Find Hole in Ground – Insert Head
Last year, I left an industry lacking vision, flexibility, and agility – the airline industry. After observing it from the employee perspective for 32 years, my conclusion is that competition in the airline industry is pretty much – react to what others are doing by matching them while doing all possible to resist any real significant change. Also, talk a lot about teamwork, hold a lot of meetings, print a bunch of propaganda, but first and foremost – hold on to the past.
Now, I'm in the real estate industry, an industry that is at the forefront of being impacted by the Internet and technology. Being in a room with 100 real estate agents is like being in the room with 98 ostriches. Don't get me wrong – they're great birds, nice birds, wonderful birds, but they have their heads in the sand.
Just yesterday at the Valley Marketing Association, a well-known, very successful agent made a comment to the effect – I'm too old to do a website.
Well, like it or not – SHIFT HAPPENS – Here's a little something to give it all some perspective. Grab a drink and invest the 4 minutes to watch and another to let the old gray matter actually be affected by the message.
April 15th, 2007 at 2:01 am
John,
You can “lead a horse to water. . . but you can’t make it drink”; “All’s well that ends well”; “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”; “All that glitters isn’t gold”; and my favorite of all time. . . “Fail to plan then plan to fail.”
It is simple: today’s realtors are still unaware of the Google “land grab” (Top 10 spots on all page 1′s)that is taking place. You know very well that 6 months to 12 months from now most realtors will begin to investigate this phenomenon. Of those that begin to “get it” only 5-10% will attempt to blog. And of those that make the attempt half will succeed in maintaining their blogs. . .
The rewards will be endless for those who succeed. For those who do not create an online marketing presence above and beyond a vanilla web site, their ability to market to their target audience will be severely limited.
Great video thanks!
April 17th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
Nice post. Before I became a realtor I was a technology consultant for some fortune 100 companies. I worked on some cool projects too. Then I went to a real estate office. I guess I don’t understand how any small business owner can ignore technology.
May 31st, 2007 at 7:31 pm
[...] I recently stumbled across a great video over at the Harper Team blog about how technology is changing our world. It reminds me of one of the best books I have ever read: The World is Flat. Population trends, education trends, and technology trends all indicate that the world we live in today is going to be drastically different tomorrow. This video helps explains why… [...]