Digital Real Estate and Creating Personality Within Products

by Scott - 2 Comments

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Value creation from real estate is not limited to property in the offline world. It exists across web platforms we interact with on a daily basis. The obvious opportunities exist anywhere we can create content. From short bursts to long-form writing, tangible value is created atop digital real-estate.
 
Each piece of online content serves as a potential touch point for value creation: a potential sale; a relationship; a partnership; the list goes on. People are very good at using content to bridge knodes of connectivity to create these things.
 
What I find interesting is the amount of online real estate people aren’t leveraging effectively. Money is being left on the table. Every piece of digital real estate is a chance to make an impression. A chance to stand out. A chance infuse personality within a dull application and thus, align knodes in your favor. Let me show you what I mean.

Product personality

Here are two Linkedin profiles of friends:

Product personality

We’re looking at the same piece of land here folks. One guy has just decided to do his landscaping. Which one are you clicking? Which guy do you think would be more interesting to have a conversation with if you didn’t know either? I know who I’d rather oh so “serendipitously” just happen to meet at an event.

Product personality

Then there’s this guy. He doesn’t have a blog. He thinks his job is done. Wrong. He’s an avid Quora user and he tweets vehemently trying to get followers. Yet he has failed to leverage this real estate in his favor. Why not link to these properties with titles like “Bursts of Brilliance” and “Best Answers to Life’s Questions.” If I saw these not only would I click, I’d probably want to meet this guy over an Octoberfest.

Let’s talk where serious money can be made: the email signature. If you’re not leveraging your email signature, your missing out on probably 50 touchpoints a day. I see that as 50 missed opportunities where you could have created some form of capital. Okay, you put a link to your blog in your email signature. That’s cool. But do you email the same people over and over? Odds are these people have become de-sensitized to mysweetblog.com. Why not make that piece of real estate dynamic? Why not strategically leverage it according to what you want certain people to see? Check out my signature:
Product personality

Everything you see here is customized to a few objectives I had yesterday. I did this by spending the extra 30 seconds today to change up my signature. I view every email I send out as a chance for me to accrue capital in some form. I seek A Few Good men (you too girls-just love this movie) to take me up on my challenge to engage the homeless. Its an effort I want to champion. I want people to check out my book and skillshare class because coffee is exspensive in New York…oh wait I’ll teach you how I get it for free from the most popular coffee house in America at my skillshare class. ALWAYS. BE. CLOSING.

Enter rapportive. A beachfront property within gmail. If you don’t have it, download it immediately. If you’re in the tech community, I imagine that there is a good percentage of people that currently are using this app. This means there are opportunities to leverage the real estate in their inbox. Many people leave money on the table here. It’s not good enough to just put your personal twitter handle. Put every property on the web where you could potentially create value. This means your company twitter handle, blog, quora, etc.

Product personality
The first step is to occupy the vacant real-estate in your digital life in ways that help you achieve what you set out to accomplish. But if you truly want to have the highest ROI on your property, you need to find ways to make it stand out. I think the most effective way to do this is to infuse it with personality. Personality stands out; it creates contrast amidst a largely homogeneous landscape. This contrast manifests itself in the off-line world from dollars to social capital.

Look at the web like a strategic canvas. One that is most effectively used when you dynamically alter brush strokes in order to accomplish your goals. I write this post with the hope that other people start taking full advantage of all these under-utilized touchpoints to accomplish the things they set out to do.

I’ll be thoroughly demonstrating how I make web sub-divisions my playground more extensively when I skill to the share. Check it if you think this topic is interesting.

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