Christopher Watkin doesn't waste a second on the Letting Agent Podcast. The cameras are rolling and he's straight in with social media for estate agents.
"Top tips for social media in estate and letting agency. Talk to me, Neil."
"Start. Start doing it," I tell him.
It sounds too simple. But so many agents know they need a Facebook page or an Instagram account and still haven't got one. Or they've got one and don't really use it.
Then Chris has a guess at what most agents post. How wonderful the agency is, how big the market share is, every listing. I play along. "I'm going to show you the front of every house, because when you live somewhere that you spend all your time out the front looking at it, right?"
That episode went out in August 2019.
Who are you posting for?
The big thing, I told Chris, is to "think about who are you posting content for? What do they want to see?"
He asked why agents talk about themselves so much. My answer was that it's habit. "Because I think we've had a culture for a long time that says that's what marketing is." It goes back to the corporate brochure thinking of the '80s and early '90s, where you had to tell people stuff about you.
Everyone talks about storytelling now. What gets missed is that "you've got to tell your story from the point of view of how is it interesting to the people who are consuming it."
I used Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman, which had not long come out. You could tell Elton John's life or Freddie Mercury's life in a way that only their close family would care about. Agents do the same thing. "They focus on the stuff that's only interesting to the people who are inside the business and really close to the story."
If you want to talk about your business, "tell me why it exists". Tell me about the one client where something happened and you thought, hang on, why don't we do that for everybody? Saying you do it for everybody isn't enough, because "maybe so does everybody else, or people assume they do."
A story in four seasons
At the time, this was the short version of how I taught storytelling. A lot of people use story mountains. The best stories, to me, "basically have four seasons", and we all know those.
You start in autumn. Light evenings, gorgeous colours, everything feels kind of good. "But we all know winter is coming." Winter is the problem, the "Oh, crap" moment where you're wondering what to do next.
Then spring. "We start to see blossom and new opportunity and new potential. So it's finding a way out of the problem." You're not out of it yet. It still rains, and Chris chipped in with the frosts. Summer is when the problem's solved and it all looks good. And round you go again.
Look at your life or your business and ask "how many autumns have you got?" There are loads to pick from, and they don't have to come from the same time. It could be that "your autumn is now, and it reminds you of something that happened 20 years ago, and that's your winter". Films jump around in time all the time. Your story can too. If you want more on that, I wrote about how to tell stories in your business.
True, but trimmed
Chris pushed me on this one. "So it doesn't have to be true, just truthful."
No, I said. They do have to be true. "I would never give a story that's not true or that's like massively embellished." But you can do what film makers do. Combine scenes, simplify, leave out what doesn't matter, because "you've got to get the essence across."
My example was my 3 minutes on a TEDx stage. I had a lot of story to get across in no time at all, so instead of the plain, factual version I picked one short phrase that carried the feeling. With the right phrase, "there's excitement, there's emotion, just in that simple little phrase."
"So you've got to think about the language you use in every situation to encapsulate the emotions you want people to feel." You're still telling the truth. If you try to explain the whole thing, you lose the impact.
Watch the full chat
Keep a story inventory
The last thing I said to Chris was this. "Have an inventory of stories." When something happens that changes how you do things, or shows you a problem your customers are dealing with, write it down. "Even if you don't share it, document it." That way, when you come to create content based on it, you remember how it felt and you get the details right.
So the next time a client conversation makes you change the way you work, make a note or a video, even if it's just for you, on what happened and how it felt. Once you've got a handful, pick one and find its winter.
First published August 2019 on Christopher Watkin's Letting Agent Podcast.
