Each year NAR invites big-name speakers to enlighten and entertain attendees of the REALTORS® Conference & Expo, and this year is no exception. The 2008 speakers include Joe Theismann of NFL fame, creative thinker Daniel Pink, Internet marketing guru David Meerman Scott, and author Frans Johansson, who wrote the best-selling Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation. In these exclusive interviews, they share some of their wisdom before the conference. 

 

 

Read the Q&As:

David Meerman Scott: Sell a Lifestyle, Not a Home 

Joe Theismann: Make Others Feel Good

Daniel Pink: The Rise of Right-Brained Thinking

Frans Johansson: Time to Fail Forward

 

 

David Meerman Scott: Sell a Lifestyle, Not a Home

 

Slapping the copy and head shot from your company brochure onto your home page is the surest way to doom your Web site, says Internet marketing guru David Meerman Scott. As a former marketing executive at NASDAQ-traded online news distributor NewsEdge Corp., Scott has a keen eye for how technology can help you communicate. The author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly notes that one of his smartest moves was to start using his middle name. It helped him stand out from the myriad other David Scotts already on the Web.

 

What are your thoughts about real estate Web sites in general?

 

They’re not as good as they should be. Most are focused on the property itself. They use the same approach that’s been successful with offline marketing. You take a picture and description of a house and put it into the newspaper; that’s pretty much what I’ve seen on most Web sites.

 

How can real estate practitioners use the Web more effectively?

 

The Web allows us to think more about the individual people that we’re trying to reach—what I call buyer personas. These are distinct groups of potential buyers. They could be families with young children, or single parents, or retired people. So the goal for any great Web site is to create information for these distinct buyer persona. These buyers are not looking for products. They’re looking for something that will recognize their needs and problems and help them live their chosen lifestyle. The best sites use the words and phrases that those buyer personas use.

 

What’s an example?

 

If your listings include a town house on the water, you’re selling a property that enables a couple in their 60s who have sold their big house in the suburbs to be able to enjoy the lifestyle they’ve always dreamed of. So you want to talk about it from the perspective of that couple in their 60s, who have been longing to live the next phase of their life on the waterfront. With a great Web site, the humanity shows through, not the marketing. When somebody visits for the first time they think, “Oh my gosh, these people totally understand me and what I’m looking for in my new lifestyle, and I want to do business with them. I don’t want to go across the street to the other real estate company that’s treating me like a number.”

 

Where do visuals fit in?

 

It’s important to think video, audio, images, diagrams, and floor plans. Video is used a lot these days, but it could be so much better if people included content such as interviews with neighbors or a 30-second snippet from a lecture at a local library or college, to give people a sense of the community and lifestyle they’re buying into. A site based on buyer personas would be able to provide background information for people to say, “Well, yeah, that feels like me!” I also have an aversion to stock photography. Use real people rather than models. Otherwise it looks fake and posed and does a disservice to consumers.

 

More real estate pros are starting blogs. What’s the best way to delve into this arena?

 

Step 1 is to begin monitoring the blogs in your community. Virtually every community has blogs or forums or chat rooms. I recommend that real estate people first spend time understanding who the bloggers in your community are and then follow them online for a month or two. Step 2 is to become known within those blogs and chat rooms by becoming a participant, by being human, not a salesperson. Don’t try to sell real estate. Get your voice known by discussing things of interest to the community

 

But how will this help peoples’ business?

 

I like to compare the Web to a city. And blogs are like the pubs of the city. The people who get known in the pubs, have an instant audience of people who begin to respect them. You get to know people, so when those people have a house to list, guess where they’re going to go? Are they going to go to the friend in the bar or are they going to go to someone down the street that they haven’t met?

 

So you don’t necessarily advise starting your own blog?

