Justin Stoddart 0:00
Welcome back to the Think Bigger Real Estate show very excited about today’s episode all about video. I think if you’re in real estate today, you absolutely know that video is an essential part of getting mindshare, which allows you to gain more market share. And yet so many agents are afraid of it and or are afraid they aren’t doing it well. So I’ve got with me, an expert, Michael Dyson, first and foremost, on the show today, man
Micah Dyson 0:20
Justin, thanks so much, man. Thank you
Justin Stoddart 0:22
Most handsome man in real estate right here.
Micah Dyson 0:23
Not even
Justin Stoddart 0:25
Brought him into teaching us some things about video. Actually, Michael works for fairway independent company by day, but he’s also a video expert by night makes you sound like you like Batman or something. Wow.
So ours is right.
So Mike has studied film in college. And so he knows, like, for real, like how to do film. And actually, you’ve made that as part of your value proposition is how to help agents kind of up their game, right? Absolutely. Let’s talk maybe first and foremost, why videos important? Obviously, we talked about the mindshare and market share. You know, what I see, Mike is you see these massive tech company, he’s with seemingly endless amounts of money. And they’re coming in and they’re trying to educate consumers that their platform is this will provide the same results as a real estate agents, correct. Right. Right. Right. And so when you look at that, obviously, real estate agent, the typical real estate agent or brokerage does not have the financial backing to be able to compete and be on all the buses, billboards,
Micah Dyson 1:25
benches, everything
Justin Stoddart 1:26
everywhere, right, right, to be able to tell their side of the story, which is, it’s not about necessarily the fee, it’s about how much a client that’s at the end, and then having a great real estate agent can actually determine and create a really positive ROI on those fees. Right?
Micah Dyson 1:41
Absolutely.
Justin Stoddart 1:41
But I think video is a critical way of doing that. Yet, so many agents are afraid of it. Let’s talk maybe first, why do you think we as humans, I’ll put myself in that category, Why have we been or why are people afraid of video? What are your thoughts? Right?
Micah Dyson 1:53
Well, first of all, I think it’s very important that we tell our story. Okay. And that’s a very personal and very intimate thing. And oftentimes that can be intimidating. You know, who am I? What, what, why would anyone want to listen to me? And I think that when a professional comes along, a very large corporate professional comes along and says I can tell your story. Look at me, I’m huge, I massive, let me do it for you. I can do it. You know, the burden of having to speak in front of other people, hundreds, even 10 people hundred thousand is lifted off our shoulders and given to someone else, all we have to do is smile, give a bio and then the professional does everything else for us. What’s very important about our stories
Justin Stoddart 2:41
now Now, are you talking about if you hire an outside film person, or like in the sense of like people, hiring paid actors, will will
Micah Dyson 2:49
either really I mean whenever we introduce a third party to tell our story in any medium, we’re, there are sometimes there’s an advantage to that. But for the new, the fresh when if you will the new agent, the new loan officer, anyone that title agent, anyone getting out there? We, it’s very intimidating.
Justin Stoddart 3:08
To compete with that.
Micah Dyson 3:09
Right, compete with that, exactly.
Justin Stoddart 3:10
Hollywood actors, it’s like, well, that’s not me. And that’s what I’ve got to go up against.
Micah Dyson 3:13
Correct. And what we have to understand is that we are trying to grow our audience, our sphere, our market share locally, you know, let’s take one step at a time. You know, let’s, let’s leave Hollywood to Hollywood for now. Right? So, um, absolutely. And if we think back of even when we were children, we were kids in grade school who want to get called up to the chalkboard. None of us.
Justin Stoddart 3:35
Yeah, right.
Micah Dyson 3:35
You know, that was a whiteboard. Sorry, I just dated myself.
Justin Stoddart 3:38
You’re right with the attention was not necessarily something you wanted in front of a group of people. Right.
Micah Dyson 3:42
Exactly.
Justin Stoddart 3:42
Embarrassing. Exactly. That’s somewhat like you know, the stuff that’s keeping us from doing it is like, I don’t want to call attention to myself. That’s a bad thing.
