Vanilla is boring. I’ve said it before I will say it again and again. NO ONE goes out of their way for Vanilla. Yet, vanilla is everywhere.
I’m not talking about ice cream, I’m talking about boring, bland, invisible. Most real estate agents are invisible. Not that they are “secret agents” as some call them, no, they are far from it – they are invisible because they say what most other agents say. They do what most other agents do. They hide in plain sight.
When I started at Driggs Title the marketing department called, “Stephen, we are ready to order your business cards, we just need a picture of you to put on it”. NO. I said, I don’t want one. Huh? You don’t want a picture? . Nope. I don’t want a picture, I explained, because EVERY other title rep has a picture on their business card (that most likely looks NOTHING like them – but that’s another story altogether). I want to be different.
Different gets noticed. We celebrate different. We appreciate the guts it takes to be different.
I’m different. Are you? I’m not only different because I don’t have a picture on my business card, LOL that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’m different because I don’t do as other do.
For instance, I started using video in my business over 4 years ago. Started with a 13″ macbook pro, then Flip Mino, then Flip Mino HD, Kodak Zi8, Canon T3i, Canon 60D, Go Pro Hero 2, Canon Mark III. What’s next? I don’t know. I’ve used them all, I still own most of them, I practice what I preach. I’ve made a ton of mistakes, wasted tens of thousands of dollars because I didn’t have someone like me to help me – do this, don’t do that. It’s the basis for the Video For Real Estate Agents course. It seems like everyone wants to teach video now. I got a flyer the other day from a client, an invite to a video class. The instructor – had been to at least 2 of my video classes. OMG. Really? How is that different? Hysterical!
Video is going to become as vanilla as email. Who doesn’t have email? EVERYONE will be doing it – some better than others. That really doesn’t matter though, because video is merely the delivery method. Video is the needle. It’s not the needle that is important but whats IN the needle. The content. The message. As important as the message is, it only REALLY matters if the right person finds it. Watches it. Takes action because of it. Otherwise it’s just noise. (we don’t like noise).
So, because I want to remain different, because I want my clients to remain different, I’ve already started on the the AFTER. You see, posting a video to YouTube with a provocative (keyword rich) title, writing a description, adding tags is vanilla. That’s just the beginning. There are at least 42 other things that need to happen after that. For backlinks, for traffic, for leads. But they won’t know about that. Guess who does.
Different. Who wants to be different with me?
