Stash that cod-piece: I’m not waxed fruit and you are not a rock star

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I should probably stop picking on this little nebbish, but he’s such a champion at leading with his chin that I find him hard to resist. His theme? “Rewriting the book on how to kick ass.” I wish I were joking. I’m gonna guess that he wasn’t among the first picked on the ass-kicking team in grammar school, and I’ll bet a large dollar he wasn’t even in huge demand for the coloring-outside-the-lines squad. I just love it, though, that he’s so completely dysclued that his ass-kicking theme song is entitled — wait for it — Unchained. And before you trouble yourselves trying to imagine Kevin Boer and Noah Rosenblatt in day-glo-hued spandex tights with huge cod-pieces — these two being Davison’s envisioned rock stars of real estate — stop for a moment to consider that we are talking about marketing in the world of Web 2.0. Rock stars are all about “Me, ME, MEEEE!!!!” This role belongs to the customer, not the vendor — this according to this same mental midget a few weeks ago. Brian Brady and I are rewriting the book on real estate marketing, an iterative endeavor that will see its next big advance at the real Unchained. But if you want to find a Web 2.0 star, it’s not me or Brian or Kevin or Noah. If I were to pick one person who best expresses what consumers are looking for in a Realtor or a lender, I would pick Dan Melson. There’s is nothing of a rock star in the man, but if “fiduciary” had a face, it would be his — and that comes through in everything he does.

I, very much on the other hand, command attention. The words I, me and mine are sweet on my tongue, and I have to admonish again and again that what I am teaching and what I am doing are two different things. One of the persistent delights of my life is how well Teri Lussier understands this, and how much she is able to pull out of the things I say. Dilberts like Davison live a parasitic life, devouring ideas they did not create and never fully — or even partially — digest. They extrude this waste to creatures even lower on the dumbass food chain — that is to say, your typically clueless real estate broker. Even so, for all of us, almost everything is borrowed. Almost nothing is new. But there is no substitute for real understanding. Everything you see is almost always monkey-see/monkey-do. But when someone approaches a new idea with her whole mind, what emerges is not just understanding but even newer, even better ideas. Concepts are ideas, the substance of thought. Words are concepts made flesh, ciphers for ideas in a transferrable form. When words are nothing but mimicked sounds, echoed as if by animals or recording devices, nothing results. But where active minds trade the products of their thinking — this is the highest attainable achievement of human social concourse. We think alone, but we can learn together. Slugs like Davison are legion, alas, one minute mindlessly mimicking, “I am not a lead!” and the next faux-vamping, “Look at me! I’m a rock star!” But one mind like Teri’s makes up for that entire miasma of mindlessness.

So, on that note, how do you rate BloodhoundBlog Unchained’s chances for winning this beauty contest? The fact is that, in three months’ time, we’re going to have 16 solid hours of very hard-headed, nuts-and-bolts content that America’s starving Realtor class surely needs. Not everything will be new to people reading here — though quite a bit will be — but 90% or more will be new to the NAR’s audience. Do you see them giving us 16 hours? Eight hours? Four? One? What we should do is schedule a one-day seminar for November 6th…

The last time I was on the Tee Vee News, I mentioned that I’m taking my blogger attitude with me everywhere I go. It’s not a pose; to the contrary, I was born to this world and I’ve been growing it to my scale for the past 30 years. But I’m being very careful not to be swayed into betraying it, not to bow and scrape to the media or to any sort of clubby corporate sensibility. The real Day the Music Died wasn’t the night of that terrible plane crash, it was the Sunday night when Bo Diddley went on the Ed Sullivan show looking like Malcolm X with a Gibson guitar. So be it. That world was his, and Sullivan was already a relic. This world is ours.

And all of that is by way of introduction to my thoughts on Ann Brenhoff’s article on real estate weblogging in the Los Angeles Times. Everyone else mentioned in the piece has written their reactions, all this while my Mac was making Sad-Mac faces at me. But my slice of this pie owes directly to the take-no-prisoners Bo Diddley attitude discussed above. Jeff Brown fingered me to Brenhoff, although I gather BloodhoundBlog had come up more than once in her research. I laughed at her from the first, telling her that, even though I knew she was going to write yet another just-what-are-those-crazy-kids-up-to-now? story, that we represent the future of print communication. She surprised me by agreeing, and she told me that she hoped I would look upon her favorably if she ever came looking for work. In fact, she’s a hard working dog — I have a Google-bot running on her name — and I don’t doubt that she has a game plan for the demise of the dead-tree media.

Anyway, my dream, when working with the old media, is that I’ll run up against someone like Dan Melson, someone who can’t leave one stone unturned, one lead unpursued. When I talk to a reporter, I say everything I know and then some, I finger everyone I can think of — and then I follow up with two or more emails full of links and references. Matt Carter chastises me every time I beat up on the press, but he is that kind of reporter, writing prose that is just drenched in detail. This is what I did with Brenhoff, in any case, with what seem to me to be good results. It’s all just waxed fruit, never forget that. But it was a fun kind of waxed-fruit experience.

We are each one of us stars, not always rock stars, in our own little introspective dramas. It’s nice to get paid, but the best gift we can have from these ambulating things that surround us — each one uniquely distinct and yet identical to us as entities — is the gift of their having paid attention to what we had to say. I am not waxed fruit, even though I might play waxed fruit on TV or in the newspaper. It was nice of Brenhoff to notice.

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