Notorious R.O.B.

Marc Davison (@1000wattmarc) of 1000watt Consulting is one of the top thinkers and one of the most compelling writers in our industry, and his latest posts on the future of brokerage are examples of why one might think of Marc as Master Yoda of the Real Estate Jedi Academy.  You can read part 1 here, and part 2 here.  Marc takes on topics that are near and dear to my heart — real estate brokerage models, the future, and branding — and it goes without saying that I have to add my two pennies to the conversation.

As this post is likely to get long, let me summarize briefly at the outset.

I take Marc’s premise at face value (and agree with him), but then extend the solution beyond what he proposes.  Our difference in approach lies in our different backgrounds — Marc was trained as a copywriter, and comes out of the branding/advertising world.  I trained as an attorney and an entrepreneur, and come out of operations and marketing arenas.  As a result, where he sees the need for a complete and effective repositioning, I see the need for a complete and effective reengineering.  At the end of the day, we end up at the same place, since repositioning is impossible without a level of reengineering, and reengineering is impossible without a new understanding of brand.

Nonetheless, I believe there are valuable insights to be had by comparing and contrasting our different approaches, so to some extent, I’ll be focusing on differences between our approaches and viewpoints.  Again, I think it’s important to keep in mind that Marc and I likely agree far more than we disagree, and that our agreements are fundamental while our differences may be stylistic and relatively minor.

Having said that, let us dive right in.

Read the rest of this entry »

At the recent REBarCamp Orange County, I found myself staring at the board listing the sessions and enjoying the wonder of discovery.  The discovery was that apparently, I was supposed to be leading a session with Stacey Harmon on “Social Media and Branding”.  As they say, anything and everything could happen at a BarCamp.  That joy of discovery was followed by the joy of improvisation, as I learned that Stacey had to stay behind to finish up a session on using Twitter, and I had been planning on being Vanna to Stacey’s Pat Sajak.

So I got up and did a bunch of verbal tapdancing.  For those in attendance, I promise to refund your registration fees.  [ED: Rob, BarCamp is free, you idjit.  Yeah, well, it's the thought that counts.]  To my surprise, the session ended up being one of the better ones for me, in part due to the awesome people who didn’t seem to mind that I was speaking completely off the cuff, and in part due to the warm rays of the incredible southern Californian sun.

I wanted to expand on some of the concepts we discussed, however, because we didn’t really get into how social media and brand interact.  It also appears that we need to discuss things further because prevailing misconceptions on how social media fits in to an overall marketing scheme.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Brandie Young‘s wonderful post, I found David Amano’s thought-provoking post on “Marketing in a Post-Consumer Era”.  It’s worth reading in full.  Actually, they’re both worth reading in full.

I couldn’t help immediately reacting, however, with skepticism.

Perhaps it’s because the last time we were in a recession, we heard the same thing: conspicuous consumption is out, and frugality is in!  Since then, we have seen an absolute explosion of conspicuous consumerism, celebrity worship taking over as the official culture of the United States, and a continual denigration of the average middle American lifestyle in our cultural institutions.  (I for one do not recall “Walmart” being a dirty word back in the recession of the early 90′s.) Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Dollinger, of @Properties in Chicago, raised a very interesting question at the Leading RE conference that just concluded.  He then raised it again over Twitter (Matt is @mattdollinger) and the discussion threatened to overwhelm the 140-char limit.  It’s time for bloggery.

Matt’s question was this (in essence):

In 2015, with companies like Trulia, Zillow, Roost and others really advancing the technology of real estate search, should brokers have their own search site?

Since the panel was titled “Real Estate 3.0″, it naturally lends itself to these kinds of speculative questions.

This is an important question.  Money is not unlimited.  Brokers have to make decisions today to align their strategy going forward.  And as Matt himself pointed out during session, brokerages are not technology companies at heart.

The answer seemed to be from the panelists that brokers have to do both: create a top-notch brokerage website that is optimized for SEO, has great user experience, and captures leads all over the place, but also send listings to all of the aggregators to drive additional leads, because the big guys have national (global) reach and can grab so many more eyeballs than a single brokerage site could.

Trouble is… that just doesn’t jive logically.

Internet is Not Local

Fact is, while a brokerage may be local, and real estate may be local, the Internet is most assuredly not local.  There is no reason why someone searching for “chicago real estate” from New Jersey would not find a local website.

Granted, @Properties apparently needs some SEO consultancy love, seeing as how it doesn’t appear on page one, two, or three, but other local brokerage sites are right there: Baird & Warner, Rubloff, Dreamtown Realty, etc. all show up.

And Trulia also shows up.

