A recent incident at the website of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch offers an excellent reminder for real estate professionals.

First, the background story:  ReadWriteWeb reports that an employee at a St. Louis area school lost his job for repeatedly posting vulgar comments on the newspaper’s website.  The employee assumed his comments were posted anonymously.  Meanwhile, the social media director at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch traced the IP address of the poster to a local school and contact the school’s administrator, assuming the comments had been posted by a student.  Not so.  The commenter was an adult employee at the school who was immediately fired.

People posting on the Internet often get confused and think that no one will ever know who they are.  Or, even when their identity is well known—as when they’re posting on their own blogs—they think only a handful of their closest associates will ever see their comments.  Neither of these things is necessarily true.  Therefore, whenever you post something to the Internet, it’s important to use good judgment.

For real estate professionals that means:

1. Be Kind to People You’re Working With.  Never write in an unflattering way about a client, another agent, another agent’s client, or anyone else involved in a transaction.
2. Be Kind to People You Don’t Know. Never make fun of a seller or a property you’ve seen, no matter how ridiculous the offer or the property seems to you.
3. Be Aware of Your Duty to Maintain Confidentiality.  Never disclose any details about a transaction.
4. Think Before You Type.  Never put anything in a blog post, in a comment, in an e-mail, or in any other electronic format that you might regret later.  Once you hit the enter button, you can’t really ever take it back.
5. Remember that the Internet Never Forgets. Deleting or removing a post doesn’t necessarily get rid of it.  Websites are often cached or archived so that deleted comments can still be searched and found.
6. Assume That What You’re Writing Will Be Read by Millions. Always write as if your words will be seen by people beyond your intended audience.  Readers can link to your comments or forward them to others.  Search engines can often find what you’ve written.  Comments posted to sites like Twitter can be seen by everyone everywhere.
7. Know that You’re Not Really Anonymous. Few people are really anonymous on the Internet.  Comments and e-mails can be traced by people who know how.

Your feedreader is supposed to save you time by allowing you to see all of your favorite web content in one place.  But if your feedreader is overflowing with unread articles, it’s not a time saver, it’s a time sinkhole.  Here are 6 tips to help you get control of your RSS reader and manage the overload.

1. Put a time limit on it. Limit in advance the amount of time you’ll spend reviewing articles in the feedreader. When time’s up, move on to other more productive work.
2. If you’re not reading it, get rid of it. Like the items in the back of your closet that you’ll never wear, articles from blogs you visited once probably languish unread in your feedreader.  Be honest with yourself:  if you’re not reading it, unsubscribe.
3. Put new feeds on probation.  One way to keep from accumulating items you’ll never read is to save your newest feeds in a folder labeled something like “Probation.”  If you find a new feed useful, you can elevate it out of the probation folder.  On the other hand, if you realize that the articles are not as good as you thought they would be, you can unsubscribe to the feed before it takes up residence in your feedreader and starts accumulating.
4. Feel free to mark all as read. If your reader has hundreds (or even thousands) of articles waiting to be read, it’s probably better to empty the reader by marking all items as read and starting again.
5. Search to find the gems. If you use Google Reader, you can Search by topic to find items of interest. The articles that meet your search criterion are pulled out for you to read and tag as needed.  This keeps you from having to page through all of your articles to find the few you want to read.  You may want to do this before you mark all as read.
6. Save the best for another time. When you find articles that you want to read in depth, you can mark them with a star to be read later, or you can tag them as a “Favorite”. Then you can come back to them at your leisure.  Set aside a specific time in the day or the week to do your catch-up reading. Beware of tagging so many Favorites that you never get around to reading them all.

Google has a slew of cool tools.  One of them—Google Alerts—can let you know what bloggers, the press, and even the general public are saying about you or any topic of your choosing.

While Twitter is an excellent source of info about what people are talking about, someone has to put it in a tweet in order for it to be picked up.  But Google Alerts let you “follow” stories that no one is tweeting about yet.  It also lets you follow stories that are of interest to you, but may not catch the attention of others on the Internet.

Use Google Alerts to

• Listen out for good (or bad news) about you or your company
• Generate intelligence on what your competition is doing
• Find items of interest to tweet about
• Follow a news story that interests you
• Get up-to-the-minute information on changes in interest rates, the housing market, zoning laws, or anything else that impacts your business

Here’s how it works:  You enter a search term in Google Alerts.  When a news story, blog post, or video is added to the Internet that would appear among the top ten search results to someone using that search term, Google will alert you.

For example, let’s say you want to be alerted when anything new happens with the first-time home buyers tax credit.

1. Go to www.google.com/alerts
   
2. Enter the exact words you would use if you were searching for it on Google, in this case:  “first time home buyers tax credit”.
3. Enter the type of content you want to be alerted about.  For example, do you want to know when there’s a new news story, a new blog post, or some other kind of written content on the Internet?  Choose “comprehensive” if you want to be alerted about all three.  You can also be alerted if someone uploads a new video about your topic (choose “video”) or if your topic appears in a new e-mail aggregate (choose “group”).
4. Enter how often you want Google to check for new items:  once a week, once a day, or continuously.  If you want Google to check continuously, choose “as-it-happens”.
5. Enter your Google e-mail address (You must have a Google account to use Google Alerts).  If you use Google Reader and you prefer to have your alerts sent to you as a feed rather than via e-mail, select “feed”.
6. Click “Create Alert”.

Once you log in to your Google e-mail account and confirm, your alerts will start coming to you.  Because you checked “as-it-happens” you may start getting alerts right away.  And because you checked that you wanted them to come to your e-mail, your alerts will look like the example below.  Here you see links to two news stories about the first-time home buyers tax credit that popped into your e-mail inbox within minutes of setting up your alerts.

Keep in mind that you’ll only be alerted when there’s something new on the Internet that would appear among the top search results.  If you don’t ever get any alerts, it’s because there’s nothing new, because there’s nothing new that comes up high enough in a Google search, or because your search term isn’t very good.  You can always go in to Google alerts and make changes.  To do that:

1. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts.



2. Click the link that lets you edit your alerts.
3. Select the alert you want to edit and make your changes.

To delete an alert, simply check the box next to it and click the delete button.

How might you use Google Alerts?