Episode 40 - What are you waiting for?

A pretty simple question, but one I ask myself all the time.

Episode 32 - It's the same but different and better

After some discussions this week with fellow apartment nerds I had some thoughts about how new media is the same but different and better. Enjoy!

Episode 27 - Your online brand is just as important as your offline brand

While each company is going to use communication tools a bit differently, your online brand is extremely important. I contest that it is just as important as your offline brand.

Episode 26 - I'm killing the "Building Your Online Brand" series

It just was going too slow, and is just unrealistic. There is no one way to build an online brand. I'm sure I was giving some helpful tips, but it takes so much more than that. Here's why, and I also mention an upcoming project called The Resident Connection.

Episode 20 - Craigslist is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

After the podcast last week I wanted to expand on my idea that "Craigslist is the tip of the iceberg" in regards to online apartment marketing. I have a theory, and would love to know your thoughts.

Episode 19 - The ILS Conundrum

This may come as a shock, but I've been thinking. After the Rent.com debacle, I started thinking about the ILS models in general. I've shared some of my thoughts about ILS's in a MFI discussion (click here) before, but here are some more ideas and I want yours please. Tell us what you want to see. How do you want to see the ILS's change?

Episode 13 - Let's Not Get the Cart Before the Horse

In Episodes 11 & 12 I talk about strategy. That's one thing some of the best in our industry do. Some of the largest brands in Multi-family have been successful because of their strategy. Whether it's a branding strategy, a training and best practices strategy, or an overall marketing strategy, they are winning today because of a great plan. You don't have to be a large company to have a strategy, and there's no reason a smaller company can't have a better strategy than the big guys.

In Episode 13 I expand on marketing strategy and why getting the cart before the horse with your online marketing and social media efforts can be an issue. As we saw last week with the Horizon Management debacle it's important to participate and manage your brand online, but (as many of us have been talking about for the past year or so) it's not a good idea to just jump right in without a plan. Let's not get caught "Bear Shaving." So let's talk strategy. What are your plans? Do you have a plan? Do you need help? If you'd like to know more about the J.C. Hart strategy for online marketing I'll be sharing those efforts in the coming weeks along with some tidbits from other industry friends. Until then, I recommend you start thinking about a strategy and think about finding an online marketing team to help your efforts.

Episode 10 - It's Happening So Fast & The Topic of the Day

I'm sure many of you agree with me that things are moving quite fast in the online marketing word. While it's overwhelming at times, it's a lot of fun. So let's have some more fun with it. Two things today. One, I'm going to try and bring more frequency with the vids. The feedback I'm getting is that people like the concept, so I'll try to dream up some more topics. Two, have you seen the @AptGuide Twitter contest? I give my thoughts and would love yours. Enjoy!

Building Your Online Corporate Mullet

Yesterday was a lot of fun. Realpage was very gracious to invite us to speak at their 2009 user conference, and we ended up having standing room only for our presentation. Very humbled for the excellent turnout and kudos to Kate Good and Lisa Trosien for recommending our session during their presentations.

When thinking of what to speak about I somehow immediately thought of this concept my good friend Duncan Alney, with Firebelly Marketing, had been brainstorming about, The Corporate Mullet. It's a metaphor for your business and how wearing some business up front and a party in the back is a great way to build a brand and relationships offline and online. We focused on building the corporate mullet online specifically for the apartment industry, and used case studies from Urbane Apartments, J.C. Hart Company, and some non-apartment industry companies. Below is our slide show sharing some of our data. If you have any questions about our presentation please feel free to write a comment or email me directly at mark@theapartmentnerd.com. Thanks for stopping by and enjoy your day.

Building Your Online Corporate Mullet

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Is Social Media Stretching You Out?

Let me preface this post by saying that I wrote about half of it a week ago and decided to sleep on it to see if I was just in a funk or if my thoughts have changed. Some recent readings have allowed me to make some revisions and additions so I can let ‘er fly. I will apologize up front for the length of the post, but it is what it is. No video this time, just The Apartment Nerd in black and white. Enjoy.

Recently I have felt super stretched for the time to dedicate to blogs, twitter, email, and just my regular job and personal life. It’s been frustrating to not read blogs that I used to somehow find time to read and comment on, and to find myself getting buried in emails that require my attention but don’t get the immediate response they probably deserve. Then, by chance, I saw a tweet this weekend by Jeremiah Owyang*. He linked to the most recent post on his Web Strategy blog speaking to the scalability of humans. While he references how difficult it is for his peers online and in the blog world to scale what they do as they grow and do more, I think we can look at this as an example for why online Social Media and Social Networking is so challenging for anyone.

A couple weeks ago Lisa Trosien had an interesting post with "Maybe It Should Really Be Called Social NOTworking?" After commenting, feeling the way I have in recent weeks, and reading Jeremiah’s post, I want to ask the question a bit differently and more in general for all business and marketing. Should it really be called Social NOTworking because people just don't have time? And I'm not just saying us as companies trying to use the tools for networking and marketing, but also as a consumer.

We know it takes time from a business perspective to participate in social media, but are we making an assumption that consumers aren’t stretched for time as well? Maybe it’s too much to participate in social media and fulfill the needs of our day jobs and personal lives? I find myself up at midnight writing things like this blog post wondering if it's just a bunch of nerds getting psyched about social media for marketing and trying to push everyone else on board. How many everyday people really have the time or desire to participate online as a hobby or even regularly? Yes, the number of accounts and the growth has been staggering, but what about the ongoing usage and the falloff? Is social media just another fad?

