With this week’s Inman Connect Conference coming, I’m reminded of the first time I stood on the Inman stage. It was 2010, and I was on a panel with the great Steve Harney to talk about “5 Things We Need to Start Doing in 2010.”

To make it fun, he came up with 5 things to do, and I came up with 5 things we needed to STOP doing. I don’t remember all five, but I remember the first, because it’s still as relevant today as it was 8 years ago.

Stop being annoying.

Too much marketing is annoying. Too much real estate marketing, especially, is annoying. Essentially, like many salespeople, we seize on any new communication technology and slowly corrupt it to the point that people start running away from it.

Think about the way that communication technology evolves from an exciting way to connect with people to a barrage of solicitations that constantly bother us:

Phase One: Excitement.  In the beginning, people are excited about the new technology. They look forward to getting mail, or calls on the phone, or emails, or texts. Indeed, this kind of excitement goes all the way back to door-knocking, the most rudimentary of communication methodologies.  People used to look forward to someone knocking at their front door.  Why? Because we’re talking about the days before television, and home life was really boring, and someone at the door was way more interesting than staring at the wall.

That’s how all new technologies work: the more they excite people, the more they accelerate adoption. You remember why people got answering machines in the first place? They didn’t want to miss calls!  It wasn’t about screening messages, they simply loved seeing that little red blinking light when they got home.  And how about email — remember the old AOL alert for “You’ve Got Mail”? They made a whole romantic comedy with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan built on the premise that people loved getting email.

Phase Two: Solicitation.  As the communication medium becomes more mainstream, the sales-industrial complex looks for ways to exploit it with solicitations. A hundred years ago, the door-to-door vacuum salesmen took advantage of the willingness to open the door to a stranger.  The postal services establishment of bulk mail rates in 1928 sparked of direct mail marketing.  Cold-calling took off in the 1970s, once landline telephones penetrated over 90% of American households.  After we all got email, we got spam in what seemed to be about fifteen minutes later.  Social media feeds filled with updates from our friends are now overrun with targeted ads.

Basically, if you create a communication medium, marketers will figure out a way to solicit business with it.  And eventually, they’ll crowd out all the other people trying to use it.

Phase Three: Protection. Indeed, once marketing solicitations have corrupted the communication medium, people look for ways to protect themselves. They put up “No Solicitation!” signs at their door.  They use voicemail and Caller ID to screen their phone calls, and in many cases get rid of their landline altogether. They open their mail over the garbage can, and their email with their finger hovering over that delete button.

Essentially, consumers dig a moat and build a high-walled castle between themselves and visigothic solicitors, which forces marketers to be ever more creative and resourceful.  As email use wanes, for example, we’re starting to see incursions into our text messaging, with automated messages pinging at us all day long. I wouldn’t be surprised if people start thinking of their text messages like we now think of email — as a drudge, rather than an easy way to communication. And, of course, we’re seeing the same thing with social media, which used to be fun, and is now a toxic dump.

So what’s the solution? Well, we can’t do anything about everyone else, but we can police our own behavior. Instead of using email/social media/phones to make annoying calls that only serve our own interest, we need to focus our outbound marketing efforts on providing a service to other people.

Think about what they need, not what you need.

And stop being annoying.