So, if anyone was following Big Builder on Twitter this morning, you'll no doubt have gotten my gazillion tweets from the session "Building an Effective Home Builder Brand Using Social Media." (I was not the only one tweeting, I'll have you know. Some guy had his laptop out and was clacking away on the keyboard as well.) What a great session. I thought the three presenters--Lora Heramb, Jon Bailey, and Jay Baer-- did a really bang-up job going through (1) why you should care about social media (2) the various platforms, and (3) the basic dos and don'ts of each.

You can get the presentation at www.buildersocialblog.com, which is a Web site-slash-blog they developed specifically for PCBC to encourage builder follow up on the subject. Oh, and they asked if anyone was up for blogging for the site. So, I encourage you to unleash you inner blogger!

(Jon and Jay, I couldn't wait for all the questions to be answered because I had a meeting to run to, but hopefully you got my Twitter message that basically said, 'sign me up.' Oh, and, Jon, many thanks for you recent comment on my blog.)

So, let me just run through a couple of takeaways...

1. Why you should care? The short answer is you should care about social media because your buyers do. 200 million Facebook users and 50 million Twitter users. Imagine what capturing a fraction of a percentage of that audience would do for your business. Lest not we forget that 87% of home buyers start a home search on the Web. Can you afford to not be there?

2. The other, more selfish reason to care... As Baer so eloquently put it during the session, "People are going to talk sh** about your company." Like it or not. And chances are they are blogging about their beef with your company and it's turning up higher up on a search results list than your Web site. The only way to combat that is to become your own best, trusted source of information about your company. You can't stick your head in the sand any longer. Of course, remember when you engage do so in a professional and courteous manner.

3. "You own the company but your buyers own your brand." Think about that one for a second. It's totally true. So, as one of the presenters said social media is an opportunity to make your brand about people not logos. I've heard a few builder execs say they are not in the home building business but rather they are in the people. And that really holds true in social media. So a great tip was make sure your social media strategy is based on telling a story rather than highlighting features and benefits. People like people.

4. Fast fact: 38% of home buyers start searching for a new home nine to 12 months before they actually buy. So what, right? What this means is that you have to give them a reason to keep coming back, so you've got to keep it fresh; your social media platforms need to have a constant churn of new, exciting information. That takes time and people, so be forewarned before you go great guns on social media. A word of advice from Baer, "If you can't update your Facebook fan page three, four, five times a week, don't do it."

5. The six fatal social media fallacies... (I loved this part of the presentation.)

It's inexpensive: It costs more in terms of time and people than you might think even if the technology is free

It's fast: Developing a solid social media strategy takes time--and so does developing a following

It's viral: You can't invent viral; it is something that happens organically, so stop trying to force it

You can't measure it: Maybe not in traditional ways, but there are ways to measure and you should be measuring to find out what works

It's optional: Revert to the first takeaway in this blog post.

It's hard: It's not really, it just is a little complicated at first.

So, there it is--my takeaways from this session. The only thing I would've like to have seen is more builder examples of social media strategies from inside our community. I don't believe, as one presenter said, that no one in our industry is doing a good job. People are out there trying stuff; two that jump to mind are Ideal Homes and Campbell Homes. Maybe it's not a homerun off the bat, but it's not un-noteworthy.