Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Today I spent some quality time with my wife Maria in reviewing my business and setting the objectives for the year to come. It has been an important moment because, despite all the things to do, I have taken the time to actually stand back and review everything I do or that I could do and lay it down in written format on a white board so that she could also review it and give me her opinion. She has been with me all along this incredible American journey and has enough good sense and business experience to advise me or at least help me better clarify my true objectives.

She is always able to make me focus on the important achievements and my abilities rather than on the setbacks and the difficulties, and this is priceless. But there is a little story that she sent me via e-mail today that I want to share with you.

Once upon a time somebody organized a frog race. The objective was to reach the top of a very high tower. Many people gathered to look and the peculiar competition and bet on the winners. The race began but the audience actually didn’t believe it was possible for the frogs to actually climb that high so they started telling to each other: “What a pity, they will never make it!” Some of the frogs that were attempting to the climb the tower heard these words, and felt discouraged, so they abandoned the race. Just one frog continued in trying to climb to the top.

But the people kept saying: “What a pity, they will never make it” so even more frogs abandoned except for this single stubborn frog that was still trying despite everything. Eventually all the frogs gave up except our lonely frog which stubbornly and with great effort managed to arrive to the top.

At this point everybody wanted to know how he had made it to complete successfully such a difficult task. But the frog didn’t answer… So everybody found out that this single triumphant frog was DEAF!

Moral of the story: don’t listen to the people who have the habit of being negative about things, they will rob you of your best hopes. Remember the power contained in the words you read or hear. So try always to be positive and always be deaf to anybody telling you that you can’t make your dreams come true.

Thank you Maria.

Roberto Mazzoni

Today everybody was shopping all around, yet for me, aside from buying a trampoline for my kids, it was business as usual. I was inside one of the house we have finished rehabbing recently and I was checking the last items and designing the layout of the external lights so to make the house stand out.

I was actually in the garage when I suddenly got a phone call on my mobile phone from my business partner and best friend Daniele Bogiatto who was driving along the Italian highway towards to Rome for a major event where he will launch, together with other partners, a whole new company dedicated to Social Network Marketing. An enterprise that wants to be the first really successful mixture between Web 2.0 and network marketing.

He has been working on this project for some months now and in the coming week end they will organize in Rome the first world wide convention of the company that is an evolution of an already successful European network marketing company that has been using the Web effectively in the last decade but that now wants to master the social networks.

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The success of a business or a project can be measured by the reach of the effects it can create. When you can establish relationships and cause effects at a very great distance, then you know that you are on the right track and you have a role to play. During the next weekend, in Rome, there will be a major event on Social Network Marketing that has begun from an idea me, my wife Maria, my business associate Daniele Bogiatto and his wife Jenny talked about one night, last summer, under a palm tree on Ana Maria Island.

Maria has an extensive high level background on Network Marketing and Daniele is a genius in Web promotion, and I have been studying the merging of network marketing technique, e-commerce and Internet Marketing by meeting and talking with some of the highest people in the field to date. By the merging of our experiences and ideas, and with the superb development of the project by Daniele after he returned in Italy, we now have the first world wide convention on Social Network Marketing in Rome, next week end.

Many big companies, also in the US, have tried to merge network marketing and social media and have failed so far or have achieved limited results. This project, that will follow closely the culture and the etiquette of the Net, will probably bring together two of the most powerful promotional channels of the last hundred years: Web 2.0 and network marketing.

While this is going on, Mark Jackson, an experienced North American real estate investor is in Italy and is meeting all the people connected to this huge project and other connected projects to explain them why and how to invest in real estate in the US.

This all started with my arrival in the US 15 months ago and with the selection of the right people to network with and the development of such a network. It is a result I am very proud of and I can’t wait to see the evolutions it will have in the near future.

Roberto Mazzoni

Yesterday I spent some time with my family at a carnival in the parking lot of the biggest local mall. Our attention was captured by the game where you drop a coin hoping that the scooping movement of a sliding mirror will make many more coins and gadgets fall on the table in front of you. We spent some time the all four of us dropping quarters and winning quarters and then dropping some more. We knew that by the very fact that the lady running the game was in business, the odds were against us. Statistically the must be more coins that stay inside the box than those that fall out.

The game where you drop a coin into a slot and hope to win the jackpot.

But there were so many coins just on the verge of falling and sometimes one little coin would produce a whole waterfall of coins for us to gather, that the game continued long enough to keep us entertained without spending too much money, but we did lose most of the coins that we put in despite, the many wins we had in the meantime. We walked away putting our last win in our pocket and we felt we had won anyway since the game turned out exactly as we expected. The odds were all against us, but it was fun to try.

In life you often find similar situations: get rich quick systems that are being offered you where you just have to throw that extra coin to gain all the previous money that has been amassed by the people that came before you. And sometimes the system seems credible enough and the guy selling it sound really convincing.

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Every new business or activity that we undertake has a learning period that can be substantially long when the complexity and potential profitability is high. I never believed in the get rich quick system that makes money while you sleep by you just pushing a button because developing such a system takes work and knowledge.

The road to success can seem long, but it will pay off only if you travel it all the way.

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Anyway when you first begin you sometimes feel that you are never going to make it since the first project or action you perform seems to be taking forever and to produce very little or no gain, or maybe even a loss. This is part of working yourself up the scale that will eventually lead you into the position of fully controlling the operation, but you’ll never get there if you don’t go through the motions and actions of learning your trade or hobby in the real world.

Studying is fine but it will never allow you to get anywhere until you get your hands dirty. Study doesn’t take into account the dishonest or incompetent worker that keeps messing up what you have assigned him, it doesn’t take into account the fears and uncertainties you will have to face while going through the critical decisions that will lead to your first product.

And if the project takes a long time to develop, you might just as well quit much before you get to the end. My wife Maria keeps telling me that the only people who fail are those that quit before arriving. And it is very true. And even when you arrive at your first result it might seem so inferior to what you were expecting and so hard to get that you might decide to give up and to avoid repeating the same steps again. But this would be again a mistake, because the second time around will be better and the third time around even better until you can really put it on automatic (or almost) and delegate most of it.
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