We started at Max's Restaurant for some breakfast, then headed over to the docks by the Boston Aquarium to board for our whale watching tour through Boston Harbor Cruises. It was a bit longer than a three hour tour, as we left at 10:00 am and returned around 3:30, but it was worth it. The high-speed boat took us off the coast of Provincetown, Massachusetts to see some whales.

The tour didn't disappoint. As soon as we arrived at our destination, we saw gorgeous humpback whales all around the boat, and we were able to get really close. We saw flukes, flipper-slapping, and were able to appreciate the sheer size of these animals as they swam about 10 feet parallel to our boat!

We ended the day at Boston's Durgin Kitchen in Fanueil Hall. After filling up on a variety of deliciously fried seafood (after being on the ocean all day, it felt appropriate) we went our separate ways to each take our perspective post-adventure naps. We had an amazing time!

Read more about the Boston Logic Team.

The fact is that most individual realtors don't have the budget to do this well. Lots of the real estate agents that we speak with are spending less than $100/month online. On their own, they're highly UNLIKELY to see any result from that C-note, but let's think about what could be done by working together.

I've also observed that these agents would be happy to spend even twice this much if they thought they would see results. Most would not be willing to jump in and spend $500/month.

Instead of every agent spending $75 or $100 per month on a website that sees almost no visitors, what would happen if everyone in the office invested together. Let's assume that your average office invested $200/agent/month. So, 10 agents pool their $2000 and make an investment. Let's see what they would get, assuming that you sign up to do all of this with Boston Logic vs. every agent signing up with a cheap template provider:

It's obvious that the economies of scare are huge!

I've been bringing this up in meetings lately. I'll report back soon and let you all now whether or not anyone actually gets behind this logic.

What we're doing is looking for through tweets with the words 'real estate' in either the tweet or the user's description.  If we find that term, we add them as a friend (or follow them).  I've been running this for just over 24 hours on a test account (so as not to taint our existing Twitter account), and already have some interesting observations:

1) There is a lot of spam type tweets out there.  It makes sense.  It's easy to automate the process of both tweeting and following.  Just like email, there is virtually no additional cost of an additional recipient, and even if you're response rate is quite small, as your pool of followers is large enough, you're likely to get a few responses.  I think to really effectively leverage a bot, we'll need use it simply as a tool for finding people to follow, keeping a human in charge of determining whether someone is worth following or not.

2) People want to network.  Yes, I know that sounds quite obvious, that's why we use Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin; to grow our pool of people we are connected with.  Our bot has found and followed about 100 people at this point, and about a third of them have started to follow us.  This is a bit surprising to me because we've given nothing in terms of relevant or useful information.  Remember, we're just doing this on a test account. My one and only tweet is 'First Post!'.  I would assume that if we provided value through our tweets, we'd see a much higher rate of people following us after we follow them.  We'd also keep followers, instead of seeing them drop off after time.

I'm personally a bit nervous that Twitter will turn into a place dominated by bots and spam.  I'm sure the folks at Twitter share similar concerns.  I also am not sold on the value it brings.  Call me old fashioned, but I like my blogs.  I like that a good blog is a means through which to transfer knowledge. Twitter is much more of a notification tool. For me, the number of notifications quickly surpass my desire to monitor those notifications for for personal value.

Given its 'Right now' nature, I'm interested to see if we can convert some of our Twitter audience into customers.  I suspect like most forms of online-marketing, it's going to be dependent on our ability to provide value to our base.  If we can effectively do that, we'll be successful in converting some of our followers into paying customers.

For those interested, here's the code.  I leveraged John Nunemaker's fantastic Twitter gem:

require 'rubygems'

gem 'twitter'

require 'twitter'



terms = ['real estate', 'Real Estate']



httpauth = Twitter::HTTPAuth.new('username', 'password')

client = Twitter::Base.new(httpauth)

friends = client.friends.map{|i| i.screen_name}



while true

  stream = Twitter.firehose

  stream.each do |tweet|

    str_tweet = tweet.text

    str_tweet += ' - ' + tweet.user.description unless tweet.user.description.nil?

    terms.each do |term|

      if str_tweet.include?(term)

        puts "tweet: #{str_tweet}"

        begin

          unless friends.include?(tweet.user.screen_name)

            client.friendship_create(tweet.user.screen_name)

            friends << tweet.user.screen_name

            puts "added: #{tweet.user.screen_name}"

          end

          rescue Twitter::NotFound

            puts "error: #{$!}"

            puts tweet.to_yaml

          rescue Twitter::General

            puts "already a contact: #{tweet.user.screen_name}"

          rescue

            puts "error: Malformed JSON"

        end

      end

    end

  end

  sleep(30)

end

You see, before we added this here blog to bostonlogic.com, the only blog we had was our real estate SEO blog.  So, when I had something to write about another topic, I had to either post it on someone else's blog or just toss it on the back burner.

No more my friends! This blog is going to have every thought that I, and the rest of the team, come up with. We're constantly coming up with ideas, noticing trends, seeing stupid decisions being made, complimenting awesomeness and just generally thinking.

What are we thinking about? Well, the web, online marketing, real estate, eCommerce, communications technologies, business models, SEO, PPC, SEM, wordpress, social media, design, books, websites, video, FLASH, and so much more.

Stay tuned.