I wanted to bring you all one other “Best of” piece. I was actually flagged to it as a result of an April Fool’s joke from the good folks at SlideShare — a joke that I appreciated and thought was funny, but many others apparently didn’t (judging from the blog post).

Thing is, I had completely forgotten about this post and the accompanying slide show. I thought it was really good, and so did many of the people to whom I presented it late last year.

The presentation itself and the set-up for it is after the jump.

The actual presentation is on social networking for commercial real estate, and how it should be done. I just looked through it again, and I wouldn’t change a thing from when I first published it.

Here’s what I wrote before about the slide show. I think the background helps you to understand where I was “coming from” with this, as it were.

Yesterday I was privileged to give the keynote speech at the monthly meeting of MAREMA in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. What is MAREMA? It’s the Mid-Atlantic Real Estate Marketing Association - a committed group of CRE and business-brokerage pros who meet on a monthly basis to exchange needs/wants, learn some new techniques and close more deals.

“MAREMA is where deals are made,” the Web site says. And from the little bit of the meeting I saw, I definitely believe it. In fact, I wish I would have been involved with it back when I was still in CRE brokerage — and the only reason why I wasn’t involved is because I didn’t know about it. I’d say it’s a great little secret group, actually.

MAREMA is the perfect example of a professional/ social network. People gather together to help one another do business and make money. Yes, it’s that simple. There’s a lot of planning and effort (and I mean a lot) that goes into such a network — I know because I saw it yesterday. But the idea behind it is very simple. And it works.

Internet-based social networks — be they professional or personal — are the online versions of the exact kind of meeting at which I spoke yesterday. There’s an advantage to an Internet-based network (like Sibdu) though, in that you have access to tools like file storage, calendaring and message boards that you don’t get at a personal meeting.

There is a disadvantage to the Sibdu’s of the world, though. Personal, face-to-face interaction. It ain’t there. Yet you can use a Sibdu to arrange that personal F2F (a little ‘Net/geek lingo there) meeting, though, so it’s not a total loss. Plus, you can “meet” and do business with people outside your area, which is something you really can’t do in the local F2F setting, unless you start traveling everywhere and knocking on doors to meet people. Not recommended.

Don’t get me wrong - I love such real-life events. I try to get out to as many as I can. I just like to supplement them with social networking — especially with the type of networking that’s specific to my industry. And like I said, there’s times when online social networking works better than F2F.

With that in mind, if you’d like to see the slide show of the actual presentation I gave — it was a basic “Social Networking for CRE 101″ type of affair, see it/download it from below. And if you just take out “commercial real estate” and apply it to a different industry, it pretty much works as well (except for the mini-commercial for Sibdu at the end; although you could even use those ideas for a company at a different social network, too).

And here’s the embed:

Social Networking For Commercial Real Estate For Previous Versions

View more presentations from bob_sibdu.

Join Sibdu today, and connect with professionals involved in all facets of commercial and investment real estate. Whether its brokerage, architecture, construction, property management, insurance or any other field that makes up the entire CRE market, Sibdu is the place to be to find those valuable associates. It’s all at Sibdu, and it’s all FREE!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 @ 9:15 am on the category Helpful Hints, Local Markets, Marketing/Sales, Professional Networking, Self-Help, 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.