Replace your e-newsletters with lifestreaming

You may have noticed that I have discontinued the weekly “Real Estate News Summary, that I called “The Cutting Edge – real estate news you don’t usually see in the mainstream media." The content for the weekly post was clipped and shared from both very popular and somewhat obscure real estate blogs, mixed with my blog posts and comments, and pictures. The weekly post is discontinued in favor of an automated lifestreaming post (WP Lifestream plugin does it automatically)

Lifestreaming?

Put very simply, lifestreaming is a log of your (selected) social media activities, and can include many social, sharing and bookmarking platforms as well as blog feeds. But the term can mean a lot of different things. I actually have 2 lifestreams – one that is real estate oriented and one that is a little more personal and with more emphasis on social media and Memphis. Bottom line – you can share what you want in one place.

The Tools

I started “Real Estate-The Cutting Edge” as a Friendfeed group. Friendfeed basically consolidates your presence on the web into a stream that can be read or subscribed to via RSS. You chose which platforms are included in your feed, for example, you may want to include your Facebook, Twitter, your blog, Linkedin updates, Yelp, etc., or any other networks where you are making a contribution or that you receive information from. Since I use Delicious to bookmark and share much of the information I find from blogs I read, I also add my Delicious feeds, so readers can see what I have bookmarked. This is the information I share in the “Real Estate-The Cutting Edge” feed.
You can direct this information to your main Friendfeed feed or make as many specialized groups as you like, each of which has a specific RSS feed for subscribers. So stop wasting time formatting and editing e-newsletters. Offer your clients the feed if they are RSS users; use a plugin on your blog like WP Lifestream; or, if you are more old fashioned, copy, paste, edit and clean up the contents of your feed and publish that. Here's is what I offer clients and readers who are interested in what I think is important about the real estate market, Memphis or the world in general: Subscribe to Real Estate, the Cutting Edge Feed at http://friendfeed.com/real-estate-the-cutting-edge Subscribe to my Delicious bookmarks Feed at http://delicious.com/joespake or, better yet, subscribe to (or just read) my blog for the automated news summary post at http://memphisrealestatebuzz.com