I read the below listed blog post over at Remarkablogger, and thought it is pretty sage advice for any property management company or apartment community starting to blog. Just substitute the word Resident for Customer. The main point here, IF you start a blog, it shouldn’t be about your apartments, no one cares about your apartments or their features. At the Urbane Life Blog, we do not have many rules, but one of the few is it is NOT about Urbane Apartments.
Make Your Customer the Hero
Aug 22, 2009
The best subject about which you can write on your business blog is not your business, but your customers. Make your customer the hero. You are the that person in the hero’s story who provides the sage advice or the whiz-bang gadgetry the hero needs. But you’re not the hero. Your customer is.
People don’t want to hear about you, they want to hear about themselves. More precisely, they don’t want to hear you talk about yourself. They want to see their own fantasies and fears confirmed and reflected back at them. They want to know that you get them. Adopting this point of view and remembering to do this isn’t easy.
How to Make Your Customer the Hero
* Feature extended customer profiles or write-ups. Treat your customers as heroes who are solving problems and succeeding.
* Publicly point out on the blog when a customer does something noteworthy with your product or as a result of using your services. Give them a gold star, a pat on the back, a high-five on the blog.
* Invite your customers to tell their success stories in their own words as guest posters on your blog. Especially if you can get them to do it in a video.
* Interview your customers: grab your Flip or your video phone or whatever and visit them. Talk with them about what they’re doing and the results they’re achieving. If you don’t have a video camera, then use Skype with PrettyMay or a service like FreeConference.com to record your interview. This is a case where video or audio will make a more visceral impact on your blog readers. Certainly, you can just do a written interview.
* Subscribe to as many feeds from your customers as you can so you have access to this information. Your customers, by the way, will be flattered you’re paying attention. Call them up and email them to specifically ask what they’re doing (bonus result: you’ll be able to use this information to improve your business, not just market it more effectively).
Why You Want to Do This
Write about what your customers are doing, and prospects will want to become customers more readily. Why? Because they’ll see what they’ll get. They’ll imagine themselves being your customer more easily. And that, my friends, is powerful mojo.
Now Go Make Some Heroes
Eric Brown
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 Urbane Media, 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 Urbane_Media on Twitter. Eric also writes regular articles for the following publications; Multi Housing News Social Media Examiner Search Engine Guide
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