Micah Dyson 3:50
Exactly. And what if I, What if I slip? What if I mess up? What if I stutter a huge part of my story and then I share with people is that as outgoing and as an extrovert, as I seem now, I had a massive stutter as a child. I
Justin Stoddart 4:05
So did I, seriously, you don’t know this about me. But there you go.
Micah Dyson 4:08
Both of us. Two kids are with massive stutters I dreaded saying certain words because I knew that the second I was up in front of the classroom, I would stutter. And so that that’s something that that can turn into a lifelong handicap that we have to overcome if we’re going to make it in this in our industry. And so and you’re probably gonna get to this but but social media with the introduction of social media, it has allowed a lot of us to enter that landscape without having to hire a film crew, hire channels, get broadcasting all of that, you know, advertising that all of that is sidestepped to a certain degree? Because of social media. Yeah.
Justin Stoddart 4:53
Really interesting. So to your point of stuttering, for me, it was any word that started with an M?
Yes, which created some, for me, difficulty
Micah Dyson 5:03
for me, it was t, s and a T sometimes m cause we get stuck on “mmm”, our mouth was like Sasha Yeah, it was crazy. It was horrible, actually.
Justin Stoddart 5:12
So to this day, not many people know this about me. But to this day, I’ll still in my mind, I’ll go to say something. And it doesn’t come out. Yes. And I’ve got to quickly work around it a different word for it. Do you still have that?
Micah Dyson 5:22
I do. I would tell friends that I got really good at being sort of a thesaurus. Because I would think of a word and I would feel myself. stammer, yeah, I go, okay. Go around that word. Think of another word that is just like that word, but doesn’t start with an M or an S T, or whatever your word is. Whatever your letters are.
Justin Stoddart 5:41
Yeah, I didn’t know that about you.
And yeah. And yet you had the audacity to go into film school knowing that right now that’s, that’s a pretty bold move. Interesting. So for anybody that’s out there watching this. That is saying, like, you know, I thought that I had a problem speaking- you listen to a couple of guys. That was that kid that you felt terrible for? Because he went to talk. And it sounds like this. Like, we like we’ve all been around people like that. And our heart goes out to them. Like, it’s awkward for everybody. It just hurts, right? I just want to help them or like, say it for them. That was us. That was us and how we are we’ve overcome that we’re on video now. So if we can do it, you can do?
Micah Dyson 6:22
You can do it. Absolutely. And I think something else that I’ve seen this.
And having talked with many agents, you know, and getting them in front of the camera. Here’s what I hear often. You don’t know, Mike, do you see this? Do you see what I look like I can’t be on camera, there’s no way. And I have to tell them? Hands up. We all know what this looks like. We’ve been looking at you for four years, once everyone knows what you look like, everyone knows what you sound like, Oh, I can’t sound what I sound like, we all know what this looks like, we all know what you sound like. So just get out there and shoot some video. Yeah. And I think that’s once we get a few under our belt, we feel a little bit better. You know, you and I were talking about some of the pointers. And one of the things that I go with is that it’s got to come from the heart. Part of that the heart is a part of that comes from having done it many times. So you and I have done this many times. And so part of this is we can do it off the cuff as we’re doing now when people first get started at when I got started, I had to write everything down. What I found when I did that is that it actually became a stumbling block, because I was reading off of a script. And so I was reading and I had to say all these things, and it sounded very robotic. Whereas if we internalize the message, it becomes it’s, it’s from the heart, it’s, we don’t have to think about it, we feel passionate about it. So the more we internalize the message, whatever that message is, we can then convey it to our audience. And then the real us comes out, you know, I talked about my hands, you know. And that’s just kind of how I am, you know, and so everybody’s different. We’re all going to find our niche, you know, our way in shooting our video, you know,
Justin Stoddart 8:05
to your point about helping people overcome the fact if I don’t like how I look into like how I sound. I call people out on that. And I say, you know what, if you really felt that way, you wouldn’t have chosen a profession like real estate, like if you really didn’t want people to see your face, you would have chosen some back office role where nobody ever saw you. Reality is you chose a role where it’s required to have your face on a lot of places, signs, business cards in front of clients like that, that excuse won’t fly because you chose this public profession. And the reality is what public means now, is that you really need to start doing video. Absolutely, you actually reminded me of this point about memorizing, I’m gonna pull up an email that I I got today from Seth Godin. For some of you that follow Seth Godin. He’s one of my favorite authors. And I hope