2 Percent Creativity

Will it work? Will there be buzz? We will see. A team of very respected marketing, advertising and blog evangelists have teamed up to create a tremendous treasure hunt for Budget Car Rentals called, Up Your Budget. The details on the creation can be found at B. L. Ochman’s blog and is worth the read. We are certainly going to follow this project as it must rate as a 2% approach to corporate blogging and so far, from what we have seen, the blog looks like fun and the concept is solid.

Tom Asacker has a new look for his weblog (looks great Tom) and a recent post on a famous Drucker quote, “the aim of marketing is to make selling superflous.” Tom goes on to ask,

“Have you ever been approached by a Google rep? An iPod salesperson. Someone from IKEA, Ebay, JetBlue or Target? Me either. And that’s how you can tell that their marketplace offering is truly unique.”

What a great thought. The question for real estate professionals or anyone marketing their services is, how does this translate to you and your online marketing? Does your marketing attempt to “sell” or could it be a starting point in a relationship? Something to think about for sure.

Link: acleareye.com: Peter Drucker on marketing.

The folks at HouseValues.com have just launched another website. This one is called HomePages.com. Interesting name? One has to ask themselves, how easy will it be for them to make online consumers think of a website about ‘homes’ rather than ‘homepages’ of websites? I can just imagine the marketing meeting where this idea came up. “Hey, we’ve got boat loads of cash, let’s just pay whatever it cost to buy this great domain name I heard was avaliable for our new site—HomePages.com!”

For you REALTORS® out there, it is a national IDX website designed to build the HomePages.com and HouseValues.com brand - not yours. When you perform a property search, the REALTOR who has purchased the zip code for that area is profiled (if you can call it that) on the top of the page. We can only assume that all ‘leads’ captured here will go to that agent.

Link: HomePages .

To be sure, there is another tipping point about to occur on the WWW. We are going from the information age to the recommendation age in the blink of blog. What was once all the information that you could ever want, to too much information and no way to find the nugget that I really want—when I want it.

To say that Seth might have something here with his new project Squidoo, is a little like saying there might have been something there when you first saw the Louvre in your 1995 Netscape browser. Download his latest FREE ebook, ‘Everyone’s an Expert’ NOW. Read it and understand it as soon as you can. Don’t walk, run.

Glenn

Link: Seth’s Blog: The next free ebook (Squidoo!).

Zahara Mossman is one of the first REALTORS we have seen to utilize Podcasts to promote her listings. Check out her website, Zahara Properties, where you will also find a link to her site Podcast Realty where she presents the whole concept. It’s good to see REALTORS pushing the online envelope in an effort to separate themselves from the pack and provide their clients with remarkable service.

If you have followed some of the posts on 37 Signals and their various web apps, design philosophies and the new Writeboard, you just have to see this post on their blog today. Essentially they are doing a product demo on how they are using Writeboard to write their new book. But look at the comments that some of their users are making. What you are seeing is much more than a product demo, it is the way really useful and powerful new software is being written.

Using Writeboard to collaborate on the text for our new book - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals).

The funny thing about the web, especially for those involved in the real estate industry, is that the real innovation and potentially the future, remains 2-3 years ahead of most users today. It’s the bleeding edge, the innovators, early adopters and power users, that shape what we will all want to have next. These are the true 2%, the Purple Cows, the excellent ones….

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