The First Virtual Real Estate BarCamp: A Huge Success!

Thank You!

Thank you for all your wonderful comments, kudos, suggestions, concerns, promotion, enthusiasm, and most of all, your participation.

We’re chalking this event up as a huge success, thanks to all of you.  We couldn’t have done it without you.  It seems like we simply set the event in motion, a little over a month ago, and you all took the ball and ran with it.  If we take anything away from the experience it is that there is a very clear need for this sort of event.  So be certain, we will continue to fill the need in every way we can.

Statistics From The Event:

1. Number of Registered Attendees: 1928
2. Number of Live Presentations:  26
3. Number of Pre-Recorded Presentations: 1
4. Hours of Live Content: 13
5. Maximum Number of Attendees in All Webainrs at Once: 1004
6. Maximum Number of Attendees in a Single Webinar:  404
7. Registered Attendees That Participated: 1634
8. Number of Live, In-Office Events: 71
9. Largest Population at an In-Office Event: 127
10. Number of T-Shirts Printed: 500
11. Number of T-Shirts Delivered by Tuesday: 460
12: Total Unique Traffic to VREBC.com in 30 Days of Existence: 11,161
13. Total Unique Traffic to VREBC.com on Day of Event: 3,651
14. Most Registrations in One Day: 366 (11/16/09)
15. Fewest Registrations in One Day: 5 (11/8/09)
16. Greatest Referrer of Registrations: Facebook 20.9%
17. Referrer Runner-Up: Office/Co-Worker: 20.2%
18. Number of Sponsors: 13
19. Total Money Raised For Warmath Charity on Day of Event:  $427
20. Total Number of #vrebc Tweets  During Event: 2330
21. Number of Countries that Tuned In: 11
22. Number of Attendees in a Bathrobe: Insufficient data.

Of all the stats above, the one that stands out most to me is the charity total.  If everyone had donated a quarter ($0.25) we would have raised $475 for the Warmath Children College Fund.  Collectively, we raised only $425.  If we can find 120 more donors that feel like they got $5 worth of knowledge from this event, then we can at least present the family with a $1000 donation in all of out names.  Together, by giving a little, we can all make a big difference.

Presentation Downloads:

Below are download links for the Notes and PowerPoint presentations of the Speakers that we have received.  If you presented at the event, and have something for us to post here, please send them so that we can update this list.

Ross Hair - Converting Social Media Into More Real Estate Closings
Ross Hair - Social Media Mind Map

Frances Flynn Thorsen - Social Media Risk Management Part 1
Frances Flynn Thorsen - Social Media Risk Management Part 2

Suzanne Roy - Top Tips For Free (But Highly Profitable) Advertising Online

Steve Rosenbaum - The Best Online Marketing Tools and Free Software Sites

Was It Social?

One of the concerns before the event, even at its conception was: Can it be social?
Can we capture any of that social magic that happens in the real life barcamp events?

We set up the 3 obvious avenues, a Twitter Hashtag (#vrebc), a Facebook Fan Page, and a Chat Room.

Here’s what Matt Stigliano had to say about the experience:

My biggest fear as it was a very simple scrolling chat, was that the conversation would inevitably turn boring. It didn’t. People engaged and discussed the finer points of what was being said in each session. We shared our tips, tricks, and ideas. My guess is that it was a lot like the conversations that take place in the hallway of REbarcamps all over the country.

This was the sense that I got from many of the participants that we heard from.  We also heard that people were jumping from the Twitter hashtag to the chat room, not wanting to miss anything.  With 2330 #vrebc tweets and 100’s of active attendees in the chat room, there was at least a conversation happening, that’s for sure.

71 Offices held their own live event during the BarCamp.  One office wrote this blog about the experience, mentioning that, “The day exceeded all expectations as 3 rooms had standing room only attendance.”  He continued, “ it provided me with the opportunity to spend a day with the agents and then kick back at the social meetup party afterward.”

Our goal with the office events and the in-real-life meetups after the event were to try and bring participants together, physically,  much like the standard BarCamps can.  The feedback we have received from the office meetups and the after event meetups is that everyone enjoyed themselves, and really took advantage of the social aspect of the day.

I think we can continue to improve the social experience in subsequent events, but for a first go at taking the conference online, I think the consensus is that YES, it was Social.  Mission accomplished.

Suggestions We’ve Received:

Here are some suggestions that we are considering and would love some discussion among our participants in the comments.

1. Longer Sessions.
Is 30 mins too short?  Should we encourage the speakers to present on a mitigated topic?  Or, do we extend the presentation time to 45 mins, or even an hour?

