Being an active participant in social networking usually means having conversations, many conversations.  Hopefully for you it also means contributing value and adding to the community, if you're active.  There are however, many people I would consider spectators.  They have LinkedIn accounts for example that sit dormant and they are not having conversations or using the site to it's full potential...that's a shame because there are several ways to generate new targeted business from being on that site if you're a Realtor.

This brings up the overarching question for all of us, how do we justify the time chatting away on forums, blogs and Facebook without generating in some way a measurable return for our efforts?   I don't know about you but I'm not retired yet.  In addition to meeting many great people around the world, which I love to do, I still in some way have to generate revenue for my business as I'm sure is the case for you and there's only so many hours in the day.  The level of frustration is growing.

Luckily I'm in a unique position to be able to do both.  My "soul" purpose for being a business owner is to educate and thereby accelerate other business owners and their goals, it's what my company fusedlogic inc does.  I've been studying and actively participating in the Web 2.0 and social media industry for awhile now, my blog was started in 2005 as my first entry into this area, with research conducted prior to that.

Well we've done it.  I say "we" because I've aligned with some experts in other areas and together we've built out an evolving program that we're delivering in many consumable forms to the business public.  Seminars, video clips, I'm about to launch my new book soon, the first in a series on the subject of converting your social networking efforts into revenue.  Combine this with articles and other methods of communicating these concepts and there are all sorts of ways one can take advantage of my mistakes, experiments, tests and success (as well as that of my colleagues).  

We recently decided that we needed to "shift" the Real Estate marketplace by educating, influencing and ultimately changing how Realtors conducted business.  (We include mortagage brokers, home stagers too) We decided to impact small "early adopter" groups via seminars.  It's working!  The message is getting out and people are realizing that what we're doing is working and generating results, on Facebook, LinkedIn and elsewhere on the Internet.   For the early adopter attendees this means a distinct and large advantage within a local market.  

An example of our seminar information/registration is here.  http://www.disruptorschool.com

You can watch yours truly on video here. http://www.fusedlogic.blogspot.com 

We've set a goal for our Disruptor School participants in the Real Estate industry.  "500 targeted buyers" to your client portfolio in 2008, driven there as a result of their new social networking blueprint that we provide them right in our seminars.  

Yes, these are certainly very interesting and exciting times we live in...