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Value Proposition Is More Than A Trend

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I’ve read with great interest this year’s Swanepoel Trends Report. Stefan Swanepoel and his talented team of co-writers have again done a stellar job of describing where the real estate industry is, or should be, headed. And the trend that really caught my attention was trend #5, the value proposition of brands.

It’s a critically important topic. I typically attach it to conversations centered around vision and values. And it’s a topic of frequent discussions between me and my friend and mentor, Bill Leider, author of Brand Delulsions.

The Swanepoel Trends Report cites the chief problem facing real estate brands:

“When asked to describe a real estate brand most consumers’ response is: They’re a real estate company or they sell real estate but I can’t describe any unique feature, market niche, position statement, etc. that relates to the brand.”

 And even though I spend a good deal of time interfacing with brand leaders, it’s true for me as well.

Why is this true? The answer seems obvious to me and it appears obvious to Swanepoel. The report states, “The service delivered in almost every national real estate franchise office will differ significantly from office to office within the same stable, and even from agent to another agent in the same office.” Bill Leider labels this phenomena, a brand within a brand within a brand.

As I’ve often said, people love to blame “the model,” or the independent contractor status of the individual real estate agent, or the inability of real estate franchises and brokers to lead effectively. Or they use the state of real estate professionalism, Trend #6, as a scapegoat. Furthermore, they use all of these as excuses for failing to establish a truly consumer-centric brand.

The real culprit, at every level, is a lack of vision, no clear actionable values, and a misguided understanding of what brand really is. “Your brand,” writes Leider, “is a widely held set of beliefs and expectations about what you deliver and how you deliver it, validated by customers’ experiences.”  And it’s that “customer” word that seems to be throwing real estate brands for a loop.

“The reason behind this,” according to the Swanepoel Trends Report, “is the fact that real estate franchisors themselves disagree as to who their client really is.”

 It’s impossible to build a consistent brand experience when you aren’t sure who your customer is.

All of this highlights the fact that, for many, there is no clearly defined path.  It’s hard to get people to follow your lead when you don’t know where you’re going. This is why I’m so excited about what’s happening at RETSO this year. RETSO is moving away from delivering tips and shifting its focus to strategy.

This is not a knock on other conferences. Quite the opposite. There is a place and a need for tips, and for conferences that focus on new technologies and how to use them. I enjoy learning about new technologies as much as anyone. But that conference field is saturated. The problem with tips is that while they generate excitement, they usually don’t have staying power, or real change power. They wow us, we pause to reflect on what has just been said, but after the tweetable moments pass, we go back to living in the present and doing things and relating to people in the same ways we did before we heard the tip – and nothing changes.

I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I’ve been one of those speakers and I’ve been one of those listeners.

“Change requires a conscious plan (even if it’s oral, or written on a napkin),” Leider wrote to me last week in an email. 

“Change requires a concerted, sustainable commitment. Change requires the requisite skills, disciplines, and accountabilities to do and become what you aspire to be. Change requires cultural shifts that reward the desired behaviors and discipline the undesired ones – the ones that people presently practice and that may have been successful in the past. Change requires the willingness and ability to say goodbye to people who refuse to come along on the journey. Change requires patience, long-term commitment and a willingness to hang in there when things go temporarily awry and to get back on the path.”

A Path

A key word in that paragraph is “path.” Strategy is a path. The path is likely to be different than the one you’re on today. So, staying on the path also requires a clear vision and an explicitly stated set of core values. It’s not something that can be accomplished in a day, in a large group, but it’s something that can begin. You can lay a foundation.

Defining a value proposition requires that you answer a few important questions.

What customers’ problems are you solving?  What needs are you satisfying?  What services are you offering to each Customer Segment? If you’re a Broker, there are likely two distinct “Customer” constituencies: end user clients; and real estate agents. There are different value deliverables for each of those groups. By answering the questions you will establish your real value deliverable. And the beauty of the Business Model Generation Canvas, (which is the basis for how RETSO is organized this year) is that it provides a framework for having meaningful discussions around these questions. It becomes even more valuable when these diverse customer segments are defined, because otherwise it’s easy to lose focus in those scenarios.

