I recently had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Allan Dalton, President and CEO of Realtor.com. Allan was discussing the ongoing commitment by Realtors to print advertising and likened it to the Patty Hearst Syndrome suggesting an analogy that Realtors have fallen in love with their (print) abductors.

Allan's analogy was based on the following case study:

Why are companies spending 56% of their money on an activity that produces just 8% of inbound calls? I don't think Allan was joking when he quoted a Realtor as saying, "we're spending millions of dollars offline because we can afford it, but our stupid competitors can't, and they're following us anyway." Interesting strategy but it does almost sound like he's kidding, doesn't it?

You can get a very sophisticated community blog which will increase search engine results and more importantly supercharge your offline and online networking for less than most regular professional websites. Doesn't it make sense to take a small portion of that Newspaper Print spending and turn it over to Internet spending and see that channel's ROI increase even more?