lesson learned

This was the Animoto video that I created that enabled me to being a Realtor base of clients for future developments of an inexpensive way to advertise their listings;

http://youtu.be/ruGmmsOCT7w

Lessons Learned

I definitely found this class to provide me with a very different aspect than that of other classes. First of all, I spent most of the time in the hospital, albeit doing my work. In other classes, where the required reading would require certain chapters as did this one, I read all three books cover to cover. I never knew what Futuring was and now I have a different respect and outlook on it. Although I do see, especially in the models of Wall Street predictors, there is a lot of money to be made, that those making the most money were those investor advisors that were writing the newsletters on the predictions. One of the books even compared the actual S&P 500 over a certain period of time, 108 newsletters and a coin being flipped as to who was on the upside most of the time. The S&P 500 edged out the other two with the coin nudging out the newsletter predictors. Yet still, they still earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in writing the newsletters.

The second most important aspect of what I took from this class was the creation of the Animoto platform. As the owner of a social media marketing group, I found a way to market on a white label basis (paying the $499 annual fee) and offer my services to create videos/ slide shows for weddings, events, but especially within the Realtor circles. Then becoming a re-seller for a nationally known print media company, I was able to promote the Realtors open houses and their accompanying videos through printing invitations given at the open house that included a QR symbol that I put on the self-designed media which in turn allowed the potential client to scan the QR code and then watch on their smartphone or tablet, the Animoto creation. The Realtors think I walk on water.

From this many ideas came out of this class that I now use in real life. I only wish that I was able to get to the SL and Breeze sessions, however without regard to the actual grade, I took away from this class valuable real life information that will make me money far into the future.

Although I will never take into consideration Futuring as a living, I can absolutely see where I believe that the future of social media will go, but I will keep that to myself because with the state of technology, the iPhone5 that was released yesterday (Friday September 21^st) will be old news during the next holiday season. Microsoft will then meet them, Google will buy another Motorola type company and the titans of the industry will keep the technology coming at us so fast and furious that if we WERE to write about our predictions, by the time they were to go to print, they would already be outdated.

Personally, I like not knowing that no one else in my industry knows exactly what is happening, because that gives me a leg up on everything because it makes me believe that I and only I, know what is going to happen next….. and I am not sharing.