Good Morning Apartment Marketing Friends!
I like Saturday mornings a lot, as it provides time for thinking and pondering new ideas. I thought that the conversation over on #AptChat yesterday was pretty interesting. How quickly the conversation has shifted from social media won’t scale for apartment operators, to now everyone, or at least most in the chat seemed in agreement of the value of blogs for apartment communities.
Will It Scale
Just as recently as a few months ago we were getting significant push back from the apartment marketing consultant pundits when we hailed Social Media WILL Scale for Your Apartment Community. That is the wonderful thing about basing your direction on results as opposed to theory. We have tested lots and lots of different ideas and Apartment Marketing Experiments here in the Urbane Lab, first on our own apartment portfolio before taking ideas to the market.
Change The Conversation
So, the one point that struck me so from the #AptChat, was the focus on blog content type, meaning original verses repurposed content. This subject draws a lot emotional from folks. I received multiple DM’s during the chat from a variety of viewpoints regarding content type ranging from words like “fake”, “disrespectful to the industry”, “totally disappointed”, all of which are pretty afar the mark, and are what happens when folks insert more theory than fact, or actual experience.
My colleague Todd Dubner at NCI, the parent company behind behind the Digital Sherpa Products, Community Sherpa, Design Sherpa and CRE Sherpa, sent an email yesterday that is spot on, and well articulates a solid blogging strategy,
We have an opportunity to change the language. What we do is content curation – it is neither editorial nor is it repurposing. Curation involves a process of selecting and then making content relevant to our community of interest. We are not “bloggers” in the traditional sense, composing original thoughts and posts. We should start sewing the language into the market discussion wherever possible.
At the media panel at the Webtrends conference this week, Huffington Post’s chief technology officer, Paul Berry, described some of the methods. Every hour, editors see how the traffic that hour compared to the same hour a week ago. The site is a laboratory for so-called A/B testing, where stories are played against each other to see which draws more traffic–and how long each story should stay on the front page.
It isn’t about where or how your blog content originates and aggregates to your blog site. It is about providing content relevant to Your Community of Interest, meaning your Residents. That really isn’t a new concept either, providing something of value to your Residents, shouldn’t that be the core of our Apartment Marketing Campaigns?
We would love to hear your thoughts on this content debate,
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;
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