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A few months ago, I had the opportunity to speak with Ben Martin of the Virginia Association of Realtors (and the Certified Association Executive blog) and two Realtor members of VAR about VAR's social media incubation efforts. The article I wrote based on our conversation tells the story of an association jump-starting its social media presence through good old-fashioned relationship building--but it only covered the initial stages of VAR's efforts.

Ben kindly spoke with me again to bring me up to date on his association's ongoing outreach efforts through social media. Here are some interesting ideas he shared with me:

- Looking for sticky ideas. Earlier this year, VAR experimented with the idea of a "Blog Brawl," a contest to determine the best real estate blog. Beginning with 70 real estate blogs, the contest went through six rounds of voting to determine a final Blog Brawl winner--and you had to go to VARbuzz, VAR's blog, to vote. Ben said that the contest got "great buzz" and generated lots of comments--more than 60 in one comment thread alone (a special thread created for Blog Brawl participants to talk to each other). VAR will be holding a second annual Brawl next year, and they will be upping the ante with prize money.

- Helping bloggers meet bloggers. Both of the Realtors that I spoke with for the original article spoke very highly of VAR's first "bloggercon"--a meeting of bloggers held at VAR's 2007 annual meeting. They enjoyed the opportunity to meet other bloggers face-to-face and discuss issues that matter to them as bloggers. VAR found the event to be successful enough that Ben is planning to hold two bloggercons per year moving forward--one at the annual meeting and one in cooperation with a local Realtor association somewhere in Virginia.

- Gathering information. Ben is planning to study social media adoption in the real estate field, releasing results once per quarter or so. The planned research is intended to determine who is using what forms of social media in the real estate field, the average number of subscribers to a real estate blog, the average number of comments real estate bloggers receive on their posts, and so on--very useful benchmarking information for those in the real estate field.

The original article on VAR's "social media incubator" is available online as well as in the July issue of Associations Now.