Notorious R.O.B.

From Twitter itself (h/t: @mathurrell) comes this amazing piece of news:

Nearly one in five (19%) online Americans now uses Twitter or a similar service to post and share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others, according to the latest survey data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

This figure represents a significant increase over previous surveys that reported on Twitter use. Research in in December 2008 and April 2009 from Pew found that only 11% of internet users preported using a status-update service, while a similar study by Harris Interactive in March/April of 2009 found that number to be even lower, at 5%.

Let’s assume that the research is valid and accurate.  1 out of 5 is an amazing figure in and of itself.

There are, however, two other even more amazing observations that can be made if we take the 20% figure as valid.

First, we may be heading towards a self-balkanized America with no common shared cultural touchpoint.

If 19% of online Americans are on Twitter, and some 73% of all American adults are online (this is from 2006, by the way, so the actual number might be higher), and there are 304 million Americans of which 227.4 million are 18 years of age and older, what we get is that there are some 31.5 million Americans on Twitter.

Well, the #1 highest ranked Twitter user in terms of number of followers is one Ashton Kutcher, with 3.88 million followers or 12.3% of the total Twittering Americans.  That’s it.  in terms of news or information sources, CNN tops the list with 2.79 million followers, or 8.8%.

The implication is that Americans have formed a bunch of small cells of their friends, colleagues, people they know on Twitter — there is no Twitter user/company/whatever that commands the majority of the Americans using Twitter for whatever it is that they use it for.

If social networks is the future of information distribution and communication, then we’re likely headed into a society without a defining common shared source of information or culture.  We’re going to make references, allusions, and jokes that will become increasingly “insider info”.  Gamers will instantly know what other gamers are talking about, while art fans will be speaking mostly with other art fans.  Micro-fragmentation appears to be something we need to think about.

Second, maybe none of that micro-fragmentation stuff will matter because Americans are just plain too dumb to survive in a challenging world.

Here’s the top ten most popular (in terms of number of followers) users on Twitter:

1.  Ashton Kutcher (aplusk)
2.  Britney Spears (britneyspears)
3.  Ellen DeGeneres (TheEllenShow)
4.  CNN Breaking News (cnnbrk)
5.  Twitter (twitter)
6.  Kim Kardashian (KimKardashian)
7.  Ryan Seacrest (RyanSeacrest)
8.  Barack Obama (BarackObama)
9.  John Mayer (johncmayer)
10.  Oprah Winfrey (Oprah)

Seven of the Top Ten (eight if you include Barack Obama, Celebrity President) is an entertainer/celebrity.  Some are celebrities that are famous for being famous — Kim Kardashian for example.

If this is what Americans want, then that’s what Americans want.  Just don’t ask me to think the future is rosy and wonderful on this evidence.

-rsh

PS: Note that adult Twitter users are computer-literate, tech-savvy people over 18.  The supposed creme de la creme of our society, who “get it”.  Oh #*@(%@!

So now that Benn Rosales of AgentGenius has jumped into the fray with his latest post, which comes on the heels of Jim Marks’s critique of my Inman column (subscribers only), I figure it might be good to consolidate my responses here.  And this is not to mention the various commenters on the Inman post, conversations via Twitter, email, etc.  This topic’s got folks fired up — in a good way.

Let me point out that the critiques come in three different flavors.

1. Social media is a great marketing platform!
2. Interaction on social media, including Twitter, is no different from offline networking.
3. Twitter is a great tool for building sphere of influence!

Let us go through each in order, then summarize with what I think is a larger lesson about marketing strategy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, I got into an interesting debate over Twitter with Ari Herzog among others over the topic of whether social media is MEDIA.  Because Twitter isn’t really the appropriate forum for laying out one’s arguments, I thought to transfer it here in hopes of advancing it some.  Or at least getting my thoughts down.

The Setup

It all started when Ari tweeted:

I casually responded:

@ariherzog ain’t social media… y’know… MEDIA? that there is a fundamental problem of modern journalism.

That launched a series of back-and-forths with others jumping in that was one of the more interesting Tweet-Debates I’ve had to date.

My basic point was that if major news sources embrace social media, then that basically puts the value proposition of journalism into jeopardy, because I view social media as a new form of media.  Why subscribe to a RSS feed from the LA Times when I can subscribe to RSS feeds from the people and organizations that the LA Times reporter spoke to to get his facts?

It turned out, Ari had a different definition of “Social Media”:

Well, can’t argue with that.  If he meant by “social media” stuff like people mashing up maps with data… okay, then journalism has no issues at all.

But what if he’s wrong?  What if “social media” isn’t just a stand-in for the undefined term “Web 2.0″?  What if it really is a new form of media — transfer of information from one party to another?

I thought it worthwhile to lay down my arguments on… er… “paper”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ve heard of this “social media” thing. But if pressed to define it, you — like the rest of us — would stammer out a few words about Twitter, Facebook, and blogs and then… realize that the term is more or less undefined.

