Steven Groves

• Manage |RSSConnect SF 2008

Gahlord (or is it Gaylord??... anyway...) "The Big 3" is a great idea, it puts some boundaries around the huge sphere that is social media today, exemplified by "The Social Media Bible" a book co-authored by my friend, Lon Safko. I'd agree with Jay on the comment on a blog being an essential part however. I've been writing on social media for a few years now and actually developed a model for real estate social media called 'Agent2.0' (back when Web2.0 was the de jour phrase for social media) that started with a blog. That model has evolved to one not only applicable to a basic presence for real estate, but other applications as well I call "The Trinity of Social Media" which includes a blog, a microblog and a social network as well. Which social network though is what I see your post making a stab at - ActiveRain, here at Inman, Facebook, LinkedIn all qualify as social networks. The best one is related to the overall objective of the social media presence you are trying to establish. One size does not fit all. Great article!

I read a recent article about how the journalism community was providing bloggers training on how to avoid lawsuits as citizen journalists. http://www.examiner.com/a-1442421~Training_helps_bloggers_hone_professionalism.html (don't know how to make this a link - sorry) The article reports that there have been more than 100 legal judgements rendered against bloggers in the last three years and awards of over $17M made. The judgements were made 60% of the time for defamation, 25% for copyright violations and 10% involved a violation of privacy. I'll suggest that when you are blogging, or have decided to have someone on your team blog for your company, you need to be aware and refer to a simple set of guidelines. These are just a starting place for your consideration, but you may want the guidelines to read something like this - 1) Do not defame competitors, associates, prospective clients and current clients; might be best to just not talk about them at all - I never do 2) Do not use content you have not have rights to; this includes pictures and images, but also includes writing from other blogs and news articles. You can use a reference from another writers work, but you must attribute their words to them 3) Do not write / comment about items / issues that might otherwise be considered confidential to a person. How you phrase these to your people is up to you, but I do not think you cannot afford to not participate in social media in real estate today.