Greg: You’re so right that I pulled a stray man. (although in my defense, Brian pulled a bit of a straw man in suggesting I’m against more money and/or business.

Brian: When you start talking about soft-sell stuff (i.e. “we have to do it without appearing to be selling them anything!”) where professionals are adding value long before the “sell”, we’re in complete agreement. The only issue I’d take with your comment is that I don’t think real estate professionals who are successfully engaging in a web2.0 world, can measure the performance of their “contact list” by the number of people in their address book in that measuring your performance based on traditional “touch” metrics is quickly becoming dated.

“Touch” implies that you know who you’re talking with when in reality, many of the best leads that have come through RCG have reached out to us when they are ready. Had we tried to find out who they were BEFORE they contacted us (let’s say by requiring registration to engage in our community), we never would have been able to build up a community to begin with.

Jeff: Your perspective is always appreciated.

And Greg, you took Dustin’s comment out of context. It is neither wrong, nor irrelevant in the context of how you approach the social networks. His point is that Realtors have a conscious desire to get to know a great mortgage broker as part of their daily business practice. Consumers don’t have that same conscious desire, except when they are IN a transaction.

If I am talking to a network of people I know is thinking about what I have to offer all the time, I can approach it much differently than if I know that only a small percentage of the network is thinking about someone like me at all. It’s apples and oranges.

And I agree with Dustin that there is danger for the real estate agent if they are not shown the difference.

Our goal, as marketers, is to be THEIR provider BEFORE the transaction happens. The trick is learning how to use SMM to accomplish just that.

My advice to new agents and originators is simple: if you want x amount of transactions/year, you need 10X in your database (with their permission) and you need to “touch” them 40 times/year. It’s the Millionaire Real Estate Agent strategy on steroids. We need to “stoke different senses”. I mean that we need to show up in their snail-mail box, their inbox, be a consistent voice on the telephone, and eventually, be sharing a cup of joe with them….and we have to do it without appearing to be selling them anything!

It’s gotta be so powerful that you think “Ardell” or “Reba” when you think Seattle real estate like you would say “Coke” or “Pepsi”. How can we accelerate that process, without offending, in a world that’s getting more crowded?

That’s going to be our challenge next week, Dustin.

Straw man. Brian suggested none of those things. What he said — and I’m now guilty of paraphrasing, too — is that the commercial relationship begins when it moves beyond broadcast technologies and into person-to-person communication. This is not controversial, but it definitely needs to be said. Commercial blogging doesn’t create business, it creates opportunities for people who want to do business to feel each other out. If neither one is willing to close on the opportunity, they might as well be ships passing in the night.

> most consumers of real estate services have NO DESIRE to form a deep relationship with a real estate agent

This is just about half wrong, and the other half is irrelevant. Buyers want houses, not necessarily Realtors. Sellers want Realtors, and they know it. The ideal long-term relationship for a successful Realtor is to be regarded as “my Realtor,” much as someone might speak of “my attorney” or “my dentist.” This is very much a process that can be initiated and sustained by social media marketing — although the real work is done by delivering the goods person-to-person.