Notorious R.O.B.

It may be completely inappropriate to compare the life-and-death work of our military in Afghanistan to the buying and selling of real estate ensconced in our safety… but I could not help but read this with interest:

We also must strive to be first with the truth. We need to beat the insurgents and extremists to the headlines and to pre-empt rumors. We can do that by getting accurate information to the chain of command, to our Afghan partners, and to the press as soon as is possible.Integrity is critical to this fight. Thus, when situations are bad, we should freely acknowledge that fact and avoid temptations to spin. Rather, we should describe the setbacks and failures we suffer and then state what we’ve learned from them and how we’ll adjust to reduce the chances of similar events in the future. (Emphasis added)

That is from a recent speech that General David Petraeus gave at the Munich Security Conference talking about the very real, very serious problems of fighting Al Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan.

But if he were speaking at just about any real estate industry conference, I don’t know that those words would be any different.

How often have we heard condemnations of NAR, and specifically of David Lereah, former Chief Economist for NAR?  There are even whole websites set up to rant at Mr. Lereah.

And according to at least one real estate professional, David Lereah and the whole ‘head-in-sand’ approach to the RE market hurt her directly by undermining the credibility of the profession, forcing her to un-educate then re-educate consumers, and establish her own credibility as a realtor.

What’s more, not one big brokerage or big brand in real estate was sounding the alarm back in 2005 or so, while individual realtors were starting to get real skeptical of home values, and blogs like Patrick.net were in full bubble-warning mode in 2005.

What has that done to the brand image of all Realtors?  What has the failure to freely acknowledge that situations are bad, the failure of so-called ‘real estate experts’ to warn about the housing bubble, the failure of so-called ‘mortgage experts’ to warn about the credit bubble, and the failure of so-called ‘ethical professionals with fiduciary duty to clients’ to properly advise buyers during what was obviously a bubble done to the industry?

Post-bubble, has there been any major statement by NAR or by a major brokerage acknowledging the “setbacks and failures” and stating “what they’ve learned from them and how they’ll adjust to reduce the chances of similar events in the future”?  If so, I missed it. Read the rest of this entry »

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

Twitter, some say, is a useless waste of time.  That’s often true.  But then, sometimes, it’s really kinda fun and useful to boot.

Case in point:  Earlier today, I had  brief Twitter exchange with a few people starting with a question I asked.

“Why do you have a ‘website’ and a ‘blog’?  Why not one site that does it all?”

A number of people responded that they were struggling with that very question.  Still others provided even more in-depth thoughts.  Kelley Kohler (@housechick) had some very interesting insights on the blogpost linked to above:

It’s an interesting line to walk, and it’s taken a bit of doing to stop thinking about the blog like it’s a blog, because it isn’t a blog, it’s a framework (can I get that printed on a t-shirt?).  Having started originally with AR and Blogger, it was a difficult mindset to break – two blog services where blogs really ARE just blogs.  But for WordPress and Drupal, they aren’t blogs, they’re just platforms, a framework.

In the end, it’s not about what is website and what is blog, it’s about where in the framework some piece of information should live.  And that’s a liberating place to be, conceptually, while in the midst of designing a new web presence. (emphasis added)

While I agree with Kelley wholeheartedly from a certain perspective, I do think she discounts a bit the psychological and marketing imperatives that may be driving realestistas to divide their web operations between a “website” and a “blog”.

Crass Commercialism vs. Authentic Engagement

I think the hint of the underlying issue came from Fran Bailey (@franbailey) who wrote:

My site is my blog which focuses on helpful info 4 buyers. They can search listings on my broker’s site which promotes listings.

The mantra of Web 2.0 — borrowed from the good people of Cluetrain — is authentic engagement.  People don’t want to be sold.  They don’t want to be marketed to.  They don’t want to be a lead.  And so on.  Hence, the listings — which is the basis of the commercial engagement — are over there on the broker’s site.  My site here is where I’m simply helpful.  I understand the instinctive pull.

