Commercial Real Estate Professional Leverages Social Media Tools
January 16, 2010 by adam
Filed under Engagement Strategies, ROI and Case Studies
Posted by: Adam Japko, ajapko@nci.com
It has been a busy season for us at DigitalSherpa releasing industry focused social media service programs helping both local and national businesses harness the social web as part of their marketing programs. As we were preparing for last week’s release of CRE (Commercial Real Estate) Sherpa, we discovered John Reeder, a local commercial real estate professional associated with Sperry Van Ness in Southern California.
John has a really fine commercial real estate blog. You can check it out here. It is an impressive centerpiece for his overall social media campaign on several fronts:
1) There are not that many commercial real estate blogs to begin with. This is one of the reasons that we introduced CRE Sherpa to help the industry leverage the available tools that can drive their personal and business brands like John is. John is breaking new ground and is an early adopter in the CRE space.
2)John has integrated other social identities, like Twitter, and has also leveraged some good tools on his blog such as Disqus Comments.
3)His posts are regular and frequent, a key to a good social platform and engaged following. In addition, he is providing a “News Dump” that he powers that includes CRE content from around the web.
Most interesting of all to me, as a hungry learner on how and why businesses begin leveraging powerful returns from social media participation, was John’s starting point thinking found on his “Who Am I” page:
Why am I blogging? Good question. I don’t know for sure, but here is what I suspect:
30% because I am a shameless self promoter, but corporate websites are a poor venue for random thoughts about the market. I see the power that having an online professional persona has had for my blogger heroes (Barry Ritholtz, Fred Wilson and Brad Feld) and it seems like leveraging an online presence is a no brainer for a CRE professional.
40% because I always end up creating a bunch of charts and graphs, and I figured I may as well post them on the internet so that 6 visitors a month can look at them.
15% because I wish there was a really good commercial real estate blog. I’m skeptical as to whether this site will be the really good blog I am hoping for, but it never hurts to try. Investment real estate gets very little good coverage in the mainstream press (as in journalists do not understand investment real estate, not that it gets bad press), so the internet seems like a natural place to be able to read thoughtful commentary on the market. But I guess I don’t really see it online either.
25% because I believe that we are nearing the next sea change that will affect the way that we conduct business. Tools like LinkedIn and Facebook are only starting to influence the way we conduct business. I see this trend accelerating as the tools become more useful. So I want to have my boat in the water when this sea change happens.
This is a common and prevalent perspective that new businesses or personal bloggers embrace when they begin deploying social media tools. They have something to say, figure there is an opportunity to be heard, and there is little to lose besides some time trying it. As you can see, John figured only about 6 visitors a month would show up and see his charts; and I am sure he was only half kidding when he wrote this as he was probably preparing to launch his blog.
It is not clear to me how long John has been at it. I can’t find an archive on the blog. But, his results have been impressive. First, traffic to the Real Property Alpha blog is substantial. According to Compete reporting, the site has been averaging 2500 t 4500 unique visitors for several months.
In addition, John has been active on Twitter and has about 480 followers and is on more than 20 lists of real estate related twitters.
The traffic results and engagement that John is driving around his content marketing effort is impressive, but not out of the ordinary for local businesses that approach the social web systematically. The amount of web benefits that most social media participants see far outstrips the returns they previously experienced with more traditional tactics for driving traffic to their web sites.
I have not met John Reeder in person yet, but I have an impression of him as a smart CRE professional and somebody that I would turn to if I was looking for advice in Southern Cal CRE. That’s the power that John has unleashed. And it is doubly impressive that he has accomplished this in a marketplace that is under leveraging the power of the social web to date.
Fantastic article and another real world example of the power of social media in reaching consumers. I would love to hear more from John Reeder on the impact his social media efforts have had on his business.
Great post. I have been searching for this exact info for a while now. I will bookmark it in the public bookmarking sites to get you more traffic.
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I'm not quite sure which one should be my new hero; John or Adam. Real estate is like law, once you have a law degree there are still a hundred different specialties to select. In law there is family, environmental, contracts etc. In real estate we have office, multifamily, warehouse, hospitality, etc. And yet “the industry” is only beginning to utilize socal media. And blending “real estate” with “social media” requires two different skill sets. I'm happy to learn from those that are accomplishing this mind-meld….