 

If you’ve begun to leave comments and provide valuable information, and you’ve avoided trying to sell stuff, then and only then should you consider starting your own blog, By now, you’ve developed a blog voice by virtue of commenting on other blogs. You would also have a sense of what you want to blog about because typically when people start a blog without having done those other things they don’t know what to do. If you’ve never been swimming before, and then you dive into the deep end, you’ll drown. But if you watch people swimming and then you start to paddle around in the shallow end, eventually you’ll be able to jump into the deep end if you want to. After completing these steps, some people will be ready to blog and others may not feel it’s the right time.

 

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Joe Theismann: Make Others Feel Good

 

Joe Theismann has enjoyed public triumph, leading the Washington Redskins to victory in Super Bowl XVII and being named the NFL’s Most Valuable Player in 1983. He’s also suffered major setbacks, most famously a gruesome broken leg televised live on "Monday Night Football" that ended his playing career in 1985. But football is only one of the arenas in which Theismann’s competed. A successful sports broadcaster, restaurateur, and real estate investor, Theismann is a master of reinvention. He’s learned that perseverance plays a big role in any lasting success.

 

What parallels can a real estate pro draw from your experiences playing football and working as a broadcaster?

 

We’re all independent contractors. We get paid and we earn our money by doing our job the best we can. I base my presentation off of five areas:

 

First, goals, which I guarantee you every real estate operation in the world has. Every athletic endeavor has them, and I think every person should have them.

 

Second, attitude. For the last year, the real estate market has looked dismal. And I think it’s important to understand that every dark cloud that we run into is part of a cycle, and you have to figure out how to come out of it.

 

Third is customer service. How do you treat the client looking for property? How do you treat the client who’s trying to sell the property? One of the little sayings that I use in this particular area is, "People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care." You can have more information than anybody, but if people don’t feel like you care, you’ll have no clients.

 

The fourth aspect is teamwork. There are the people who process the paperwork; there are the people in the home office. Everyone is part of your team.

 

And then the fifth element is motivation. I’ve been very blessed. Since my feet hit the ground in the morning, I’ve been running like crazy because I feel like there’s so much life out there to live and there are so many wonderful experiences to have.

 

When you played at Notre Dame, you went through a branding process, changing your last name’s pronunciation from "thees-man" to "thighs-man" so it rhymed with the Heisman Trophy. What’s the story behind that?

 

It was an interesting gimmick, but I think sometimes we try to get too cute and it winds up backfiring. In 1970, I was lucky enough to be the guy who finished second [behind Jim Plunkett], if you call that lucky. I don’t really feel like the balloters and the voters wanted a public relations gimmick [like my name change] to determine the outcome of the Heisman. When I was first thinking about doing it, and I asked my dad, he thought I was nuts. When I explained it to my grandmother, who was sort of the patron saint of the family, she said, "You know, the correct pronunciation of our last name is ‘Tice-man,’ and ‘Thighs-man’ is closer to ‘Tice-man,’ so I’m OK with it." It wound up being the way my family pronounces it now.

 

With all the problems in the mortgage industry, what role can real estate practitioners play in guiding buyers anxious about obtaining financing?

 

Try to be teachers. Educate yourself every day. And if you don’t know the answer, don’t be afraid to say you don’t know the answer right now. But do get back to the individual. That honesty is appreciated. Meanwhile, many people are as aware of what’s been going on as you are, so don’t kid yourself. There’s a difference between a college football player and a professional football player. They both understand the game. One just does it at a higher level. The same is true for real estate practitioners.

 

As a real estate investor, how has your approach changed with the current market?

 

I have patience. I own homes and raw land. I have had apartment buildings. I have had office buildings. History tells us that the market will come back. The values will come back.

 

What core values guide your day-to-day actions?

 

I think honesty, respect, and loyalty are the things that are important to me. Those are the core values. But I also believe in being able to make somebody feel good, being able to put a smile on somebody’s face. Those are the things that matter so much.

 

You have a reputation for speaking your mind and not backing down from controversy. Who’s had the most influence on you in this regard?

