Transparency, Socrates and the Red Pill

"When people feel information is being withheld from them, they become even more skeptical and their trust begins to wane."  -- Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.

For months he demanded greater transparency from AIG. And for months information regarding who benefited from the $173 billion bailout of the insurance behemoth were withheld. Regulators feared providing too much information to the public would further cripple the financial system.

Well, those fears now appear to be exaggerated.

As more and more bailout disclosures ensue, as information continues to leak across the wire and as transparency now begins to rear its righteous force, it appears to me that the world isn't ending like everyone thought.

Sure things are bad. And they may get worse. But...

The truth will set you free

The Matrix was a film filled with religious, social and philosophical symbolism suggesting we humans were being fed false sensory information by a giant virtual reality computer. Not that much different from the false information the public had been fed for the last decade. 

We all sensed something wasn't right. Yet we all bought stock in unsustainable companies. And homes we couldn't afford. Or helped folks buy homes they couldn't afford with bad loans backed by the likes of AIG.

We were a Blue Pill society.   

As Neo reaches for the Red Pill, Morpheus warns, "Remember, all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more."

As the film proved, the truth hurts. But it also sets us free.

Transparency

As the opaque veil of false bliss is ripped off everything around us, truth and rationality stream in. Virtuously. At every turn.

It's painful no doubt. But it leads us to the sort of examined life Socrates envisioned, one created from the positive results that stem from the excellencies of rationality.

The goods of that experience are the greatest and highest goods of all. 

A Red Pill of transparency now finds its way across all mediums. As a result we are slowly, painfully, unhooking ourselves from our Matrix. And though we all seem to be somewhat shocked by the realities of the world around us, we are also realizing that the sky is not caving in. 

And this is precisely what happens time and time again when the shit hits the fan. People come alive. We thrive on real. And honestly, we haven't felt real in a long time. So despite the troubles, the pain, the loss of equity, the devaluation of our business, the truth is, we are starting to feel alive in a way we haven't for a long time.

And the positive effects ripple ever so slightly. 

Red pill

Take one every morning. And strive towards greater transparency. Seek to achieve it across everything you have. Your website. Your business card. Your blog. Your Twitter bio. Your collateral. Your market reports. Your core values. 

Socrates was right.
As was Morpheus.

It will set you and those around you free.

- Davison
Twitter: 1000wattmarc

This "office of the future" thing is starting to catch fire

First it was NRT's Manhattan Beach Project. That was circa 2005, a year following a presentation Brian and I gave the folks at NRT about the paperless office. 

Then it was Intero's Andare office on Santana Row, which has been getting considerable attention these days.

Last week Inman featured a guest perspective by Matt Dollinger from @properties [disclosure: @properties is a 1000watt Consulting client] that took the notion of a future real estate office to some far-reaching lengths. Given the absolutely stunning nature of their facilities, I can certainly see where he was coming from.

Today Coldwell Banker announced their own take on the office of the future, which offers several of the ideas and appointments taken from the participants at a workshop we moderated with Sherry Chris last summer at Real Estate Connect.   

Just now I was sent a link that introduced me to the Dunes Properties website, which includes a microsite built around their office of future.

Man is this hot!

Here's what I like:

The website itself is super clean. It has a Web 2.0 feel to it which I found to be quite elegant and appropriate for real estate. I love the simple navigation that excludes all those typical things most brokerage websites offer that nowadays seem so pointless, such as" Buyer Tips," "Free Reports," etc.

I was excited to find a "Contact Me" page that actually offers a phone number, which strangely enough is not all that common. Many brokerage sites don't publish a phone number anywhere on their site.

Oddly, the site is missing a direct link to search. If you click around long enough you'll find it, but I wonder how many users will put in as much effort as I did searching for it.

Nevertheless, the payoff on this site is the microsite, a "studio tour." What a great idea. And talk about environmental branding -- holy cannoli!

I've quickly logged a host of suggestions that would make this microsite much better, such as including some video, live chat, links to PR, a blog and quite possibly a live cam - things that could bring this place to life. 

But here's my bottom line: If I lived in Charleston or decided to move there and needed to source out a brokerage, I'd go with Dunes. This facility creates that much of a wow factor for me. Considering I recently hired an agent to work with me in Austin due to her quick trigger on Twitter, and how nicely this has worked out for us, I trust my gut on this one.

While this website itself might not make our Top 10, and while there are many things I would do to improve the site, this post is more about what some brokerages are doing today to create difference, to spread the seeds of their brand, create impact and build something that brings them into the here and now. And poise themselves for the future.

I know there is considerable focus on the virtual office. But there is still something precious about a terrestrial facility -- if it is done right.I have a feeling we are going to seeing more and more of these as time goes on.

