Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking to the Chicagoland Women's Council of RealtorsR on the power of Social Media in the marketplace. Originally titled, "Social Media - Do you Twitter?" I took a little creative liberty on myself and expaned the topic.

-Twitter is not the silver bullet for real estate...

and there's so much more that they should be doing-

Personally, I enjoy Twitter, but think most of the time it's a bunch of noise unless you choose to follow the right people. And so, my presentation focused on how they could truly embrace, utilize and build upon the tools that social media, networking, microblogging, and RSS could provide to an agent. I worked on this presentation for almost 5 days, boiling it down to brass tacks, then expanding again, then editing. At the end of the day, here is what I came up with.

- It is time to evolve with your clients' needs and become a Real Estate Advisor

- Social Media is a fantastic tool that can serve as a communication/connection platform

- Social Networking as described by the movies of John Hughes

- Google Reader and RSS should serve to educate both you and your clients

- Microblogging and Twitter are communication tools to share your expertise

I truly believe that this is the start of something big... the breaking of shackles on an industry that is rooted in information guarding and old-guard salesmanship. It's time to break out and become something bigger, something new, something that will position yourself not only as an advocate and advisor of your clients, but as a gear in the overall machine towards recovery.

Below is the presentation that I used with some "web friendly" links thrown in for better understanding highlighted in BLUE.

Please email me for more information, to reuse this presentation, and as always, please share your comments below!