Well, here’s the Wikipedia definition of “social media”:

Social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences. (Emphasis mine)

And the entry goes on to note things like World of Warcraft is social media. Okay, then so is internet gambling.

Furthermore, the highlighted portion suggests that email is also social media. So is a fax machine. Or that cutting-edge (for the 19th century) device, the telegraph. They all “integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction.” In theory, so do messenger pigeons and smoke signals. In other words, “social media” doesn’t actually mean anything.

And yet, it does. The real meaning of “social media” may be difficult to define, but everyone knows what it is — and more importantly, knows what it is not. Stories in the New York Times is not “social media” despite being an activity that integrates technology (the printing press), telecommunications (the Associated Press wire service), and social interaction (the reporters write, the audience reads).

Some might say that “two-way communication” is the essence of social media. This too is wrong. There are blogs that don’t allow comments — yet they are very much “social media”. YouTube is considered “social media” but it’s hard to call what goes on in the comments section to be “two-way communication” in any meaningful way.

The Internet is not “social media” since mobile applications can entirely bypass the Internet and still become social media. Meetups and Tweetups often fall into “social media” categories, but it’s hard to see how people sitting in a room together talking can be conceived of as web-based simply because they arranged to meet via the Web.

So what the hell is “social media” in its essence?

Social Media Defined

My personal definition of social media is this:

Communication channels that enable the authentic and personal engagement of one human being to another.

Admittedly, my definition is heavily influenced by Cluetrain principles. While each and every one of you needs to go read the whole thing (free, online!), this passage from the Introduction speaks most eloquently to how I define social media:

The Internet became a place where people could talk to other people without constraint. Without filters or censorship or official sanction — and perhaps most significantly, without advertising. Another, noncommercial culture began forming across this out-of-the-way collection of computer networks. Long before graphical user interfaces made the scene, the scene was populated by plain old boring ASCII: green phosphor text scrolling up screens at the glacial pace afforded by early modems. So where was the attraction in that?

The attraction was in speech, however mediated. In people talking, however slowly. And mostly, the attraction lay in the kinds of things they were saying. Never in history had so many had the chance to know what so many others were thinking on such a wide range of subjects. Slowly at first, a new kind of conversation was beginning to emerge, but it would achieve global reach with astonishing speed.

For those of us grizzled old dinosaurs who got onto the pre-Netscape Internet, and were absolutely floored upon discovering IRC know the feeling. The strange combination of utter freedom and complete anonymity brought out levels of authenticity in many people — while others invented online personas with a wild variety of roleplaying.

What makes a blog a blog and not an online magazine is the authenticity of the voice, and the personal engagement of the blogger. I’m a big fan of Instapundit, where Prof. Glenn Reynolds holds court on a variety of political, kitchenware, photography, and nanotechnology topics. There are no comments on Instapundit. Yet, it is social media because Prof. Reynolds never fails to speak in his voice. He never fails to be personal.

Another great example is contrasting the National Review Online (an online magazine) with The Corner on National Review Online (a group blog). [So sue me, I read conservative websites. The point is on social media, and these came to mind.] These are two sections of the same website, yet the flavor, the tone, the feel is very different. The NRO proper has articles that have been edited, written to professional standards. What it lacks in personality and authenticity, it makes up with authority and seriousness. The Corner, in contrast, is full of the authentic voices of the bloggers — many of whom are also writers and editors of the National Review — and a personal human engagement exists there that is lacking in NRO itself.

I believe, therefore, that social media is not defined by the tools or the technology, but by the authenticity and the personalness of the engagement.

The Corruption

Trouble is, marketing departments worldwide in every major and minor corporation could not see (and in some cases, have never seen) what the big deal with the Internet was, and what is so important about Cluetrain, and about social media. To far too many marketers, “social media” was just like “any other media”, but “more social” — whatever that means.

The same strategies and the same models for putting ads on magazines were used to put ‘banner ads’ on this newfangled World Wide Web thingamajig back in the late 90′s. When Facebook became the flavor du jour, companies regarded it as just another place to have a branch office. And as Twitter starts to take off, we are finding more and more companies regarding it as something like a streaming billboard:

@XXXXXX You kin’ buy DD coffee online: http://bit.ly/4lwB65 … see drop down menu for whole bean options. Cheers!

That tweet is from @DunkinDonuts. Cheers! Sounds just like a micro-ad! Gee, thanks!

Is this social media? Or it is just a variant of email spam, TV spam, mailbox spam, and billboard spam we have to live with in our commercialized world?

And now, we apparently have a “directory of brands” on Twitter: TrackingTwitter.com. First, the Yellow Pages, then the Web (and Google), and now Twitter. Cheers?

