What does your email bounce-back say about you?

This is a quick post; September really got away from me and I haven't offered much here lately. Sorry for those of you who are still following along.

As most of you know, I am the one who sends the blanket email messages for the company on issues like E&o, Sharper Agent, etc. Sorry if they are boring, I'll try to do better next time. Nonetheless, when I send those messages, one of the things I can always count on is the bounce-backs that I get from your accounts. Quite frankly, most of them scare me.

So what is a bounce-back? Well, for most of you it is just your auto-reply message to your incoming email. Some of you have great bounce-backs...like "thanks for your email; I am out on the road at present but you can count on me getting back to you today." That is great...as a consumer when I read that message (assuming, of course, that you follow up like you promise) I feel good about you and your commitment to the business.

But here is a sample of a few I have seen in the last couple weeks:

"I am out of the country and not available by email...please know I won't reply to you until X" (which happened to be 6 weeks after my message). Really? They don't have computers in this country you are going to?

"Thanks for your email. I am away from my computer until X and can not reply to your message" (nice, only problem is that X was two weeks BEFORE I sent the message).

"I am not available by email. Call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx and I will be happy to help." (In other words, I won't deal with you by email).

and finally, my favorite:

"Thanks for your email| First Name, Last Name| Other job title, Other Job address" (really? I thought I was contacting my REALTOR)

Please remember that email bounce-backs are seen by EVERYONE who sends you a message...while you think you are offering a practical service, you may very well be telling the public that you really just don't care.

The twitter revolution continues

twitter....twitter....love it or hate it I think it is going to stick around for a while.

I know some of you could care less about twitter (which just to refresh everyone's memory is a microblogging platform where users leave 140-character or less "tweets" for anyone to see) but the world is still enamored. Turn on any television program not named "Leave it to Beaver" and you will see people talking about twitter, or encouraging you to "follow" them for the latest news.

CBHearthside embraced twitter a long time ago. Here is a blog post from Stefanie that dates back to 2008 talking about how the service works. Our intranet site has been encouraging you to follow the CBHearthside twitter stream for some time now, we have been using twitter to push new listings to consumers in several school districts around the area, and when news comes out (like it did about our virtual office the other day) we are using twitter to push the news out fast.

So the other day when twitter decided to make a change in its security settings needless to say we had to pay attention. Their new OAuth password validation (trust me, way more technical than you need to know) meant that we had to go in and redo each of our school district listing feeds. That meant I had to go in an look at each one while making a change. What I noticed in almost every district I checked was that there are people following our listing feeds and they are putting us on lists of things they want to follow. That is great news for us and sets us so far ahead of our competition I can't even begin to put it into words. How many other brokerage companies are even talking about twitter, let alone having people follow their specific district listing feeds? Trust me...no one.

twitter is going to continue to grow - that I can guarantee you. I was with a group of GenX and GenY cousins over the weekend and all they wanted to learn about was twitter. Perhaps it's time you took another look. Check out this national post (again from Stefanie - she seems to write all the good educational stuff) about how to get started.