One of the questions was about the impact of social media on their businesses. I think we ran out of time before we got to the juicy stuff, so here is what I would have said if I were on the panel: you're ambivalent about us, but you're really going to hate it when social media puts some of us out of business. And I'm not talking about Facebook and Twitter.

1. Video sites - Search for your property on YouTube.com and chances are you'll find more than one video that has been placed by you or an ILS on your behalf. You'll see tracking numbers in many of the ads. YouTube videos are starting to appear in the search engine rankings. Some users will click through to your website, but others will just pick up the phone and call you. There's not enough information in these videos for prospects to properly qualify themselves. You're going to hate the drop in lead quality you'll experience as traffic from YouTube grows.

2. Review sites - You already hate apartmentratings.com, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. Today, you also need to contend with apartmentreviews.net, shouldirentit.com, ratemyapartments.com, 247apartments.com - and that's just what I found on the first page of Google results for my search for apartment ratings and review sites. Google favors sites where content changes frequently. What better way to achieve this than to tap into free labor provided by disgruntled renters? We're already seeing these sites appear more frequently on the top two pages of search results. And by the way, if you are taking advantage of "free" listings that appear on these sites or use Google Content ads, you are indirectly supporting these sites!

3. Internet directories - Sites like Yelp, everyapartmentmapped.com and dozens of others are also beginning to displace top tier ILS sites from top placement in the search engines, and it's only going to get worse. You'll get traffic from these sources, but you're not going to have the same control over your listings. Sites like Yelp do a better job of giving property managers a voice to respond with reviews, but you will still need to contend with the negative ones. Sites like everyapartmentsmapped.com get their content from aggregators who syndicate their content there (e.g. ILS vendors) and so you are removed from the conversation. In addition to losing control, it will make it even harder to know where your leads came from, because the prospect will say one thing, and the tracking number will say another. This is already a big problem with Craigslist tracking.

The genie is out of the social media bottle. While social media offers a lot of opportunities, it complicates our ability to track where leads come from and decreases control over ad content and ad placement. In some cases, it even decreases lead quality. When you view it this way, the ILS vendors don't look so bad after all.