Identifying The Technology Bubbles
Some experiences just can’t be recreated online.
When my wife went on her recent journey to Africa for a few weeks, she left small gifts behind to remind our kids that she loved them. One gift was a bag with two bottles of bubble mix. These were old school bubble bottles, with the cheap plastic bubble blower inside.
When my kids saw the bottles of bubbles they were thrilled. A few minutes later we were outside blowing bubbles into the cul-de-sac. Other neighborhood kids soon joined in the fun. As I watched the pure joy of the experience on their faces, it hit me. This is what TechnoSanity.com is about.
TechnoSanity is about identifying what’s blowing real bubbles and what’s not.
No Web 2.0 application is ever going to replace the real life experience of blowing bubbles. I know that sounds obvious, but there are many other experiences that fall into this category that are apparently not so obvious - like buying a home.
No Web 2.0 application is ever going to replace the real life experience of buying a home.
We’re not going to be buying homes online - ever. I know there will be those who read this and say, “Well, I know someone who bought a home without ever going to see it.” This may be true for a few people in a few isolated instances, but it’s never going to be true for the vast majority of people. Buying, owning and living in a home is personal – not virtual.
We may choose which homes we’re going to go see online, but we’re not going to buy a home until we’ve had a chance to experience it in reality. And yet, some technology companies and the techie-babblers who run them, want us to believe otherwise. They tell us that coming as close as possible to recreating that physical experience on-line is a laudable endeavor. They push out messages that tell us that if we’re not getting as close as possible, we’re doing buyers a disservice.
I believe the exact opposite is true.
There is a line between tantalizing viewers and overloading them (and chasing them away). When real estate agents cross that line and try to get too close to replicating an experience that can’t be replicated, the more harm they do to both buyer and seller. The objective of online marketing for real estate is NOT to sell the home. The goal is to get someone to come visit the home – in person.
If the Internet viewer is given the false impression that they’ve already been there, they may miss the opportunity to have the real experience. And that is a shame. That real experience may create the chemistry that tells them that that house is right for them.
I’m not interested in what’s cool. I want to know and I want to talk about what works, what makes the experience better and what helps sell more homes and satisfies more buyers and sellers.
So, our goal here at TechnoSanity is to make some sense of all this new technology and to sort the wheat from the chaff.
I’m not interested in chasing online bubbles. I want the real thing.
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Comments
you hit the nail on the head. ‘try to get them to visit the home’.
my online endeavors are mostly for out of state consumers getting a ‘feel’ for the area, so they hop on a plane.
i’ll be looking forward to your separating the junk from the funk. 
You mean This is not as fun as the real thing?
Here, here. I think online presences should not always try to recreate the ‘real’ how about trying to make the experience fresh, interesting and, as is often the case, useful.