You must take a hard look at the characteristics of your value proposition, like newness or uniqueness, performance, status, or simply “getting the job done.” There are many characteristics to consider. How you answer the questions will require that you address the various characteristics of value that come into play. Of course, all of this is in the context of your overall business model, “the rationale of how you create, deliver and capture value.” This is simply one very important part of the model.

Why is this important to you? Because you make better decisions about your business when you have a more complete and accurate understanding of your value proposition and the context in which that proposition is delivered. You better direct the actions of everyone associated with your business and they execute more successfully when they have a clear understanding of the value proposition that they are expected to deliver. And everyone extends from the receptionist at your front desk , to your newest real estate agent, to the managing broker responsible for it all.

On April 4, 2013 at 1:00 PM, I will be leading a general session defining  The Value Proposition block of the business model canvas. In this session we’ll outline the process of defining your own value proposition and how to answer those questions. Then you’ll be able to start working on answering them for yourself and your organization.

And one thing is certain, if value proposition is to truly be “a trend transforming 2013 and beyond,” it’s going to require some intelligently focused effort. I’m looking forward to it. Thank you, Stefan, for naming this a 2013 trend. It is that and so much more.

 

A New Focus – Reducing The Distance Between Us #RETSO

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“Truly different behaviors require truly distinct situations.”

Those are the words of Joshua Meyrowitz from No Sense Of Place: The Impact Of Electronic Media On Social Behavior. The real estate world is feeling the negative social impact of that concept as much as any other industry. Real estate is a relationship business. Real estate is a trust business. And that trust has been eroded by two distinct phenomenon related to the rise of the Internet: Loss of information control and the erosion of opportunities for nonverbal communication.

The Loss Of Information Control

“Our increasingly complex technological and social world has made us rely more and more heavily on ‘expert information,’ but the general exposure of ‘experts’ as fallible human beings,” Meyrowitz writes, “has lessened our faith in them as people.”

Why? Because, in general, authority is strengthened when a group holds the keys to information, like listing data in the MLS, when information systems are isolated. Authority is weakened when information systems are merged, when the general public can access the information.

“When high status persons lose control over information that assured their status, all concerned are likely to sense that a metaphysical change has taken place, a deterioration of the individuals and of society. If a doctor is not familiar with a recent miracle cure that his or her patient has seen on television, the assumption may be that he or she is no longer a good doctor—indeed, that doctors are not as good as they used to be. And this feeling may be felt by both patient and doctor.”

It has happened to doctors on some level and it has happened to real estate professionals on a larger scale. The ability to access information previously held captive by the industry has opened a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences, not the least of which is a deterioration of a feeling of authority and trust in real estate agents and brokers. And that’s merely the beginning.

The Erosion Of Nonverbal Communication 

The distance between speaker and hearer changes the importance of the different elements of communication. “When nonverbal information is weak or absent, the verbal information becomes more dominant,” Meyrowitz explains. “The attention to a speaker’s verbal message, therefore, varies with interpersonal distance. The closer the distance between people, the less attention paid to the verbal message.”

In writing, actual words become more important, and the work required to diferentiate using that medium becomes greater. Writing is hard. Good writing, writing that can truly distinguish one person from another, is even harder. As our online interaction continues to move toward soundbites of information via status updates on Facebook, Twitter and other online venues, our writing moves from long form content that can attempt to elicit emotions, to contextually neutral, disconnected pieces of information.

In this way, the Internet has provided both a means of closing gaps and widening gaps. It hints of “engagement” but falls short for those who begin to trust that the “likes” and “retweets” they give in the public spaces are equivalent to the feedback they give a real human being in private spaces. Those who take the path of least resistance, doing the simplest “engagement” act, will not be rewarded. Those actions don’t differentiate.

When “information” becomes the dominant form of communication, differentiation is made more difficult. The Internet leads us to believe we have come closer together, but when our ability to really know someone and to experience the fullness of communication is diminished, the relative distance between us has actually increased. While time and distance no longer matter in our networked culture, really connecting with another human being still does.

