Designations . . . Most Designations are More Hype and Less Substance and Don't Mean a Thing to the Consumer

Designations . . .  Most Designations are More Hype and Less Substance and Don't Mean a Thing to the Consumer

I know my title may seem a little strong, but that is how I feel and here is why?

First, I work in a profession that has more peddlers of designations than teenage girls at a Justin Bieber concert. I also do marketing, social media and SEO so I get tons more people peddling designation than the average person does.

In my opinion, most designations are bogus and after 22 years of real estate, I have my wall lined with those so called designations. I think I leave them up, because of the nice graphics on them and I like seeing my name up on the wall.

So why do I believe that most designations are bogus? Here is one example out of many.

A month ago I received an email about this really cool real estate social media designation. Before I was able to quit dreaming about having my name scrolled over the certificate with this really cool graphic, I got an interesting phone call from a representative of the designation.

The representative asked if I had a chance to view the email that he had personally sent me. Now at this point I was kind of skeptical because my email program had indicated that his email was sent to many people. That is right, the email he sent me was not a personal email but more of a mass produced email.

Without telling him what I knew, I listened to his sales pitch. He elaborated for a few minutes and kept telling me how much more successful I would be after I received the designation. After he was done with his sales pitch, he asked me if I had any questions.

After a short pause, I said, "Yes".

This is were I was about to give it to him, but instead, I held back. I said, "after taking this course I will understand how to use social media like a master, right?"

He said, "Yes, we have found that most real estate agents really don't know how to empower the uses of social media and successfully use it."

Since I didn't disagree with his statement I told him I wanted to think about it overnight and I would get back to him the next day.

At this point, the representative tried the old closing techniques on me, but I wouldn't have any part of it.

During the night, I researched the instructors of the course and I was surprised. The course was taught by struggling real estate agents who felt like their calling was social media. All of them had few friends personally or professionally. They had little social media engagement on their profiles and demonstrated to me that they lacked social media skills 101. They worked more like a network marketer. All they did would spam sites about their social media skills. They didn't engage with their audience. Matter of fact, people would ask questions and they would not reply. I saw several post that had not been replied to after several weeks.

The next day I received another call from the representative. He started with trying his closing techniques. After I threw out my objections about the instructors, the representative, said and I quote, "I will knock off $200 off of the price if you sign up today." 

After throwing him more objections, his discount grew to $300, then $400 off. I was wondering why he was knocking $400 off of his designation that the day before was going to cost me $500. I was curious why this man was eager to nearly give away his services for practically nothing. I soon realized that this representative wanted to use me as a reference. I asked him who else he was contacting and I recognized many of the names as real estate social media experts. 

What this company is doing is what many companies who offer designations do. They take highly successful people, run them through their courses, give them their designations then go around and telling their audience that so and so went through our course and look at how successful they are now. 


In my opinion, the information that I would receive from this course would not make me more successful in social media. 

If you need a name with a good looking graphic on it, most of the time you would be better off saving your money and printing a certificate off on your printer.

I would be better off spending my money on my kids. They are the true masters of conversations. They'll start by asking a question and 2 hours later we're still talking. 

Don't get me wrong there are some great designations out there.  I have found that spending a roll of cash on most designations is a waste of money. A designation doesn't make you a smarter person. 

RE/MAX sells more homes than any other real estate company.
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