I can find it because it was so appropriate with what you’re saying, with regards to not memorizing stuff. And he actually compared it to a KFC, excuse me, I’m looking down here for a second while I find this email. But his point was that there are a lot more people now more than ever doing TED Talks. And he said, as a result of that, these TED Talks, you tend to have a lot of people do awkward memorization, here’s what he said. So I’m going to credit Seth Godin. For this. He said the spread of TED Talks means that more and more people are being put on stage and told to memorize their talk. This almost always leads to failure. It’s not because people memorize too much. It’s because they don’t memorize enough. Watch a great performance and you’ll see no artifacts of memorization. Instead, you will see someone speaking from the heart, exactly what you’re saying. Right? He says this is what it means to know something by heart. memorizing the words is half of it. And woefully insufficient. My suggestion, don’t memorize your talk. memorize your stories case, this is a great tip. memorize your stories. 10 stories, make a talk. Write yourself a simple cue card do remember each stories name, then tell us 10 stories and it says to be you. We didn’t come to hear your words. If that’s all we wanted, we could have read that memo and save the ton of time to bring your heart. I love that. Like how a breath free absolutely true for your advice, which you’re telling people. Stop, stop like reading lyst stop scripting it all out. Stop writing everything you need to say. Because it’s it’s terrible for the audience because it’s not you.
Micah Dyson 10:24
Right. Exactly. And our and our audience, we’re building our audience. We’re building our tribe, our people, and you can’t fake that. Yeah. You know, people that listen to me people that I work with, they work within because they like me. I mean, it’s the famous quote, you know, my Angelo, and I’m horrible at quotes, but it is something you know, it’s, I’ll paraphrase of course, where it’s like, they’ll forget what you say, but how you made them feel right. And that it’s about the feeling as much as we talked about numbers and then and, and the arithmetic of things. You know, it’s really about the feeling. It’s about developing that trust and trust. Access Point comes from stories. We love stories, the person who can tell a great story is a winner. I just got a haircut recently. I hope you guys it looks great, thank you. But I love anyone can cut hair. If I can get the same stylist again, I will she because she told a story. She just talked about where she was from where she had been her trips to Hawaii, her trips, swimming with the sea turtles, I didn’t ask for any of this. Yeah, but it was amazing. I was on one of the best haircuts I’ve gotten, I get the same haircut, but it’s because of the experience. It’s the stories that she shared with me, that’s really what it is people want to have a connection, we’re all humans, we want a human connection. And that’s where that’s our ace up our sleeves as, as new as freshmen as people, even if you even if you’re a veteran and you and you’re trying to branch into a new audience, that’s what we need to do is, is expose a little be a little vulnerable, like you and I just were we both stuttered when we were children. And sometimes even as adults, you know, but that’s what people can connect with one cares about, XYZ they want to hear about, they want us to be vulnerable, you know, to a certain degree. And one thing as well, while it’s on my mind, we don’t want to memorize things. And this is a very informal interview that we’re having here. It’s fun, it’s great. You do want to have bullet points, you do want to kind of touch on a few things. And and and just like Seth was saying, right on the flash card, the cue card, a couple of topics, a couple of bullet points until those stories hit those points up. So just so
Justin Stoddart 12:30
you know, I love it. And I think that’s kind of getting into the more tactical, which is let’s go there now. Right? And I think, you know, to kind of wrap up the first point is a lot of people don’t go to Video, or they don’t do video Well, because they get stuck on I don’t know what I’m going to say right? So the end of the day, your point Micah and to Seth Golden’s credit as well, is that tell a story right? Like what is the story that you go back and tell to co-workers what’s the story you go back and tell a spouse or to a loved one something that was funny, somebody that was entertaining somebody was heartwarming, like started like those stories that that that you feel those the stories that you want to tell right now. And what I see a lot of our real estate agent partners and clients doing is talking about houses, right, three bedrooms, two baths listed 1000 square feet, granite counters, tile, okay, there’s no emotion there. Right? Right. Rather, you know, you could talk about that. But you could say like, imagine having all of your favorite people around this kitchen island, right? Here you go. How would that make you feel? Do you imagine? Just that feeling the sensation of inviting people to your home for the first time. Like now it’s like, oh, my goodness, I can feel myself there. Right. You did the same thing. You talked about the granite countertops. But you told a story, right?