 

Actually, no one really has influenced me when it comes to expressing my opinions. I guess I’ve always sort of been that way, ever since I was young. It’s just human nature. You’d like everybody to like you, but I believe in honesty, and as a broadcaster I believe that my loyalty is to the fan as well as to the athlete. My mom probably gave me the best advice a long time ago. She said, "Joe, it’s never what you say, it’s how you say it."

 

As a public figure, you’re scrutinized daily. What advice would you offer real estate practitioners who might feel under a microscope within their communities?

 

If you’ve worked very hard to attain something, you have to realize that it doesn’t take much to make it all go away. Also, a lot of people are very envious of the fact that you are a high achiever. If you’re not the No. 1 real estate agent, instead of being mad at whoever is No. 1, sit down with him or her, and figure out how that agent got there. Maybe then you’ll have a shot.

 

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Daniel Pink: The Rise of Right-Brained Thinking

 

For decades, the most valued members of society seemed to be logical, linear thinkers, those more comfortable with crunching numbers than exploring conceptual ideas. But Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, contends that going forward the contributions of right-brained, creative types will become increasingly more influential.

 

Are most real estate practitioners right-brained empathizers or left-brained financial analysts?

 

I think that most are a combination, just as most human beings are. But with some changes in the broader economy, and in the real estate industry in particular, the key differentiator in achieving success is going to be the right-brained abilities; these include empathy, symphonic thinking, meaning the ability to see the whole picture, and design acuity. A lot of the purely transactional, purely informational abilities aren’t that valuable on their own anymore.

 

You recently bought a house. What did your salesperson bring to the experience?

 

The daughter of the owner was, maybe, in her mid-40s or early 50s, and our agent ended up talking to her and getting the back story of this house and the family. It turned out that they had lived in this house since the 1950s and raised five kids there. They were not going to be moved by $10,000 more from the sale. What really mattered to them was the commonalities between our family and theirs. These commonalities were actually attractive to them in a way that $10,000 more might not have been. There’s no way a computer program would’ve figured that out.

 

You have to tell authentic stories, truthful stories. I think stories sometimes get a bad rap as something artificial, when in fact the stories that are really powerful are the ones that are truthful and straightforward. There are all kinds of things people can do to get better at telling stories. Good salespeople understand the power not only of telling stories but also of listening to others. The ones who are relying more on these algorithmic transactional abilities are the ones that are in a world of hurt right now.

 

So if your strengths lean toward the transactional, can you learn to be more creative?

 

Everyone has both sets of abilities in some measure. But what’s happened is that these right-brained abilities haven’t been prized, particularly in business. And as a result, for many people, they’re like muscles that they haven’t used. That means people have to work them back into shape.

 

For some people, no matter what kind of interventions we put forward, they’re not going to become Mother Teresa. But there are ranges of empathy, and you can move people to higher ends of their range. People can get better at reading facial expressions, can learn to simply stop what they’re doing and become more aware of others, and can try various kinds of listening exercises. I think for real estate professionals, especially in difficult markets, empathic abilities become a differentiator.

 

So exchanging stories between buyer and seller helped to move your transaction along?

 

What it ended up doing is uncovering information that affected how the negotiation unfolded. Our salesperson had never worked with the seller’s agent before, but immediately understood the other agent’s style and how to present an offer to that person. These kinds of subtleties in understanding what makes people tick are an important element in a transaction, more than simply the dollars and cents. We ended up getting a great house at a very fair price. It’s hard for me to imagine reducing that transaction to an algorithm.  

 

What are important right-brained abilities?

 

Visual and design acuity. To improve in this area, I tell people to keep a design notebook for an week. Each day, you write one instance of good design and an instance of bad design you see in your midst. One of the things that you begin to realize is that everything in our midst is a product of a design decision. I mean, the crappy phone that I’m holding right now is a design decision. The computer I’m working on is a design decision. Certainly, when you think about homes, there are a huge number of decisions. For example, it’s not only what color to paint, but what it feels like to walk up the steps. There are some very inspiring decisions and there are some crappy design decisions, and knowing the difference is really important.

