Developers and brokers blogging and networking online to grow their brands

Over 1 Billion people are now on social networks and we recently witnessed their power in Egypt. Henry Miller said: “Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.” In the US, ½ of all adults use social media regularly for personal as well as professional reasons. Although the CRE industry should start to operate the way the world is already going, our industry continues to lag, except for some leaders who see the opportunity and inevitability.

Reproduced courtesy of the Urban Land Institute and Commercial Property Executive magazine

Social media in CRE is associated with positive words like effective, growing, opportunities and success. Professions most mentioned are developers, brokers, lenders, associations, bankers, lawyers, appraisers, investors and then publishers. Surprisingly consultants and owners are behind.

They use social media to network across markets, talk about deals and research, grow their brand, manage their e-reputation, grow relationships, improve their career and get the latest news, competitive intelligence and best practices.

A number of leaders at CREObuzz ™ clients have had recent “Aha” moments that having no blog = not being found in prospect Google searches, whether or not they use social media.

Expect leading CRE organizations to start using social media insights to also inform strategic decisions, and execute on the organization's objectives, marketing plans and product roadmaps. Functional leaders will respond effectively after resisting change or will be replaced by younger executives given a mandate to build social capital.

In addition to the networks themselves like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and CREOpoint, the organizations that recently created the most positive buzz online were CCIM, Sperry Van Ness, Dechert, Colliers and Real Capital Analytics. We’ll track which of their competitors make the CREObuzz™ list in 2011 as this will be the year where CRE organizations recognize the need to define themselves rather than leaving others to do it. This starts soon at the MIPIM international property event March 8-11 so stay tuned!

           -       JC Goldenstein, Founder CREOpoint.com and CREObuzz™

Source: CREOpoint, the global leader in using online networking to foster effective and useful communication in commercial real estate. Its CREObuzz™ reputation risk management tool is provided to client corporations to help them prepare for the potentially devastating and certainly embarrassing damage incurred when sensitive data is diffused far and wide instantly. Insights are also used offensively for more cost effective influencer marketing. The CREObuzz™ proprietary data-mining algorithm uniquely aggregates the online buzz and derives insights about CRE, drawing on more than 10,000 non-classified publicly available and online sources. Mainstream online news, blogs, comments, Twitter, video sharing sites, forums, discussion threads, bookmarking sites as well as feeds from networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and CREOpoint are aggregated and filtered in real time. About 30,000 CRE-relevant articles in English are selected each day. In the six-month period through February 5, 2011, the expression “social media” appeared in 356 online posts about commercial real estate.  In the above chart, word size corresponds to frequency of references. Expected words like CRE, Internet, marketing and social media were removed. The above overview is refined for CREObuzz™ clients looking for differentiating insights by market and product, or other leading indicators. You could visit www.CREObuzz.com for more information.