Which way, dawgs? There are growth paths from here, but they require effort.

We added a contributor today, for the first time in what must be a decade. I’ll brag about that more when there is more to brag about, but this much matters: BloodhoundBlog is back.

Sort of. It’s back for me – and I was away for long enough to have managed to miss it. I’m having fun writing a lot, which is what blogging is – writing a lot – and I’m delighting in that playfully-informal blogger’s voice. It’s back for Brian Brady, too, and he can tell you which stars he is shooting for himself. And it’s back for people who have been asking to hear from us for a long time.

We could hear more from the latter folks in the comments. It’s challenging to shop into the echoes of a seemingly empty shopping mall, but there are a bunch of shoppers here – y’all are just too shy.

Here’s where I am: Social Media Marketing and social-media sociability are splitting up. Speaking your mind on social media sites is bad for business and is likely to cost you your marketing investment on that site if you get banned. Meanwhile, being able to speak freely in purely-sociable online settings will become more and more a walled-garden phenomenon. This is already so for the many thousands of folks who socialize with like-minded folks by way of forum software running on hundreds of little web sites.

So I need to get out of Dodge, at a minimum, and I don’t think I’m alone. Are there enough of us to sustain a community? We’ll find out.

Meanwhile, there are lots of ways for this place to grow. There are no more real estate weblogs, for one thing – not in our world, defending the grunts on the ground from the parasites who prey on them. Nothing left of real estate bloggers talking to real estate bloggers, but really nothing left of blogging directed at Realtors and lenders that is not itself predatory – monthly subscriptions, sales training, books-’n’-tapes. If I’m wrong about this, I’m very interested in links.

But from our end of the planet, the best way to grow is as a social network. We offer Realtors and lenders a place to talk freely – in full view of consumers, of course. I can do what I want with or without a big audience; when it’s music to me, I don’t care who else hears. But for this weblog to offer benefits to minds other than my own, we need to grow.

Easy for me to say. Hard for you to do, but there is hard work for many someones to do. Consider these notions:

• We’re not ready for anything like forum software or even a daily open thread – something we could have done before but never did – but we could profit right away from an email sign-up list and a weekly best-of emailed newsletter.

• Likewise, we would surely profit from actual social-media management. I can’t even post to Twitter right now, and the blog needs to be represented as its own accounts, so we all can promote new posts to those accounts. Et cetera, as in whomever is doing this understands it better than me.

• Ditto SEO. Any we have right now is unintended. We have clout in the archives, and it can be beneficially exploited. Note also: I own BloodhoundBlog.com. It redirects for now, but it would be easy enough to rebuild the SEO there, redirecting from here.

• There’s more: Security, for a start, but that’s not yet a problem. Live shows in due course, perhaps podcasts or webinars – and who knows what else? We have lots of server power and a world of software at our fingertips.

I can think of other ways to grow from there, but they all start with with us – not me, not you, us – the many of us who say they want for BloodhoundBlog to be back. If that’s really true, speak up – write, comment, volunteer. We can have a conversation Big Tech can’t shut down, and we can make a music that the vendorsluts can’t play.

I’m all in, clearly. How about you?