As a consumer, if I go into a local brokerage site like Dreamtown’s, then go into Trulia, there is a world of difference there from a user experience standpoint.

The one has all manner of busy advertising, bullshit marketing messages that I would immediately ignore, and so on.  The other has a clean interface, a nice Google map mashup, and easy to use search filters right there on the page.

For Dreamtown to come up to par with Trulia, it would need to spend a pretty serious amount of money and time.  And the Dreamtown website is actually pretty darn good as far as local brokerage sites go.  Having worked on corporate brokerage sites, I think it is no stretch to say that a top-notch custom-coded website with developers, designers, UI design, SEO, and the like can easily top $250K in cost.

That isn’t even taking into consideration what it would cost to develop something actually new and innovative.  A new kind of search, a totally new way to interface with listings data, etc. could mean literally millions of dollars in R&D costs.

In theory, the aggregators and web portals like Trulia are technology companies first and foremost, and have core competencies in design and development.  They should always be ahead of the brokers in terms of technology and user interface.  (And in theory, they should dominate the brokers in SERPS… though often, they do not.)

Branding & CRM

Matt would argue — and correctly — that a brokerage company still needs a website for branding and CRM purposes.

For instance, you have to have a site where your existing seller clients can go, login, view all activity reports on their listings, see where the transaction is, download paperwork, upload paperwork, etc.  (You all do have this, right?)

And it would be difficult to brand your brokerage and your agents as local experts (since real estate is local, even if the Internet is not) without providing some heavy duty in-depth information and data about your local market.

But neither of these things need a SEARCH experience.

In theory, @Properties could have an awesome local website, filled with information about the area, a series of hyperlocal blogs written by their agents, and so on.  But rather than a search experience, just offer a “Search Our Chicago Listings on Trulia” or some such.

Either/Or?

Of course, most folks would assume that like in all debates, the real answer is a “bit of both” rather than an “either/or”.

So a broker would go invest a few thousand bucks to get a templated site from some low-cost website creator, or frame in a search solution from some IDX search provider, and still spend thousands more to feature listings on Realtor, or on Trulia, or pay for leads from some aggregator.

This is, however, a case of “either/or”. One of the following is true:

1. The money spent on putting in a search into the local broker site is wasted, since consumers would naturally prefer (and only find by year 2015) the tech-sites that emphasize the whole search user experience and functionality, and leads would be sent directly to the broker.  Instead, spend that money on enhancing local info, the brand presence, and the CRM applications.
2. The money spent buying traffic/leads from Third Parties is wasted, since all searches begin with Google anyhow.  The name of the game is to rank higher in Google, and not having search and all those results pages kills you.  Plus, you don’t need super-duper search; you just need good clean intuitive search that connects the consumer to your agent as quickly as possible.

Both cannot be true as a matter of logic.

Traffic vs. Lead

An important distinction here is between ‘traffic’ and ‘leads’.  Louis Cammarosano of HomeGain is fond of pointhing this out.  A broker or agent, in his view, could care less about a site sending him a billion visitors if all of them are bored-ass tirekickers who wouldn’t convert to a customer anyhow.  They would rather that HomeGain (or whoever) send them ten people who are solid ready-to-buy or ready-to-sell consumers.

In theory, the third-party sites can send enormous amounts of traffic to the spiffy brokerage site with a great search experience.  Since these are just random visitors, the brokerage site would need to do a lot more — including offering a search experience — in order to convert them to actual leads.  And it is possible that these sites could send millions of visitors, not one of whom will ever hit “Request More Info” or “Request a Showing” or pick up the phone.

That traffic, however, is sourced more or less from Google, which brings us right back to “SERPS are what matters, not SEARCH”.

Or, the third party sites are sending enormous amount of leads, which are consumers asking to be contacted.  In which case, they’re past the whole “search for a home” deal and into the “I need more information” deal.  And the brokerage’s spiffy new search technology is completely bypassed.

Real Estate in 2015

So let’s fast forward.  2015.  Hard to make assumptions based on technology today, with our rapid speed of change.  But let’s go with it.  Let’s assume that search technology is so advanced by 2015, and computing has totally changed, with multi-touch computing the norm.

What happens to search-based broker/agent website then?  The answer is directly related to what happens to the big aggregators by then.  And where search technology is by then.

As the fast and furious twitterstream on this topic indicates, this is a bigger issue than one might think initially, with implications across the entire spectrum of online real estate.

I’m looking forward to the discussion and exploration.

