Chris V.,

Thanks for for expanding on this commentary. I agree with most of what you are saying and I think like many areas discussed on MFI, there are shades of gray on this issue.

Is 100% unique content always best for a community blog? No. For instance, we proofread and physically post content to social media sites on behalf of customers. Some content come from corporate offices along with instructions to post it to all community blogs, which in some cases is scores of blogs. An example that comes to mind is a Happy 4th of July message we posted earlier this year. In this case, the company's primary objective was to use their social media platform as an internal communication vehicle, not an SEO engine and IMO, social media's value as a resident communication, engagement and retention tool has a higher potential ROI than SEO.

Since 2009, we have had a custom blog option and 98% of our customers have chosen an offering that includes duplicate content. We recently dropped the price of our unique content option and reintroduced it. Exactly one customer is upgrading and we have not been able to sell the unique content option to anyone new (and it's just $20-40 more per month). Truthfully, we were a little surprised, but the reality is while in theory this make the product "better," in practice we can't prove it. Our test sites didn't perform any better (and yes, we were also surprised by that).

Notwithstanding my opinion SEO is of secondary importance, I just looked at Google Analytics and in the trailing 30 days, 33% of our social media customer's traffic came from organic search, 46% from referring sites and 21% was direct traffic. Given that so much traffic from referring sites is baked in (the community sites, some ILSs and each FB and Twitter post link to the blogs) I think it will be hard to move the % needle too much.

What is even more important (and an ongoing challenge for us) is to get the communities to let us know about events and community news so we can post them on their behalf. The content we produce should only supplement what is coming directly from the community anyway. Not tomorrow, but in the near future, I expect community managers will be expected to write their own blog posts at many PMCs.

In the meantime, the content curation and auto content generation tool providers are making inroads into the multifamily space. In a nutshell, content curators let you do a keyword search and then show you a bunch of related web pages. With once click, you can copy of paragraph from existing web content as well as a link to it. In theory, you're supposed to use this as the starting point for your blog post, but in practice, I think the temptation to simply hit "publish" and lean on the fair use loophole of copyright law will be too great. This will lead to a lot of duplicate content of low value...but more on this in another blog post. :-)