Personal and commercial relationships have merged and become intertwined like never before. Your brand is competing for the attention of your prospects against their own family and friends. Whether it is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or email in-boxes, your success depends on the worthiness of your message. Are you blasting an interruptive sales message or are you providing real value with the information you share? If you practice Youtility instead of trying to get your logo in front of as many eyeballs as possible, you'll be rewarded with loyalty and advocacy. This is known as friend-of-mine awareness. To be successful, your prospective customers must consider you a friend. In what ways are you building relationships with people?

The future of real estate marketing is in help, not hype. And that's the premise of the new ebook Youtility for Real Estate, written by New York Times best-selling author Jay Baer and Erica Campbell-Byrum from Homes.com.

One of the best examples from the book is from Brad Bell Real Estate.

Friend-of-Mine Awareness Both Online and Offline

Brad Bell Real Estate is a leading residential brokerage and property management company in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Beginning in 2010, they realized the massive impact the Internet has on the way people research and buy. Sarah Bell and her husband, James, set out to meet the new methods of buying behavior in order to stand out from the noisy crowd.

Recognizing social media is a powerful mechanism for communication, they took steps to better understand how they could leverage the power of social in their business. Their goal was to build communities on Facebook, enabling them to truly build a relationship between their business and the local community.

A major tenet of creating a successful social media strategy is to establish "One Thing," a clear differentiator between you and your competitors that can be consistently emphasized and underscored in social media. Sarah and James determined their "One Thing" was to invest in becoming a major part of their community. To do that, they knew they had to provide support to the community in ways reaching beyond real estate.

"We realized we had to step sideways. Move laterally," Sarah said. "We needed to extend ourselves to broaden the funnel and give people a reason to interact with us that wasn't just about the property, because how often are you really in the market for property?"

In order to appeal to all residents, even those who weren't looking to buy or sell at that time, Sarah and James launched The Hub 4122, an online newspaper and resource center for the community. They invited local businesses to partner and create content. They also built a strong online foundation by creating Facebook and Google+ pages to support the website, providing additional opportunities for interaction with local residents.

The next step they took is truly innovative and combined their online presence with their offline community. They added their own coffee shop, also called The Hub 4122, in the same office complex where Brad Bell Real Estate is located. The Bells are providing a useful and welcoming space for the community to interact with each other and their brand while settling in as a powerful connector in their neighborhood. Meetings with existing and potential clients take place over coffee in a relaxed setting.

"We're friends, and we're having a chat over coffee," Sarah says.

By embracing a different approach and becoming truly connected with their community, Sarah and James are achieving friend-of-mine awareness in both the digital and real world spaces. What started as an overhaul to their social media presence became a radical change in their business model with Youtility as the centerpiece.

Youtility is marketing upside down. Instead of marketing that's needed by companies, Youtility is marketing that's wanted by customers. Youtility is massively useful information, provided for free, that creates long-term trust and kinship between your company and your customers.

Read more about Brad Bell Real Estate along with many other examples of Youtility in action by downloading Youtility for Real Estate now.