A recent Pew Internet and American Life study reports that 48 million Americans have posted content to the Internet.

I'm wondering why real estate public relations professionals and ad agency executives lag mainstream Americans so badly in their use of the Internet. In my experience, none of them are adapting readily to the Internet.

Business executives need to wake up to the fact that their media professionals are serving them very badly when it comes to connecting with an audience on the Internet.

Paul Conley's advice is addressed to reporters and editors, but it applies equally well to public relations professionals:

If you're a reporter or editor who bemoans the loss of the past and resents the future, here's what you need to know:

—your publication can't survive in print alone, and nor can you.

—your publication is becoming a multimedia operation, and you best become a multimedia operator.

—you can not transplant much of what you believe is good about your work in print (story structure, writing style, story length) to an online environment. Having worked in print does not make you an expert in online.

—the people you work with and for are growing less patient with you, your lack of new media skills, your glamorized vision of print, your lack of enthusiasm for new products and new storytelling techniques, your stubborn personality and your delusional belief in the value of your outdated skills.

I first began pitching newspapers to post richly visual, highly interactive news releases online a little over four years ago.

The concept made so much sense to me, and seemed to hold so much potential for building readership and revenues, that it was inconceivable to me that they wouldn't do it.

They haven't. It's been four years of pitch-in-a-ditch. A complete and utter strike-out.

Two major newspapers use our online technology to enable builders and public relations firms to submit news releases to appear in print, as paid adicles. That's all the progress I have to show for four years of effort.

At the rate at which newspapers are adapting to change I'm not going to make any more progress in another four – or fourteen – years. I'm a patient man, but I'm as likely to listen to newspapers whining for four more years as I was to go along with Nixon's Four More Years pitch. Not likely.

I'm confident that readers, writers, editors, builders, management firms, real estate professionals and audiences yet to be discovered will be delighted with what we're building at HousingNewswire. Rather than waiting for newspapers to wake up to the opportunity, we'll take advantage of it ourselves.

If you make your living communicating, you need to read and absorb the 95 Theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto. You don't have to agree with them, but you do need to read them and think about them.

Many real estate public relations people, and the writers and editors who pass on (in more ways than one) their messages, don't seem to have understood these (or any other) Cluetrain theses:

1. Markets are conversations.

3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

16. Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

19. Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.

20. Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

21. Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

25. Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.

26. Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.

27. By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay.

Most housing news releases fray the nerves of anyone who has to read a few of them.

We're posting the Cluetrain theses on the door of this blog to start a conversation about how to make those releases speak in a human voice.

Warning: I often lapse into a non-human voice. My excuse is that I'm a "recovering lawyer" and haven't fully regained my ability to speak or write English. Writing the way I do is part of the price I have to pay for 3 years of law school and 5 years of practice.