Notorious R.O.B.

I started writing a response to this amazing comment by Matthew Shadbolt of Corcoran, and thought… it’s too long to go into the comments. It deserves a post of its own.

Basically, Matthew’s challenge poses the question of passion on the one hand and technique on the other:

So, just as we disagreed yesterday with the advice of ‘post great content that people will want to share’, ‘be passionate’ isn’t an endgame in itself either. I feel like passionate content exists in real estate, pretty much only within social at the moment (I wouldn’t characterize any type of online home search as ‘passionate’ although I would love it to be), but my criticism of such content is that it is very often poorly executed. There is a very important quality issue missing from the content creation discussion. If it looks like crap, is tough to hear, or unreadable, people will not use it, no matter how ‘passionate’ the intent behind it – as a result your work becomes invisible. This is why I disagree with Rob’s point that you can’t strategize around creative – I think you have to. This is what ad agencies do, and why some in the real estate industry hear the call to think of themselves more as media companies, especially around their marketing. [Emphasis mine]

It’s an excellent point. Who cares how passionate you are about whatever topic, or how committed you are… if you just suck? No one will care about your passion if you can’t put it into a form that audiences can consume. Right?

Well, sort of.

I’ve actually written on this topic before, in the context of video. Back in 2009, I wrote in The Price of Artifice:

Because the audience expectation is so high when it comes to professional work, in order to avoid looking like an idiot, your execution must be extraordinary.  This is both prohibitively expensive and incredibly difficult.

Turns out, the theme and the idea are both applicable to all content of any kind. You need both passion and technique, and perhaps my error in the first post was assuming/taking it for granted that anyone who would write a blogpost about his town with passion is at least in possession of above-average writing ability. At the same time, I don’t believe that professional marketers are always aware of the tradeoff between passion/authenticity and technique/skill.

Let us explore further.

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This morning, I got into a bit of an interesting discussion on Twitter with Maura Neill, Daniel Rothamel, Matthew Shadbolt, Josh Ferris and others. It was about content creation strategies.

At almost every agent-oriented real estate conference you might have attended in the past few years, and are likely to attend in the next couple, various people offer various advice to real estate agents on how to create “great content” for their blogs, websites, Facebook Pages, and so on.

The most frequently cited advice is something along these lines: “Know your audience and what they want; you can’t lose if you do”.

I emphatically disagree with this, and consider it to be very, very bad advice. It turns out that when it comes to content, knowing your audience and what they want is almost entirely counterproductive for all but the few (I’ll explain below). My advice: “Create content that you find compelling and forget everything else.”

Let’s get into why.

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After a recent Lucky Strike Social Media Club dinner — the very first one, as a matter of fact, in which the club was formed — I had the pleasure of riding in a car with two realestistas.  Sarah Bandy (@sarahbandy) and Perri Feldman (@perrifeldman) are two NJ-based realtors who are just a joy to be around.

As we were rolling down the NJ Turnpike, Sarah and Perri started telling tales from showings that went akimbo and other war stories.

After I got done getting off the floor from laughing too hard, I said to them, “You know, forget about blogging market data and whatever else you’re doing.  Blog those war stories instead.”

Five reasons why realtors should focus their blogging on war stories.

Entertainment

First, war stories are fun.  Sarah’s story about the homeowner whose cat was on the toilet doing what humans typically do on toilets during a showing drew howls of laughter from me.  Perri’s tale of the one showing she did where the sellers forgot about the appointment and decided to… ah… take a mutual lunch break… and were discovered in flagrante delicto — that’s a classic story.

And I’m certain every realtor has horror stories, has funny stories, touching human stories — in short, entertaining stories.  Blog those.

Information

Second, war stories are educational.  I mentioned HeyAmaretto — a realtor named Diane Guercio — in this blog earlier.  I find her stories to be filled with information and things I didn’t know, as a consumer.  For example, here’s a war story of sorts from one of her posts:

The one which I will share was about a listing I have- a bank-owned property that had suffered from neglect and freeze damage. Some of the damage was repaired, but I wasn’t certain the extent of it. An interested buyer called me and requested placing an offer, and of course I disclosed this information. I had his mortgage person run me a preap, and it came back contingent on several items that I had told the buyer may be problems, among them being the heating system.