The Fundamental Misconception: Social Media = Media, Social

The fundamental misconception about social media — held mostly by marketers — is due to that word “media”. We understand “media”. Many of us have frikkin graduate degrees in media management, public relations, and communications. We come out of advertising agencies where dealing with various forms of “media” was a settled practice. So we apply those same principles to “social media”.

“Hey, we really need to get a corporate Twitter account!” likely passes for innovative thinking inside many corporations today. “That way, we can really engage the audience with our brand message!”

Trouble is, the audience doesn’t really want some faceless, identity-less brand to ‘engage them’ with their brand message. What the audience really wants is for a human being that works at your brand to engage them in an authentic, personal way.

Once again, Cluetrain:

In the market, language grew. Became bolder, more sophisticated. Leaped and sparked from mind to mind. Incited by curiosity and rapt attention, it took astounding risks that none had ever dared to contemplate, built whole civilizations from the ground up.

Markets are conversations. Trade routes pave the storylines. Across the millennia in between, the human voice is the music we have always listened for, and still best understand.

So what went wrong? From the perspective of corporations, many of which by the twentieth century had become bigger and far more powerful than ancient city-states, nothing went wrong. But things did change.

Commerce is a natural part of human life, but it has become increasingly unnatural over the intervening centuries, incrementally divorcing itself from the people on whom it most depends, whether workers or customers. While this change is in many ways understandable — huge factories took the place of village shops; the marketplace moved from the center of the town and came to depend on far-flung mercantile trade — the result has been to interpose a vast chasm between buyers and sellers.

I don’t want to twitter with @DunkinDonuts. I want to twitter with Amy, who works in marketing or customer service or sales or whatever for Dunkin’ Donuts, and is allowed to communicate openly, honestly, authentically, in a human voice with me.

Social media is not media; it is conversation. Theses 62 to 65 of the 95 Theses of Cluetrain Manifesto read as follows:

62. Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.

63. De-cloaking, getting personal: We are those markets. We want to talk to you.

64. We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.

65. We’re also the workers who make your companies go. We want to talk to customers directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script.

I have learned so much more about what the real estate community thinks, what its needs are, its pains and joys, and so on simply by being myself on this blog, on Twitter, and in personal conversations. They are all the same to me. In some cases, individuals who have decision-making authority at clients or prospects for my employer share their issues with me, not because I’m trying to sell them something, but precisely because I’m not. I think I do a better job of marketing Onboard simply by being myself, speaking in an authentic voice, and engaging in a personal way.

Could I really do that hiding behind a @onboard persona? No, not really.

The fundamental misconception about social media is that it is media, just more “social”.

The Beginning of the End

If companies and marketers continue to treat social media as just another variant of media, then it spells the beginning of the end for social media.

What makes Twitter interesting is not that I can get bombarded with offers from Dunkin’ Donuts, but that I can have real conversations with real people thousands of miles away.

Once misguided marketers and brand chieftains start to corrupt Twitter with fake-personas, with brand twittering, and so on, it will become just like blog comment spam. People will begin to retreat further and further into smaller and smaller niches where they can be left alone to have the conversations they are craving.

And companies who do not understand social media as authentic human engagement will lose out on the opportunity to empower their people to converse with those consumers.

There lies the beginning of the end.

Real Estate & Social Media

For whatever reason, social media has been a buzzword in real estate for years. Blogs, blog networks, twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and all these social media tools have been enthusiastically embraced by our industry with varying degrees of success.

The first wave of pioneers — people like Todd Carpenter — did social media as individuals. They blogged, they emailed each other, they linked up, they facebooked, and they twittered and so on. People got to know each other as people, as authentic human beings first and foremost. This early adopter group used (and still uses) social media primarily as a platform for socializing and making connections.

The second wave saw how much fun that first wave was having, and was starting to hear various ideas being floated about how these new communication technologies might be used to drive more business, sell more homes, do more transactions, and the like — and jumped on the bandwagon. Most of these people are also having a blast networking with people, meeting new and interesting folks, and having great conversations… but they’re a little concerned that all this social media stuff isn’t throwing off much cash. Because this group looks at social media as some newfangled innovative way of marketing — predictably, for realtors, that means marketing homes, listings, and themselves.

The third wave either has arrived, or is coming. This is the “professional marketer” brigade, and the future of social media in our industry depends on what happens with this group.

If the numerous newly-minted social media directors, and the VP’s of Marketing who oversee them, overcome the fundamental misconception about social media, then we may be the industry to drive change in how people who work for companies relate to other people who want to buy from those companies. If the social media directors become, in my formulation, “Cluetrain conductors“, then we have a chance to alter the relationship between consumer and service provider in a profound way.

If, on the other hand, the third wave consists of folks who think that Twitter is just another marketing channel, that blogs are just a new way of publishing listing brochures, and that branded corporate identities (which are both opaque, and speaking in that stilted “corporatespeak” we all have learned to detect) online are the answers to the challenge of “social media”… then it’s just a matter of time until these communication technologies also become just another spam-filled cesspool of fakery.

