Real Estate Lessons Learned From a Bottle of Smirnoff

Writer Debut:

Please welcome AG’s newest writer, Janie Coffey, owner of Pappilon Real estate and Papillon ReDevelopment in Florida. She has a very unique background ranging from commercial construction, residential sales, undergraduate work in historical preservation all the way up to her current higher education pursuit in the history of business and technology. Spend five minutes with Janie and you’ll learn about her obsession with anything geo- mapping old school and new school, and is a consummate researcher. She will be writing about geotechnology and consumerism along with her related passions in real estate. Please take a moment to welcome Janie in the comments of her first post.

Smirnoff has a pretty catchy ad campaign running called “There”

It’s all about being there, in the moment, and capturing something  unique and special.  You may have seen them; building islands, foam pools and underground jam sessions…. Watching the ad made me realize that Smirnoff is  darn smart.  They realize where we are in the world today and what grabs our attention.

Lessons I’ve learned from Smirnoff:

• You need to think outside the box, go for the unexpected.
• You need to tell the story, the unique story.
• You need to be “there”, both literally and figuratively.

If you are not “there” you won’t even know the story happened and might miss something really special.  Special might not be building an island, but it might be a great connection, new insight or broadened horizons.

The evolving geoweb makes it easier than ever to be “there”, to hear about the story in real time, to have the pulse of your community. Twitter now is geotagging tweets since last week,  WordPress has some nifty mapping plugins and geosocial apps such as Foursquare and Brightkite are popping up left and right. Geomapping, geotaggin and geosocial gives “Location, Location, Location” even more relevancy than ever before.

The geoweb is just starting to gain momentum and is building on the foundation laid by blogging and social media.  The geoweb is the next generation.  For someone who absolutely loves maps and the information that can be gleaned from them, I’m all in.  My first boyfriend’s mom was a cartographer.  I didn’t know what that meant, so I ran home and looked it up and I was hooked from that moment on.  My obsession with mapping has not waned and judging by the speed in which geo-everything is taking off, I am not the only one obsessed.

So, what do you think? Is geo the new wave (and not google wave) or is it the next “shiny new object” which will be turned over in our hands and eventually set aside in a short time?  I’d love to hear your thoughts!