I told the mortgage officer this, and told him that this property was being sold as is. Apparently, this buyer had an issue with reserved funds. The mortgage officer asked me to “Please advice” (sic).

Fair enough. I have issues of my own with reserved funds from time to time. But selling this buyer the home would be plain irresponsible, to my way of thinking. Possibly everything would work out, but more likely I would get the listing back as another bank-owned property a year or two down the road.

Now, this may seem completely routine to professional realtors.  But to a consumer who is in the market every seven years on average, finding out some of this back-and-forth between a broker and a mortgage officer is fascinating.

Plus, now I know enough to ask how the mortgage could be contingent on the heating system.  And what the heck is a reserve fund?

I think war stories are a fantastic way for consumers to get really useful bits of information without being bored to tears with some earnest “10 Things To Do When Selling A Home” type of article.  Don’t talk about how you should stage a house properly; instead, tell us the story of the time when you showed a house that wasn’t staged properly and the hilarity that ensued therewith when the buyers saw the dominatrix-themed basement…

Education

Third, war stories make obvious what a realtor actually does.

It’s actually amazing how few consumers know what you realtors do for a living.  I know I didn’t know until I started to meet and talk with many of you.

None of us see the behind-the-scenes phone calls, negotiations with the other side, the wrangling with the mortgage officer, the calls to appraisers, to attorneys, etc. and so forth.  We have no idea.

All we know is what we can see.  And what we see is not very much.  You show up, get the listing, then stick a sign on our lawn.  Then maybe you hold an open house or two.  Miraculously, some weeks later, the house sells, and you take $45,000.  No wonder consumers think you’re all overpaid.

We don’t know about the eighteen hours you may have spent with the buyer’s agent, only to discover that the buyer’s husband absconded to another country at the last minute with the family funds.  We don’t know about the dozens of phone calls you may have made to other realtors in the area.  We don’t know about the arguments you had over the CMA report you thought was inaccurate because it didn’t reflect the unique value of the house having great sightlines out the back porch.  We just don’t see the work you do.  (Assuming, of course, that you’re a pro and you do in fact do some work.)

Again, if you do a self-righteous, whiny blogpost about how customers just don’t appreciate all the work you’ve put in… well, that’s a big turnoff.  But if you do war stories that happen to show all the work you do… why now that’s fun!  The message still gets across.

Unique

Fourth, war stories are unique.  Market reports are a baseline — you have to do them, I suppose, if you’re a realtor.  But know that every other blogging realtor — and pretty soon, that will mean every other realtor — will do them.  There are companies that will supply you with canned reports, and many MLS’s also supply them.

But war stories are uniquely yours.  It isn’t likely that anyone else had to walk a client through the second-floor cat… bathroom.  Is isn’t likely that another realtor had the exact same client with the exact same counterparty with the exact same set of circumstances.  All stories can be unique.

Personal

Fifth, war stories reveal the personality of the storyteller.

Different people have different ways of telling stories.  Some are animated and fun; others have a dry sense of humor; still others are earnest, but honest and authentic.

What makes so many realtor blogs unreadable to me is that the real voice of the person behind the keyboard is often stifled.  It’s as if many of you are looking at the blog as just another giant listings ad, or a professional resume, and are determined to use the most “professional” voice you’ve got.  Most of the time, that makes for dry reading.

War stories are inherently personal, inherently unique, and inherently reflect your storytelling voice.

The Value of Storytelling

It is said that literature began as a bunch of cavemen sitting around a fire telling each other stories of hunting trips, birth of their babies, and the like.  Storytelling is baked into our collective consciousness in a way few things are.  Some people, like Seth Godin, believe that all marketing is just telling a story.

So start telling stories.  It’s the most human of activities.

-rsh