There’s something to this perspective that says that anything which smacks of crass commercialism is bad in social media/blogging/whatever-you-call-it and that blogs have to do more to educate, to engage, to brand the writer as a local expert, and so on.  To surround a post on the local neighborhood with listings, or to have a “Ten things to consider about mortgages” with a “Featured Listing” does seem somewhat… in bad taste in the world of bloggery.

Even Kelley Kohler’s own website (which, I guess is under revision) shows that the blog lives in a top nav link and lives in its own url (www.mytucsonblog.com).  In addition, her blog has no listings search, even though her “website” features a listing search prominently in the top left position:

So I do think there’s something to the division between the “storefront” and the “fireside chats” in the real estate world.

False Dichotomy

And yet, is there a notion that such a dichotomy is just a bunch of hooey?  Mike Simonsen of Altos Research (@mikesimonsen) pointed out to me via Twitter:

@robhahn riiight. as if there’s a hard line between the personal and professional. The functional difference is one of tone

As a matter of fact, a blog is — in a way — a gigantic extended ad.  [Granted, I thought (and said to Mike) that Notorious ROB was my personal blog written primarily to entertain myself, while the corporate blog of Onboard Informatics, my employer, is where I write to promote Onboard and its products and services.  But Mike may be right.  Perhaps with social media, we are entering an age where the Personal is the Political Commercial.]

For a realtor blog — one written to help drive business, as opposed to satisfy the blogger’s need to put words on virtual paper — the distinction disappears completely.  The Personal is the Commercial.

All the advice-giving, all the helpful hints, all the videos of mojito-making, and so on continually brand the realtor as an expert, as a good person, as a fun-lovin’ master of the mystic liquors.  Since real estate appears to be an intensely personal business, it simply pays to be personable and personal.

And if the advice-giving, helpful hints, and videos and twitstreams and such are actually not bringing you any business… then don’t you have to ask yourself why you even bother with the blog?

Just sayin’.

One Site to Rule Them All

But having established the business importance of being personable… why leave a “website” hanging out there ruining all of that goodwill?  What’s the point of a brochureware site that has a bunch of boilerplate about how great an agent you are, or how much you care about your clients and all that when you have a whole other website dedicated to showing, rather than saying, precisely those things?

The ideal realestista site to me is one where you have the fusion of content: listings, statistics, and dynamic content.  For larger organizations, listings and statistics will take precedence, but they too need dynamic content that showcases their brand promises and lets consumers form authentic relationships with their people.  For individual realestistas, I think the dynamic content drives the site, but listings and statistics must also be present.  Again, see Kelley Kohler’s site for a great example.  She already has her latest blogpost there; why not just merge the thing together and create the ash gwî (One Web…site)?

The consumer knows — or should know — that he is on a realtor’s website, reading a realtor’s opinions and professional advice, and learning more about that particular realtor.  Either the site visitor is in the market or is not; if he is not, then he may turn into one at some point or refer you someone who is.  If he is in the market, then he’s not only looking for a fun person who knows a lot about real estate and the local communities — he’s looking for someone who can help him.

Authenticity does not mean pretending to be a disinterested commentator — hell, I’m as close as such things come, and even I’m not 100% disinterested in everything.  So in that, Mike Simonsen may be right.  Authenticity simply means trying not to bullshit someone, spin bad news, get into marketingspeak (“this house is doubleplusgood” is a bad sign), or such.  It means letting your personality come through while at the same time maintaining the commercial nature of the desired relationship.

The dichotomy is false.  Ash gwî durbatulûk!

-rsh

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

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

Lawyers — probably the most risk-averse group of human beings on the planet by training, vocation, and personality — are starting to embrace social media and web marketing principles.  There are some rather interesting lessons from that world for realestistas.

For example, this article from Lawyers USA (h/t What About Clients?) titled, “Are you overlooking your best marketing tool?”:

Many law firms are missing a marketing tool that is right in front of them: their own staff.

While all law firms believe the mantra that every staff member is an ambassador for the firm, few make it an explicit element of firm culture.

In fact, your staff is already marketing all day long – they just need to be reminded of it.

