The real estate blog.

There’s a game going on in the real estate bloggers group called the “5 things people don’t know about me” meme. I caught the virus a couple days ago from Kevin Boer at 3oceans real estate blog.

What is a meme?

This is something I’ve been trying to figure out for a while. It seems everyone who’s been tagged in this game has a different answer. Wikipedia defines meme as :

a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another. Dawkins said, Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.

Wikipedia also says it’s pronounced “meem” like dream or theme. I always thought it was pronounced “may-may.” So in the picture I chose for this post, the meme is facepainting. Even though the

site it came from is about racism in France, the meme the picture projected is one that evolved from something kids did at local fairs to something everyone does at most major sporting events.

That’s something else about memes. They change or evolve, so the strongest meme survives. Music is a great example. The difference between a “one-hit-wonder” and an “enduring classic” is the underlying meme underneath it. Successful memes change and adapt. Two bands come to mind to illustrate this point. The first is U2. They originally sang a lot about the conflict in Northern Ireland. Their song Sunday Bloody Sunday put them on the map. As that conflict changed and became more peaceful, the meme behind U2 could have disappeared. But the band changed focus and has since brought attention to AIDS in One and their latest album raised awareness for poverty, especially in Africa.

Another band whose meme adapted was Aerosmith. A hard rocking band from the 70’s, Aerosmith was on the way out until they re-released their 1977 top 10 hit Walk This Way. The unique characteristic about the re-release in 1986 was it was paired with a rapidly emerging music genre - rap. The collaberation with Run-DMC on Walk This Way brought great success to both bands and helped bring rap into the mainstream lexicon. You could put it this way - if Aerosmith had never existed, nobody would know who Nelly and 50cent are today. Memes definitely have a life of their own.

With that definition of a meme in mind, let’s look at the real estate blogger meme that was passed to me.

Five things you don’t know about me

1. Though I grew up in Salt Lake City, I was born in Kingston, Jamaica. My father is Jamaican while my mother is American.

2. When I was 27, I worked with the Jamaican Bobsled Team as a marketing and fundraising consultant. My efforts and those of many other kind supporters, helped them attend the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

3. During my work with the team, I was exposed to website design and web marketing. Subsequently, I started my own web design business during the first dotcom era.

4. The dotcom era came to a complete standstill about the same time as the 2002 Winter Olympics completed in Salt Lake City. With both of my business industries over, at least temporarily, I turned to real estate as a career when I was hired by a local title company.

5. In Salt Lake, the national economic downturn of 2001 reversed itself in 2004. I got back into web marketing as a career and became a mortgage broker as well. Blogs were in their infancy and I studied them in depth…though it wouldn’t be until this year that I started one of my own.

I don’t consider the real estate bloggers “5 things people don’t know about me” exercise to be a meme in itself. The “5 things” each blogger is mentioning are different from each other. There are no “5 things” in common. Perhaps the meme is the game itself or the method by which the game is passed forward.

One thing I do recognize though is if we don’t pass it on outside our circle, it will never become a full blown meme.

Pass it on

The most important component of this thread is that someone else gets “tagged.” I first considered tagging Greg Tracy at Blue Roof because he’s a Salt Lake real estate agent I’d like to get to know offline. Alas, he had already been tagged.

In the spirit of getting this meme out of such a small circle, I’m tagging Keith at HousingPanic. I’d like to know what makes these bubble bloggers tick. Maybe his five things will offer some insight.

I’m also tagging Casey at Iamfacingforeclosure.com. Though his life is an open blog, I’m sure there’s some things we don’t know about him that he could share.

Finally, taking a page from Time Magazine, I’m tagging you! If this game is truly going to become a meme, there needs to be participation from all sorts of people, especially those from outside the housing industry. Just link back to this post when you post “5 things people don’t know about you.”