Our focus needs to be on reducing the distance between us. When you reduce the distance between people communicating, words become less important and the expressive cues become dominant. When we are face-to-face, even silence has meaning and conveys significant pieces of information that trigger feelings of trust and like-ability. We connect on a different level.

“Digital communications convey “content” messages,” Meyrowitz writes, “while analogic expressions convey “relationship” messages. That is, digital communications can be about things in general, while analogic messages tend to reveal how the persons emitting them feel about people and things around them or about the digital messages they are speaking or hearing.”

In this way, those who rely too heavily on the “consistency” of their online message or in their printed material in the presentation of their brand miss the mark in understanding the importance of the delivery of that information by each individual in the organization. They fail to recognize the quantum nature of brand.

This is why shared values become so critical in establishing the real brand of any organization, or the personal brand of any real estate agent. Your values are your true brand. “A person can lie verbally much more easily than he or she can “lie” non verbally,” Meyrowitz rightly explains. So non-verbal, non-written expressive communication, because it is easier to understand and more trusted, overshadows the carefully crafted branding messages.

So, it’s not the brochure that matters as much as the behavior of the person delivering the brochure. It’s not the delivery of the contract itself, but the way the contract is delivered. The nonverbal cues dominate in this situation. This is where trust is really solidified.

Change Must Occur At the Local Broker Level

The blurring of lines between public and private information has made visible what was once invisible. As a result,  The need to create a REAL distinction between the professional and the amateur, consumer is required. I believe the  responsibility for this is best handled at scale by a broker/owner at a local level.

Actions speak louder than the words. The Internet has not changed that truth. In fact, the Internet has made the power of that truth more evident by effectively reducing the relative number of opportunities to experience that truth. “Electronic media create ties and associations that compete with those formed through live interaction in specific locations, ” Meyrowitz says.  ”Live encounters are certainly more “special” and provide stronger and deeper relationships, but their relative number is decreasing.”

We can change this. But we’ll need to shift our focus. ”The networked culture is very young,” Sherry Turkle writes in Alone Together.  ”Attendants at its birth, we threw ourselves into its adventure. This is human. But these days, our problems with the Net are becoming too distracting to ignore. At the extreme, we are so enmeshed in our connections that we neglect each other. We don’t need to reject or disparage technology. We need to put it in its place.”

We need to remove technology from its pedestal and place it in the toolbox. We need to place the art of influence and face-to-face communication back on that pedestal in local real estate and move to focus our attention on increasing the relative number of opportunities for “live encounters” that result in more direct paths to trust.

Internet tools can lead us to more meaningful encounters. They won’t, however, if we continue to take the path of least resistance and allow these tools to coerce us into behaviors that make us more same than different, behaviors that eliminate the barriers of distance while disconnecting us from those closest to us. They will not allow us to do this if we don’t redirect their power toward situations that provide the opportunity for more than just digital communication.

We are at a crossroad. We are beginning to understand the full impact of electronic media on society and on real estate. It’s time to stop, focus, and decide which way to go next.

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Creative Commons photo from Flickr via  David Roseborough

Facebook Is Not A Business Requirement

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If you’re a serious business, you have to have an active Facebook page. Right?

Some have argued that you don’t even need a website anymore, a Facebook presence is all you need. So if you must be there, you better “do it right.” You need to make sure you have an interesting cover graphic, and landing pages designed to get people to “like” your page, or act on some other call to action. And supply it with content.

The web is literally littered with articles that tell you how important it is populate your Facebook business page with up to date, relevant content. And of course, in order to be successful in running a Facebook business page, you must also engage with your fans, responding to their comments and posts in a reasonable amount of time. The advice is hard to argue with. It just feels like solid advice. And it is. If you’re going to have a Facebook business page, you might as well do it well.

But if you’re great at what you do, you can toss all of that out the window.

