Much has already been said on the subject of Orlando RainCamp, courtesy TLW’s featured post and Petra’s own (also featured) takeaway, replete with notes, so I won’t bore you with details of the presentation itself. To start of on a huge positive – hubby and I got to meet some peeps we’ve been internet friends with on AR and FB – face to face, and that was absolutely fantastic. I got to squeeze TLW, and as some of you already know, got a gift of a very nice digit for my trouble. I got to meet and be hugged by Debe Maxwell, for whom coincidentally, we were finishing up some branding and new business card designs while at RainCamp:-) And rather accidentally, we were introduced to an absolutely adorable person with too many names that everyone in the ‘in’ crowd just calls Coop. At the afterhours, got to meet and talk to for brief moments with Petra, who is just charming, Neal Bloom, who is still weirdly New York and was much much nicer to me than I was to him, my long time subscriber Sharon Alters who is exactly as she is online, which is truly refreshing, and of course the rest of TLW’s gang and family. BTW – Bryant is a great hugger!
We laughed on our all too frequent stogie breaks, assaulted FB with our various rants during the event and all in all had a great time socializing. The price of admission was entirely worth it just to meet those folksJ:-) That said – there were a few things that could have and should have been handled entirely differently, in my opinion, which is hardly ever a humble one.
Ben Kinney had the unenviable task of entertaining a crowd of a few hundred for some seven hours with a few break in between. Not an easy feat, by any stretch, but asking for input or for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to those all-too-obvious questions was reminiscent of elementary school at times. That’s a minor offence, however, when compared to the few that really got to me. The first punch, if you will, was the rather deliberately stated order in which referrals by Ben are distributed: KW agents anywhere first, and if there is no match, he’d move down the line to look for one within the ranks of Active Rain. Which brings me to a strange little conundrum of sorts. Agents use Active Rain to blog and show their personalities, knowledge of the local market and a whole lot more, all of which should make it easier for someone Internet savvy to pick the best agent for the job, whether a consumer or a fellow real estate professional elsewhere in the world. I always thought that, in a nutshell, was the whole sales pitch to the agents for why they should blog on AR in the first place.
I might be talking out of my butt here, but I am not aware of a KW specific blogging platform that would lead one into the knowledge and personality of a fellow agent, but apparently, the KW next to one’s name means more to the one preaching blogging and social media than the community whose platform is used as a pulpit.
Enter Zillow and Market Leader pitches. I love Zillow’s Sara – she is adorable and is only doing her job and I get it, but truly – so many agents are indeed upset over the zestimates of dubious accuracy that it would have quite probably been more prudent to leave the sales pitches to the flyers and not the stage, especially given that RainCamp took place in a market where Zillow’s margin of error is at 36%, if my memory serves me right. Market Leader being the ONLY IDX resource even mentioned was off putting at best, especially given how many in the audience were using RealBird, DS et al.
Finally, an affront I took possibly all too personally, as it affects what my company does rather directly.
In the latter part of the presentation, Ben was making a Seth Godin-inspired pitch for the agents to stand out in their branding and marketing. He urged folks to do something, and I quote, “remarkable” with their brand, whether in their just listed/just sold cards, logos, business cards or anything else. He urged agents to be the now over used, but so convenient Godin’s Purple Cow…. All true indeed, and a necessary reminder to a lot of professionals in any industry. Then Ben Kinney referred folks for their “remarkable” branding and design to websites whose business model is a bunch of people competing for your design and a paycheck of $250.00. You get a bunch of submissions, pick the one you like the best and off you go.
In the interest of full disclosure, here are the sites recommended: logotournament.com and 99designs.com.
Ok, fair enough, everyone has their preferences. Ben referred to these two places as places where you get world’s best designers work for you, all in an attempt to do the absolute best job, so that you pick their logo or design, and they get paid, as only the designer whose work you choose to utilize gets compensated. By way of comparison, he referred to what hubby and I do and so many others, including quite a few members of the AR community, as producing, and I quote: “crap”, from which you, the client, are forced to pick the “crème”.
So it was that an independent design shop or an agency was relegated to “crème of the crap”, which elicited a few laughs from the audience.
Speaking of the best of the best, I hate bursting anyone’s bubble, but I assure you the best designers in the world are NOT sitting at their computer desks all day pumping out stuff in the marginal hope of getting that elusive $250.00 check. In much the same way the best of anything in the world do NOT do anything for a maybe. Primarily, because they don’t have to, and what you do get that was done for a ‘maybe’ is a great illustration of the process and the business model, equally removed from any possibility of a Purple Cow or sense of anything remarkable. It’s not a questions of taste, but time, knowledge, experience and talent.
So here goes my little reality check, and my own word of warning to agents everywhere. 99designs.com and the like do not take the time to get to know you and your business, your personality or research your competition. Not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t. What you do get for the investment of $250.00 is not a unique brand or a purple cow, but a few shapes and fonts hastily thrown together in the hopes that you’d pick theirs. You can save yourself the trouble and just design your own utilizing the same method on any one of the many sites that allow you to use their online design tools.
And while some of you might be fine with a generic design obtained by those means – don’t insult Seth and call it a Purple Cow, quite simply because it’s never going to be one. If the packaging of the presale version of that oft-misunderstood and misquoted book is any indication – those milk cartons took human passion, creativity and thought to pull off. I doubt the person who designed that is a member of the aforementioned sites.
Lastly, and on a somewhat personal level – hubby and I were putting finishing touches on the designs we were working on for Debe Maxwell at the time of this bit of presentation. We were all in the same audience, and for a minute or so I got the nagging feeling that in the eyes of Debe, my brand new client, we were producing “crap” she'd be forced to pick from. After all, when one goes to a professional seminar, the words of the person with the mic do matter, and certainly carry all sorts of weight, as well they should. I also pondered the effect a sales pitch like this will have on so many members of the Active Rain community who are NOT real estate agents or lenders, but who provide a service of some kind to this industry.
My little recommendation, for what it’s worth – if you would like to have something designed, find a human being or a company whose work you like. You can start by searching AR for graphic design services, or for anything else you need for that matter. After all – that’s the point behind any community, or at least should be. I just hope RainCamp and crew realize that at some point.
A thank you to Ben Kinney: – the advice on using those targeted FaceBook ads was great, so thank you! How did I do?
PS: I’d like to publically state that AR’s Lauren to whom I promptly complained about being peeved at that sales pitch has been a total sweetheart and listened rather attentively, and then even sought me out and offered me those little tile ads on AR (which I declined). She tried genuinely and sweetly to make me feel better and to let me know that Ben’s presentation when it comes to that is not a reflection on AR’s overall philosophy. Thank you, Lauren. It can’t have been comfortable, and I really appreciate it. :-)
Comments(58)