- Davison
Twitter: 100wattmarc

Two new online real estate companies that snuck by me

Crazy busy this week. Not much time for blogging (or eating, or showering...).

But real quick: Here are a couple interesting online real estate sites that launched recently that I somehow missed despite a fair amount of media coverage outside our industry. 

Home-Account

Home-Account is self-described as "Your key to always having your best mortgage." The site allows users to determine whether or not they are getting the best deal on their mortgage by submitting detailed information on their current loan, tolerance for risk, and larger financial picture.

Home-Account is different from most other mortgage-related sites in two ways:

First, the resolve for the consumer is not a hailstorm of offers from mortgage originators (think LendingTree or Zillow Mortgage Marketplace). Instead, they are presented with various mortgage products along with the the level of savings they personally stand to realize. Home-Account also displays loans the user might be able to get if they take certain steps to improve their credit score (which is provided as part of the profile process). Users are also alerted when loan conditions move to a point where action (e.g., a refi) may be warranted -- something like an email listing alert for mortgages

Second, consumers will pay for this service. $9.95 per month to be exact. I like that.

What I don't like is the site's very confusing interface and dialed-to-11 design. It needs improvement.

Nonetheless, Home Account is a welcome addition to the sparsely populated online mortgage landscape. 

RentWiki

RentWiki was launched late last year by Jamie Gallo, who ran Realestate.com for Primedia before it sold the site to IAC.

RentWiki bills its offering as "Social rental search," which it achieves by pairing apartment listings with neighborhood profiles, user-submitted reviews and a nice Twitter integration that captures the ambient online noise about a given neighborhood.

Online rentals is a crowed space. And neighborhood sites haven't exactly been a home run. But RentWiki is nicely executed and offers plenty of cues for anyone looking to create an interesting search experience.

Back to work!

-- Brian Boero

Replaced

Nicole sat across the dinner table from us Friday night. She was not her usual positive self. Something happened. I decided to pry.

Replaced

A former actress, Nicole followed her true calling behind the camera. She did film. Music videos. And stills. The latter is, IMO, her best work of all.

Her son came twelve years ago. A daughter, sever years later. So she ditched LA and set up a photographer's studio here on the Central Coast.

Many of her stills adorn the walls of my home. Family portraits. My kids. Wife. Dogs. Taken at different times over the last ten years.

Nicole closed her studio on Friday. 

I assumed the economy took its toll. Nicole believes it goes deeper than that. "Everyone is a photographer today," she said. "They own digital cameras, enhance them with Photoshop (or picnik) and post them on Flickr. The value of a professional is no longer recognized I suppose."

That hit home. Big time. Especially as it relates to real estate.

Maestro

In 2004, I presented twenty-five very far-out predictions in a speech given for a large Realtor association. Slide nine read as follows: In the future you will no longer "own" any listings. A nice 3-D rendering of a product box was placed below the title. Across the top of the box the word "Maestro" was printed in bold. Underneath, it read: Orchestrate the entire process of selling your home - yourself.

Maestro included: 

• A turnkey blog site that featured your home
• A unique URL based on your home's address
• Map mashups with local data 
• A huge photo library and video player
• Direct syndication to every listings site on the planet

Maestro was real estate marketing in a metaphorical box. It provided the homeowner tools to recreate everything an agent does -- the many photos they should be taking, the compelling copy they should be writing and the web distribution they should be executing. 

The premise behind Maestro fed into the notion that in the future, by virtue of handling all of their own marketing, homeowners would retain ownership of their listing and simply hire agents to coordinate the sale -- i.e. show property, hash out paperwork, etc.

The audience booed. "There's more to selling a home than that," they barked. I knew that. Just like there's more to capturing a moment than saying cheese and properly framing your SureShot. The problem was, four years ago, when homes were selling like hotcakes, I wasn't sure the real estate consumer knew that.

And I'm not so sure that the consumer knows any better today.

Nostradavison

Several predictions from my presentation have now come to pass in real estate. And honestly, most of what I predicted seemed inevitable anyway.

A few, however, veered towards absurd.

Consider:

"Holographic Search" that allowed consumers to walk through a listing projected from a computer while sitting in their own kitchen.

"Caravan" was a device agents provided to their buyers. Think listing alerts meets GPS (I got this idea one evening waiting at a busy restaurant that handed out devices to patrons that lit up when your table was ready).

And of course Maestro.

I know they are borderline silly. They were offered to stimulate conversation. 

But then today my inbox received a press release sent from the U.K. announcing the launch of EstateCreate, a self-publishing website built to help consumers list their home and market it everywhere.

Holy shit.

Blinders

You'll think the product is simple. Regard it as a basic template website. With few bells and whistles. Much like most agent and broker websites are now. You may also shuck this as silly, much like some of my predictions, pay it no mind and think to yourself, well... even if a seller uses this, they'll still need to sign their listing over to an agent for full commission.

