Feed for Thought
I recently received an email from a friend and mentor who has been in the real estate business since Noah found engough dry land to put up the first sign. I’ve been coaching Jim on blogging and all things web and tech.
Jim had received an email from an agent on the East Coast advising him that his content was being stolen and posted over on IReference, a site supposedly owned by Damion Flynn of Simply Sold Viking.
It appears Damion has stirred up a hornet’s nest amongst his fellow Realtors by using their feeds to populate a site that is obviously intended to be part of the lead generation model for SimplySold.
I’m not sure if this is the same situation that prompted this post from Teresa Boardman, but I was quite surprised to see Damion participating in this type of activity. A year ago, I was reading some good material from Damion over on Active Rain and thought him to be very knowledgeable and insightful.
I find it interesting, given that Damion is trying to build SimplySold into a national franchise, that he would do something to stir up and alienate the online Realtor community.
I don’t believe that pulling a feed into your site from another site is illegal or a breach of copyright as long as you do not claim the material as yours. To me the point is not a legal one, but a question of ethics and smart business practice.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that bloggers are very protective of their content. It’s theirs. They wrote it and are using it to build their business. When someone grabs that material for their gain in such an obvious self-serving way – well, people get pissed. And then, given that they are writers with blogs, they start writing unfavorable things about the people that are (in their mind) stealing material for personal gain.
This doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do if you are trying to sell real estate franchises and have any concern for establishing a reputable name. I don’t know what Damion is up to with his SimplySold Viking model, but the mere fact that a blogger that has only been posting material for six months is getting emails from other bloggers alerting him to SimplySold & IReference should give Damion Flynn pause.
I’m no genius, but would you want a bunch of negative backlash indexed in Google if you were trying to build a business?
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This article published on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 12:20 pm | Contact the editor
Topics: Social Media
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Writer for national real estate opinion column AgentGenius.com, focusing on the improvement of the real estate industry by educating peers about technology, real estate legislation, ethics, practices and brokerage with the end result being that consumers have a better experience.
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John – you have the ability of writing something that is so negative and controversial in a way that doesn’t offend…it’s a gift.
The whole personal gain concept of using someone else’s material which they work so hard to create is simply not acceptable.
I know there is a term for people getting a bad rap on the blogosphere…what is that again? linching…no, flogging? mangling? It’s Doocing!
Ines – your the first person that has ever accused me of that! All my hard work on tact must be paying off.
I knew you would like that – but you really did it tactfully!
There is no question that established bloggers have power to brand someone forever in the online world that Google indexes.
I wrote a positive piece on my mortgage officer last year, within two days it was the #3 result for a google search on her name. Talk about a report card that lasts forever.
Likewise, our negative reports on people and things have a way of sticking too. Even simple tricks like naming an image of a horse’s rear end a persons name… well you get the idea. Searchable forever…. >:->
This was a great post. I have been reading your blog for some time as it is generally very well written. I did not see the posts at ActiveRain about this but am familiar with the ireference site.
I am very familiar with Damion as he has been coaching me for a couple of years on my website and was the person who introduced me to blogging.
My blog was being put on the ireference site as well and I received a phone call from a buyer within about 3 days of it being put on there. Damion explained the site to me as a “mega-site” that would allow us all to get more exposure for ourselves and it worked.
I am actually very disappointed in all this mess. I think the agents that backlashed at him were out of line. It seems that he made a mistake by pulling their content without asking, but a simple email would have sufficed instead of the bombardment of emails, phone calls and posts about it trying to ruin his reputation.
While he may have made a mistake by not asking the agents, I personally think these few agents overreacted and have hurt some of us lesser known bloggers by their actions.
He took down the whole site and even after I begged him to leave it up he told me that it was simply not dealing with the hassle of it. I think the final blow came this morning when one of these bloggers called him on his cell phone at 3 in the morning (per a personal email – woke his 9 month old baby up).
I think, had anyone of these agents did a little reading on his ActiveRain blog, they may have had a different story.
I talk pretty regularly to some of the other people that were on Damion’s site by request and they are all pretty upset at this as well – that a few pissed off people ruined a good thing for everyone else.
From what I hear it was the “using my content without asking me” thing which ruined the site.
Just my two cents.
It was Damion that I wrote about on this blog. A friend of mine did some research on him. His name comes up quite a bit on the internet. When he gets caught doing something questionable he acts all innocent, who me? I was just trying to help. He has fooled a lot of people. Do some research.