“If you really believe, as I do, that everybody is marketing from the moment they wake up to the moment they sleep – meaning that you are persuading someone as to the validity and worthiness of your idea, whether the idea is ‘Hire me,’ or the idea is selling your story to a judge or jury –then everything that involves your people and you is marketing,” said Edward Poll, founder of LawBiz Management Co. in Venice, Calif.

But lawyers and law firm management have not successfully transmitted this message, said Tom Kane, principal of Kane Consulting Inc. in Sarasota, Fla. and author of www.legalmarketingblog.com.

“Everyone needs to understand and buy into the idea that they have a significant impact on the firm’s brand,” he said.

For small firms, whose clients more often visit the office in person, it’s even more critical that everyone from the receptionist to the paralegals to the people in the copy room know that they represent the firm. [Emphasis added.]

This brings together two separate, but related, strands of something I’ve been talking about on this blog for a while.  One is the notion of a integrated real estate brokerage modeled after law firms.  The other is the idea that a broker’s brand is in the hands of the weakest, least competent agent.  Every broker, indeed every company, talks a whole lot about customer service.  You can’t read a corporate mission statement these days without hearing about how they’ll be focused on providing excellent customer service.

And yet… how many companies actually go beyond pretty words on the corporate website, or lofty phrases of the mission statement, and do something about service?  The reason, as the author of What About Clients blog points out, is that customer service is hard to do:

Client service is very hard, and most businesses don’t even know it. So they don’t build it, they don’t work hard at keeping and improving it, and they don’t enforce it.

The author is Dan Hull, a partner at a law firm in Pittsburgh, who is quoted in and written about in the article above.  I think his suggestions are something brokers might consider.  I think they can be summarized as Train, Evaluate, and Enforce.

Train

The first suggestion is to make client service an official policy of the firm, and to let your people know what is expected of them.  And if you’re training everyone to be client-centric, then you may as well let it influence your hiring decisions as well:

“Teach your staff that they are marketing the firm. Give them instructions on how to answer the phone and interact with people and the standards of care you would like to see,” said Poll.

This message should come across as early as the hiring process.

When Dan Hull, a partner with Hull McGuire PC in Pittsburgh, interviews potential employees, he introduces “The 12 Rules of Client Service,” a 30-page book of required reading created by his firm that includes such items as Rule #6: “When you work, you are marketing” and Rule #9: “Be there for clients – 24/7.”

Evaluate

Training, of course, merely sets the table; to implement it, you have to evaluate the impact and create a system of incentives and disincentives.

Employees at his firm know they will be evaluated based on their customer service skills and are encouraged to evaluate the partners on the same.

Presumably, at Hull’s firm, annual bonuses, perhaps even raises and promotions, are based at least in part on how the employee has carried out client services.

A lot of policies fail in implementation because there is no evaluation, no metrics.  No matter how great the idea, no matter how thorough the buy-in from people, if you can’t measure how someone is executing on the idea, then success is highly unlikely.

Furthermore, talking about evaluation and metrics forces you to get real.  “We’re client focused!” is easy to chant.  But it’s meaningless.  “We have 95% client satisfaction rating” is harder as a slogan, but it’s meaningful.  “I return all client emails/phone calls within 5 minutes” is pretty uninspiring, but it’s something that really can be measured for an individual.  And talking about metrics and evaluation forces the idea-guys to boil down the ideas to specific actions.

Enforce

Perhaps the most illuminating suggestion, Hull is absolutely clear and absolutely unforgiving when it comes to enforcing client service:

He bluntly tells everyone in the firm the rules are not a gimmick and anyone who doesn’t buy into them will be fired.

“The only way you can get fired in my firm is to make a joke about client services. We are dead serious about it,” said Hull, author of the blog www.whatboutclients.com.

And he has followed through on that promise, such as when he fired an employee on the spot for refusing to take a phone call from a client over a weekend when both partners were out of town.

For what it’s worth, without enforcement, it isn’t client service; it’s lip service.

