Anybody that stops by this blog from time to time knows that I am prone to meta blogging (or blogging about blogging).  Constructive critics might ask who the audience is for meta blog posts, aside from other bloggers.  My girlfriend is one of those constructive critics.  She gave me a hard enough time about meta blogging that I decided to give it a rest for awhile.  However, a few things that I saw this week inspired this (triumphant?) return to meta blogging.

NYU Real estate grad student and blogger Joe Stampone has a post up today listing 10 real estate blogs to follow in 2010.  Some might question Joe’s lack of ambition here, surely it would have made for a catchier title if he had profiled the top 2,010 real estate blogs to follow in 2010 (now that’s a blog post!)…OK, I’m obviously kidding here.  Go check out Joe’s list of blogs to follow.  I found a few that I wasn’t aware of, but will be sure to check out from now on.

In Joe’s list he is nice enough to mention this site and also mentions that I update almost daily.  Joe gets to a point that almost anyone that has a profession-related blog has to deal with, which is time.  How do you balance time to blog against the rest of the things you have to do in a day?  Who even has time to update everyday?  It’s a good question and I’ll have to come back to it later.

I saw something else this week that prompted this meta blog post.  There is a website called www.cre-advice.com that is essentially a large community blog/social site for commercial real estate.  Based on what I know, it lowers the bar for CRE pros to have an online blog/social media presence on a site that is dedicated to the CRE space.  From the site:

CRE-Advice.com membership is a paid subscription service offered by invitation or application only. Because less than one-half of one percent of commercial real estate advisors will qualify for membership, visitors can rest assured that only the best commercial real estate professionals are represented on this site.

The service is likely geared towards people who would be intimidated at the prospect of starting their own site.  I suspect in the near term there is a real need for the niche that CRE Advice is trying to fill. Perhaps the most interesting part of the CRE-Advice site is that for a fee they are willing to ghost-write blog posts for you (actually they even offer to send tweets for you).  Nice.  I can’t say there aren’t times that I would like to be able to say “Give me 600 words on the bid/ask gap and have it to me in the morning.”  But obviously, the service is not geared toward people like me.  (As an aside, what level of irony is it that teachers in schools tell you that you can’t have other people do your homework for you because it wouldn’t fly in the real world?).

Some might be asking themselves when I’m going to get to the point.  OK, here it is.  I actually think that professionals that are seeking results through social media need to ask themselves a few questions.

1. Is social media worthwhile?  If it is, it’s worth doing on your own and without the aid of a ghostwriter.
2. Should people who find you through social media have an expectation that you actually wrote the blog post with your name on it?  Isn’t blogging essentially putting your knowledge out into the world and letting readers judge whether you know what you’re talking about or not?  But what if you don’t actually have the knowledge attributed to you in the blog post that has been ghost written for you?  CRE Advice says in the membership application that “only the best commercial real estate professionals are represented on this site”.  But the obvious problem is that there is no guarantee there is anything authentic about the content on the site.  [Update: this did not occur to me when I was originally writing this post, but I think the potential incidence of ghost written blogs on a site like CRE Advice undermines the value for the people who have paid for subscriptions.  If I join the site and am writing real content, do I want the authenticity of that content questioned because other people on the site are using ghost writers?]
3. What are the costs of social media versus other lead generation channels, and what provides the highest ROI?  This website costs me $10/year in domain name fees and $5/month in hosting fees.  I set it up with a boilerplate template from wordpress.  My time is simply time that I am not sending my thoughts to clients in emails and instead put them on the web.  So it costs me virtually nothing.  But not all professionals are going to have the same low costs.  Some people don’t like to write.  Let’s say for the sake of argument that there is a blogging/social media service that costs CRE pros $3000 annually and you had to pay $250 per blog post for one post per month.  And let’s say that you need to figure out whether that $6000 is going to provide the same ROI as your other lead generation activities.  I can send 12,000 pieces of mail for $6k.  If I have a 5% response rate, that’s 600 incoming phone calls.  I can tell you that I haven’t gotten 600 incoming phone calls from this site.

If you can’t tell, I’m not entirely crazy about the idea of ghostwritten blog posts becoming a part of the social media fabric.  I think the lure of social media and its attractiveness is the amount of access it offers you to the writer.  I also don’t think that professionals are well served by paying for these services.  I’m not worried on any level because I think “for pay” social media sites are a patchwork solution that will only exist in the period between now and when social media becomes widely adopted.  I certainly don’t begrudge the people who run these sites, as they are simply providing a solution that the market needs in the interim.  But I also think that these sites are short term opportunities/solutions.  For instance, if LinkedIn were to offer a real API, the web would be flooded with high quality custom made professional/social media solutions that would fill the gap that these sites are currently seeking to fill.  The LinkedIn professional ecosystem would likely blow competing sites, like CRE Advice and their competitors, out of the water.

Related posts:

1. More on Social Media/Blogging A reader had an interesting comment on my post about...
2. Real Estate Twitter Profiles The response to my list of top 100 influential real...
3. Carol Flammer aka @AtlantaPR Carol Flammer made my list of Top 100 Real Estate...