Finding a job, sourcing a deal, selling a client, creating new business relationships – all these money making activities are essentially the same. One needs the same resources – the data, the social network and the business credibility – to manifest these opportunities.

The social media has created a sea change in how relationships develop to facilitate the task of making money via relationships. Pre-social media, it was a matter of who-you-know. One used the inner circle (the who-you-know) to “send” the request (a job, a contract, etc.) and wait for that request to slowly filter outwards one person at-a-time. The problem is the inner circle may not be suited to facilitate the request; if one is looking to change their career, their inner circle of work buddies aren’t as useful. Making a wholly new network was daunting. The problem was confirmation of trust and credibility – the social graph and personal transparency didn’t exist even as early as a few years ago.

With the social media, new networks can be formed more quickly by “broadcasting” the request to like-minded people who have become part of your adhoc network comprised mostly of strangers. For example, I estimate I only know 5% of my 11,500 Twitter followers, and about 2% intimately where we’ve actually met.

Social media’s most profound and radical manifestation is the unique ability to form tight social relationships in a matter of days or weeks. These relationships are formed on the basis of opportunity, and are often serendipitous. The business relationships I’ve formed in the past three months are as tight as and more relevant than relationships I’ve had for ten years (that now don’t fit my business needs).

The key to attracting new opportunities is who-knows-you. The messages one broadcasts out into the social media hit their targets serendipitously. Many of my newest and most interesting relationships are initiated from unexpected cold calls, or short Twitter DMs of interest.

Social compatibility is a numbers game. The bigger your network reach, the more people with shared interests, cultures and personalities will come out the woodwork to say “hi”. This is the power of social networking.

Brett Rogers @Ecresystems sent me a Gartner article that intuitively explains the reasons why social networks sometimes don’t take off like Facebook:

1. Magnetic
The purpose should draw people directly to participate, immediately appealing to the “What’s in it for me” characteristic.

2. Aligned
Purpose should align with business value, that is the “What’s in it for the business” value, be it direct or indirect.

3. Low Risk
Organizations are advised to resist the temptation to opt for high-risk communities, which seem to offer the greatest potential for business value. They are better revisited once social applications have gained momentum.

4. Properly scoped
Gartner advises organizations to start with a minimal scope and focus on growing a community’s scale as fast as possible. Once the community has scaled up, users will guide on how to expand the scope.

5. Facilitates Evolution
Purposes must be selected that both the organization and community can build on. A “purpose road map” will allow for growing the scope of communities or establishing other applications and communities with the goal of progressing toward a highly collaborative enterprise.

6. Measurable
The success of a good purpose can be measured. Especially early on, when organizations are skeptical of social applications, Gartner advises choosing a purpose where business and community value can be clearly measured.

7. Community-Driven
The value must come from the community. The best communities contribute far more to themselves than do the enterprises that support them. If the purpose requires the enterprise to contribute most of the content, and the community participants are mere readers, the enterprise has simply used the new technologies as another channel to push communications.

The Real Estate Industry Fit

Although the article is focused on Enterprise Social Software, the real estate industry as a vertical fits all of Gartner’s observations and has been a breeding ground for social networks:

1. Magnetic: What’s in it for me? Personal brand marketing to a massive local consumer market.
2. Alignment: Personal brand marketing translates into online lead generation.
3. Low risk: Conversations revolve around low risk business topics related to real estate, not personal expression.
4. Properly scoped: Real estate social networks like Active Rain have grown organically, and introduced new products like Localism based on participant demand.
5. Facilitates evolution: The real estate blogosphere continually adopt new technologies and solutions based on their business development potential.
6. Measurable: Real estate participants continually advocate social media as a powerful marketing play that gets results.
7. Community driven: The real estate blogosphere is as intimate as their tech counterparts. They gather at conferences and seem to act and opine as a group.

Twittered links are clicked. With about 1,000+ followers, my last five Tweets with links averaged 30 clicks, about 3% of total follower base. However, assume 20% are online at the time of the Tweet delivery (I’m guessing, this ClickZ study says in 2005 blog readers were online 23 hours per week, about 14%). Then, the actual clickthrough rate approaches ~ 15%, all within a window of minutes. This points to Twitter as a high affinity / high trust networking tool that spreads news and ideas quickly from individual to group to group.

Twitter app Tweetburner measures these clicks; I learned this at BlogWorld’s Twitter panel.

The real estate industry has been the most pragmatic in applying social media constructs – blogging and social networking – in order to develop lead generation systems for its professional practitioners. Real estate’s Active Rain continues to be the most active participatory social network devoted to a vertical. Its success spawned the recent introductions of agent blogging platforms in Web 2.0 real estate sites HomeGain and Trulia.

Although a blog is the best social media construct for the creation of personal branding and messaging, the broader professional population is challenged by the writing and time commitment demands to develop a well trafficked blog. One year ago, blogging was essentially the defacto standard for developing an online voice. With the massive adoption of micro-blogging applications like Twitter (and many others), a professional doesn’t need journalistic skills, just the  ability to type out interesting soundbites and converse as if on an IM. Finally, social media aggregation applications like Friendfeed and SocialMedian now track every participant activity – blog posts, bookmarking, Twitter feeds, etc. – and displays the activity in a time line. In essence, this is a complete record of one’s online identity and message.

New social networks will leverage the feed aggregation features that Friendfeed introduced to replicate the conversational nature of “commenting” on comments that characterizes Friendfeed. For example, a real estate brokerage site might include a stream of relevant Twitter feeds being shared by their agents (see mockup image to the left). These comments would be specific to the housing markets: new open houses, new sales data, local events, and would not include any of the “what I had for lunch” detritus. A Tweeter can parse the relevant comments to be included in the feed stream by tagging with a hashmark (#) identifier, which Twitter’s search engine can identify and incorporate into a feed. For example, Social Median participants who want to add their Twitter comment to the Social Median comment stream can add the hashtag #sm to their Tweet.

Conclusion: Feeds are nothing more than content syndication systems that can be embedded into any website and make that website an extension to any social network relevant to its message.