It’s all just pretty words, and useless metrics, unless there’s actual enforcement.  Now, “enforcement” has a strong punitive connotation, but it really needs to be both positive incentive and negative punishment.

If an employee is doing great, performing awesome client service, then he needs to be rewarded — and the rest of the firm told how, why, and how much that reward is being given.

Of course, in contrast, if someone isn’t following the firm policy on client service, then that person needs to be punished, even terminated.  Lack of enforcement simply means that the organization understands that all the “client service” hoopla is just hype.

Medium, Meet Message

Due to some recent conversations on the topic of social media, the idea of client service really strikes me with some force.  Social media, after all, is still a channel for communication.  It does not, by itself, bring a message forward at all.

And amidst the buzzwords, the strategeries and tactics for using social media, doesn’t it sometimes feel like we’re all learning how to speak in all directions without thinking of what to say?

So here’s a thought: client service is the message.

Whether you use social media, Web 2.0, Web 1.0, telephone, U.S. Postal Service, or stone tablets, the message remains the same: client service.  Whatever that might mean, however you might measure it, and however you go about the business, at the end of the day, doesn’t the practice of real estate services come down to providing some sort of client service?  And beyond the whole small-is-beautiful or bigger-the-better, isn’t the determining factor for victory superior client service?

So ask yourself this: Is your company, your business, about client service?  Or lip service?

-rsh

One of the “risks” of having a company blog or company social media operation of any kind is that someone will come on your blog, your Facebook page, or whatever, and just trash you.

Most of the advice on dealing with negativity is to “address it”.

For example, here’s a post from MarketingProfsDaily on handling negative blog/site comments:

If you see negative comments on a blog/site, especially those based on inaccurate information, you need to address those comments. (Emphasis in original)

And the post continues with some good general suggestions:

As I told Allison, as soon as she joined the conversation and encouraged interaction, the tone of the dialogue changed from people throwing negative comments AT the company, to the commenters talking WITH Allison. And then Allison later blogged about the article on HA’s own blog.

What can you learn from how Allison handled this situation?

1 – If someone is leaving negative comments about your company, respond.

2 – Be thankful and polite. Nothing escalates a negative comment into a full-bore flamewar faster than an ‘Oh yeah?!?’ reply from the company.

3 – If commenters are jumping to the wrong conclusion about your company, kindly correct them with the proper information.

4 – Thank them for their feedback, and encourage them to provide more. Leave your email address so they can contact you off the blog, if they choose.

If you are thankful and respectful toward commenters, even those that are attacking your company, the end result will almost always be a positive experience. Allison’s experience isn’t the exception, it’s the norm.

Now, I think this is solid advice… but note that the underlying theme is that the criticism leveled at the company is erroneous.  The commenters are jumping to wrong conclusions.  They don’t have the facts.  They’re mistaken.

But what if they’re not?  What if they’re right?

There’s plenty of good advice out there.  I think this one from Ogilvy360 is particularly nice.  In part, they recommend:

• Address The Issue. Acknowledge the comment, and admit when you are wrong.  Your readers will respond better and respect you more if you can admit mistakes.  Everyone can make a typo, forget to say something important or just be plain wrong.

But frankly, courtesy and saying thank you isn’t always appropriate either. Sometimes, the commenter is just a prick, adding nothing to the conversation.  Or he just has an axe to grind or something.  What then?

I personally like this handy chart I recently found (via Twitter, I believe, but the h/t goes to Web Strategist).  It’s from an organization that knows a thing or two about “handling conflict”: The United States Air Force.

In particular, I like this advice about dealing with “RAGER”:

“RAGER”

Is the post a rant, rage, joke, ridicule or satirical in nature? –>

MONITOR ONLY

Avoid responding to specific posts, monitor the site for relevant information and comments.

Now, when the USAF says “monitor the site”, I’m pretty sure they don’t mean with this or this.  But then, you never know, do you?

On a more serious note, I think the ideal of transparency cuts in multiple ways here, when the criticism is correct, is based on truth, and is neither a Troll nor a Rager who can be ignored.