Blinders. 

Products like EstateCreate are trying to tap into the gaping holes left in the consumer mindset all the dog branding, bad websites, lack of transparency, poor search experiences, misguided marketing and lack of professionalism created and continues to create.

These are the gaping holes that today's real estate brands continue to avoid filling with better information. Higher standards. These are also the voids that real estate innovators are trying fill with solutions offered to real estate folks who continue to shun the idea of spending a few dollars a month for new technology.

If vendors can't sell their innovations to real estate professionals to help the consumer, my guess is they are going to start targeting the consumers themselves in greater numbers, tapping into their motivations to market, buy and sell their homes.  

Think TurboTax.

I hurt for Nicole. Being taken out by the economy is one thing. But being replaced because the marketplace misunderstands your value proposition is something entirely different. I'm showing Nicole how to change that and save her business. 

- Davison
Twitter: 1000wattmarc

100 great Twitter tools

Kelly Sonora from Online Best Colleges just sent me her post titled: 100 Twitter Tools to Help You Achieve All Your Goals. 

There are many tools here that I never heard of and will be testing them throughout the week. 

If you are still coy about Twitter, think again. Where else can you broadcast your message to an entire world for free? 

There are conversations going on right now about you, your marketplace, your industry and life in general that you could be a part of. Many of the tools listed above can keep you connected easily with little intrusion.  

Twitter is open 24/7. It's an online rave. The ecstasy you ingest and the high that ensues come from the connections you are bound to make that will lead to opportunities you would never, ever, create otherwise. 

Unlike blogging, little time is needed to get something out of Twitter.  Personally, I invest no more than thirty minutes a day. What I accomplish would have, in the old days... been impossible. 

Davison

Twitter:1000wattmarc 

Thinking horizontal in our vertical

John Battelle posted this gem the other day. It captures so neatly the challenges and opportunities facing many in online and "traditional" real estate these days.

Consider this point:

"Every customer interaction is marketing. Every partnership is marketing. Every employee is a marketer.

And all your data, well, that's marketing too."

And, further:

"Joining the conversation economy ... means taking your core assets - the data that drives value and knowledge inside your enterprise - and offering it as fuel for the collective intelligence of all your partners - your channel, your vendors, and, ultimately, your customers."

His thinking here is placed in the context of a discussion with Oren Michaels, CEO of Mashery. Mashery provides a managed solution for companies that want to create APIs. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) allow publishers (e.g. Trulia) to share their data with others.

Lie down

We've been telling broker clients for some time that their conception of marketing must be obliterated if they intend to survive. That means empowering everyone -- including the executive team -- to become part of the "marketing department." The person formerly known as the marketing director needs to become the managing editor -- and work with IT, sales (i.e. agents), and management to coordinate the extraction and broadcasting of data and knowledge into the marketplace.

For MLSs ... well, we've beaten this dead horse to a pulp, but I'll take one more swing: Stop protecting and start broadcasting. With great care of course. And with the goal of putting information to work for broker and agent subscribers. But, man, unlock the value!

Break glass in case of emergency

There's so much inside most real estate organizations: Data, personality, knowledge. But it sits behind glass, that smudgy barrier of plastic marketing - and, frankly, bullshit - that has stood between real estate and its customer for too long.

It's time to break the glass and create a glorious mess.

Get horizontal as Battelle says. Reach outward. Forget about an API is that makes no sense for you. There are a hundred ways to take the larger point and run with it.

-- Brian Boero

Literature of the doomed

BoingBoing highlights some poignant boom artifacts found on Amazon. Caveat emptor and all that, but excuse me while I go barf.

-- Brian Boero

Speaking to a Tweeting crowd

This image was posted on Conversion Agent this morning in a great post titled "Twitter Brings Interaction to Events." In it, Valeria Maltoni offers some great tips to speakers on how to craft presentations that are interactive and sustain audience attention.

This is certainly a must read for anyone on the speaking circuit today, especially if you are addressing large audiences from a stage and may have wondered why half the crowd appears to be asleep during your presentation. You can be assuaged of your self doubt and take comfort in the knowledge that all those bowed heads are probably distributing, commenting and conversing about your subject matter to the world at large via Twitter.

Having spoken from large stages, I can vouch for the energy a speaker derives from eye-to-eye contact with the audience. The increasing number of Tweeters wrapped up in their own broadcasting makes that harder to achieve.

Personally, I wonder if the resolve for speakers is as simple as setting up a Twitter account for each presentation with appropriate hashtags, project it live onto the screen, and seamlessly incorporate the comments that ensue directly into their presentation.

There is no doubt that this would complete the circle of social interaction. But in any event, it is clear that speakers who are used to the "1.0" method of addressing a crowd - you presenting and the crowd listening - need to adopt new communication skills for a new kind of audience.

