Why the NAR Needs a “Social Media Director”

Trevor Smith said in a comment here:

The other thing that drives me nuts about the NAR is that they have never made an effort to become a part of the real estate blogging community. It’s very “Come read my blog and hear the truth my little children.”

People like Drew and David at Zillow, folks from Trulia, and Glenn (Redfin) have done a great job of blogging, commenting, and generally being a part of the community. The NAR has failed to do this.

Athol Kay remarked:

I think thats a good point Trevor.

Unfortunately there is not even a single person at NAR acting as any kind of social media guru. We can’t even say “NAR sucks, but person XYZ at NAR at least seems to be equipped with a brain and operates with a personality”.

They just seem to have a legal department and bipolar “release the hounds” / “we are oblivious” attitude to us blogging.

These guys got me to thinking (happens every once and a while).

The NAR doesn’t really seem to understand blogging, or any aspect of social media / networking. Clearly they are trying to “blog”. They’ve recently rolled out a few blogs. Apparently someone at NAR sees some value in blogging.

But do they “get it”?

Let’s take a quick look. The ”YPN Lounge” (Young Professionals Network) was the first of the new blogs. They’ve got a contributors page that includes 19 young professional Realtors.

I’ve heard of two of them. Now of course I don’t know of every blogging agent out there (though I do know a lot of them). So in an effort to get to know these folks, I took a look at their profiles. I fully intended to subscribe to each and every one of their blogs. Here is what I found:

8 of the 19 have no link to either a web site or blog in their profile.

2 of the 11 remaining actually had a link to their blog. One of those two was an Active Rain blog.

1 link went to the hosts parked search page.

1 link lead to the oblivion of a “server not found” page.

These leaves 7 links out of the 19 contributors to take a peek at…

All 7 lead to static static web sites. Of these 7, only 2 had links to blogs. One of those had a total of 8 posts (the last made over a month ago) and one was started on Jan 30 and has a total of five posts.

The final tally? 19 contributors. Two I already subscribed to. Two more added to the feed reader. 15 with no apparent blog presence other than two on Active Rain.

I am not highlighting these facts to pick on or demean the contributors to the YPN Lounge blog. But given the quantity and quality of prolific (and young) real estate bloggers out there, it simply begs the question — why aren’t these folks contributing to the NARs YPN blog? Has anyone at the NAR asked them to? Has the NAR even attempted to recruit anyone? Are they reaching out and engaging Young Professional bloggers?

I have to think the NAR isn’t doing any of this. Why not? Likely because they don’t understand blogging, and/or they don’t know how to do these things. They simply aren’t actively engaged in the new social media of real estate.

Let’s take a gander at the NAR blogs from another angle…

Almost without exception, the articles are relatively well written. However, I’m going to have to agree with Matt Carter’s take on the Inman Blog yesterday. Matt said, “On the NAR blog, the style is formal and it’s hard to get past the constant use of ® with every mention of REALTORS®.”

The term “REALTORS®” or “REALTOR®” appears 20 times on the home page of the Voices of Real Estate blog. In 7 posts…

(In another telling moment — Inman News, arguably the real estate industries leading “mainstream” source and provider of news, wasn’t even aware these NAR blogs existed..)

“Linkation” is one of the critical components of blogging. How do the NAR blogs look in the link arena?

In the last 10 posts on the YPN Lounge – 1 link. To a NAR survey.
In the Speaking of Real Estate blogs last 10 posts – 9 links. All to realtor.org articles.
In the Voices of Real Estates last 7 posts – 4 links. One to the Code of Ethics, one to the Realtor Action Center, one to NARs new web site and one to a realtor.org article.

In summary, not one single link was made to anything outside of a NAR domain.

This is not taking advantage of the power of social networking. It’s demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of it.

To Trevor’s original point of not seeing the NAR reaching out and becoming a part of the community, I looked at all the new NAR blogs for a significant length of time. I did not see one comment from anyone in the NAR administration/leadership team. No links out to the community and I can’t find any links into any NAR blog posts.

I read a tremendous amount of real estate and industry blogs, and I can’t recall a single instance of anyone in any position inside the NAR ever commenting on a blog. Never seen them on Facebook. Active Rain? Nope (though I haven’t been there in quite some time). What about YouTube? Other than some NAR commercial clips (the posting of which clearly violates the NARS Terms Of Service) I can’t find any NAR presence. MySpace? Twitter? LinkedIn? I don’t think I even have to look. If they aren’t on these “primary” social networks, you can bet they aren’t on any secondary ones.

Does the NAR “get” blogging and other aspects of social media? I believe the answer is clearly no.

So why should the NAR hire a “Social Media Director”? (Director, Guru, Advocate, Manager – pick a title, any title.)

To help bring them into the 21st century.
To improve their brand recognition.
To improve their brand reputation.
To accelerate their learning curve on the implementation of all aspects of social media.
To take advantage of all social media has to offer.
To engage the “RE.net” to help turn some into advocates for the NAR.
To develop and provide training and systems for the NAR membership to take advantage of social media.
To provide an active conduit between the membership and leadership.

You tell me, what else could a NAR Social Media director do? I’ve been racking my brains trying to come up with a disadvantage. No can do.

The Internet and social media can be incredibly powerful tools if they are used properly. With a good Social Media Director, the NAR could trim hundreds of labor hours from the learning curve and use the power of social media marketing and networking to reach out to not just its membership, but the general public as well.

Believe it or not, I’d take that job in a heartbeat. And I bet there are others out there that would too. Despite what I often write here, I want the NAR to succeed. The power of social media / networking is too great not to be taken advantage of.

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