The Google's and Yahoo's of the world are incredibly efficient at gathering information that is on the Internet. Sometimes it's amazing how quickly they can crawl and index data.

What is also amazing to me, is how often people display…. let's just call it "poor judgement" when they post on public blogs, message boards and forums.

Point2 Agent provides a message board for their users and prospective users. Some of these threads are "locked" — meaning only active Point2 members can access them. These locked threads are also set to not be crawled and indexed by the search engines.

However, many of the threads are NOT locked, and are publicly accessible and indexable by the search engines.

I am an active participant on the P2 forum. I like to help people, get help and just get to know my fellow P2 members. We've got a great little community.

Last week an agent came on the forum and made his first post. He was seeking advice on a specific clause in the Ohio purchase agreement. He identified himself as a new agent. I responded with what I thought was helpful advice. His response was a flame, by any definition of the word.

Here's the actual question, and subsequent responses:

Hmmmm… Now I get this sort of stuff on occasion. It's happened on this very blog. It used to hurt my feelings, but at some point I just decided to consider the source and move on.

My response to Mr. Nick Strippy was:

Nick - Whatever. I'm not even going to bother replying to your ridiculous attack. I will say this though, and you can take it however you please…

If you respond to clients and prospects with just one tenth of the attitude you displayed to me, then good luck succeeding in this business.

Many of my forum friends also responded (and I thank them for the support). And of course, it's a week later and Mr. Nick Strippy hasn't returned to the message boards, nor offered an apology (not that I was expecting one as people with that type of attitude can rarely admit they made a mistake).

I'm not blogging about this to bring Mr. Strippy before more of his peers, or to see that this gets indexed in Google.

You see, Nick did all that himself. He posted this on a public section of the message board. ANYONE can access it, including Google. And Google, in it's typically impressive fashion, has already visited the thread and indexed it.

In fact, if you Google "Nick Strippy", the link to this entire thread comes up in the #1 spot. Above Nick's own web site.

And this folks, is why you have to be careful what you say on the Internet!

I suspect someone might be saying right now, "So what, no one searches for agents by name." And that may indeed be true for people looking for an agent. But I assure you that many people WILL Google the name of someone that they are considering whether or not to have represent them.

And this is exactly what they are looking for.

Mr. Strippy has immortalized his words on the Internet for all eternity. There is no taking them back.

Be careful what you say on the Internet folks. It never forgets.

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