Ellen Thompson's Blog

It’s the question every property manager and industry partner wants to figure out: just how much does social media help build our brands, improve services, save money, and create new revenue?

I think it’s especially difficult to calculate social media’s rewards because they flow into many different buckets. I’m not implying this means we should shirk the responsibility of measuring ROI—but remember that there are benefits beyond leads, like branding, customer service, and SEO lift to marketing pages with proper social media integration.

It can take a long time to see that social media is generating leads, leases and sales, so we naturally try to justify our investment with other data, including increased page views, inbound traffic generation, SEO, and engagement.

            I recently heard someone say that duplicate content will get your site banned from Google. It simply isn’t so. If it were, every single ILS would have been out of business years ago.

            Most larger property management companies are interested in maintaining a consistent message and rely on products like Lead2Lease, ILS Portal, Dynamic Lead Solutions or other lead management and tracking solutions to automate feeds to ILSs, craigslist and other online marketing vehicles. Among other things, this results in the same community description text being in hundreds of places on the web.

            Let’s look at 1500 Locust as an example, which is managed by The Bozzuto Group, one of the top 10 multifamily developers in 2011 and one of the largest property management companies in the East. Its community description is 199 words long. According to Google’ Webmaster Tools, “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. ” I think most people would agree 199 words is a substantive length.  Doing a Google search for a snippet of the text reveals they are sending this description to (or in some cases, it has been unknowingly syndicated to or scraped by) ForRent.com, Orbitz.com, 4WallsInPhilly.com, BridgeStreet.com, Oodle.com, ApartmentRatings.com, YouTube.com, RealEstate.com and olx.com.  Clicking through to the second page reveals another ten results. After looking at the 5^th pages, I got bored. I’m sure if I continued clicking I’d see Google has omitted some results, but I rarely click beyond the first pages when I’m searching anyway.

I spend a lot of time thinking about social media engagement. What’s it mean? How do we improve it? How can we use it to help our clients grow? One way to find out is to look at what other companies are doing.

I’m currently reading Onward, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s memoir of returning to save the company he founded. Early in the book Schultz says that social media has always been a huge priority for Starbucks. On the face of it, he’s right.

I finally did it. I culled the herd. I unsubscribed to most of my email lists.

Why? Some were pushy, some were irrelevant, and one actually offended me. I haven’t seen multifamily marketing make these mistakes, but keep them in mind as you plan your campaigns.

Don’t post too much. Whatever your platform, be respectful. I quit Ann Taylor’s list because I didn’t need to hear about a weekend sale 4 times in 5 days.

I know this is a topic often covered,  but we still see properties running Facebook profile pages without even being aware of it.  

Your property should be on Facebook.

In 2011, that’s a no-brainer. With over 750 million active users—half of whom log in every day—Facebook is the world’s largest social networking site, an essential, real-time link between businesses and their customers.

I wasn’t planning on seeing The Green Lantern.

After my trip to the NAA Conference in Las Vegas, I was relaxing alone at my sister-in-law’s place, enjoying two things that were missing from the past few days: peace and quiet. But when my husband called, alerting me that I had his car keys, I had no choice but to join him and our 11 year-old son on a date with a movie superhero.

For those of you unfamiliar with the DC Comics series, the Green Lanterns are an intergalactic peace keeping force. Their special rings give them tremendous power to control the physical world, limited only by their willpower and strength. When a Green Lantern is killed, their ring seeks out a brave, honest replacement.

While lead and lease generation is undoubted the Holy Grail of social media, measuring evidence of resident engagement is a more realistic short-term goal for newer social media campaigns. The use of great questions can help you prime the engagement pump, better understand the needs of your residents, and positively position your brand.

Chances are, you have posted or responded to a question in a social media forum. For instance, I recently posted a question for a friend in the Philadelphia Web Geeks LinkedIn group about SEO friendly eCommerce platforms. Within days, I had numerous, helpful responses to my post.

Questions posted on apartment community social media pages can also yield powerful results. For example, Park La Brea, a large apartment community in Los Angeles, recently posted what I think is a particularly brilliant question on Facebook: They asked residents if they would be more likely to buy an electric car if the community installed charging stations. This one smart post accomplished many goals. First, it created resident engagement. Numerous comments were posted, all of which were extremely positive. Second, the post allowed management to gain valuable feedback regarding resident reaction to this potential amenity. Third, the post positioned the community as forward thinking and green.

If I could boycott US Airways, I would. But I live in Philadelphia, their primary hub, and despite the welcomed arrival of Southwest, US Airways is often the only carrier with a non-stop or convenient departure to my destination. Such was the case with my current trip out to Seattle for the Riverstone conference—sure enough, I saw once again why I don’t like USAirways: their lack of communication.