Micah Dyson 13:43
Around it.
around it. Yeah, you paint a picture. A lot of something I was just something just popped my head here. In addition, doing film so I started out as an art major I love to draw film was my way of getting a degree actually out of it. One of the things that I loved to sketch my son thankfully, he’s he’s inherited that gene from both my wife and I. Yeah, totally. One thing I tell people what back when I was really drawing, and that was shown to me is you got to get out. And this applies to anything, this applies to film, this applies to anything you got to get in and you just gotta, you just got to rough it out. And you just got to get in there. So I would suggest one of my suggestions to Well, when I was an artist was Don’t think about the nose. If you’re drawing I love the human form. And I took tons of figure drawing loved all that. Don’t think about the nose or just the eye, or the finger the thumb. It’s the whole body. It’s the energy. It’s the space that occupies think of that. Just a rough it out really sketching, you know, it’s called sketching for a reason. It’s not called perfect. We’re not we’re not robots. Yeah, get in there and rough it out. So and then slowly. It’s like, you know, clay or plaster, you start hacking away at it. And slowly the form reveals itself. And so this film is like that video is like that. Get out there and do a couple of shots, you know, and you’re going to stumble, you’re going to Oh, I forgot what I was saying. Fine. Do it again. Rough it out, take many practices, 10,000 shots, whatever, different, you know, just do it. Eventually, it becomes you.
Justin Stoddart 15:16
Yeah. Micah saw when I was getting ready for this the show today. There wasn’t a lot of prep was there. I was like, Alright, man, let’s get the lights on. Let’s keep going. And I’ll tell you that doesn’t. I probably done closest I would say maybe close to 500 to 750 live videos. Yeah. So and I don’t say that to brag, by any means. But it’s just like riding a bike. It’ll get comfortable. You know, one of my mentors told me this. He said, Your first hundred videos aren’t for your audience anyway, forget about your audience. It’s about you finding out what you want to talk about and what you’re passionate about. Right? That’s great. And so for me, like, this is why I’m passionate about is really poured into real estate agents, helping them think bigger, right, so that they can have a better business and have more impact and have more options. That’s my passion. And so it comes really nice to me now because I’ve, I’ve found but it took a lot of time to find out what I really wanted to talk about. What lit me up? Yes, because that’s what’s helped me find my tribe, right is that it’s gonna, like the right people are going to feel something and be like, hey, that’s my guy.
Micah Dyson 16:13
Right? And they’ll go towards you. That’s right. Yes. attraction. Yes.
Justin Stoddart 16:18
So, back to a couple of the more kind of logistics tactical items. Okay. So let’s talk about you recommend maybe having three bullet points? Correct. Okay, not having everything scripted out as ever you want to say, right, because that turns you like into this and your heads down? And you’re and then you might shed no emotion? Exactly. Yeah,
Micah Dyson 16:36
I would say three, I was half joking. We have average intelligence, I’m writing about three threes. And number three is like a magic number for us. So you know, if it’s the top three reasons you should buy now the top three ways to get clients to list their homes, the top three, you know, etc, etc. Think of three things bullet points, do all the writing you want to get on paper, internal and but know that when you’re in front of that camera, it’s going to be the bullet points that you’re going to remember, unless you’re some super intelligent person, three bullet points are going to be and that’s about all we can store. And if you’re having a camera pointed at you, there’s only so much you Oh, there’s only so much you can you’re going to be able to remember.