Be warned: this is one of those stories. I think writers who put the words Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or MySpace in a story, have pretty much drunk the Kool-Aid and jumped on the bandwagon. Much like using stomach-churning clichés, writing about what everyone else is writing about is considered a kind of uninspired shortcut to coming up with a story people are likely to read.

Anyone got one of those giant swizzle sticks and a large pitcher?

I was at a gathering of Realtors from Long Beach and the South Bay earlier this week, and up popped the topic of social networking. I rolled my eyes. Then I heard that some real estate firms are beginning to offer training courses to Realtors on how to market themselves better through social networking. I rolled my eyes. Then came more statements, and some pretty surprising statistics. It all made the too-oft-breeched subject hard to ignore.

“Most of my business comes from the Internet,” stated one Realtor. Another stated they are getting increasingly more referrals from Facebook and Twitter. And a few others hinted they have pending sales thanks to easy-to-do social networking activities. After all, how hard is it to open a Facebook account, find a few people willing to yak back and forth online and make a funny comment or two on your friend’s “wall?”

Easy to do + little-to-no cost + millions of prying eyes = opportunity. It’s probably an equation in some college text that’s required reading en route to earning one’s Harvard MBA. If not, it oughta be. What this world could use is a little more common sense and a little less analysis, and that’s just what many Realtors are doing by stepping away from the negative market news and capitalizing on one of the few decidedly positive trends ongoing in the businessworld today: social networking. As if the subject needed another introduction?

The idea of using social networking is not just being tossed around as a catchphrase by Realtors looking for better ways to market themselves and their properties, but it’s being pushed, and taught, by real estate firms and Realtors’ associations preaching that it’s possibly the next wave in the industry.

“We’re still kind of in the exploratory stages of it,” says Phil Jones, owner of Long Beach-based Coldwell Banker Coastal Alliance and the incoming president of the Pacific West Realtors Association. “We are promoting it within our company and the association.”

Coldwell executives recently created their own Facebook identity, Long Beach Real Estate. “Within a week-and-a-half we have nearly 100 fans,” Jones says. And firms like Coldwell have actually begun training agents through seminars to use social networking to their advantage. “We had an expert come in and show them how to put together their business page,” Jones says, adding the seminar was a follow up to one last February where “a social networking guru” came to the office to offer agents tips on social networking.

Jones doesn’t see social networking as a fad, but as the new world order in the business community.
Next year the Y-generation and the X-generation will overtake the Baby Boomers in demographics, Jones says, adding, “All these X and Y geners are linked into the Net. It all points to the fact that the social norms have changed so much. It appears that in the future the way business will be done is through social networking. People believe more in trust referrals and referrals through friends than they do in referrals through advertising.”

Facebook now exceeds 300 million users, “and that makes it the third largest country in the world,” Jones says. “Ninety-six-percent of the Y-geners text or use social networking for communication.”

It’s difficult to independently confirm the statics quoted by Jones, but there’s a great deal of anecdotal evidence that backs up his assertions, most of which Jones gathered during a National Association of Realtors leadership symposium in Chicago in August. During that meeting, a large gathering of Realtors from all around the nation, “they all talked about the sense of urgency around social networking—to build their networks to reach out to others, and have those people add to their networks, and build exponentially.”

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