And we all, consumers and professionals alike, will move on to our next fix.

I know which way I’d like things to come out.

Markets are conversations.

Commerce is a natural part of human life.

Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.

-rsh

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

- Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charge of the Light Brigade

Todd Carpenter (@tcar on Twitter) has been named as the first ever Social Media Manager for the National Association of Realtors.

After an extensive search, we hired Todd Carpenter, a founder of RE Blogworld and of mariah.com, a network of real estate and mortgage web sites including lenderama, REMBEX, and Denver Modern Homes. Many qualified candidates, both inside and outside of the real estate industry, applied for the position, and I asked a small set of finalists to prepare assignments detailing what they would do during their first 90 days in the role and how they would handle a challenging issue leveraging the power of the RE.net and the blogosphere.

We loved Todd’s ideas, his easygoing manner, his reputation and how knowledgeable he is about social media. We also really valued his relationships with so many REALTORS® who are using blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media channels to connect effectively with one another and with potential clients and customers.

As I have recommended Todd for this job way back when — albeit layered with concerns — I am of course thrilled for Todd, and wish him the best of luck.  I have also been privileged to be invited to converse with NAR leadership about their social media strategy, with an emphasis on what the NAR Social Media Manager’s role ought to be, and have given them further thoughts on that.

Here, I want to expand with three further thoughts.

1.  Yours Not to Do and Die / Yours But to Reason Why

With due apologies to Alfred Lord Tennyson, I’d like to stress what this role cannot become: the voice of NAR for “social media”.

Becoming the “voice of NAR for social media” does two disservices: one to NAR, and one to you.

For NAR, it ghettoizes social media as “just another marketing channel” just like print, TV, radio, or email.  What is needed is not another “marketing channel” but a wholesale change in approach to how NAR connects with its members, with the public, and with policymakers.

For you, the disservice is that rather than becoming a change agent able to drive cultural change from within NAR, you become yet another communication channel — of which NAR has plenty.  I likened the proper role of the Social Media Manager to be something like a “cluetrain conductor“.  And I think that remains the case.

Yours is to reason why NAR does or does not speak to its constituents and the public on a particular topic, in a particular way.  And to force the organization itself to ask “Why?” or “Why not?”

2.  It is the Valley of Death

Well, perhaps “Valley of Death” is a bit dramatic — but it fit with the whole poetry theme!  Let’s rather call it the “Valley of Slowly Getting Co-Opted”.

What you know already is that the people at NAR are delightful.  They’re smart, dedicated, professional, and truly cares about the industry, about their members, about consumers.  Contrary to some of the portrayals of NAR in the media and RE.net, I have found that everyone I’ve met at NAR is just wonderful.  There isn’t a person who works at NAR that I’ve met personally who I wouldn’t want to go have a beer with, or talk policy with, or even just talk about our favorite movies with.

This is a danger to you.

Because it is far too easy to become “one of them”.  JeffX’s twitter joke is actually profound:

@JeffX: Hey TNar, i mean @tcar will the NAR allow you to maintain your Ninja rights?

It isn’t simply NAR allowing you to be the person they hired; it is also you staying the person they hired, instead of slowly transforming into “one of them”.  You can’t stop the blipstreams, now that you have this “important position” in the real estate world.  You can’t stop blogging, can’t stop Twittering as @tcar, and can’t suddenly become “respectable”.

Of course, NAR can’t try to stop you — that plainly defeats the purpose of bringing you inside the fold.

3.  Be the Virus

The remedy, then, is to internalize that one of the biggest values you are bringing to NAR is to be the “virus from without”.  Your task is to make NAR more like you: open, authentic, honest, and constantly in touch.

Just as you have been transparent to the RE community over the years, so you must “infect” the rest of NAR to become transparent.  Just as you have always been one of the most authentic human beings on RE.net over the years, so you must infect the rest of NAR, the state associations, the member organizations, and indeed the NAR members themselves to be more authentic, be more human, and be more connected.

Through those efforts, I know you can bring in the fresh voices, the new perspectives from the RE.net and realestistas everywhere to the mainstream of the industry.  And you know that you have friends and allies who support you in those efforts.

So once again, congratulations to both you and to NAR.  You have my best wishes, and my pledge to support your efforts to become the Cluetrain conductor we so desperately need.

-rsh

(PS: I posted this publicly because many of the thoughts here are applicable to any large organization that is starting up social media initiatives, and to anyone working at those organizations.  And because some of these things are worth discussing.)

Last week, I had an opportunity to attend an extraordinary meeting with some of the most senior people at NAR, on the topic of social media.  I have to thank Jim Duncan for putting the meeting together, and of course, I am grateful to the leadership at NAR for being willing to listen to a bunch of blogger types.  I finally got the chance to meet Jim in person, and it was absolutely fantastic to meet and converse about social media, web, real estate, and marketing with some of the best and brightest in our industry.

