I have to admit I'm a little late to the dance with this one, but a few weeks ago (three in fact) Inman ran a story about an audio conference* that was held dealing with advertising strategies.

The thrust of the story was that Realtors are still spending the lion's share of their dollars in traditional offline marketing, despite the fact that consumers are moving more and more toward the Internet for homebuying information.Coldwell Banker is spending about 30-35% of its budget online and Real Living about 20%, according to the article. But the yard sign is "not going away" anytime soon it adds.

Real estate professionals are using offline marketing campaigns to drive traffic to their online counterparts. "The Web address is on everything we do. We don't do any marketing without a Web address on it," states Charlie Young, senior vice president of marketing for Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corp.

One participant in the audio conference understood the need to create a more "personal" presence online and get away from the "corporate" feel many websites have. He did not mention blogs specifically as a way to do that however.

Speaking of blogs, the last paragraph in the article stated, "The panelists said their companies generally embrace blogging and social networking, and noted that such forums have served to boost the rankings of sites in search results in some cases."

My role here (and my mission so far as this industry is concerned) is to build awareness for the use of blogs as a marketing tool.Considering the fact that blogs and social networks are mentioned almost anecdotally and only in the very last paragraph, it looks as if my job is cut out for me.

*Article viewable by subscription only