 

What can people do programmatically to increase personal and professional satisfaction?

 

One of the key determinants that comes out of a lot of the research on subjective well-being and satisfaction is simple to articulate but difficult to enact. To gain satisfaction, you can use your strengths and do things that you’re reasonably good at. So if you don’t like being around people or doing deals or getting phone calls on your mobile phone all of the time, you probably shouldn’t be in real estate sales. But if it juices you to hear that there’s a new crisis to handle on the phone, or you say “Wow, I get to deal with these new people every day,” then you’re going to be good at real estate. People who have the greatest enduring satisfaction are people who use their strength and then hitch it to something bigger than themselves.  

 

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Frans Johansson: Time to Fail Forward

 

Take a stroll with Frans Johansson, author of the best-selling The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation, and he’s likely to guide you into the middle of an intersection, his metaphorical meeting place where ideas from unrelated fields collide. Breakthrough insights, says Johansson, are generated by mixing it up with new people and new points of view. Johansson, raised in Sweden, is the product of a Swedish father and an American mother, herself a mix of Cherokee and African-American heritage. That multicultural upbringing has contributed to his ability to think outside the box.

 

Let’s start at the beginning: What is the Medici Effect?

 

It’s a name for the phenomenon where the greatest chance of coming up with groundbreaking insights is at the intersection of different disciplines, like art and science. I took the name from the Medici family of Renaissance-era Florence. They brought people from all over Europe and from as far away as China to work for them and created this explosion of art and culture and science. 

 

The book talks about the fact that we have an exponentially greater chance of creating good ideas when we combine two different fields. An example is an architect in Zimbabwe who designed a groundbreaking building by looking at how termites build their mounds. His building uses 90 percent less energy than a typical building and stays around 73 degrees year-round.

 

You embrace “positive failure.” What does that mean?

 

Failure is not a good idea if you’re doing something you’re supposed to know how to do. It’s just a mistake. But when you’re trying to do something new and different, that means you’re trying something that’s never been done before. That also means you’re not exactly sure what is going to work. If you look at the most innovative people, they have thousands of ideas; some of them work, and some of them don’t.

 

Picasso produced 20,000 pieces of art. We see only a small fraction of them. If all you’re doing is trying to avoid failure, then you can’t move forward. You have to keep on trying the new marketing campaign or sales tactic.

 

In your book, you say that quantity leads to quality. Can you explain how that works?

 

When you look at successful innovators, they have to keep trying. When they come up with a good idea, they don’t know if it will work or not. But they know if they want to be successful, they must keep trying different ideas. If they keep on trying them all, they have a greater chance of succeeding with one. Google is a really good example of this. They give their employees 20 percent of their time to do whatever they want, as long as it’s related to Google. They let people just try out ideas on their own, no money, no resources. Gmail came out of that. Google Earth came out of that. That’s why innovators and innovative companies ultimately produce so many ideas.

 

That really leads to another critical point about innovation: If you want to try something different, try something you’re passionate about. Only then will you have the wherewithal to stick through the mistakes, the failures, the mistaken assumptions that you made. Given that failure is inevitable, if you’re not driven by passion, you’re going to quit.

 

How can you innovate in the real estate business?

You must escape the barriers we build for ourselves. We develop a familiarity with our customers, our methods, our infrastructure. But if you want to be continually successful and innovative, eventually that network and infrastructure is going to work against you. If you want to maximize your chances, take a step outside that. It doesn’t mean you have to quit your business. But start talking to people who are different from the people you talk to and see every day. Construct another set of networks and infrastructure. Stop relying on the things that have provided you with success so far.

 

We’re closing on a house, and during our home search we saw the same approach, the same effort, people chasing the same clients. A little bit of innovation, a new idea will set you apart. Maybe grab a tool you’ve discovered from a different country or an idea from somewhere else. I know a real estate broker who took the concept of social networking sites and built a real estate site around it. He’s been tremendously successful with it, and it’s all free.

 

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