REALTORS Should Listen to Kanye West

In case you missed it, or in case Hip-Hop just isn’t your thing, Kanye West released a new album a few weeks back. I have all of his albums, and I think this one is by far the best.

Kanye is one of those artists that everyone knows about, but hasn’t seen tremendous success as far as album sales are concerned. This album was different, however, selling almost 1 million copies in its first week. What made this album different from the others? This album isn’t for Kanye, it’s for everyone else. Kanye explains in this article:

I think my music is really inspirational and I really made it for the people. I really understood that in this Internet age people are their own superstars … the best bet that we had was to make a soundtrack to their own lives.

Kanye understands something that REALTORS would do well to learn and practice, “I really made it for the people. I really understood that in this Internet age people are their own superstars.”

REALTORS are notorious self-promoters. It is the nature of our business to a degree. Sometimes, however, it rises to a new level of obnoxiousness. Personally, I am turned off by the whole trend of “#1 Listing Agent,” “Millions Sold” and “(insert precious metal or gem here) Circle Award-Winner” tag-lines that are found in agent ads and websites throughout the industry. I mean, who cares, really? I don’t think that consumers do.

The corporate landscape is littered with the discarded carcasses and skeletons of once mighty companies that focused so hard on their sales targets that they forgot about the people that buy their products and services. Once a company loses focus on the people, and their needs, the usefulness of that company ceases. The nature of people, when seeking out a product or service, is to ask, “what’s in it for me?” If a company isn’t constantly answering that question, they are failing.

The Internet and Web 2.0 have merely magnified everyone’s tendency to focus on themselves. The Internet enables people to filter out everything they don’t want and focus on the things that they do. While Internet space may be infinite in general, the competition for getting inside an individual’s Internet sphere is fierce. People can easily eliminate or ignore anything they don’t want or that they think isn’t benefiting them.

Think about it. You filter out content all the time when you are on the Internet. You run a Google search, scan the results, and click on a few links. The links that you click on, you probably just skim, and if it doesn’t appeal, you move on. You do this because Google returned over a million results for your query. This site doesn’t work? No problem, on to the next one.

This is something that Kanye understood about the music consumer. The music consumer has endless choices to make, why should they choose his album? He was able to create an album filled with music that speaks to people, grabs them, relates to them, moves them, makes them happy, and therefore benefits them.

Kanye gets it. This revelation helped him to achieve greater success than ever before. Every REALTOR out there reading this has the opportunity to do the exact same thing. The sooner that REALTORS can learn that it is more about their clients and customers, and less about them, the more everyone will benefit.

Technorati Tags: real estate, realtor, charlottesville, virginia, kanye west, graduation, marketing, advertising, Web 2.0