Quick shout-outs then to: Dale Stinton, Frank Sibley, Mark Lesswing, Pamela Kabati, Hilary Marsh, and Keith Garner from NAR.  And to my fellow realestistas Jim Duncan, Ben Martin, Jay Thompson, Joe Ferrara, Eric Bryn, and via telephone, the redoubtable Benn Rosales, a tip of the ole hat.

However, this is not a post about that meeting.  It is, rather, about a concept that was brought up that has really intrigued me: multi-layer brand, and how that interacts with social media.

Multi-Layer Branding

The notion is that all working realtors (or REALTORS, more precisely) have what one might call a “multi-layer brand” and that this will have enormous impact on social media (indeed, on all marketing efforts) for real estate services.

Let me illustrate:

So the idea here is that every single REALTOR has multiple brands.

First, they are a REALTOR, a member of the National Association of REALTORS.  Presumably, this distinguishes them from the non-REALTORS, who I understand are referred to as “licensees”.  Those non-REALTORS are nonetheless real estate brokers and agents, fully licensed to help people transact business.

Then they are often members of large franchises or networks, such as Coldwell Banker.  Again, this distinguishes them from people who are not CB agents and do not carry the CB brand.

Then you have brokerages — in our industry, many/most operate under their own brand name as an extension of the franchise brand.  (Those that are not franchised operate under their own brand.)  So presumably, being with Coldwell Banker United is different from being with Coldwell Banker Joe-Blow Realty.

Next tier down may be either Teams or Offices.  Now this brand is trying to distinguish the realtor from others who are not part of the “Jill Smith Team”.  It’s trying to say, “Sure, those people are also CB United REALTORS, but we’re better/different because we are the Jill Smith Team.”

And finally, you have the agent’s personal brand:  “That Joan Cartwright is a real expert, and so friendly too!”

As the graphic attempts to illustrate, brand awareness (or breadth of brand) is higher towards the top and drops as you go down the layers.  More consumers have heard of REALTOR than have heard of Jill Smith Team.  Conversely, and interestingly, brand value (or power) is lower towards the top and higher towards the bottom.  For example, you may be referred business because you’re Joan Cartwright, super-agent, but only rarely (if ever) will you have a consumer say, “I’m giving you this listing, because you’re with Coldwell Banker, instead of those Keller Williams people.”

Born of Marketing, Growing Up on Social Media?

What I find interesting about this is that the multi-layer brand is the inevitable result of past marketing strategies focused around mass communications media.

It is much easier — and more effective — for national organizations to leverage TV, radio, and national print campaigns to create a national brand than it is for a local agent team to do so.  In fact, it probably makes no sense for Jill Smith Team to buy a Superbowl ad, but it may very well make a lot of sense for NAR to do so.

Since traditional marketing had a more-or-less direct correlation to the amount of spend, awareness is inevitably tied to size.  At the same time, over the past decade or so, the erosion of brand value not just for real estate brands but for almost all brands has been accelerating as consumers become more and more networked, and more and more skeptical of advertising.  As the Wired article says:

A study by retail-industry tracking firm NPD Group found that nearly half of those who described themselves as highly loyal to a brand were no longer loyal a year later. Even seemingly strong names rarely translate into much power at the cash register. Another remarkable study found that just 4 percent of consumers would be willing to stick with a brand if its competitors offered better value for the same price.

And,

The single biggest explanation for fragile brands is the swelling strength of the consumer. We’ve seen a pronounced jump in the amount of information available about goods and services. It’s not just bellwethers like Consumers Union and J.D. Power, established authorities that unquestionably shape people’s buying decisions, but also the crush of magazines, Web sites, and message boards scrutinizing products.

Hinted at in the Wired article is the growing power of “social media”.  New-school web-heads might look at “message boards” and laugh at it as being so Web 1.0.  But Facebook is really just a message board, which are in turn just a prettier face to the old Usenet newsgroups.  Plus ςa change…

One of the observations I made about social media at the meeting is that no matter what else social media might do, it definitely does one thing: bypass traditional media.  Brands that were born from traditional media, and sustained by traditional media plays (like mass advertising and PR) need to look at social media with some care and even trepidation.  Because social media allows other players to bypass traditional media, one of the implications is that the higher-awareness brands (whose value is already weak) start losing awareness to boot.  If you’re a consumer getting most of your information from Twitter, blogs, and Facebook, you may never have even heard of Keller Williams as a brand.  You’re certainly not going to have any impression or emotional connection to the KW brand.