-rsh

Last week, I had an opportunity to attend an extraordinary meeting with some of the most senior people at NAR, on the topic of social media.  I have to thank Jim Duncan for putting the meeting together, and of course, I am grateful to the leadership at NAR for being willing to listen to a bunch of blogger types.  I finally got the chance to meet Jim in person, and it was absolutely fantastic to meet and converse about social media, web, real estate, and marketing with some of the best and brightest in our industry.

Quick shout-outs then to: Dale Stinton, Frank Sibley, Mark Lesswing, Pamela Kabati, Hilary Marsh, and Keith Garner from NAR.  And to my fellow realestistas Jim Duncan, Ben Martin, Jay Thompson, Joe Ferrara, Eric Bryn, and via telephone, the redoubtable Benn Rosales, a tip of the ole hat.

However, this is not a post about that meeting.  It is, rather, about a concept that was brought up that has really intrigued me: multi-layer brand, and how that interacts with social media.

Multi-Layer Branding

The notion is that all working realtors (or REALTORS, more precisely) have what one might call a “multi-layer brand” and that this will have enormous impact on social media (indeed, on all marketing efforts) for real estate services.

Let me illustrate:

So the idea here is that every single REALTOR has multiple brands.

First, they are a REALTOR, a member of the National Association of REALTORS.  Presumably, this distinguishes them from the non-REALTORS, who I understand are referred to as “licensees”.  Those non-REALTORS are nonetheless real estate brokers and agents, fully licensed to help people transact business.

Then they are often members of large franchises or networks, such as Coldwell Banker.  Again, this distinguishes them from people who are not CB agents and do not carry the CB brand.

Then you have brokerages — in our industry, many/most operate under their own brand name as an extension of the franchise brand.  (Those that are not franchised operate under their own brand.)  So presumably, being with Coldwell Banker United is different from being with Coldwell Banker Joe-Blow Realty.

Next tier down may be either Teams or Offices.  Now this brand is trying to distinguish the realtor from others who are not part of the “Jill Smith Team”.  It’s trying to say, “Sure, those people are also CB United REALTORS, but we’re better/different because we are the Jill Smith Team.”

And finally, you have the agent’s personal brand:  “That Joan Cartwright is a real expert, and so friendly too!”

As the graphic attempts to illustrate, brand awareness (or breadth of brand) is higher towards the top and drops as you go down the layers.  More consumers have heard of REALTOR than have heard of Jill Smith Team.  Conversely, and interestingly, brand value (or power) is lower towards the top and higher towards the bottom.  For example, you may be referred business because you’re Joan Cartwright, super-agent, but only rarely (if ever) will you have a consumer say, “I’m giving you this listing, because you’re with Coldwell Banker, instead of those Keller Williams people.”

Born of Marketing, Growing Up on Social Media?

What I find interesting about this is that the multi-layer brand is the inevitable result of past marketing strategies focused around mass communications media.

It is much easier — and more effective — for national organizations to leverage TV, radio, and national print campaigns to create a national brand than it is for a local agent team to do so.  In fact, it probably makes no sense for Jill Smith Team to buy a Superbowl ad, but it may very well make a lot of sense for NAR to do so.

Since traditional marketing had a more-or-less direct correlation to the amount of spend, awareness is inevitably tied to size.  At the same time, over the past decade or so, the erosion of brand value not just for real estate brands but for almost all brands has been accelerating as consumers become more and more networked, and more and more skeptical of advertising.  As the Wired article says:

A study by retail-industry tracking firm NPD Group found that nearly half of those who described themselves as highly loyal to a brand were no longer loyal a year later. Even seemingly strong names rarely translate into much power at the cash register. Another remarkable study found that just 4 percent of consumers would be willing to stick with a brand if its competitors offered better value for the same price.

And,

The single biggest explanation for fragile brands is the swelling strength of the consumer. We’ve seen a pronounced jump in the amount of information available about goods and services. It’s not just bellwethers like Consumers Union and J.D. Power, established authorities that unquestionably shape people’s buying decisions, but also the crush of magazines, Web sites, and message boards scrutinizing products.

Hinted at in the Wired article is the growing power of “social media”.  New-school web-heads might look at “message boards” and laugh at it as being so Web 1.0.  But Facebook is really just a message board, which are in turn just a prettier face to the old Usenet newsgroups.  Plus ςa change…

One of the observations I made about social media at the meeting is that no matter what else social media might do, it definitely does one thing: bypass traditional media.  Brands that were born from traditional media, and sustained by traditional media plays (like mass advertising and PR) need to look at social media with some care and even trepidation.  Because social media allows other players to bypass traditional media, one of the implications is that the higher-awareness brands (whose value is already weak) start losing awareness to boot.  If you’re a consumer getting most of your information from Twitter, blogs, and Facebook, you may never have even heard of Keller Williams as a brand.  You’re certainly not going to have any impression or emotional connection to the KW brand.

