The following is an interview with Karen Goodman, a real estate agent in St Louis.

1) How long have you been blogging?  What got you started?

Last July I switched real estate brokers from one that provided me with all of my clients to a traditional real estate brokerage. With the change, I knew it would be necessary for me to start marketing my services to build my business. I wanted to do more than simply send out announcements to my sphere of influence, and I had no desire to knock on doors of FSBO sellers trying to convince them to work with me. From the start, I knew I would need to set up a website. I honestly had no idea what a blog was and how it could be used to market my services. I had heard the term thrown around on TV newscasts, but had never read one.

My website provider, Point 2, includes a blog that is integrated into the website. As I learned more about blogs, I knew that it was a perfect fit for me. I’ve always enjoyed writing, and helping people learn about their options is important to me.  I knew that writing a blog would be a perfect opportunity to provide information to my clients and potential clients, and to show them how I do business. I launched my website in November, and wrote my first blog post a couple of weeks later.

2) Do you get many leads from what you write? 

I don’t have any hard numbers on how many of my clients have come from the blog yet. I do know that several clients have commented that they spent some time on my website and blog before they decided to use me, and that they were impressed with what they found there. Three of my recent home buyers found me after seeing an online ad for one of my listings, then clicking through to my website and spending some time there. All of them were relocating to St. Louis, and relied on the internet to help them choose an agent.

3) What do you try to focus on?  Do you write for business, or do you write because it's enjoyable?

My blog is definitely a business blog, and I’m writing it to build my real estate business. My goal is to provide a resource for my clients and for potential clients. I’m trying to reach the people I meet through my other marketing efforts and those referred to me from friends and former clients. I want to have a place that these people can read up on real estate issues and learn about how I do business. I hope that if they are on the fence about making a decision on who to use for a buyer’s agent, they’ll read my posts and decide to give me a shot.

For now, I’m not really trying to capture all the search engine traffic. As much as I’d love to have tons of people reading my blog, I know that my focus on real estate issues and St. Louis market conditions will have limited appeal. But I will admit that it is fun to check out the search terms that people are using to find my site, and to discover that I’m number one on Yahoo’s search for ‘st louis homes for sale’.

Oh, and I do love writing. I’ve never really had an outlet before for my writing so it’s been a lot of fun.

I was reading through my St Louis Recruiting blog, and what to my wondrous eyes did appear, but a PPC ad for a local bar and grill in Dogtown.  Pat's Bar and Grill, located in Dogtown, is using PPC to drive people to their website.  The ad appeared on the site presumably because of it's St. Louis related content, but I find it an amazing bit of information on how local marketing is starting to get it.

All I can hope is someone reads the ad, or this post, and heads on over there, telling them that they got there from my blog.  In fact, I think I'll contact them and see what kind of results they've seen.

Jeremiah shares a story on what to look out for from big, bad agencies selling "social media" services.  A vendor of theirs pitched a $110,000 blog solution that looked and sounded great.  But....

But make sure the vendor walks the talk
So what was the problem? The problem with the Ad Agency and their Media Measurement partner was that they didn’t have ANY experience with social media, in fact, they couldn’t even show they had a blog, either work nor personal.

I've been banging this drum for two years, and it's not that I don't love and respect all you agency types, it's that you're muddying the waters for those of us with an actual track record, and you're also charging more.

The upside of all of this is my prices have steadily risen as I see what other people are paying for and getting (or not getting), but it would be nice to hear about successful projects run by large agencies before I started hearing about social media departments in said agencies.

The real question, is how much do you charge to have someone write a comment on a blog?
  (it's a trick question - you shouldn't be paying people to leave comments on blogs)

There's a Hire Me Button over there to the right.  Consider using it if you get a $110,000 solution.

Also filed under: PPC vendors, SEO vendors, E-mail marketing vendors, and "My designer says he can make me a weblog."

The following is a portion of my answer for the Techdirt Insight Community on how to use social media to sell. 

The explosion of Web 2.0 technologies has not reached the sales department of corporate America. Though social media consultants and Web 2.0 conferences abound, and the possible successes at the corporate level are preached seemingly in every trade publication in the country, the vast number of corporate salespeople are not only not using, but are unaware of the potential of social media in the sales process.

Some of the reason for this is structural - larger companies have established methods of new business development and silos of knowledge where collaboration is discouraged. Part of the reason is inertia. Large companies don't need to be as creative, and thus lack the impetus to try new things. For whatever the reason, the true successes in social media are occurring at the small business level, as owner/entrepreneurs discover that social media yields benefits in terms of marketing, PR, branding and new business development that allows them to compete with their larger, less flexible, and more risk averse counterparts.

I'll cover several areas where these tools are useful, and attempt to give examples of how the specific tools can be used.   

Half of our clients are in the recruiting and staffing world, and since my experience lies in headhunting, I've really been getting in touch with my recruiting roots in the last six months.  After a series of successful webinars introducing social media tools to staffing firm owners, I've decided to launch a series of webinars on specific methods of recruiting using individual tools.

Most advice on line consists of platitudes like, build a Facebook profile, or learn a Boolean search string, but my webinars are going to be live walkthroughs of recruiting using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIN, and blogs.  We're going to use actual screenshots and real job searches to demonstrate how recruiters should be attacking the social network space.

The first is May 21st, and it's open to everyone.  It's $89 and it will be run through Hireability.  It's simple.  My goals are 200 people for the conference, a pretty big number, and the only way it's going to happen is if my social media skills are up to the task.

Any help is appreciated - if I've given you some info or written something you've used, I'd truly appreciate it if you helped me pitch this webinar to your corporate recruiters.  If you're a Facebook user, you've been on the end of some bad pitches.  My job is to make recruiters Facebook-friendly.  And it just may get you ajob.

As always - links promoting my stuff are always met with links promoting yours (as long as you're not a spammer). 

I don't know why it's not so obvious to other computer companies, but the way Mac delivers its product and starts off its first power-up is the best in the industry - well, maybe Tivo beats them out, but it's a close second, and Mac has better packaging.

Companies don't spend enough time creating an experience for their customers.  All this money spent on packaging and design, and so often they fail to wow the person who just bought their product.

Franki converted me a few years ago - and it's hard to back to the PC.

One of the keys to success in marketing is taking experiences from other industries and applying them to your clients.  In the last two years, my success in internet marketing, specifically in social media, can be shown in many ways to stem from my time as a recruiter.

Recruiters build relationships to gather information about the market, namely to generate referrals and job orders.  It's a data-heavy experience that depends on the ability to draw information from your network.  Learning to filter important data and make quick decisions from e-mail and searches is a valuable skill for recruiters, but I've found it to be important in using social networks to promote client sites.

Of course, finding information is only half the battle.  Candidates want to know where you found them, and so if you're going to delve into this area, make sure you know how to speak to the people inside the social network.  I want to showcase a friend of mine whose company helps sourcers build those lists from internet sources.  Broadlook is a pretty cool company with powerful software for recruiters, but the president has a deft touch in social media.  Watch as he pulls 4,000 names from a recruiting social network, and then to show that he can be trusted, deletes them. 

It's a good lesson on building a reputation, but it's also a lesson to marketers about the possibilities in social networks.  A first page google or Technorati search isn't enough anymore, and most marketers lack the tools or the training to dig deeply into a community.  With Broadlook, I'm able to apply my training and their software to bring recruiting knowhow into social media marketing.