Viral marketing, Thinking Outside of the Box, What Your Realtor Should Do When Marketing Your Home

Back to a few more articles on Connect SF, Real Estate Connect in San Francisco. Connect SF was great, but nothing was more fun and interesting than the keynote speaker, Hugh MacLeod. Hugh is a cartoonist, humorist, and viral marketer extraordinaire. He has a website called gapingvoid.com. One of his jobs is marketing wine for a South African winery, Stormhoek.

(This is my photo of the Blue Monster cartoon taken during Hugh's talk at Connect SF. Great copies of the cartoon can be found on the attached Gaping Void links.)

His sense of humor and creativity resulted in a marketing campaign that greatly increased the number of cases of wine sold. Here is how he did it. Hugh created this cartoon which he passed onto a friend who worked at Microsoft and the cartoon took off. Microsofties have gotten a big kick out of it, downloaded the cartoon, and put it on computers and T shirts, you name it. There is even a group on Facebook called Friends of the Blue Monster.

Part of the beauty of this cartoon is the website for the winery, Stormhoek, is listed at the bottom of the cartoon, along with Hugh's gapingvoid.com website. This, of course, piqued a whole lot of people's interest, resulting in a new segment of the market finding out about Stormhoek and buying the wine. Hugh sent complimentary bottles of wine to bloggers who subsequently blogged about the wine, helping again to increase wine sales dramatically.

The message here: The job description for Realtors includes marketing properties. Realtors need to think outside of the box. It is even more important now when the market is tougher.

When you hire a Realtor to market your home, your Realtor should use creative internet and web 2.0 marketing to showcase and sell your home. There are new and great sites for putting homes and information out in front of buyers. The old marketing strategies of newspaper ads and open houses is not enough. A dynamic web presence is the key to maximum exposure and maximum dollars to home sellers. As I mentioned on a previous post, Street Advisor is just one example. This site gives neighbors a chance to comment on the nature of the neighborhood. For example, does everyone get together for an Easter egg hunt or a summer picnic. The internet is the portal to community information. What about Craigs List? This is a "community based" website which is the perfect vehicle for advertising a home. Try using Zillow. Realtors can advertise homes on the site. Expolive, Microsoft's website is another great marketing tool.


Bottom line, there are great marketing tools out there to reach a vast number of people. Make sure your home gets full advantage of these marketing sites.