The Council of Residential Specialists is running a Promotional Materials Contest for CRS designees:

Great promotional materials and a solid marketing plan lead to better name recognition, more clients and a better bottom line for your business. They can also lead to great cash prizes and peer recognition when you sign up for the CRS 2006 Promotional Contest.

We are a marketing practice. We believe in marketing like fish believe in water. It would be an error to say that marketing is a part of everything we do. Instead, everything we do is a facet of our marketing vision.

Anyway, I entered two of our efforts in the contest. Unfortunately, if you’re not a member of the Council, you can’t get to the web page where the contest entries are on exhibit. From our own site, here are our two entries:

If, perchance, you are a Council member, please feel free to go here and here to vote for our entries. I would never, ever think to spam the voting for an on-line contest. That would reflect too great an understanding of the inter– oh, wait…

The true fact is that, until now, I have been careful not to share ideas with other Realtors. We sit back and look at absolutely everything. If we see something we think shows promise, we deconstruct it down to the original idea, then rebuild it our way, keeping what we think it good, jettisoning the rest and adding everything that is uniquely our own. But for the most part, other Realtors just act bored when we even presume to talk about marketing, so we just sit down, shut up and take it all in. Better for us, anyway: If our competitors don’t understand what we’re doing, they have no idea why it works so well — on their former clients.

I’m actually interested to see where this goes from here. The Council sent me email asking me to talk about technology and marketing issues. Cathy and I both have a lot to say on the subject. Our take is that Realtor 2.0 is either going to be adept at internet marketing — or unemployed. We’ll see how that flies in Chicago…

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