My first thought is that your company really shouldn’t be doing things it is afraid to defend in a public forum.  Bribing elected officials with special “Friends of the CEO” type of deals?  Not only don’t talk about it, but seriously, don’t do it in the first place.  Adding cheap fillers into baby food?  Blog flames should be the least of your concerns.

Do not defend the indefensible.  If asked to defend the indefensible, quit the job.  You can find other jobs; you can never get back your credibility, and “I was just doing my job” is a poor excuse.

Second, if you are being criticized for something true that you do feel comfortable defending, then by all means, defend away.  Don’t do the “ignore it and it’ll go away” thing.  That leads to disaster.  Be polite, but be firm.  You feel you’re in the right — why be defensive?  Keep an open mind, sure, but defend yourself.

Third, be transparent as to your thinking.  You’re not necessarily looking for agreement from the negative commenter; you’re looking to explain your decision/article/whatever.  I find disagreement and debate tremendously useful, as long as both sides are disclosing their reasoning.  I can evaluate for myself which side I agree with, but end up with respect for both sides for being transparent in their analysis.

When you realize you were wrong, or when you realize you were mistaken, just admit it.  Blogging/communications isn’t a competition with winners and losers.  It’s a discussion.

I know this is a big topic, with a lot of different angles.  But the rules of thumb seem to be:

• If they’re mistaken, correct them.
• If they’re trolls or ragers, ignore them (and ban them).
• If they’re right, and you’re up to no good, then cut it the hell out. Then apologize.
• If they’re right, and you’re up to good, then by all means, defend away.  Be direct, be firm, but be polite.
• Explain your reasoning in disagreement.  Let your audience make up their own mind; even in disagreement, they’ll respect you.

What have I left out?

-rsh

First of all, let me give a shout-out to Hey Amaretto, aka, Diane Guercio, whose blog I just read for the first time.  She’s got an amazing voice for the web: personable, yet relevant, with useful information mixed in with humor and an overall fun voice.  Really, check her out for one example of how realtor blogging should sound.  (She is also now blogrolled here.)  Here’s a taste:

So, okay, I can’t see how they would have signed an Exclusive Buyer’s Agency contract, let alone a MA Mandatory Agency Disclosure form. And handing out my lockbox codes to buyers doesn’t exactly constitute representation. Just thinking about the things that could happen made me really upset. Suppose the buyers had slipped on the ice, or had fallen down the cellar stairs, or SAID they had fallen down the cellar stairs? I am just getting over the headache that had started after I was handed this little nugget of information.

See what I mean?  Useful info, but with a really nice, personable, human-sounding voice.

Her latest post — which I found out via Twitter (which is, in and of itself, some sort of testament to social media) — is also interesting: Business Darwinism, Success, and Laundry.  Her point appears to be that to survive in a Darwinist environment, one needs to become a “Shortcut” — a superior specimen par excellence that becomes the ‘automatic choice’ for any given task.  And to become a “Shortcut”, one needs plenty of elbow grease:

And that is the point, in summary- by working harder and better than others, you become indispensable. Not much of a surprise that I scored well on the online test, given the rigorous training sessions I had been through with the little cherubs. I guess you want to be the best you can be, in business, in your personal relationships, in life. That’s how you create job security, and really, it’s the only way to go, regardless of the rewards. (Emphasis added.)

Now, here’s the thing: I have a passing interest in the application of Darwinist theories to other subject areas.  Indeed, it’s fascinating what happens when you apply evolution to something like computer programming.  There’s a whole institute, called the Santa Fe Institute, that focuses on things like chaos theory and evolution as applied to areas like economics, physics, chemistry, and so forth.

[By no means do I know more than the tiniest of the tiny bit about any of this stuff.  So it is quite likely that I'm going to sound like an idjit in the next few paragraphs, since a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  Caveat lector. -- ED: And this would be different from your other posts how?]

