Aren’t the Rating and Review Sites such as Yelp and Get Satisfaction just a form of an old fashioned Recommendation Letter? Remember Recommendation Letters? Sales folks would salivate over getting one about their company, and proudly display them for all to see somewhere in their store, or in a binder for folks to peruse. Why, because people like reading what other people have to say about you. This is not a newfangled idea.
SNAIL MAIL IS NO MORE
While the idea of Recommendation Letters may somewhat still exist, none of us get much Snail Mail anymore. The handwritten note takes too much time, and a letter, who does that when you can zip off an email much faster. We all certainly still get a few handwritten notes and letters, but not so much. So, if folks aren’t sending letters or notes much anymore, how do we get those ever so valuable Recommendation Letters?
We have been working hard to point our residents toward our Urbane Yelp page, Urbane Get Satisfaction page and Apartment ratings page. However, folks sometimes just don’t have the time, so now what?
AGGREGATE and CONSOLIDATE
Ironically, as I was drafting this post, John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing who has been called the World’s Most Practical Small Business Expert for consistently delivering real-world, proven small business marketing ideas and strategies, just posted Bring the Conversation to Any Web Page. What John is suggesting is exactly what Mike Whaling from @30Lines, also an Urbane Lab Technician, crafted for Urbane Apartments, a ratings and Review page, aptly named Urbane Talk.
FISH WHERE THE FISH ARE
We have used this metaphor before, and it is just on target, You should be hanging out where your customers are, where your Residents and Prospects are hanging out. But what about when they are in different places? We have actually added a page to our web site to highlight ratings and reviews and conversations about us labeled Urbane Reviews.
It is really just another blog site that our main web site points to. That enables our residents/customers to thread a conversation there via comments. We have set up RSS Feeds to automatically aggregate reviews from our Urbane Yelp page, Urbane Get Satisfaction Page and Urbane Apartment Ratings page directly t the site, with link backs to check authenticity.
The real value though, is just what John points out, Fishing Where the Fish Are. A lot of conversation about our Brand takes place on our Urbane facebook page, and we have started to aggregate those over to this Rating Page too.
We just launched this recently, so we are working out the bugs, but the point is, it becomes our show place for everything that folks are saying about us, good and bad.
Not all reviews and comments can be good, and I think the manor in which a company responds and participates in the conversation is also valuable to your prospects decision to choose your company
Eric’s background is rooted in the rental and real estate industries. He founded metro Detroit’s Urbane Apartments in 2003, after serving as senior vice president for a major Midwest apartment developer. He established a proven track record of effectively repositioning existing rental properties in a way that added value for investors while enhancing the resident experience.
He also established The Urbane Way, a social media marketing and PR laboratory, where innovative marketing ideas are tested. Eric has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine and Business Week Magazine.
You can connect with Eric_Urbane on Twitter.
Eric also writes regular articles for the following publications;
Related Posts -
A Like button plugin may help web traffic... kind of Does your website have a Facebook like button, or another Facebook social plugin? You're not alone. Are you wondering if that plugin is doing anything to drive web traffic? Well, you're not alone in that, either. As it turn out, they can be. As this article explains, the author requested...... -
Apartment Marketing Outreach; Jazz Up Your Outreach Efforts and Results Hello Apartment Marketing Friends! Hope your week has gone well, We have a few new Apartment Marketing Outreach Ideas for you to think about here at the Urbane Way Laboratory. At the Urbane Lab, We believe the advent of Social Media Marketing has changed the dynamics surrounding typical apartment outreach.Apartment...... - Apartment Marketing: Increased Web Traffic = Increased Rentals Good Morning Apartment Friends!I wanted to get back to a conversation that began to develop around web site conversion ratios for marketing apartments, Does Increased Web Traffic Result in Increased Rentals, and how that relates to Renting More Apartments. One thing that is pretty clear, there doesn't seem to be......
-
How Are You Measuring Your Web Site Conversions? Apartment Marketers, Do you know your web site conversion numbers? If so, what are you tracking? It is refreshing to see apartment marketers taking stock and owning their web site traffic. Some are even creating their own Branded Media. As internet marketing continues to permeate the apartment industry we need to look at web site analytics and...... - Filtered Apartment Search Urbane Lab Project #070609 Lifestyle is such an overused word, although I like the way our friends over at Village Green use the term Lifestyle For Rent. The point of this post is; When is the last time that you questioned yourself about what business you are we really in. I have always thought......
Related Websites - Facebook And Network Advertising - 8 Stage To Dominate Your Sector facebook for business marketingWhat I am viewing with most folks is they are getting into the social networking arena like a road fighter heading into his very first actual skilled fight. He appears to be to confront up Ok but when the stress will get utilized, he stumbles and his......
- Drive Up Your Website Visitors - Review Your Traffic Logs. When we are talking around increasing website visitors we can increase it in two totally separate ways. The first is by increasing the number of new visitors to the site and the second is by increasing the number of pages each of your traffic are looking at. Both aspects will......
-
Three Steps to Convert Traffic to Consumers One of the primary goals of a business owner online is to turn traffic from random people to people willing to buy from you. Just like a regular business, your business is to sell something or several things to people who are interested in them. The internet public though is,...... - Optimization And Promotion Of A Site Promotion of websites is not just placing a banner on the pages of Web resources on which all users will be on your site, it is a long and painstaking process which is resulted in that you not only raise the ranking of your site, but may find for yourself......
- Discover The Secrets To Generating High Conversion Rates From Your Squeeze Pages Internet marketing is a matter of using and leveraging the resources you have to make a profit. Your email list is one of the most important assets you can have when you are marketing online. To build your list from the ground up, one of the first things you need......
