I wonder if we Realtors can differentiate between the old style hard sell interruption and the softer sell of permission marketing.

Interruption marketing is the old school, shove-it-down-their-throats technique, still taught in many or most real estate marketing featuring cold calling, direct mail, email blasts, print ads, trade shows, and TV/radio ads. We are very comfortable with our one way messages and believe that our advertising time and dollars are well spent employing these age-old selling techniques.

Permission Marketing, the term popularized by Seth Godin, embraces customer buy-in to our marketing concepts and features SEO/SEM, blogging, social media (such as FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter), RSS, video, free tools/trials and a more transparent marketing atmosphere. It’s a soft sell, because if customers don’t like the message they can turn it off or tune it out.

Yet I find many sales people dabbling in the social media and trying to use them as interruption marketing tools. It won’t work, at least not for long. Real estate blogging often holds onto the concepts of interruption marketing, presenting new listings, tired how-to articles, and sales lures. If a potential client reads my blog and finds nothing but listing advertisements, information about me, propaganda about why this is the best time in the history of the universe to buy a home, or cut and paste boilerplate, she is likely to move along to a blog with relevant content to her real needs.