What appears to be Apple Computer’s official Facebook page has over 6.5 million likes, and exactly zero posts. They have never posted a single time. Not once. In addition, they rarely, if ever, engage with those who post on their behalf. I could not find a single instance of interaction. They have no cover graphic, no landing pages, they don’t take advantage of the timeline to illustrate their stellar corporate history, they don’t even have a complete description of their company in the About section. Oh, and they’ve been on Facebook less than a year. They showed up late to the party.

And yet, there were 74,272 people talking about them on Facebook this morning. Their “friend activity” stream was littered with posts. Dell, by comparison, which is extremely  active in posting to its page, updating its content and “engaging” with the fans who come to comment, praise or complain, has a beautiful cover graphic and multiple landing pages dedicated to specific campaigns, had 46,387 people talking about them this morning.

You know where I’m going with this.

At the close of the stock market today, Dell (DELL) was trading at $11.97 with a Market Cap of $20.94B and Apple (AAPL) was trading at $576.16 with a Market Cap of $538.75B. Apple consistently ranks at the top of list for brand value, brand recognition and customer service. Simply put, they produce amazing products and they deliver them in a way that is second to none. Literally.

They don’t need to do a lot of talking on a Facebook business page to get their fans to share and like their product. Apple’s focus, clearly, is to deliver on their brand promise, without fail, and to let their fans do the talking for them. They are not social, but their fans are.

They, like many other great companies, deliver their brand experiences via their website. “I think we’re going to go back to the website being front and center,” Drew Olanoff states in Facebook Has Become a Lazy Marketing Tool, ”simply because it’s the pieces and functionality of platforms like Twitter and Facebook that appeal to consumers, not the platforms themselves. Show me the kids who say “Cool, I’m going to drink Coke because they’re on Facebook!” and I’ll show you three unicorns with iPhones.” Like him, I believe the future ultimately lies in the past.

Facebook is not a business requirement.

You don’t have to rise to the level of Apple to NOT need an active Facebook presence, or any Facebook presence at all. I have a close friend, a very successful mortgage lender, who deleted his Facebook personal profile and business page in October of 2011 to focus on what really drove his business, which is his blog. He set a goal of having more blog subscribers than Twitter followers.

That would be an easy goal to hit for someone who has a small following, but he has over 6000 Twitter followers (and follows fewer than 100). He now has over 12,000 “opt-in” blog subscribers. He relentlessly focused on his brand via his blog and on delivering on that promise every single day. No Facebook required. None.

But, and this is a big but, he is an edge case. He has a very specific set of skills that make him uniquely qualified to do what he’s done and very few people could replicate his success with his strategy. But it’s a strategy that works for him. And it works well.

He is not alone in the area of focus. Some of the most successful real estate agents I meet, all over the country, could not care less about having a Facebook business page. And these are not “old gaurd” Realtors® reluctant to change. These are vibrant, successful agents who have decided instead to focus on the basic activities that continue to move the needle for them personally, including, but not limited to, delivering an exceptional “product” to their clients.

Their Facebook usage is limited to connecting with clients, friends and family using their personal profiles. Their Facebook use is designed to maintain a connection with their sphere of influence and past clients, where the vast majority of most agents’ business is already derived.

So, why am I NOT talking about any real estate Facebook pages?

Good question. Besides Corcoran Group, who just passed the 50,000 fan mark on their Facebook page and celebrated with an excellent thank you video, who is really generating consistent, significant business from their Facebook business page? I’d love to see the examples, and see the numbers to support it. And I’m sure they exist, but the notion that it is a foregone conclusion that you MUST have an active Facebook business page presence as a real estate agent is misguided.

Even digital media giants like Chris Brogan have left Facebook. Brogan’s personal profile avatar on Facebook is a graphic that says, “I have moved to Google+” And he has no Facebook business page. Sacrilege.  How can Apple and Chris Brogan and my friend, the mortgage lender, get away with not having any active Facebook presence? Simple. They understand and are in control of their business strategy, they execute on that strategy every day, and they are really, really good at what they do.

Here’s a potential “Facebook strategy” for you to consider.

