By Matthew S. Gosselin, Blue Goose Worldwide, 128 pages, $21.95
Reviewed by Linden Lim
With tens of thousands of real estate agents competing for business in New York, aspiring brokers need to implement savvy marketing strategies to make a name for themselves. In “My Blue Goose: Exploiting the Wow Factor in Real Estate Marketing,” released this month by Blue Goose Worldwide, Matthew Gosselin says agents should make the most of tools like microsites, blogs and guerrilla marketing to pull away from the pack.
Working with major industry leaders such as Walt Disney World, the American Red Cross and Coldwell Banker, Gosselin sought to understand why consumers favor some brands over others. He decided that the average real estate professional could benefit from some of the same marketing techniques used by Fortune 500 companies, albeit on a smaller scale.
“The overall branding of real estate agents has fallen well behind the other industries out there,” Gosselin told The Real Deal. “An agent should be able to sit down, read it and say, ‘I need to apply that same strategy to my business.'”
The book’s title comes from a tale in ancient Chinese folklore, in which a boy places his blue goose in a store window on the outskirts of town. The townspeople become intrigued with the goose, and it quickly becomes the village’s very own good luck charm. The idea of exploiting a unique aspect of one’s business is reiterated in analogies throughout the comprehensive book.
Barbara Corcoran, founder of the Corcoran Group and columnist at the New York Daily News, has cited the book as a useful resource for real estate agents who would like to market themselves in new and creative ways.
When he is not traveling across the country to speak to real estate professionals about improving their marketing practices, Gosselin works for Xpressdocs, an on-demand provider of “just listed” and “just sold” postcards to real estate brokers. The Boston resident also runs a marketing blog called BlogofGeese.com. “My Blue Goose” is the author’s first book.
Some excerpts:
The real estate industry has an uphill battle to change the perception of what the average person thinks of individual real estate agents. If you don’t believe me, just Google “realtors suck” and view any of the 163,000 results that come back. Many of these are blogs, and complaints range from agents making too much money when they didn’t do much other than list the house on an MLS, to one guy who said his real estate agent stole things from his home. One study found that lawyers and car salesmen are seen as more trustworthy than real estate agents. A 2006 Harris Interactive poll revealed that 36 percent of those surveyed felt that real estate professionals had “hardly any prestige at all,” indicating that agents have failed to show a lack of real achievement.
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Your clients and potential clients are more informed than they have ever been. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, they have access to more information, studies and research about the market, the towns and cities, tax laws, and even information about you. So how do you stay ahead of them? Sometimes you can’t. Sometimes they will know more about a listing than you do. Why? Because they are talking to their friends about the family that used to live there; they are going to places like Zillow.com to find the past transactions on the house; they are looking up crime rates and educational statistics about the towns. You won’t always have this information on the top of your mind, although you should try your best to get as much information as possible. More than 80 percent of the public researches homes on the Internet before they will talk to you. This fact will not go away.
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According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, in 2008, Internet advertising will surge over $20 billion in total spending. $2 billion of that is spent by the real estate industry. It’s hard to believe that just 10 years ago, most of us were trying to figure out how the Internet would be useful. Here are the facts as they boil down to the real estate industry from our friends at Borrell and Associates:
Sixty-one percent of agents do not spend any of their own money on Internet advertising.
Eighty-seven percent of agents are not buying keywords on Yahoo or Google.
Internet advertising seems to be dominated by new real estate agents. Sixty-four percent of the less tenured agents were likely to spend money on Internet advertising, while only 34 percent of agents who have 10 years or more in the business were likely to advertise online.
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I’ve recently spoken to a group in New York City that has asked me to keep them anonymous. What they are doing will not only change the real estate industry, but the way in which we live. Here’s what they are doing: Imagine you are living in a luxury condo building. To get into the building, you need to scan your access pass to open the lobby doors. This access card will play a large role in advertising. That access card can pass along information about you to a reader. It can read your name, what building you live in, and what company built that building. Let’s say that XYZ company built your building. They know you are going to carry that card wherever you go, because that is your key to get into your building. XYZ company decides to buy an advertisement in a mall in the form of a television screen with a small RFID reader imbedded in it. The TV will display their logo at all times until someone with an access card walks by it. Once they walk by the TV, a voice comes on and says, “Hello Matt, we know you enjoy living in your condo and would like to tell you about our new condo project that will be completed in 2012.”