What role does social media, such as Active Rain, Facebook, and Twitter, play in your business?  Do you have a plan for establishing a social media presence and then turning that presence into dollars?  Does it take all the fun out of social media to think about it in terms of its profitability? 

I think success in social media is a bit like happiness, if you go after it directly, it becomes elusive.  It's a result of doing a number of things that lead to a certain desirable result.  Doing those things doesn't have to be work, it can be fun, but it's important to have the awareness that there is a certain progression in social media that leads to money in your pocket, if you desire that outcome.

I think of the Return on Investment (ROI) of social media as having four steps. 

(1) The first step is gaining the awareness of other members of the social network.  You can measure this by the number of people who subscribe to your blog on AR, befriend you on Facebook, connect to you on Linked In, or follow you on Twitter. 

(2) The second step is engagement with other members.  On Active Rain that engagement is simply commenting on others' blogs and sometimes offline e-mails or phone conversations or even face-to-face get togethers. 

(3) Influence is when what you say has a certain amount of weight or credibility, such as when TLW expressed her opinion on "reciprocity" and it became a common practice on AR. 

(4) Finally, when another AR member gives you a referral, the socialization has moved into the realm of action and this is where you begin to realize a monetary benefit from social media.

If there is no engagement or influence, as say for example, when a consumer reads your Localism posts and decides to contact you because you seem to be the expert in your market area, then social media is is operating in Web 1.0 mode, not Web 2.0 mode.  We have all seen some AR members who focus all their posts on consumers and rarely comment on other members blogs.  These AR members are not engaged with the community and have little influence and other AR members are not aware of them.  It is hard to sustain a high Google ranking on AR with consumer-oriented posts as you have to do a lot of them and post regularly in the face of little or no feedback from others - blogging in a vacuum.  Most members of AR come here for the social interaction and the model makes sense for those who use AR that way. 

Facebook is all about engaging with people you know, but most people use it for purely social purposes.  I use Facebook to connect with other agents I know and share a personal side of myself.  I also put my listings up on Facebook via vFlyer.com which provides a thumbnail photo of the listing and a link.

Twitter works best if you engage others and have enough influence with them to take action.  I will freely admit that I make poor use of Twitter from an ROI perspective.  If I look at this model I can see that I made mistakes at every stage.  I signed on to follow people who don't know me well and therefore little reason for them to engage with me and I have minimal influence.  They are not local agents or potential consumers, so its no surprise that there is no action.  I'm self-indulgent with Twitter as I use it to check out fascinating links from leaders in the RE industry.  I know the ROI is low, but when Twitter allows for different channels, I'll create one to optimize my ROI by focusing on people in my community and providing community news updates, then I'll likely see some action when I Tweet about joining me at an Open House.