  • Do the things that make the phone ring, whatever that is for you. If it’s knocking on doors, knock on doors. If it’s calling expired listings, call expired listings. Whatever it is, focus on doing it well and doing it often.
  • At a minimum, have an online presence you control, where people can learn about your skills and get a feel for your experience and expertise and encourages them to contact you and engage with you.
  • Once they do, focus on being great. Focus on delivering exceptional customer service. Focus on exceeding your client’s expectations and verifying that you’ve actually done that. Every. Single. Time.

If you consistently deliver on a brand promise that resonates with your community, people will want to tell their friends about it. And when they do, they’re likely to be doing it on Facebook.

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Photo via Flickr  by Phil Sexton

Pinterest For Real Estate In Three Easy Steps

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For those of you who like to get straight to the point, here are the steps:

  • Step 1: Put gorgeous, “pinnable” photos in compelling posts.
  • Step 2: Make it easy for your posts to be pinned.
  • Step 3: Share as you normally would, then go do something more productive.

For those of you who might be interested in some of the underlying logic, read on.

Step 1: Put gorgeous, “pinnable” photos in compelling posts.

“Ah, Pinterest – where I dress my unborn children and decorate my imaginary mansion,” Christina Gomez, a San Antonio political consultant said. And in describing Pinterest in her own words, she illustrates the point that @dadcamp made in response to the illustration I created for this post, “Pinterest is aspirational.” And it’s hard to argue that the popularity of Pinterest owes it’s roots to vision boards.

Because this is true, photos about design, home decorating, cooking and fitness are far and away the most popular items being shared. It stands to reason that, from a real estate perspective, well executed photos of design details in a home, beautiful landscaping shots, and luxury properties have the highest potential for being pinned and “repinned” on people’s boards. They play on the apsirational nature of how pinboards have been used, long before Pinterest existed. It’s what pinboards are for. A photo of the $45,000, 2 bedroom, 1 bath listing in Alpharetta, Georgia  is not likely to generate the same aspirational response on Pinterest as the photo of the $8,499,000, 7 bedroom, 12 bath listing in the same area.

Place that beautiful photo into a compelling post that speaks directly to an aspirational quality of the home, and you have a potentially winning combination,  and for reasons that have benefits far beyond Pinterest.

Step 2: Make it easy for your posts to be pinned.

Pinning isn’t winning. Getting other people to pin you, that might be winning, but I’ll talk more about that in a minute. “The biggest thing we did to help our success on Pinterest,” Erika Lehmann, VP of PR atDesign Public stated, “was to execute on an intelligent implementation of the Pin It button. We made sure descriptions of our products were properly inserted into the pins without having to rely on our customers to do that themselves.” Other people pinning Design Public’s great content is the key to their success on the platform. It is only loosely tied to how well they have pinned things themselves. Rather, their Pinterest success is a result of having pinnable content and making it easy for those who visit their site to create their own pin.

The notion that you need to go spend a great deal of time on Pinterest for it to have benefit is not accurate. If you’re content contains photos that play well in the aspiration space, and you’ve made it easy for people who are avid Pinterest users to pin your content, you will get pinned. This is, of course, assuming you have reasonable traffic to your site to begin with.

Step 3: Share as you normally would, then go do something more productive.

Many people in the real estate industry are being driven to the business value of Pinterest based on headlines like this, “Use Pinterest To Drive Massive Traffic To Your Blog.” But in the real estate space, I’m not convinced the traffic Pinterest has the potential to drive is worth doing anything more than sharing to your existing channels and allowing others to pin if they’re so inclined.

“IMHO, Pinterest is pretty over stated.” Jim Marks says. “We have done some pretty extensive analysis of Pinterest traffic in the real estate space. The click-ins are great…. but click throughs and time on site is terrible. I have come to the conclusion that a LOT of the traffic coming from Pinterest is people clicking on an image to see it bigger, ending up on a site and bouncing.”

That’s certainly not surprising to me. The chance of a random Pinterest visitor being someone who is interested in working with you is very, very small. That’s not why they’re on Pinterest. They’re coming for they eye candy, their not coming to buy a home or start a relationship with an agent. Not all web visitors are created equal.

