of results for my own name.
So what can you do to protect your name and your reputation. Depending on your involvement with the Internet and how much time you have, you can probably learn how to make more difficult for your enemies to carry out their some times most evil attacks on your reputation. Following are few things that I have been doing lately, that may help you as well.
Join online communities and if possible link to your profile from your websites and blogs. It might be difficult for you to do if you are not particularly involved with any online communities. But if you are a member of MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, StumbleUpon, Facebook or even if you use Twitter build up your profiles and link to your profiles from your own blogs and websites. With the time, these pages will rank well for your name making harder for faceless creeps to propel pages that can damage your reputation to the top of the search engines.
If you happened to have more than one websites or blogs consider including (if possible) your name in the “about” page. Again these will be the pages to beat should any one tries to use the internet to attack you.
Set Google Alerts for your own name. This will allow you to catch the unwanted staff early on, before it would begin to appear in top results on the search engines.
You might want to befriend a lawyer who understands the nature of the internet. Some times you will be able to remove unwanted material by writing the the websites administration. However there will be cases that your attorney’s help might be required.
Depending on your popularity or how much your enemy hates you, this can easily become almost a full time job. Unfortunately not every one has time to be engaged in the above described activities. In fact during past 6 months, I have fallen behind on many projects precisely because of reputation management activities. And let me tell you, it can be disheartening.
For the last few weeks I have been seriously contemplating to start using Reputation Defender. Below is the video from 20/20 about the case involving the death of Niki Catsouras and how the pictures of of the car crash had become a nightmare to Catsouras family. The Reputation Defender was involved in the case.
Disclosure:The above post is not a legal advise nor should it be viewed as such. The link to Reputation Defender in the last paragraph is an affiliate link, if you sign up after clicking through that link I will receive commission for referring you to Reputation Defender. If you don not want that to happened you can use the following direct (not affiliate) link www.reputationdefender.com to visit their website.
So will the pieces at RSSPieces stick together now that Mary is gone? From the comments on RSSPieces appears that they might already be falling apart.
