Judging for quality instead of popularity

Lucky me, I won third place in my category in the CRS Promotional Materials Contest.

Or maybe not so lucky me. The category was Electronic Marketing. My entry, a single property Web site, was eclipsed by two booklets.

Electronic Marketing. Two booklets.

My friend and colleague Russell Shaw entered a radio commercial, indisputably electronic, but he didn't win anything at all.

I entered the yard signs we were doing at that time in the Outdoor and Transit category, where they died an ignominious death.

And this is not sour grapes. There is no point in mewling about injustice where there is no justice to begin with. The contest was not about Promotional Materials but about popularity or luck or boredom among the judges. The finalists were picked by whichever of the thousands of members of the Council of Residential Specialists chose to log on to the CRS web site and vote. The ultimate winners were selected by those CRS members who attended Sellabration.

Okayfine. This is probably the best way to elect the Prom Queen. It doesn't seem to me to be a reasonable way to identify useful new real estate marketing ideas.

The fact is, I have no idea why we won at all. At the time we did that Web site it was the best we had ever done. Since then we have revised everything. Our single property Web sites now run as AJAXified interactive slide shows out of a single property Weblog. Since the contest, we have completely revamped our sign strategy, producing unique, custom, full-color signage for every property we list. In a contest about marketing innovations, judged by experts on marketing innovations, I would expect to win early and often -- and I would expect to learn a ton when I lost. I'm utterly amazed that we won a popularity contest, and I'm sure the whole thing was an accident.

Here's are some things that CRS did that I thought were counter-productive -- or just plain dumb:

• The categories meant nothing; booklets in the Electronic Marketing category were not the only misfits
• There was no pre-screening to make sure contest entries were really innovations -- or worthy of any sort of attention at all
• Initially, entries were listed in the order received, which meant early entries got many more votes that later entries
• Eventually, to counter this bias, the entire list was inverted, with later entries getting the benefit of the bias; the folks in the middle derived neither benefit
• Judging started as soon as entries were permitted, so the earlier your entry, the greater you chance of snagging votes
• Judging went on for months
• Because any CRS could vote, popularity mattered a great deal more than the quality of the ideas
• Because there were an enormous number of entries, sorted essentially at random, there was no systematic way to judge, comparing apples to apples

But: The voting may have been all that CRS hoped for and more. It was a lousy way to identify truly great marketing ideas, but it got a lot of CRS members involved, both as entrants and judges. This may have been the true goal of the exercise, in which case it was a huge success.

However... A rational objective that hungry Realtors might reasonably pursue in a tight market is to learn how to list and sell better. In the service of that objective, a contest judging innovative marketing ideas might be just the ticket. And if this is something the Council of Residential Specialists might want to undertake, here are some ideas for doing the real job:

• Use a small number of real judges -- talented, widely-known experts with reputations they want to keep unsullied
• Don't start judging until the entry deadline has passed
• Cull the crap; if an entry is miscategorized, move it, but most real estate marketing ideas are stupid and useless; dismiss these summarily
• Judge for utility; Cutesy, Cozy, Cloying and Crap are identical quadruplets; only ideas that are actually like to make it rain should be considered as potential winners
• Reward excellence -- and nothing else

The fact is that every contest is judged subjectively. But a real estate marketing innovations contest judged by hard and fast standards is much more likely to unearth diamonds than a lurching, random popularity contest.

Here's my pitch: If CRS chooses not to do a better job, BloodhoundBlog will. We'll use our own contributors as judges, along with bigfeet recruited from the real estate community. There are some insanely great ideas out there, and there is no justice in burying them in a predictably juvenile Prom Queen election...

-- Greg Swann, BloodhoundBlog

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