A sermon for the ninety-and-nine: Don’t mimic bad examples among big-name real estate webloggers

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m kicking this back to the top from December 21, 2007. This was, I think, the second the the last time that I pissed off the echo chamber clique of big name real estate webloggers by pointing out that they were thoughtlessly committing a serious error. I was right about the issue addressed here, which is why, despite three or four days of mob outrage, no one adopted the insulting video tactic discussed in this post.

Or don’t. I’m easy enough to ignore — which will tell you a great deal about those mad spasms, if you trouble yourself to think the matter through. But if you want to profit by my experience at this kind of mass communication, I’m happy to share what I know. –GSS

 
I always thought that bible story about the lost sheep was stupid. If it were me in the story, I would stay right there with the ninety-and-nine, making damn sure that tomorrow it wasn’t the ninety-and-eight. Too bad about the lost sheep, but the mission-critical job has to come first.

Here’s an interesting fact about weblogs, and about internet discussion forums in general: You will almost never hear from the ninety-and-nine. If you manage to build an audience, you will hear from people who are reading your site. That’s a good thing. But if you take those people as being representative of your audience, you are making a mistake. You don’t know with any certainty who your audience is. All you really know is that you will probably never hear from most of them — at least not until they want to hear directly from you.

I’m writing this post to the ninety-and-nine among the readers of BloodhoundBlog. I actually do know quite a bit about y’all, from your emails and from link trails that I follow. The Unchained interest list has been a big eye-opener just by itself.

Anyway, here’s what I have to say: Be careful about the behavior you emulate. I’ve been thinking for days that I wanted to take on this topic in some way or another, but I wasn’t sure how to address it. The issue is this, and it’s something that has bugged me since BloodhoundBlog was just a puppy: As good as the big-name real estate weblogs can be at their best, there is an incestuous kind of cliquishness to them that can lead them — and you — into error.

On BloodhoundBlog, about half of the commenters are big-name real estate webloggers. On other blogs in the RE.net, virtually all of the comments come from other real estate webloggers. Just to make things worse, many of those weblogs deploy the MyBlogLog widget to show pictures of those visitors who are also MyBlogLog members. From the comments and the visual record, you would think that most real estate weblogs are read only by other widely-known real estate webloggers.

This is false. I say this all the time, but obviously I can’t say it enough:

Real estate webloggers are not talking to each other. No matter what we think we are doing, no matter what we might rather be doing, we are always talking to the ninety-and-nine.

This is easy for me to see and to talk about because it is not that important to me to be “buddies” with everyone. Love — romantic and filial love — matters to me, but nothing matters to me more than principle. Unless you are infantilized by circumstance, you can be assured I will never tell you any comforting lies — but that means I will never lie to spare your feelings. If I think you’re wrong, I’m going to say so.

I’m not going to link to it, but the Daniel Rothamel video that was all the rage among real estate webloggers yesterday is wrong, badly wrong, madly wrong, irredeemably wrong. And it stands for me as a textbook example of how the incestuous cliquishness of the RE.net can lead the whole enterprise into irredeemable error.

First, so you know, the video is not funny. It might seem funny to you, but this is because you know — or know of — Daniel. There is actually only one joke in the entire film, which is repeated ad tedium. If you send the link off to people who don’t know Daniel, they will probably be willing to help you understand how unfunny it is.

Second, the video is not important. Your reaction to it as a real estate insider means nothing — less than nothing.

Third, and most importantly, if you don’t know Daniel and if you’re not a real estate insider — if you’re just an ordinary person — the video is deeply insulting. It seems funny to you, if it does, because it would be perceived as being deeply insulting by ordinary people.

Understand that I have a lot of respect for Daniel Rothamel. I don’t know what he thought he was doing in making that video, but what it actually communicates is a profound contempt for ordinary people. Were I to guess, I would guess that he was indeed playing it for laughs among the RE.net clique — and, if this is so, he was completely successful. But I cannot imagine that he thought for even one second that the ninety-and-nine on his weblog would regard themselves as having been complimented by the attention he pays them in that video.

And what of all the other real estate webloggers who picked up that video and embedded it on their own sites? What message are they hoping to convey to the ordinary people who show up, read, absorb and never say a thing? In what way are those folks to regard themselves as having been informed, edified, improved? What conclusions might they draw about their host, when he posts a video that implies that ordinary home sellers are slavering idiots who must be led — like sheep — to their shearing?

I wrote a long time ago that nobody wants to be treated like a lead. Add to that this note: No one, ever, wants to be treated like an idiot, like a child, like a retard. The actual form of the video, qua philosophy, is post-modernism — stolen from here. And like Bob Dylan’s pomo masquerade of a performance, the idea was to include the insiders by excluding the “squares” who just wouldn’t see how funny it is to give a pomo masquerade of a performance. The difference is, Dylan was selling his bunk to the insiders, where the RE.net’s objective is to appeal for business to the “squares” it just went out of its way to insult.

This is not a debatable proposition. The essence of post-modernism is that everything is a joke until suddenly it isn’t. There is no one who thinks his own home is a joke. There is no one who wants to be treated like a joke by a salesperson. There is no rationalization to make this wrong right.

But that’s not the issue. Regardless of what I say here or elsewhere, the incestuously cliquish part of the RE.net will insist that it is talking only to itself. Okayfine. I am talking only to the ninety-and-nine. If your objective in reading BloodhoundBlog is to build and improve your business, do not do as they do. Don’t treat people as leads, and, whatever you do, don’t treat them like idiots. Don’t insult them to score points with your buddies. If you find you’ve stepped in shit, admit it at once, clean up what you can and move on. Do whatever you have to do to remember that the people you are most interested in talking to are the ones you will never hear from until they are ready to hear from you. If you blow them off in some misguided idea of pomo “fun,” they will turn instead to someone wise enough to show them respect.

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