As the NAR makes its first forays into the participatory internet, wired Realtors must get a handle on a very difficult question: How do you get rid of the Boojum under the bed?

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, so the National Association of Realtors has made a big deal out of its search for a “Social Media Director.” Apparently I’m the only person who finds the terms “social media” and “director” to be inherently self-contradictory, but that doesn’t matter anyway.

Why? Because the NAR is interested in social media for two reasons only, neither of which will resonate with anyone in our world.

Their two objectives are these:

First — and primarily — they want to clamp down on and control everything associated with real estate in the participatory internet. Dinosaur organizations are censorious by their nature, but the NAR is very much like the Mafia in its need to control its message, silencing dissenters and whistle-blowers.

Second, the NAR wants to turn the Web 2.0 world into yet another distribution channel for treacly, sleazy sales propaganda.

I never thought of Pinocchio as a wise-guy before, but it comes to the same thing. You can’t get too near The Boys without becoming one of them, and if you lend any part of your credibility — your reputation for moral probity — to the NAR, it will turn you into yet another insipid, perpetually-smiling marionette. Dance, puppet, dance!

I think this might be a three princes fable. If it is, the first prince may well be Todd Carpenter, who for some insane reason actually wants this job. At least he had better want it, because he gave me as a character reference and I gave him a glowing review. If the NAR actually understands its world and ours, my recommendation should have worked the other way for Todd. But my impression was that they ate it up.

Prince number two is NAR CEO Dale Stinton, who has announced that the new Social Media Director has already been chosen, but who won’t reveal who is the poor benighted soul who will get to be torn to shreds by both the lady and the tiger, never knowing for sure which is which.

I don’t actually know who the third prince is, but for the moment I’m betting on me. I abhor the whole idea of leadership, but serving as the leader of an inescapably leaderless movement has its appeal. And it is by now obvious to me that no one else is willing to take on the role.

That’s as may be. The big news, for me, about the Stintion non-announcement announcement, is this: The real announcement will be made at REBarCamp Virginia on March 3.

Give yourself a moment to gnaw on that. By refusing every attempt at definition, the entire BarCamp movement is as poorly defended as a tribe of pre-Columbian paleo-Americans coming into contact with a boatload of syphilitic Spaniards — but still…

If we go to their dipshit events, we’re taking our chances. Just don’t sleep with the smirking marionettes! But for REBarCamp to invite the NAR into its own bed — that’s just disgusting.

“Oh, but Greg! You don’t understand! Dale Stinton really gets it!”

You bet he does. He understands perfectly — as the NAR always has — that the best way to recruit new marionettes is to charm them into tying on their own strings, voluntarily.

If Dale Stinton “gets it,” where is he? A week or two ago, I gave Stefan Swanepoel a couple of swats over his new countdown of allegedly important real estate trends. The second-most import trend, per Swanepoel, is the participatory internet. Yet the man is nowhere to be found in the comments thread. I gave him a beautiful opening to come here and defend his book — what would David Gibbons have done? — but what do we hear? Nothing but silence.

Every time you turn around, you hear someone being touted as a social media guru — except for the part about their knowing nothing whatever about how to live in our world. Stinton, Swanepoel, Brad Inman… I could go on all day. They all live in the dinosaur world, and they all want dress up in camouflage and pretend to live in our world.

That much is to be expected. You either get it — really get it — or you don’t. If you don’t, then everything is just another trend, just another fad, just another chance to hustle the rubes by pretending to be one of them. And yet when someone really makes it all the way into our world, there is no mistaking the radical changes in the way they go about everything.

So how will we be able to tell if someone in the NAR really gets it? I would look for something like this: A Twitter emission reading, “I just quit my leadership position at the NAR. Can you folks ever forgive me?” An honest mafioso is an ex-mafioso. There is no middle ground.

And all of that matters to me not at all. The destiny of all dinosaurs is to become very prosperous ant colonies. The question that matters is this one:

What about us?

I personally keep everything at arm’s length — even things I like — because I never want to seem to stand in support of some evil by failing to have stood against it. But the barbarians are at REBarCamp’s gates — not arrayed for battle but dressed for the party to which they have been invited as guests.

If you just said, “Ew!” — you know exactly what I’m talking about.

This essay might be a smidgen short on literary metaphors, so I’ll kick up one more: It was you who put the Boojum under the bed. You conjured it into existence, and then you gave it all its fearsome powers, giving yourself the corresponding fears. And it doesn’t matter how many clever traps you set for it. It’s too clever to be caught. But there it is, under the bed every night, night after night, waiting for you to let your guard down for just a second…

So here’s the question for the wired world of Realtors as the NAR lays its plans for taking over our world:

How do you get rid of the Boojum under the bed?

The answer is childishly simple: You grow out of it.

It not just because of the participatory internet that we are what we are. We embrace the ethics of the Web 2.0 world because we held those ethics before the Web 2.0 idea existed. Or rather, the wired world as we know it exists because people very much like us brought it into existence as the realization of their own moral ideals. In short, the geeks are inheriting the earth.

Our objective is not to fight off the NAR — raging dinosaurs and snarling marionettes and undead ghouls with really big hair. All we need to do is to supplant it by eclipsing it — by every criterion that matters to consumers.

Do you see? All we have to do is become so much better at delivering the product that mere Realtors will be seen as second rate and the Realtor brand will become the imprimatur of inferior quality.

I feel bad for the BarCampers, but, in the end, none of this matters. If the new Social Media Underboss really is Todd Carpenter, I hope he has sense enough to quit before his face freezes like that, but that’s his lookout. All we have to do is keep doing what we’ve been doing — and keep getting better at it — and the Boojum under the bed will be gone forever.