There’s always something to howl about.

A golden rule for Teri Lussier — and for you

My eighth grade civics teacher was a big bear of a man named Russell Hazelton. He was a part-time preacher for a hard-line fundamentalist sect, and he was as dapper a dresser as a big man can get to be on two small salaries. The very first day of class he was deliberately about 90 seconds late. He wanted for everyone to be in the room and settled down so he could stalk into the classroom, turn, look us all over with the two ablative lasers he had for eyes and then bellow, “First impressions… are lasting!”

Was he wrong?

I remember every detail of my first impression of Mr. Hazelton to this very day, 35 years later. He knew exactly what he had to do to start his relationship right with our class, to put everyone on notice that he was in charge. He turned out to be a great teacher, smart, funny, engaging. But no one ever even thought about challenging him for dominance. First impressions are lasting.

Frédéric Bastiat was a French economist. One of his most popular arguments concerns the seen and the unseen. It is easy, of course, to notice what is seen, but you have to train your mind to take note of what could be seen, but isn’t.

Yesterday I stirred up a hornets nest, and I told you in advance what you should expect to see in response:

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.

There were exceptions, thank goodness, but in the main the clique of big-name real estate webloggers behaved exactly as I expected them to, even though I deliberately built them a graceful exit:

If you find you’ve stepped in shit, admit it at once, clean up what you can and move on.

This is what is seen. What is unseen?

That post got 350 hard clicks yesterday, this in addition to the hundreds of people who would have seen it by RSS and email subscription. Amazingly enough, no one wrote in to say, “I like to be talked down to.” “I love being treated like an idiot.” “I wish more salespeople behaved like that.” Obviously, no consumer is ever going to say anything like that, but not even the would-be defenders of Daniel Rothamel’s misguided video were willing to say, “I like it when vendors engage me like a baby trapped in a high-chair. I think it makes a great first impression.”

My parents gifted me with a functioning mind, for which I am beyond grateful. But an unhappy side-effect of their gift is that I always know how people are going to behave. Not just in the aggregate, in their mewling mobs, but as individuals. Yesterday, Cathy asked me how Teri Lussier was reacting to the tempest I had stirred up in the blogger clique. “She’s ruminating,” I said, knowing nothing except for how Teri behaves.

This morning I had email from her, the only inquiry I’ve had about this dumb video:

I saw Daniel’s video via a twitter link he posted. I linked to it because I am assuming that my readers are on the same page as I and would therefore get all the references: to Dylan, to SCTV, to the retro-hip-cool look… All packaged into one message, which I had just explained earlier in my post. If I’m assuming that my little ninety and nine are winking at the same jokes… where’s the insult. They aren’t I? I aren’t them? We aren’t we? That’s the leap my brain isn’t making, but understand I’m not here to argue, I am trying to make that leap.
 
If I’m assuming my readers will get the same things I get, is that not correct? Then how do I talk to them?  Greg, I’m really confused on this one.

Why would you make any assumptions at all about people you haven’t met? You might feel safe making a few small guesses about your “regulars,” but you really know nothing about them, either. You could be wildly wrong.

In fact, in real life, you don’t make assumptions about people you don’t know. This is why you wear your dressy clothes to listing appointments, why you probe for information, why you are unfailingly polite. Your protocol for engaging with strangers is strict and exacting, and you do not vary from it because you know that this is what those strangers are expecting from you — a commodity-quantity salesperson applying for a job.

This is exactly what your weblog is doing, introducing you to vast hordes of strangers about whom you know nothing, and who will not engage you directly until they think they understand exactly what they will be getting in approaching you.

This is not news.

This is what we have been talking about here for a year-and-a-half and what the enblogged globe has been talking about since The Cluetrain Manifesto and before.

Markets are conversations.

Weblogs are built to forge relationships.

And: First impressions are lasting.

If the first impression a potential client has of you and your weblog is Daniel Rothamel’s video, you’re done already. It’s not even just the first impression that matters, since many of your readers are shopping you to decide if they want to reject you. Any false step, online or in person, could be decisive. You don’t engage your clients that way in the real world — making fun of them, talking down to them, insulting them. No one does. There is no one, not even the webloggers who embedded that video on their weblogs, who yearns to be treated that way by a salesperson.

As I said — and as the mewling mob graciously demonstrated — this is not a debatable proposition. People made a dumb mistake, and, in preference to admitting the obvious, they made asses of themselves. A surprise to no one.

But I told them in advance that I am not talking to them. I am talking to all the other people who read BloodhoundBlog, many of them struggling real estate webloggers or wannabloggers. This is a leadership issue, and that’s why I spoke up, knowing in advance the response I would elicit from the mewling mob. Repeating the peroration:

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.

In short, treat your potential clients the way you yourself would want to be treated if you were interviewing a prospective vendor. Now that’s a noble ideal. Where have we heard that before…?

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