The Challenge

The conundrum of the higher-awareness brand owners then, such as NAR, is what to do about social media.  There are three available strategies:

• Alienate
• Ignore
• Embrace

Alienate

An organization (such as NAR) can try to alienate social media.  It can prohibit its members from blogging, from using Twitter to talk about the organization, and the like.  It can leverage its power in traditional media to denigrate these “upstart know-nothing bloggers”.  Traditional news organizations have tried taking this tack in the past, with disastrous results.

For real estate, at this stage of the game, I believe that trying to alienate and denigrate social media would just make an organization look out of touch and stuck in the past.

Suffice to say, alienating social media is not recommended as a strategy.

Ignore

You can try to pretend that social media doesn’t really exist, or if it does, it’s not something to be taken all that seriously.  While not prohibiting involvement, you can choose not to promote involvement either.  Have a website, even a blog, but don’t expend a lot of effort beyond that.

A variation on the theme is to do social media as a ghettoized niche of marketing.  Far too many companies that have “social media” also have “corporate communications” and “public relations” and so on.  Only those people who work in “social media” are allowed to be the voice of the organization, and blog posts have to be approved by the Director of Social Media or some such.

The trouble with this is that “social media” is just a channel; that isn’t really important.  What is important is the attitude that makes “social media” work — the natural, authentic, human voice.  When you have segregated social media into a small corner of the overall marketing effort, then what you are really trying to do is ignore it, hoping it’s a fad that will go away.

Depending on the organization, this very well may be the ideal strategy.  If you’re Apple, for instance, I don’t know that it pays for you to let your people blog freely or twitter away.  So much of Apple’s brand image, and therefore its power, is a creature of traditional media that is tightly controlled by some very talented marketing people.  Why mess with it?  Sure, have a blog; but make sure it’s controlled.  Have an Apple Facebook page, but make sure that it’s tightly controlled.  If traditional methods are working, then why mess with it?

Embrace

The final strategy is to really embrace social media as an organization.  The challenge here is that social media at its heart is not a tactic, but a culture.  It means adopting Cluetrain principles of lowering barriers to communication between the people within your walls to consumers, interest groups, and stakeholders outside of those walls.

Social media isn’t just a corner of marketing; it becomes marketing.  Corporate communications & PR are subsumed into the social media culture of openness and authenticity.  There ain’t nothing to spin, if your culture is about openness and honesty, is there?  Everyone from the CEO down to the janitor become voices of the organization, for good and bad.  There is no “funnel” of engagement into the organization, anymore than there is a “megaphone” of the Corporate Voice out to the public.

Understandably, this state of affairs would make most marketers and most corporate executives extremely nervous.

Enter Chaos

As if wholesale organizational cultural change were not nerve-wracking enough, now we add multi-layer brand effects to the mix.

If a higher-order (in terms of awareness) organization starts to engage in social media — meaning, relaxing the barriers between its people and the public — what impact does that have on downstream brands?

So for example, say Coldwell Banker really embraces social media.  All of a sudden, you have corporate executives from CB national blogging openly and freely about real estate, about brokerage, about what’s going on inside 1 Campus, and so on.  They’re providing a lot of direct interaction with consumers, agents, and whatnot.  They start going on Twitter and engaging with individual agents of CB, even individual consumers.

While this may be wonderful, there will be a sort of a “flattening effect” that takes place.  The national Coldwell Banker brand starts to be defined by the open conversation that takes place directly with consumers and with agents.

So if you are the director of marketing for CB United, what does that do to you and your plans for the CB United brand which you are trying to differentiate from other CB-branded companies?

What if you’re Jill Smith, and you’re trying really hard to enforce a certain way of doing business in an effort to differentiate yourself from the rest of the CB agents out there?  What if your strategy was to use social media to convey to your clients that you “get it”, that you’re “authentic”, not like those other CB agents?  And here comes CB corporate essentially granting that brand image of authenticity to all CB agents by virtue of their social media efforts.

While this impact of top-level brand on lower-level brand has always been in place for any multi-layer brand, social media exacerbates the problem because of its global reach, combined with direct interaction.  Jill Smith Team can overpower traditional media in its local market by focusing the ad spend in local channels, and public relations strategies focusing on local publications.  But with social media, it takes the same (low) effort for the local consumer/agent to follow @jillsmithteam on Twitter as it does to follow @coldwellbanker.

And Coldwell Banker’s blog is likely to have far higher SERPS on various search engines, and have huge multiples of readers/subscribers than Jill Smith Team’s blog.

Now what?

Many Questions, No Answers

One of the reasons why I wrote this is that I have no answers.  It’s a new area, a new conundrum.  The amount of spend — higher but broader at the top, lower but more concentrated at the lower end — has little impact on social media.  Conversely, those lower-down on the pyramid can get completely swamped and silenced by those higher up.

I’m sure there’s a way out of this maze, and that we’ll all figure it out together.  But right now, there are far more questions than there are answers.

