My friend Kevin Kelly from Chicago Title and I visited a Coldwell Banker office today and gave an overview of Social Media systems for realtors.

Like so many other problems to be solved on Windows and the iPhone, the axiom holds true for Facebook:  Whatever it is you’re trying to do, “there’s probably great app for that”.

There are two FaceBook applications for real estate listings.  One is called EListIt and another is called CribFinder.  Unlike the more general “Marketplace” app, these are tailored to do this job really well.  EListIt has over 2100 monthly users and CribFinder has more than 1300.

The skinny:

eListIt:

“Show off your latest property listings on your Facebook profile!  By adding the application to your profile, you can show off your listings in a mini slideshow on your wall page.  Additionally, you can add a dedicated tab page to your profile with more detailed listings and a personal real estate profile.”  An account on eListIt is required, but the FaceBook app will help you create one on the fly so you don’t have to jump around between sites.  On your profile will appear a “My Listings” tab with all of your listings.  Cool!

CribFinder:

“Buy. Sell. Rent. Own. Real Estate on Facebook. List properties, track pageviews and generate leads. Post your profile in our REALTOR® database. Check out the Hottest Cribs on Facebook.”  This appears similar to eListIt, with the exception that there is a centralized database that everyone can search with every property.  It also integrates with your profile to post your Cribs to your Wall and News Feed.  It seems to be a little rougher around the edges than eListIt, but I’m sure both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Most apps on Facebook integrate well with your personal profile, enabling Wall updates and the ability to add a Tab or Box to display whatever you put into the app.  Getting these apps to work with your Business Page is somewhat more esoteric.

Definitely a great way to familiarize yourself with the Facebook “app” concept and start seeing some real value right away.  Contact me if you're looking for assistance getting set up with one of these systems!

Once upon a time, I wrote a time tracking application for an employer which remained in use for nearly 10 years after I wrote it, counting up hundreds of thousands of billable man-hours of time for our OEM customers.  I loved writing it but I absolutely hated using it.  Like many engineers, I preferred getting work done to the tedious bureaucratic task of entering my time into a sheet, no matter how easy I made it to use.

Now, as a business owner, I recently started having some difficulty sticking to the schedules I set for myself and realized that a big part of the reason was due to a lack of time tracking.  I decided to bite the bullet and give it a shot.

The first thing you need to do is find a tool:  Sure you could use Excel, but it's certainly not ideal.  I did a quick search and found a great free application called ActiTime.  Their software runs locally or on a web server, powered with MS Access or MySQL under the hood.  It's fast, simple, and takes about 5 minutes to set up and start using.  It has simple reporting and exports CSVs into Excel for any kind of charting or analysis you can dream up.

The first week was a bit of a mess.  When you get excited about it you start imagining how wonderful it would be to have a detailed log of every minute spent, properly categorized into various customers, projects and categories, and end up with too much information.  Having had some practice, I decided to start over and began with a much simpler list of broad task categories.  This is the final list I came up with:

• Billable Work
• Branding
• Business Development
• Business Improvements
• Customer Support
• Marketing
• Money Management
• Networking
• Prospecting (In-Person)
• Prospecting (Online)
• Prospecting (Phone)
• Self-Improvement

Since this is a time tracking system for business, I decided to leave off anything personal that did not have any tangible benefit to the business.  This list is working out pretty well.

Here's an actual data-entry screen from ActiTime, it's pretty easy to use: 

Do you track time?  What have you learned?  Do you have any broad categories that I neglected to mention?  What software are you using?

Tweet @HaveAByte to share your experience.  Now if you'll excuse me, I need to track 15 minutes of my blogging time into Marketing, since I am spreading this around the TwitterVerse!