My advice.

Go ahead and share your posts and listings as you normally would. And if you’re already on Pinterest and have no concerns with the obvious copyright issues, have fun, enjoy it and sprinkle the content you create and own the copyrights to in with the other content you’re already sharing. But pinning for gold, rushing to set up a Pinterest account thinking it will translate into meaningful real estate business is time that could be spent doing something more productive.

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Photo credit: Pinterest 101 – Things via Jeff Turner on Flickr.

Answering Every Social Media Dinner Bell Won’t Get You Fed

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Ivan Pavlov could make his dogs salivate without any food being present.

Salivating On CommandThis discovery was accidental. Pavlov’s Nobel prize actually came from his study of the digestive system, but he noticed something else in the process. The dogs being used in the experiments would begin salivating whenever someone in a lab coat would enter the room. It turns out that they were always fed by people in lab coats.

So, he decided to see if he could condition this response. He rang a bell in close to the time when the dogs were being fed. And the dogs learned to associate the sound of the bell with getting food. After a while, at the mere sound of the bell, they responded by drooling… no food required.

You’re built to respond to emotional triggers.

One of the hottest marketing books right now is called, “Fascinate.” Sally Hogshead lays out a convincing argument for the power of fascination and details the seven universal triggers that are at its foundation. These triggers are passion, mystique, prestige, power, rebellion, alarm, and trust.

Great marketers understand how to use these triggers to get you to do what they want you to do. As Hogshead explains, “by activating the right triggers, you can make anything become fascinating.” Anything.

Ringing The Social Media Dinner Bells

More than 100 years after Pavlov’s experiments, social media marketers use these triggers like bells in “close association” to food to make you salivate. The mere mention of the potential of food sends you running for the closest shiny dog bowl. Often, however, there is no food in that shiny bowl. There’s just the bell.

Ding. Everyone should blog. It’s easy.
Ding. A personal Facebook business page replaces blogging.
Ding. No. A “365 Things To Do” Facebook Page is the real deal.
Ding. QR codes will revolutionize RE marketing.
Ding. Foursquare is the next Twitter.
Ding. Google+ is the next Facebook.
Ding. Pinterest is the Google+ killer.

I could literally go on and on. Quora was supposed to be the new Twitter. Then it was Foursquare that would be a threat. The pace can seem almost overwhelming. And the hype even extends to services that attempt to measure your own ability to pull social media triggers, like Klout, which really serve no other purpose than to make you the target for more advertising. And just as Klout was gaining steam, the real estate social media bells were ringing like crazy for Empire Avenue. For about a month, it was the “next Klout,” and everyone ran to the empty shiny bowl. It’s all a silly game really. The good stuff will shake itself out over time. There’s no need to rush blindly each time you hear a someone ringing the bell. If there’s no food, being early won’t get you fed. And if there is food, the chances are pretty good that there will be plenty to go around.

You don’t have to be part of the experiment. You don’t need a new flavor.

A report on content marketing was released a couple of weeks ago by The Altimeter Group. It’s an in depth study of what is and is not working in content marketing. Ken Yeung gives a great review of the report here.

“Pay no attention to the flavor of the week,” Yeung writes. “In their research, the Altimeter Group discovered that many marketers are distracted by channels and technologies at the expense of strategy and marketing fundamentals. Don’t try and go after something unproven only because it’s the latest and greatest. Focus on the things that will truly help you get the attention of your customers.”

“In fact, it’s the search for the next big thing that is hurting many businesses,” John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing writes. “You know what the next big thing for every business is? Find a way to clearly differentiate what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and why you’re doing it from everyone else that says they are doing what you’re doing. That’s the next big thing.”

“To me,” Ira Serkes said on my Facebook wall, “the real issue is… why are Realtors so easily seduced by the new new thing instead of focusing on the old old thing of working hard, taking great care of clients, and doing the right thing.”

Focus on what is working for you right now.

Ding.

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Photo Credit : By click-photo Erik Adam Klausz via Flickr.