Building Homes, Relationships and Community through Social Media

I really enjoy social networking and it has been an incredible experience witnessing how Alure’s social media presence is developing. Our involvement with the Lutz Family episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition provided us the opportunity to share the experience with the world in real time via our Facebook Page. We put a call out to our fans to help with the build and the community response was incredible.

Debbie Oatman and her boys were the family receiving the Extreme Makeover when we worked on the Camp Heartland build in 2007. Debbie learned of the Lutz Family build through our Facebook posts and immediately picked up the phone to arrange for her family to be on site throughout the week. Here is part of an interview Debbie, Kevin and Scout did with the media on the Lutz site in which Debbie explains how she found out about the build from our Facebook posts.

Our social presence has also allowed us to build relationships in business circles as well. Sal Ferro and I were asked to share our experiences with social media at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston this past October. In front of 500 people from all over the country, we shared how we were able to utilize this blog, Facebook and Twitter to coordinate an entire community in the effort to change a deserving family’s life.

That experience also lead to an interview with the popular podcast Marketing Over Coffee.  Sal and I met one of the hosts, John Wall at the summit in Boston and found he was a big fan of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. John was very interested in how we were able to use social channels to communicate the experience. You can hear our discussion with John about this subject during the interview. John and Chris Penn have a great show and if you are interested in marketing trends it would be a great podcast to subscribe to.

I look forward to discovering ways that we can develop sites like our blog, Facebook and Twitter to serve our clients and potential clients. They have proven to be powerful communication tools that have built relationships that will last a lifetime. I have been fortunate to meet so many good people through social sites and learn something new every day from these very bright people.

We’d love for you to share some of your experiences finding friends and building surprising relationships  through social media?

Have you connected with us?