The format we went with mirrors the standard BarCamp schedule.  30 mins up, 15 mins down.  After experiencing this schedule online, I do think that we should extend the sessions by 15 mins, making the schedule 45 mins up, 15 mins down.  Thoughts?

2. More Engagement with the Presenters.
Should we allow for live question and answer?  Do we need to encourage the presenters to have a partner to handle the live questions?

In the presenting guidelines, we encouraged the presenters to not engage the live audience in the their sessions.  30 mins was such a short window to present in the first place, and we wanted to avoid the likely possibility of being taken off track with dozens of questions from the large audience.  That said, I do believe that there is a need to engage with the presenters, and I propose that we set up ‘break out’ chat rooms for each presenter to ‘hold court’ for 15 minutes after their session.

3. Offer a Panel Format for Some of the Sessions.
Can we pull off a 3 or 4 person panel with a moderator on the line, all virtually?  Should it be given at least an hour, given the range of participation needed?

I like the idea.  If we have a solid panel that proposes a session, why not?  Thoughts?

4. Record the Sessions.
We have received a TON of requests for replays of the sessions.  The reality of the situation was that we were just 3 people doing everything we could (at the time) to make this a smooth event.  Adding the recording to the dynamic was the first thing we had to sacrifice in the production to maintain our sanity.  Now that we have the experience of this event behind us, I guarantee that our future events will have full recordings of each session, available for download.

5. Less 101 and More Advanced Topics.
We recognize that the majority of the audience did find out about the event because our social media reach, which would lead us to understand that the majority of the attendees were somewhat versed in the fundamentals of using Social Media, and other online marketing strategies.  Catering to this audience with more advanced topics and content is crucial, and we will make an effort to secure some advanced topic presenters for future events.  However, we can’t ignore that the clear goal of these events is to educate the new adopters, not the early ones.  With a little more attention to pinning 101 classes at the same time as advanced ones we can hope to satisfy the greatest number of you.

6. Less Selling in the Presentations.
We put up some guidelines for all the presenters, and included a “no selling” point in said guidelines.  But, we can’t and won’t control what happens in each session.  We can only hope that all the presenters ‘get’ the spirit of the event and follow suit.  That said, I personally don’t mind a little ’selling of your time’ in your presentation.  Maybe it is the salesman in me, but if I have a captive audience, a little shameless self promotion is impossible to resist.

Tech Challenges:

What were the “tech difficulties”?

1. Limit of attendees allowed in each webinar was accidentally capped at 300 instead of 1001.

It seems we made the mistake of launching the Webainars manually, about 15 minutes earlier than schedule.  We were anxious and wanted to get them up and running to test them and get that detail out of the way.  Well… it turns out that this is how you limit the permitted attendance of a webinar to only 300 instead of the advertised 1000.  In fact, the Admin Control Panel continues to read: Max 1001.  Immediately we started getting complaints of people not being able to join “Full Webinars”.  We called Citrix and they informed us that we shouldn’t have launched them manually, and that there is now nothing that they can do.  We closed each wenbinar room, relaunched it, and this seemed to reset the allowed attendees to 1001 again.

2. Jumping in and out of webinars was not “easy”.

We realized that the switch between webinars was not going to be smooth.  There is just no way to have it automatic, given the service that we used: GoToWebinar.  We think that we can improve expectations by posting a clear, step-by-step expectation of jumping from room to room.

3. Audio issues for the speakers.

A few of the speakers had issues calling in and being heard.  We solved all of them but 1 instance, and are still unsure what caused that challenge.  The other challenges were related to permissions, access links and audio pins.  With practice we can better manage these potential challenges, and hope to minimize them in the future.

4. Audio issues for the attendees.

Some attendees were not hearing the audio.  The only solution we have heard to overcome this is to log out and log back in again.  It seems to resolve all audio issues.  Otherwise, attendees must dial in and listen with their phones.

Our Next Event:

It is official.  We are going to ride the wave of interest and enjoyment from this event and produce another.  Bigger, Better and Broader.

Date: Monday the 4th of January (just before Inman NYC)
Time: 9AM PST - 4PM PST
Webinar Rooms: Four.
Number of Presenters: 28
Length of Sessions: 45 mins.
Length of Breaks: 15 mins.
Registration Goal: 3,000
Office Event Goal: 100

In the meantime, we will be working feverishly to build a more social experience around the event.  If you would like to be more connected to that experience, please join the beta version of TomatoUniversity.com.

Thanks again to our sponsors, speakers and those that helped produce this awesome event.

---