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Recently, I received an email from a nationally known real estate educator.

They were preparing to teach at a multi-day conference at one of the big 5 brands on the topic of Social Media, and they asked me if I’d mind contributing something to their presentation.

They asked about the things that we’ve accomplished using Social Media, and wanted me to provide some specific examples about the ROI (Return on Investment) that we’ve created using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.

Given my passion for the topic and my respect for the person asking, I dropped what I was doing and wrote a lengthy email response.

And one part of my response dealt specifically with the brand exposure that the Professional One brand has received as a direct result of our Social Media efforts.

Given their reaction to what I wrote, I thought it might be a good idea to reiterate one small part of that email.

….of Exposure & Brand Awareness….

I call this part “$1 Million of Quality Exposure and Brand Awareness.”

That’s fairly self explanatory, but as I said it in the email that I wrote to that person that night:

We would have paid literally a million bucks just to have the same opportunities to ‘get the word out’ about our brand that we’ve gotten for free because of what we’ve done with Social Media.

More specifically, here is what I am talking about; these are the actual “brand awareness opportunities/newsworthy events that create positive exposure” that we have enjoyed entirely because of Social Media (and all of these have occurred in the last year):

• 
  
  Named as one of Proxio.com’s “25 Most Connected in Real Estate“
• Named as one Inman News’ “50 Most Influential Online“
• Wrote a review of Stefan Swanepoel’s “Social Media Report” which appears on the back cover of the book
• Quoted twice in Stefan Swanepoel’s “2010 Real Estate Trends Report“
• Invited to speak at Inman Connect San Francisco (#ICSF) on arguably the hottest topic in real estate
• Professional One Real Estate selected as a “brokerage of the future” in the #ICSF keynote address delivered by BH&G CEO and Inman News’ “Innovator of the Year” Sherry Chris
• Invited to speak on Inman News’ Agent Reboot tour in Seattle, Las Vegas & Portland
• Written about in Inman News’ feature article following Agent Reboot Seattle
• Invited to speak at #140 Conference Detroit
• Invited to speak at NAR convention in New Orleans

Now I’d be the first to admit that attaching a value of $1,000,000 to these things is completely subjective and arbitrary.

But I don’t think my estimate is completely unreasonable…

…and I do think it’s *probably* a little more apropos than this one (ha ha):

And even in the most conservative view of this, if we were using traditional advertising methods, we would have spent MANY thousands of dollars to obtain anything close to the exposure we’ve created using Social Media…at a total cost…of ZERO.

Even better is that the vast majority of this elevated brand awareness has happened among the population of people we would have hand-picked to target with our message if we’d had the ability and opportunity to do so: the top-tier, tech savvy, Social-Media aware professionals in the real estate industry.

Other takeaways to contemplate:

• The issue I talked about in this post – positive exposure and the elevation of the awareness of our brand – is just ONE of a number of ROI examples I can give you. Others are recruitment of key management personnel, recruitment of real estate agents, attraction of real estate clients and direct personal access to people at the top of the food chain in the real estate industry. I wanted to keep this post under 1,000 words (always a challenge!), so I chose to focus on one specific ROI element
• To further validate the ultimate purpose of this blog post – to show that there IS positive ROI from Social Media  – please check out these other people who are leveraging Social Media very effectively in the real estate space:
  • Dale Chumbley (@DaleChumbley) is leveraging Facebook and a sophisticated “soft attraction” blog concept to build a huge online presence and attract real estate clients in Vancouver, WA…
  • Marc Davison (@100wattmarc) and his partners at 1000Watt Consulting walk softly and carry a veritable redwood when it comes to commanding respect as thought leaders in the real estate game as they roll out one amazing blog post after another after another…
  • Nicole Nicolay (@Nik_Nik) is a one-woman wrecking crew who has created real estate’s ultimate “star”/celebrity profile via the brilliant leveraging of every form of media known to man…
  • Jay Thompson (@phxREguy) is building a real estate company in Phoenix and a monster digital profile largely on the strength of an amazing blog and a consistent, candid, super-respected voice on Twitter…

These are just four of many examples I could give.

Social Media works.

And the body of evidence in support of that thought just keeps growing every day…

In fact, someday, I’ll bet it will be worth…one…hundred…BILLION…dollars!