The Challenge

The conundrum of the higher-awareness brand owners then, such as NAR, is what to do about social media.  There are three available strategies:

• Alienate
• Ignore
• Embrace

Alienate

An organization (such as NAR) can try to alienate social media.  It can prohibit its members from blogging, from using Twitter to talk about the organization, and the like.  It can leverage its power in traditional media to denigrate these “upstart know-nothing bloggers”.  Traditional news organizations have tried taking this tack in the past, with disastrous results.

For real estate, at this stage of the game, I believe that trying to alienate and denigrate social media would just make an organization look out of touch and stuck in the past.

Suffice to say, alienating social media is not recommended as a strategy.

Ignore

You can try to pretend that social media doesn’t really exist, or if it does, it’s not something to be taken all that seriously.  While not prohibiting involvement, you can choose not to promote involvement either.  Have a website, even a blog, but don’t expend a lot of effort beyond that.

A variation on the theme is to do social media as a ghettoized niche of marketing.  Far too many companies that have “social media” also have “corporate communications” and “public relations” and so on.  Only those people who work in “social media” are allowed to be the voice of the organization, and blog posts have to be approved by the Director of Social Media or some such.

The trouble with this is that “social media” is just a channel; that isn’t really important.  What is important is the attitude that makes “social media” work — the natural, authentic, human voice.  When you have segregated social media into a small corner of the overall marketing effort, then what you are really trying to do is ignore it, hoping it’s a fad that will go away.

Depending on the organization, this very well may be the ideal strategy.  If you’re Apple, for instance, I don’t know that it pays for you to let your people blog freely or twitter away.  So much of Apple’s brand image, and therefore its power, is a creature of traditional media that is tightly controlled by some very talented marketing people.  Why mess with it?  Sure, have a blog; but make sure it’s controlled.  Have an Apple Facebook page, but make sure that it’s tightly controlled.  If traditional methods are working, then why mess with it?

Embrace

The final strategy is to really embrace social media as an organization.  The challenge here is that social media at its heart is not a tactic, but a culture.  It means adopting Cluetrain principles of lowering barriers to communication between the people within your walls to consumers, interest groups, and stakeholders outside of those walls.

Social media isn’t just a corner of marketing; it becomes marketing.  Corporate communications & PR are subsumed into the social media culture of openness and authenticity.  There ain’t nothing to spin, if your culture is about openness and honesty, is there?  Everyone from the CEO down to the janitor become voices of the organization, for good and bad.  There is no “funnel” of engagement into the organization, anymore than there is a “megaphone” of the Corporate Voice out to the public.

Understandably, this state of affairs would make most marketers and most corporate executives extremely nervous.

Enter Chaos

As if wholesale organizational cultural change were not nerve-wracking enough, now we add multi-layer brand effects to the mix.

If a higher-order (in terms of awareness) organization starts to engage in social media — meaning, relaxing the barriers between its people and the public — what impact does that have on downstream brands?

So for example, say Coldwell Banker really embraces social media.  All of a sudden, you have corporate executives from CB national blogging openly and freely about real estate, about brokerage, about what’s going on inside 1 Campus, and so on.  They’re providing a lot of direct interaction with consumers, agents, and whatnot.  They start going on Twitter and engaging with individual agents of CB, even individual consumers.

While this may be wonderful, there will be a sort of a “flattening effect” that takes place.  The national Coldwell Banker brand starts to be defined by the open conversation that takes place directly with consumers and with agents.

So if you are the director of marketing for CB United, what does that do to you and your plans for the CB United brand which you are trying to differentiate from other CB-branded companies?

What if you’re Jill Smith, and you’re trying really hard to enforce a certain way of doing business in an effort to differentiate yourself from the rest of the CB agents out there?  What if your strategy was to use social media to convey to your clients that you “get it”, that you’re “authentic”, not like those other CB agents?  And here comes CB corporate essentially granting that brand image of authenticity to all CB agents by virtue of their social media efforts.

While this impact of top-level brand on lower-level brand has always been in place for any multi-layer brand, social media exacerbates the problem because of its global reach, combined with direct interaction.  Jill Smith Team can overpower traditional media in its local market by focusing the ad spend in local channels, and public relations strategies focusing on local publications.  But with social media, it takes the same (low) effort for the local consumer/agent to follow @jillsmithteam on Twitter as it does to follow @coldwellbanker.

And Coldwell Banker’s blog is likely to have far higher SERPS on various search engines, and have huge multiples of readers/subscribers than Jill Smith Team’s blog.

