It’s not often I turn a comment from one post into a different one. But this one’s too good to not highlight in some way.

Joe Stampone (@joestampone1 on Twitter) wrote the following as a comment to an earlier post of mine, in regards to Twitter and commercial real estate:

Bob, I’m really enjoying your series about Twitter for CRE and I’m looking forward to your future posts. I am actually working on my own article covering the same topic and right now I’m doing some research by monitoring the tweets of a few CRE companies.

I can tell the presence of CRE companies on twitter is increasing, however many companies such as (redacted by editor) are not utilizing it correctly. It’s not about merely promoting your business, but becoming part of the conversation. One needs to build relationships and thusly build a valuable community. This takes time, obviously the bigger companies already have an established brand, but that doesn’t mean they can just tweet out info about the company.

I think http://twitter.com/ColliersIntl has it right. Other CRE should follow their tweets, because they could learn something.

I agree wholeheartedly with his statement. And in doing so, I’m going to roll out two new memes for Twitter.

Twitter streams can promote what you’re doing, but you need to mix it in with your “who” (your personality) as much as your “what” (the stuff you’re promoting). After all, it is the “who” that people really want to read about and bond with. Sure, the content or whatever you’re offering in your what is — or should be — important and relevant to your audience. But for your audience, it comes down to being tweeted “to” by your who, and not tweeted “at” by your what. Which would you rather have?

It’s not easy, believe me — I struggle sometimes with it in my three Twitter accounts. There’s times when I feel the what has taken over my streams. My view is that if you’re going to do a what tweet, you need to infuse it with the who somehow. Sometimes that’s difficult to do in 140 characters, but give it a try.

One quick way to get from your what back into your who is to retweet someone else’s tweet — this gives them promotion, while giving your audience a different view from someone you like.

And speaking of promotion, I’m getting a discussion group going on Sibdu on the use of Twitter in commercial real estate. So this is an open invitation to join and start sharing ideas on the use of Twitter in CRE. Of course, anyone in CRE has an open invite to join for social networking, too.

Joining Sibdu is free, and you get an entire social network designed for those in commercial and investment real estate in the process. Sign up, and let’s get the conversation going!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 @ 8:45 am on the category Blogging, Helpful Hints, Social Networking, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.