Evolution and Effort

But at the heart of evolutionary theory is the notion of competition.  Evolution is not, as popular usage of the phrase has come to mean, a peaceful, gradual change from one state to another.  It is a violent conflict, with winners and losers, and the losers in evolutionary struggle almost always die.

The interesting thing to note, from a theory standpoint, is that the winners and losers are not differentiated by a level of effort.  In other words, there is no suggestion (and no evidence) that species which go extinct did not work at survival.  The dodo bird quite likely worked hard at finding food, reproducing, and so on given its environment.  It just couldn’t adapt fast enough, or adjust quickly enough, when its environment changed dramatically with the arrival of humans — and more importantly, their livestock:

However, when humans first arrived on Mauritius, they also brought with them other animals that had not existed on the island before, including dogs, pigs, cats, rats, and Crab-eating Macaques, which plundered the dodo nests, while humans destroyed the forests where the birds made their homes;^[20] currently, the impact these animals – especially the pigs and macaques – had on the dodo population is considered to have been more severe than that of hunting.

Applied to business, then, the lesson frankly is not to work harder but to adapt to changing conditions faster.

If you’re a buggy whip manufacturer, no amount of hard work, no amount of superhuman effort, no amount of being the go-to guy when it comes to horse buggy whips is going to save you from extinction when automobiles replace the horse-drawn carriage.  That is an environmental change, driven by technology: your only choices are to adapt or perish.

Which makes Diane’s observations correct, but only in part.  Working harder and better than others to become indispensable is the key to survival, but only if the hard work and better work is suited to the environment in which they are happening.

Being a mom, frankly, is the wrong analogy here, because no matter how lazy you are, no matter how neglectful you are of your kids, you are still indispensable to them.  Conversely, Diane might be the best mom in the entire world; she could be the “Shortcut”, the go-to mom, for all things momlike.  That does no good for my kids who don’t have Diane as her mom; they’ll have to settle for their own mom (who, incidentally, is pretty kickass too).

Evolution in Real Estate

Which brings us back to real estate, evolution, competition, and Darwinism.  The situation we face today is not simply a “market downturn” — although there is no doubt that the market downturn is part of the environment.  The situation, frankly, is that the environment itself has changed irrevocably, as disruptive technology tends to make happen.

I just don’t see how it pays to work your tail off doing the outdated things that worked prior to the Internet era.  You might become the go-to gal when it comes to making property flyers, but when 80% of consumers are finding homes online, does that hard work matter much?

I know this is obvious to most of the folks who are reading this (after all, this is a blog….)  But the challenge the industry faces as a whole is one of evolutionary adaptation.  Given fundamental changes in the environment, does it make sense to keep doing what one has been doing? At the same time, change for change’s sake isn’t necessarily going to lead to success either.  Just because ‘social media’ is the in-thing today doesn’t mean that it makes sense for you or your company to do.  On the other hand, maybe it does.

All depends on your assessment of the environment, and what efforts will lead to success in your environment.  Once you have some idea, then and only then will all that hard work and better work pay off.

A Modest Suggestion

So allow me to make one modest suggestion for the various real estate companies.  I know the trendy thing to do right now is to hire various positions like “Director of Social Media” and “Chief Blogger” and such.  Those things, in and of themselves, are just fine.

But you really need to have a “Chief Evolutionary Officer” whose job is to continually look at the environment and assess whether the strategies you have in place are the right ones right now.  (And yes, that should be the CEO in most cases.  The acronym is fully intentional.)  We are undergoing significant environmental disruption; now is the time to pay very close attention to the environment to ensure that all that hard work is actually accomplishing something.

-rsh

He thinks real estate brokers should start local newspapers:

What should not-so-busy real estate brokers do?

Why not start a local newspaper?

Here’s how I would do it. Assume you’ve got six people in your office. Each person is responsible to do two things each day:

• Interview a local business, a local student or a local political activist. You can do it by phone, it can be very short and it might take you ten minutes.
• Get 20 households to ‘subscribe’ by giving you their email address and asking for a free subscription. You can use direct contact or flyers or speeches to get your list.

Twice a week, send out the ‘newspaper’ by email.