Kinda like every thing else these days.

-- Davison
Twitter:1000wattmarc

Flikr, Skittles, Oodle and other cool developments

Photo sharing site Flikr now allows free users to upload video. As I noted in my "Seeing online real estate" post a couple weeks ago, Flikr is one of many services that will drive a much more visual online real estate experience in the near future. Brokers and online real estate sites of all kinds can easily display location-related images and video via the Flikr API.

Skittles - those chewy little candies - are now being marketed online in manner that is ultra-aggressive in its approach to social media. In fact the boundary between the brand and the "conversation" has been obliterated. Take a look and think about how this sort of thing might be applied to real estate marketing. Risky but not without rewards if executed properly, in my opinion. [via searchblog].

Walkscore, the site that measures the "walkability" of places, including homes, has cut two significant deals in the past couple weeks. Both Zillow and Estately have integrated the Walkscore API. Users on these sites can now view the proximity of listings to various amenities. Walkscore is a non-profit and there's a strong normative dimension to the service (We should use cars less) but it's a compelling (and free) addition to most real estate sites. 

Oodle, the classifieds site, is quietly kicking ass (Yes, I think you can kick ass quietly). They went live today as the classifieds engine on facebook. This follows upon a deal announced last week with AOL and a partnership with Wal-Mart.com inked last year. Their traffic is skyrocketing. And they have a strong real estate category. As the real estate listings aggregators approach parity in terms of volume, I wonder if they will find themselves challenged by a player like Oodle, which can develop content and traffic mass of an entirely different order.

Brokers: Jump on the neighborhood conversation now or surrender it to a media company. That's the message to be taken from the New York Times' announcement that it is entering into the neighborhood blog arena.

-- Brian Boero

Try the Zappos shoe on for size

My understanding of brand comes from a textbook understanding acquired in school and later honed on Madison Ave.

Put simply, a brand is a face you present to the world backed by a set of principles and promises unique to you. Those principles and promises should be woven through your company's employees, products and services and understood clearly by anyone who comes into contact with them.

Disney built a brand around a promise to deliver wholesome family entertainment. That promise lives in every one of their brand touch points (programming, retail operations, theme parks, etc.).  As a result, the Disney brand has become synonymous with family entertainment the world over.

The benefits this creates for Disney and other successful brands are indisputable. A well-executed brand owns a sizable piece of real estate inside a consumer's mind.

What makes a brand

Pictured here is the Zappos "Culture Book," a copy of which arrived at my house a couple weeks. Inside are excerpts from hundreds of statements written by employees that describe what Zappos means to them.

A common theme ensues from these excerpts. This occurs because at the very root of Zappos lie a set of unwavering principles and promises. Every decision, every action, must answer to them. 

The result is breathtaking. The Zappos pledge is delivered through every pore in the company's body.  They have ensured that the brand means exactly the same thing to everyone touched by it.

The Zappos brand would hardly enjoy the success it has today (millions of customers, rocketing sales, expansion into new categories) if every one of those employees had a different sense of what Zappos means.

This kind of success, unfortunately, is all too rare in real estate, where the lines many brands cast out into the marketplace contain no bait.
 
Assign this line of thinking to any real estate company. What makes Bob's Realty different from Dave's Realty? Personally, I couldn't even begin to tell you. My guess is most people inside these companies can't either. 

In these times, that could mean disaster.

A simple brand test

Last week, while delivering a presentation on branding, I asked each attendee what their personal brand stood for. Most said it was customer service.

So I gave them a simple brand test:

I asked if they could recite the greeting that currently resides on their voice mail. After all, if customer service defines their brand, they should be aware of what their message says -- especially given the fact that they were in the middle of a daylong meeting.

Most could not recall.
Some had a hunch.
One person knew.

I paused, questioning whether they had even built a brand at all.

Are you a brand or just a recognized name known for being around a while?

It's important to ask yourself this question and get clear on the answer because the time and money you are investing in "building your brand" today may in fact be misdirected.

Who are you? What makes you different? What are the principles and promises that define you? What do you do to enforce them?

Nike employees 350 people to oversee their brand. How many have you employed?

If you determine you've gotten off track, you can get back on.

Target did it.
Cadillac did it (pre-meltdown).
You can too.

There are lots of ways to do it today:

The brand Obama does it on Facebook.
Scion does it through its website
JetBlue does it through Twitter
Victoria's Secret reveals it on YouTube
Kodak snaps it through their blog
 
So instead of placing more forms on your website pages, or throwing gobs of cash at SEO, or creating web pages full of platitude graffiti, think about promises, principles and creating a culture that reverences them.

Try the Zappos shoe on for size.

- Davison
Twitter: 1000wattmarc