I've Been Named an Inman Community Leader

Inman just announced the inaugural class of Inman Community Leaders, and my name is on that list.

Twenty-five people. Brokers, team leaders, luxury specialists, coaches, marketers. And one Marketing Performance Strategist from Nevada who spends most of his time telling people to stop performing and start being themselves.

This isn't a new thing in my Inman adventures. It's the next thing.

I was chosen as an Inman Ambassador in 2023 and have continued every year since. The program has now grown and changed to welcome a class of Community Leaders.

If you've never been to an Inman Connect Real Estate Conference, the role of Ambassador and now Community Leader follows a similar path. We're the people who notice when someone is standing alone by the coffee. We're the ones who organize the informal meetups, answer the "wait, which session should I go to" questions, and make the introductions that turn into real connections.

Here's the thing about a conference with a few thousand people in it: it can be one of the loneliest rooms you'll ever walk into. Everyone looks like they already know everyone. Everyone looks like they belong. And if you're new, or independent, or just not naturally wired for a room like that, you can spend three days at an event designed for connection and leave without connecting with anyone.

Ambassadors and Community Leaders exist to make that room smaller and save people a large amount of awkward time. Because we've all been that person standing by the coffee. And we all know how much better the day gets when someone who does know the room comes over and insists on introducing you to someone you need to meet.

Community Leaders is the evolution of that role, with the same work extended past the conference doors and into a year-round digital space Inman is building. Same job. Bigger footprint. More days on the calendar.

That's what I said yes to.

Why Community Isn't a Marketing Tactic

I've spent over two decades in marketing, and I've watched "community" get flattened into a growth strategy. Build a community. Monetize your community. Community-led growth.

I understand why. Communities are genuinely powerful. But the moment you build one in order to extract something from it, people can feel it. Not consciously, maybe. But they feel it. The room gets a little colder and nobody can tell you why.

Real community works the other way around. You show up. You make introductions that don't benefit you. You remember that the person who feels invisible at the networking event is probably the person with the most interesting thing to say. You do it consistently, for years, with no expectation attached to it.

And then eventually, sideways, in ways you couldn't have planned, it comes back.

That's not a strategy. That's just how being a decent person compounds over time.

I've been doing the Inman version of this for three years now because I like it, not because it was going somewhere. It aligned with my business as a real estate broker and coach, but it was always so much more than that. It connected me with professionals around the world who see the business the way I do. Serious people with big hearts, who actually care what happens to their clients.

What This Has to Do with the Work I Actually Do

My whole business is built on one idea: the more you are yourself, the better your business works.

Not "authenticity" as a brand voice. Not authenticity as a content pillar. Actual, structural honesty about who you are, who you serve, and what you're genuinely good at, and then building your marketing to match instead of building a costume and hoping nobody looks too closely.

Community work is the same principle applied to a room instead of a brand. You can network, trade cards, run the script, work the room, and follow up with a templated message. Or you can just be a person who is interested in other people. One of those is exhausting and produces very little. The other one is not exhausting at all, and produces almost everything.

What's Next

The Community Leader program launches at Inman Connect San Diego, July 28 through 30, with this year's theme built around resetting and building what comes next. The new Inman Community platform opens to attendees ahead of the event, and the Leaders will be in there from day one, welcoming people, making introductions, hosting conversations, and generally trying to make a very large industry feel a little smaller.

If you're going to be in San Diego, find a Community Leader. If you're a first-timer, or you're independent and feeling like an outsider, or you're just not sure who to talk to, that is precisely who we signed up for.

And if you're not in real estate at all and you're reading this wondering what any of it has to do with you: that's easy. Show up somewhere consistently, be useful without keeping score, and be yourself while you do it. It works in real estate. It works in a chamber of commerce. It works at a farm stand.

It's the only marketing strategy I've ever found that doesn't cost anything and never stops working.

Oh, and hey, if I don't see you in San Diego, then meet me in New York City this coming January 2027!

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Here are some shots throughout the years at Inman Connect

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Zak Shellhammer is a Marketing Performance Strategist and the founder of Shellhammer Consulting. After a long adventure as an operations manager and real estate broker in Las Vegas, he now helps real estate agents, brokers, and other industry professionals build their business and market themselves authentically.