Of course, quite a few local realtors are already doing this, so this is one case in which realtors > Seth Godin.

The other problem with Seth’s idea is that unlike newspapers, a realtor has some definite issues with transparency.  For example, politics.

You can’t call yourself a local newspaper of any quality if you’re not providing information and news about the going-on’s inside governmental units.  Whether it’s the zoning board and its decisions, or some bribery scandal at City Hall, or an alderman’s take on property taxes, I expect a journalist to uncover things that folks might not want uncovered.  I expect journalist-types to rail against problems and highlight issues.

How do you do that, while making your living from selling homes in the area that you’ve just called “the hive of crime in Essex county”?  Will your sellers be thrilled with your expose on corruption in your county when you’re trying to convince buyers to spend hundreds of thousands on their house?

And if you don’t call things the way they really are, then what kind of newspaper are you?  If you never criticize, never talk about negative things, never talk about what’s bad about your town/area, then you’re not a newspaper; you’re propaganda.

Less Market, More Community

Realtors, however, could and should listen to Seth as to the core concept:

Local newspaper is about the local community, not the local market.

I touched on this on this post on the Onblog, but I’ve since had the opportunity to evolve my thinking a bit.

I believe that one concrete change most local realtor blogs (and attendant newsletters and such) can make is to shift the focus from blogging about the local market to blogging about the local community.  Rather than thinking of your audience as potential buyers/sellers, think of your audience as existing and future homeowners.

Far too many realtor blogs have only “Local Market Conditions for Town XYZ” as the only substantive post for weeks on end.  That tells me pretty clearly that all you’re interested in doing is telling me about the price of housing in the hopes of getting me to buy/sell.  Peppering articles/posts about “How to Sell Your Home in 90-days” or “Staging for Success” isn’t giving me any reason to read your stuff if I’m not in the market.

Instead, give me information that I might care about as a resident in your town/neighborhood.  Tell me about the water main break on Main St., so I know to go around it on my way home.  Tell me about the new town ordinance against dogwalking being discussed.  Tell me about the new Home Depot moving into the next town over, since that might impact my favorite local hardware store.  Tell me about the new restaurant that’s opening next week.

And so on.

I am far more likely to follow you, read your blog, and sign up for your newsletter.

Would that compete with true local media operations, like a Baristanet?  Probably not.  But do you need to compete with local media?  Probably not.

-rsh

Gary Vaynerchuk, of Wine Library, is a tremendously entertaining speaker. And he spoke at Inman NY this past week. While we wait for the official video from the good people of Inman, I found this… what do you call it, bootleg conference speaker video? on this blog post by Sue Adler, a realtor who actually works my market. (*wave* Hi Sue!)

Watch the whole video — I’m not going to embed it here, since you can view it on that site.

Gary Vaynerchuk — known more colloquially as GaryVee (his Twitter handle) — is an incredible speaker. He’s full of passion, full of entertaining stories, and definitely has the gift of gab. He is a superstar in the making. I found his Inman talk to be spirited, tremendously fun, and inspiring in many ways.

Unfortunately, for realestistas who must toil in the real estate industry, I felt that he ultimately failed to convince. Well, at least me. Which might be a good thing for GaryVee and his acolytes.

What is especially unfortunate is that Gary’s charisma and natural storytelling skills pose a danger for realestistas trying to figure out what’s what with all this social media stuffzorz. He makes points that are, on the surface, extremely appealing, and makes them in a very appealing way. If he had been a worse speaker, perhaps the seduction would be less.

Ah, but that’s where I come in, playing the killjoy party pooper. Let’s get into it.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m reasonably sure that none of you currently reading this has ever thought that those three terms belong together. But they do!

Recently, I got into a discussion with the inimitable Teri Lussier about Fred Astaire vs. Gene Kelly. Well… to be fair, it wasn’t much of a discussion. More of Teri beating me about the head rhetorically speaking. So naturally, I went searching for information on the difference between Astaire and Kelly.

