MyEastBayAgent: Technology, Real Estate, The Bay Area &Thanksgiving 2.0

So today is Thanksgiving, one of my favorite days of the year. I know because when I checked my email this morning, it was full of emails from real estate agents, investors and vendors blasting their email lists with a form letter.

So I thought, great idea but lets innovate the Thanksgiving form email. So here's my crack at it.

Thanksgiving 2.0

My life has changed more in the past 2 1/2 weeks, than I could have ever imagined. I've evolved from being a tech-enabled real estate agent on the verge of breaking through to... I don't even want to try to slap a label on it, but it's the next step and it's an amazing place to be. I'll be making a few major announcements in the next week, but that's a whole other series of posts. But stay tuned!

I've managed to evolve my business while creating my dream position. I'm eternally grateful that I found a company like Keller Williams and an office like ours in Berkeley where I'm encouraged to follow my passion and innovate. I love real estate and I love technology and these two passions are allowing me to position myself in a very unique place. The beautiful thing is that the owners of my office and my office manager are behind me 100% and that's a wonderful feeling.

I had one of the coolest things happen to me yesterday. A couple people who believe in what I'm doing so much that they drove me to Best Buy and dropped some serious loot on a gear upgrade for your's truly. So today is my first post coming from my new Toshiba Laptop/Tablet PC and I'm digging it.

I was running my whole operation off of a Celeron powered desktop computer & an ancient Sony digital camera with a broken viewfinder that took a photo 3 seconds after you pressed the button. I was a little embarassed to come clean to my bratpack 2.0 friends about my set-up, but they didn't hate. They had they same view as I did. It just goes to show that anyone can do it!

I feel like I've found my calling. For the past few weeks I've been walking on air, trying to describe to my officemates at Keller Williams what is going on and why I'm so pumped about it. I'm in a unique position where I'm witnessing and becoming involved in ridiculous innovation, while still fully immersed in a different sub-culture. I feel that it's almost my civic duty to spread the word of these new ideas beyond the core group of users and my postion at Keller Williams is allowing me this opportunity.

Last week I held an informational session where I discussed the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon and how it pretains to our businesses. We had about 10-12 people at our first session on Tuesday. What surprised me is that for the next couple days, people kept approaching me genuinely excited thanking me for the class. As the word spread, the unlucky ones who missed my class asked me if I would be willing to lead another one (would I???, c'mon I live for this stuff). So last Friday, I had a new group of ten people to expose to Web 2.0.

Afterwards, we had a wildly successful organizational meeting for what is going to become the Keller Williams Golden Gate Berkeley blog. (Still pre-launch, but you'll be hearing plenty about it in the coming days).

I still had people coming up to me this week who missed the first two sessions wondering if I'd be willing to do it again. So, yes, this Friday at 11am, I'm going to do it again. So if you're in the area and are interested, please stop by. All of our training events have an open door policy & anyone who wants to learn is welcome to attend.

So that's what I'm thankful for.

Also, thank you MOM for sticking with me. I told you I was going to make it happen! Also... thanks to everyone else who thinks I'd thank them. I really appreciate you all, but I've got to end this post eventually.

On a side note, I'm going to be that guy that goes from Thanksgiving party to Thanksgiving party today & I'm hoping to do some live-blogging with my new toys, so feel free to follow along and leave comments.
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Update: Flickr photosets: Thanksgiving & Thanksgiving2.0 subset