I have a feeling that the solution will involve something like a cascade of value via cascade of content, with a coordinated — rather than a commanded — social media effort from the top-down, bottom-up, and in-between.  The solution might involve one or more of the layers simply atrophying away to meaninglessness as openness becomes the norm, rather than the exception.

We’ll be returning to this topic in the future.  In the meantime, what are your thoughts?

-rsh

While I managed to escape the fate of practicing law (except for a summer experience, which is to actual legal practice as Barbados is to Mogadishu), I still have a great deal of affection for, and interest in, the business of law practice. In fact, I wrote an entire series musing on whether real estate firms should become more like law firms.

And one of the blogs I find most interesting is Real Lawyers Have Blogs (which is shortly getting added to my blogroll). The author, Kevin O’Keefe, is a recovering attorney who writes on social media, interactive marketing, technology, and overall observations on lawyers and law firms. His blog is really worth a read.

His most recent post was on lawyers and social media, and given how much we’ve been talking about social media in RE.net, I found his observations fascinating.

For starters, Kevin believes that for lawyers, social media boils down to three tools: Blog, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Now, the blog thing, I get — completely. Especially for a lawyer. Realtors deal in houses and human beings; lawyers deal in words. If you can’t blog as a lawyer, you probably should be thinking about finding a different profession, simply because churning out 1,500 words or so for an informal blog post should be just about the easiest thing in the world. (ED: Yeah, look at your inability to use fewer than forty-eight words to say, Hello. ME: Shut it!)

As Kevin so wisely points out, the blog is the cornerstone of any social media effort:

Blogs? Got to have one. How else can you develop a central place where clients, prospective clients, and the influencers (bloggers, media, and social media hounds) pick up on your passion, philosophy, reasoning, and skill? How do you get seen when people search for info? You think I’m picking a pig in the poke by reading a lawyer profile on a website or Martindale? That’s nuts.

I think that entire paragraph applies directly to realtors as well.

At the same time, I know that I’ve been known to urge realtors to stop blogging altogether. But as I explained in that original post, my point is that a bad blog is worse, far worse, than having no blog. Yes, every realtor should have a blog, but it should be a good one. And if a realtor isn’t a good writer, then he should do video blogging or podcasting or some other way of showcasing his passion, philosophy, reasoning, and skill.

A lawyer, who trades in words, has no such excuse. If you can’t write, and you’re an attorney, you need to get out of the business.

LinkedIn makes sense for an attorney as well. As Kevin observes:

LinkedIn? LinkedIn has won the professional social networking/directory space. The race is over. I get invites from professionals inviting me to join their network elsewhere. Other than LinkedIn and Facebook I ignore them.

For attorneys who tend to focus far more on businesses and professionals, I can see how LinkedIn is the ideal network.

In contrast, I’m thinking that for realtors, who want to connect with consumers, Facebook is probably the superior platform. There are other platforms out there, of course, such as Trulia Voices and now Zillow Advice but neither have (as yet) the reach of Facebook. And frankly, neither is likely to ever achieve the reach of Facebook.

The big one is Twitter. This is a tool that some folks in the RE.net have more or less given up on, while others are extremely skeptical of its value. In contrast, Kevin could not be a bigger fan:

Twitter? Single biggest learning, brand building, network expanding, and reputation enhancing tool for me this year. Twitter’s influence is what took me off this blog so much in the last couple months. Twitter is no longer an experiment for me. Like Guy Kawasaki and Robert Scoble, I’d rather go without my cell phone for a week than Twitter.

Some people will tell you Twitter is a waste of time. Ignore them. Twitter, like everything I’ve discovered on the Internet in this crazy last 13 years, was confusing as all get out when I first tried it. You get less confused by playing with something. Playing for a lot of people is called a waste of time. But you don’t grow by not goofing around. Ask Google.

If you haven’t watched the brief Scoble video interviewing Kawasaki, do so. Guy talks about other things, but Twitter is what amazes him. ‘I think Twitter is, arguably, the most powerful branding mechanism since television.’ Guy says that Alltop would be nothing without Twitter. [Emphasis added.]

Those are… some extraordinary words. The most powerful branding mechanism since TV? Okay, those are Guy Kawasaki’s words, but still. The single biggest learning, brand building, network expanding, reputation enhancing tool?

Wow.

And Kevin’s commenters — lawyers all of them — also express skepticism.  A commenter named Max Kennerly (a litigator, it appears) writes:

I just don’t know about Twitter. I’m sure it works wonders for Guy and Scoble — the primary business for both of them is to exert influence over the most wired 0.1% of the country, all of whom are on twitter. The perception that they are always on top, always on the bleeding edge, is very important to their business.

Not so important to my business nor, I believe, to most lawyers. They need (1) a good reputation among clients and lawyers and (2) to be noticed by potential clients.

