When my wife and I found out we were expecting our first child, I was exhilarated. Then my thoughts naturally went where most men’s go:
There’s no way in hell I’m buying a minivan.
But as the months clicked by, we realized a second vehicle may in fact be necessary for our small family. So with marching orders in hand, I turned to the Web and buried myself in reviews, rankings and all kinds of gearhead forums. I needed to figure out what we should buy.
Yesterday, as I stood in front of the room at the BuzzRE conference in Portland, I paused briefly on a slide to make a point. Great marketing is about telling a story, I said.
It was an off-the-cuff comment that I mainly used to illustrate the power of one of the tools I was showing on screen.
But it was a thought I wanted to come back to.
Storytelling is a lost art when it comes to real estate marketing. Too often the stories we hear fall into either the failsafe (Now’s a great time to buy!) or the flat (We’re #1!).
A couple weeks ago Brian, Joel and I gathered inside a client’s conference room to present a plan for marketing around the launch of their new Website. The wireframes and designs we created had all been approved. Everything was now in the capable hands of the development team.
We settled on a timeline and collectively acknowledged each others’ efforts. A feel good haze.
The meeting was ready to adjourn.
But then the CEO looked at us and with honest intention asked a simple question: “So guys, in your opinion, do you believe the Website we’re about to release is a 10?”
Receive new blog posts the instant we hit publish.
What is a “luxury real estate brand” that provides “luxury real estate services?”
And how might that ineffable something that registers as luxurious in our minds be manifested on a real estate company’s Website?
These are questions that are answered too quickly and too predictably in our industry. And they have been coming up a lot for us lately.
Here’s how we begin to answer them.
There are lots of ways to tell a story. And short of smoke signals, we’ve employed darn near every medium to help our clients light up their brands.
But over the past year, we kept coming back to video. Which makes a lot of sense if you think about it: real estate is all people and places, subjects that beg to be brought to life. And as anyone who has ever marketed technology into the real estate industry knows, pictures beat words every time.
It was with this in mind that we decided to bring video production in-house at 1000watt Consulting to complement our existing services.
If you want a killer video executed masterfully, we can do it for you – soup to nuts.
Read »
I’ve been traveling like crazy the past few weeks.
Detached from home, from family and from my Tempur-Pedic mattress, I had lots of sleepless nights. At the end of my trip I spent a few long days hunkered down in the French Quarter.
In the evening, after the parties, I’d sit on my balcony eating and listening to the music that carried over from Bourbon Street just a couple blocks away. It was a welcome departure from the prim and proper California town I now call home.
With my computer and cell back inside the room, ideas, thoughts and questions with no answers that had been marinating in the the back of my mind came forward, ready to be grilled.
I thought I’d turn each into a blog post, but decided I wasn’t up to the task. So I jotted them all down on my plane ride home.
Read »
I wrote the post below two years ago. I am re-posting it because the metaphor of the masked ball has come to mind often in thinking about the vast tentacular expansion of Facebook.
If, as Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “human desires grow with the means of their gratification” the social web is surely an invitation to indulge extravagantly our desire to be heard and recognized. Our lives can seem more real when they are memorialized forever in the ether.
And, hey, that’s cool. But it can make one hell of a mess if you intend to work social media for business. So plug into Zuckerberg’s graph – just make sure you do it with smarts, with content, and without the mask.
Our days are filled making decisions. But our decision-making process is often hampered by too much information, convoluted instructions and clutter – impediments that zap our time and energy.
But these things can be avoided. And when they are, the results are liberating.
Read »
Nearly ten years ago, I joined a startup that was dipping its toes into streaming video. The company had been producing a broadcast television show for many years. The show featured technology product profiles and computer reviews and was widely syndicated across Canada and the United States.
Then, in the late 90s, this thing called the World Wide Web hit the scene and the company decided to take a radical leap and – gasp! – started putting all of this video online. We ended up pushing those clips all over the Internet, to e-commerce sites and large portals like Yahoo.
It was a miserable time.
Read »
Too often, real estate advertisers focus on features or claims of superiority.
“We’re the best.”
“We’re #1.”
“We lead the industry.”
Accomplishments worthy of praise. But from the prospective customer’s perspective, what of them? If you want to own your customer you need to connect the feature dot to the benefit dot.
Our latest presentations and publications
Freaking...Get your video produced by 1000watt »
20 Tools to Bring your Real Estate Business to the Cloud
A mist of difference