And found this:

“People would compare us, but we didn’t dance alike at all!” Kelly said in a 1994 interview, quoted in the Associated Press obituary. “Fred danced in tails – everybody wore them before I came out here – but I took off my coat, rolled up my sleeves and danced in sweat shirts and jeans and khakis.”

It was the natural quality that was so attractive in a Kelly musical. While most of Astaire’s films existed only as a framework for his great dance numbers, a Kelly musical was more likely to pretend to be a “real” story in which the characters spontaneously burst into song and dance, almost to their own surprise.

In fact, here are the differences made visual:

Fred Astaire is just… ethereal. He doesn’t even look like he’s dancing in some cases, as if twirling and tapping his way across the floor were the most natural thing in the world.

And yet, there is something of real artifice in his dancing in a strange way. I simply can’t relate to the man, in some ways because of his perfection. Some of it may have to do with the characters he’s playing, or the time when those movies were made, but there’s really something unapproachable about Astaire, something forbidding in the purity of his perfection. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, Jeder Engel is schrecklich (“every angel is terrifying”).

Now, here’s Gene Kelly:

Gene Kelly’s style is much more muscular, much more physical, if you will. I’m always aware that Kelly is actually dancing in his dance numbers, in a way that I sometimes forget that Astaire is doing.

But I’m also able to relate to Gene Kelly in a way I never could with Fred Astaire. This is a man doing something that is unnatural, and doing it exceptionally well. But you never forget the essential humanity of Gene Kelly as a person in his dances. Yes, he’s capable of incredible athletic and acrobatic and balletic feats — but I feel that I’m watching a person do those things.

With Astaire, I sometimes feel that I’m watching a spirit, an angel, a personification of dance, do those things. And it isn’t the same.

I realized there’s a rough analogy to be made here between “traditional” marketing and “social media” marketing for real estate. Fred Astaire to Gene Kelly is like “traditional” marketing is to “social media” marketing.

Fact is, in the 21st century, there is no longer such a thing as “traditional” marketing — one would be hard-pressed to find a broker or agent who completely rejects web-based marketing initiatives in favor of only print, open houses, and MLS books. The books themselves no longer exist, after all.

The question, really, is one of perfection vs. authenticity.

The best of ‘traditional’ marketing — for example, sites like Corcoran.com, is reflected in its execution. Something like the Virtual Book is a pretty slick implementation, as is something like My Dream Home. Neither of these things are “social” in any way, but you can’t help but admire the execution. Even if we don’t go so far as to call it “perfect”, fact is that perfection of execution is the goal of these kinds of marketing campaigns.

Done right, they evoke admiration from the user, as well as a measure of, “Gee whiz, I wonder how they did that!”

In contrast, ‘social media’ marketing tries — Gene Kelly-like — to go for authenticity in lieu of perfect execution. The goal with blogs, for example, shouldn’t be to present a perfect face to the world, but to present a human one. It isn’t about the professional quality of the photographs, but about the opinions of the realtor who is presenting the property. It isn’t about the beauty of the market report, but about its genuineness.

Of course, the best ‘social media’ marketing is pretty admirable too — just like Gene Kelly isn’t exactly a slouch in the dance department. The point is that the goal is different.

There is one further point to be made.

Gene Kelly was still a dancer, one of the best of his generation (or any generation). He wasn’t just some random guy who ran around prancing and pretending that was dance. He still put in the time, understood the principles, and practiced being a dancer.

Having a blog does not make you a ‘social marketer’ anymore than simply throwing your body around makes you a dancer. Twittering 24/7 does not mean you’re engaging in ‘social media’ anymore than prancing around makes me Gene Kelly. And ‘social media’ is not an excuse to completely ignore basic rules of marketing.

On the flipside, the true marketers in our industry (myself included) need to raise our game some. If we’re not going to go for authenticity, then by golly, we’d better shoot for perfection of execution like a Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers number.

Perfection vs. authenticity. Here’s another look — watch and be inspired:

-rsh

UPDATE: Teri Lussier has posted a response that is worth reading in full.  Don’t miss more singing and dancing!