I don’t see how Twitter provides any paradigm-shifting benefits to either. It helps you connect in a near-real-time, highly personable manner to maybe a couple dozen people. For most people, it’s microblogging, which is like blogging except without the benefit of showing any sort of expertise or ability, just endlessly links and pithy comments.

What’s interesting about this exchange for me is how different this observation is from the observation that Marc Davison and the commenters made about Twitter in real estate.  Here’s Davison:

But that great promise has yet to pan out. Instead of using this tool as a means to leverage valuable insights, real estate has turned Twitter into restroom wall where anyone with their fly down and a Magic Marker in hand can leave behind whatever childish brain fart comes to mind.

And here are some of the comments:

However, I’m going to respectfully disagree about Twitter. If you want to post market data, and give tips etc, that’s appropriate in a blog or other similar forum, even facebook etc.

Twitter is a medium that people don’t want to see fact, market update, real estate info, etc. It’s a medium to connect with people on a more personal level. Lots of people can post market data on their website, but what person shares similar life experiences?

Twitter has helped make friends within the industry as well as find people from my area that now subscribe to my market info. They didn’t find me on Twitter from my market data posts, they found me because they searched for words like Mac, iPhone, St. Louis, Football info, etc. (I will agree there is a lot of drivel on Twitter)

- Eric Stegemann

As the owner of one of the mentioned “taboos” (maybe 2 or 3?) I stand by all of my tweets. Twitter is a social gathering place and I have met wonderful local people that have become friends who at some point in life will need real estate service. I’ve been told by several that when that need arises I’ll be called on. Some of them I’ve met initially due to similar musical styles (thank you blip), some due to similar love of great television (thank you Denny Crane). All of this to say, we tend to be attracted to people who relate to us on our most common levels. Some of these levels aren’t a constant barrage of real estate facts and figures. It is the real life relationships that sometimes start in the most innocuous ways.

- Dale Chumbley

Twitter is a way to connect with people on a very basic level. It’s amazing just how much you can learn about someone — good and bad — in a medium like this.

Flood the Twitterverse with real estate updates, listings, and self-promotion and you’ll swiftly find yourself talking in a vacuum.

- Jay Thompson

So, naturally, the question is: why such a difference in approach between Lawyer Twitter and Realtor Twitter?  See for yourself by looking at these two legal twitterati: Kevin O’Keefe, and Doug Cornelius.

Is it that lawyers are naturally more reserved, naturally more concerned about ‘gravitas’ and ‘brand enhancement’ via Twitter, while realtors are more concerned about making ‘real connections’ and not flooding the Twitterverse with real estate updates, as Jay Thompson says?

Is it the difference between the two professions?  Is it the difference in the audience?

I have no answers, just questions.  But then… that isn’t unusual, right?

-rsh

So my post about Twitter is generating a fair amount of commentary from readers.  The general tone appears to be that while one shouldn’t Twitter just to generate additional business, it’s still worth doing for a variety of reasons, such as being Web 2.0 savvy, being in-touch with non-client business associates, and personal pleasure.

Here’s a followup question:

Is it better for your business as a realtor to spend 10 hours a week at your local Starbucks, or 10 hours a week Twittering?

On a percentage of the population basis, it seems that Starbucks can safely claim 8% of Americans as at least a once-weekly customer, and as high as 22% of Americans if you include the “occasional” visitor.  That’s compared to the maximum of 6% of Americans that Forrester Research claimed use Twitter (and which people dispute).

Of course, you can Twitter at Starbucks, killing two birds with one stone.

But the following would be a great experiment for someone to conduct.

Spend a month Twittering 10 hours a week (2 hours a day).  Count # of leads, transactions, and $$ earned as a result from that month of Twittering.

Then spend a month hanging out at the local Starbucks 10 hours a week (2 hours a day), with a sign that says, “Local Expert” or “Realtor” or whatever on your laptop, your bag, your jacket, whatever.  Get into conversations.  Count # of leads, transactions, and $$ earned as a result from hanging out at Starbucks.

Let us know the result?

-rsh

According to Forrester Research, 6% of Americans use Twitter.

Robert Scoble calls bullshit:

There is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY that many people are using Twitter.

My data shows that the regular users are between 50,000 and 300,000. A high percentage of which are outside the United States. That doesn’t come anywhere close to the numbers required for 6%.

And much debate ensues in the comments sections of geekblogs everywhere.

Here’s the thing, though: whether the number is 1% of 6%… for realtors who are getting into the Twitter action, and espousing “microblogging” as a strategy for business development…

How you liking that 6% number?

Take your relevant market.  My local area is probably 3-6 towns (Millburn, Short Hills, Maplewood, South Orange, maybe Livingston, maybe Springfield).  Say the total population is about 100K people.  6% amounts to 6,000 Twitterers.

How much time should you spend to form connections with that 6,000 people?  Not all of whom are in the market for real estate services, and may not be for six years.

-rsh