Now what?

Many Questions, No Answers

One of the reasons why I wrote this is that I have no answers.  It’s a new area, a new conundrum.  The amount of spend — higher but broader at the top, lower but more concentrated at the lower end — has little impact on social media.  Conversely, those lower-down on the pyramid can get completely swamped and silenced by those higher up.

I’m sure there’s a way out of this maze, and that we’ll all figure it out together.  But right now, there are far more questions than there are answers.

I have a feeling that the solution will involve something like a cascade of value via cascade of content, with a coordinated — rather than a commanded — social media effort from the top-down, bottom-up, and in-between.  The solution might involve one or more of the layers simply atrophying away to meaninglessness as openness becomes the norm, rather than the exception.

We’ll be returning to this topic in the future.  In the meantime, what are your thoughts?

-rsh

As promised, here is my official short primer on branding. Read the rest of this entry »

There are times when the profession of marketing becomes a little bit like a romance — well, at least if you’re El Burlador de Sevilla.  You try to divine what is going on in the customer’s head, what makes her tick, what you can say or do or highlight or whatever to get her attention, then position everything such that she perceives you in a positive light, then ultimately to have her give in to her desires that you have inflamed….

No wonder there are so many pricks in this business.

But then, under the Cluetrain model, it’s more like a deep love affair culminating in a marriage.  You and the consumer, both of you uncertain, both of you somewhat hesitant, having been lied to before, nonetheless connect and start sharing stories.  You listen to her; she in turn listens to you.  Both of you are honest with each other — although, let’s face it, you’re still both going to put your best foot forward — and come to an understanding of each other’s needs and wants, strengths and weaknesses, and despite the flaws, what could be if the two of you got together is so tantalizing that you enter into a relationship.

When something like that happens, it’s magical.  It’s when you know that you can improve the life of your customer in some way, and she is more than happy to pay you for the real value you’re delivering.

At the same time, there are things about marketing that I simply cannot stand.  One of those things is the extreme imprecision in language.

Maybe it’s the philosophy degree; maybe it’s the legal training.  But I like to define things.  I like to use precise terms whenever possible.  And yeah, in marketing, sometimes that’s not possible — like defining ROI for example, or “customer”.  I believe that clarity in language results in (and from) clarity in thinking, which is every marketer’s best friend.

So when I read grandiose, hazy statements that read like an Obama speech, it makes me feel all dirty inside for my entire profession.  It doesn’t happen that often, but when it does happen, it makes my teeth ring.

For example, Brad VanAuken from Branding Strategy Insider blog sometimes goes over the edge.  His latest is a crime against the English language entitled “The Future of Branding“:

•    Building emotional connection will be key
•    Brands will focus more on creating/engineering the total customer experience
•    Customer-relevant innovation will be a key success factor
•    Outstanding customer service will also be a key success factor
•    Hiring the right employees and creating the appropriate culture will be essential

And he goes on like this for a whole page.  I haven’t done this in a while, but I really do feel the need for a bit of frisky fisking.  So here goes. Read the rest of this entry »

I suppose the fate of Ozymandias ought to keep things in perspective, but… at the same time, considering how much time and energy it has taken, I can’t help but crow a bit about what we just released.

As some of you know, my day job is as the VP of Marketing for Onboard — the premier data and geography company in the real estate industry. Over the past six months, I’ve been working on a total update of the brand from soup to nuts. New logo, new name, new website, new everything.

This has been, to say the least, extraordinarily difficult and time consuming. Reinventing a company’s brand is never easy, but it’s even more difficult when what you do is somewhat nebulous and difficult to explain. I think we managed rather well.

We launched the new brand and the new website last night. Take a look here:

Onboard Informatics

We changed the name, changed the logo, changed the color scheme, changed all our collateral, changed the website, and launched a new blog to boot.

Yes, it took a while.  And a lot of discussion.  Make that a LOT of discussion.

Ultimately, I’m happy with the new direction of the brand; it more accurately reflects our personality, our market niche, and our aspirations.

I’d love to hear from y’all what you think.

-rsh

FYI, Millward Brown released their annual Top 100 Brands report recently with some interesting findings for the brand marketer. You can see the report here (PDF).

For our purposes, however, let me limit the observation to this question:

Guess what industry is wholly absent from the Top 100 Brands list?

-rsh

When your marketing person creates a video like this one, it’s time for the pink slip (h/t: Branding Identity Guru):

As BIG said, you wish this was a parody… but it’s not.  o.0.

Excuse me –  I must now wash out my eyes with battery acid.

-rsh