Are we mainly connecting with a small group of nerds that will always think it’s cool, or is social media really sticky? How many of your friends on facebook never have new status updates? How many people do you know that don't even have a facebook account and never intend to? How many of you have completely abandoned your MySpace account? How many people do you know that have created a Twitter account, but have never posted to it and most likely never will? (And one post that says “Checking out this Twitter thing” doesn’t count.) Have you read about the recent studies on Twitter usage? How much time per week would you say you "waste" using social media sites? Do you feel guilty wasting that time? As a consumer, do you engage with any brands online consistently? I’m an Internet nerd and have never used Yelp!, ever. Is there too much focus on online reviews?

I may be contradicting some of my opinions and thoughts that I shared in commenting on Lisa's post (and in my general point of view), but I'm thinking things through a bit differently and playing devil’s advocate to myself I suppose. I love the multi-family, marketing, and social media relationships I've built using Twitter, facebook and www.multifamilyinsiders.com, but I don't take any time to engage with brands like Lexus, Apple, TaylorMade Golf, HyperLite Wakeboards, Nintendo, Samsung, Taco Bell, Gatorade, Budweiser, etc. Am I fans of these brands on facebook? Maybe. But that's as far as it goes as I just don’t have time. If we ourselves are not engaging with our favorite brands, why would we think our customers would do so? And even if they do, is it sustainable?

I believe there is a niche for social media in every business’s marketing plan, and I also believe that companies can leverage these tools to build keyword rankings on search engines, provide content for their brand, and communicate with customers. Let’s just not lose sight that there is a total plan and that there are many pieces to the puzzle that we still don’t do well in our industry as a whole. Email being one example. Heck, most statistics will tell us that just answering the phone is a challenge.

Unfortunately, I view social media as more of a challenge than a solution today in marketing apartments as well. It is a challenge as it fights for time with the phone, email, and good old face to face communication. It is also a challenge in that our customers face the same battle for time as we do in using the tools. Until social media tools can be used to consistently SAVE people time, I believe its best use is to enhance search engine optimization for a company and/or communities. There are exceptions to the rule, but I think those exceptions are rare and have not experienced the scalability challenges Jeremiah suggests in his post. I’m sure there will be an evolution in social media that addresses the issue of time and scalability, but until then I’m not certain the majority of consumers and businesses will completely embrace the tools available as we see them today. Thus, Social NOTworking.

*(If you’re not familiar with Jeremiah Owyang visit his blog with one of the links above or visit the NAA Education Conference website to learn more about him and his participation in the upcoming panel discussion on Social Media with Tony Tsieh - CEO of Zappos.com, Pete Flint - Founder of Trulia.com, and Moderator, Eric Wu - Co-Founder of RentWiki.com at next week’s conference in Las Vegas.)

Mobile Marketing (Episode 3.5)

Hello everyone. I was able to get a pretty good take here from my response to the questions I posed about mobile marketing last week. Of course you'll hear my radar detector in the middle, but that's what I get for filming these in the car. Anywho, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the mobile topic. Thanks!

The Apartment Nerd (Episode 3.5) from Mark Juleen on Vimeo.

Print Doesn't Have a NEW Partner, The Internet Has an OLD Partner (a comment for TotallyToni)

Apparently my comment was too long to make the cut on Toni's NAA blog post. So here it is for those that would like to hear my thoughts.

It's like rain on your wedding day
It's a free ride when you've already paid
It's the good advice that you just didn't take
Who would've thought... it figures

A blog post about print not being dead. Hmm, a bit ironic, don’tcha think? Well, it is what it is.

So, here goes. As Level One pointed out last week at the AIM conference, our industry has a very difficult time measuring traffic sources even with the technology of today. Only 29% of leads are tracked properly to the source according to their data. http://www.apartmentinternetmarketing.com/resource-library/slides/?action=view&id=41 I believe this is interesting as the data we collect, even today, cannot be trusted. This actually helps validate an argument for print (sort of).

That being said, I know with our experience we have continued to see the quality and quantity of our online leads/leases increase over the last few years. We've also seen the number of print leads/leases decrease over the past few years. This is, at least, according to our inaccurate numbers that apparently are only 30% correct. However, when quality goes up, the ROI bell goes off in my office. Where there is a disconnect for me is with the quantity argument and “The print medium is vital to the flow of traffic to your property!” comment. Are we looking for quantity or quality? I would prefer 5 quality leads over 10 mediocre leads. I will argue that the listing guides and other print forms of advertising provide less quality leads compared to online sources strictly due to lack of information that the print provides. Print may drive people to search online, but if we can be found online without having the expense of print to get people there then the ROI just makes more sense.

Here’s my mini case study that is still a work in progress, but I believe it will be even more relevant by the fall. During the last 3 months the majority of our portfolio is no longer using the listing guides (or any mass print advertising) as marketing resources. While we have taken a portion of those huge savings and invested them into other online listing services and enhancements to our company online presence, we have still reduced our marketing costs per unit by more than $30 on average. So, what’s the result? Only 1 community out of all that dropped the print listings has had fewer traffic/showings compared to the same period last year. And they weren’t off by much. This is also in what many call a “down” market. Pretty amazing in my opinion.

Does this example represent all markets or all property types, no. However, it does show that print is not a necessary piece to marketing an apartment community, and without it those savings can be spent in other places that have a better impact on quality of leads vs. quantity. Sales is a numbers game, but there is also a marketing ROI that can’t be overlooked.

OK, now onto your “Online Ad” argument. You make a great point. Online ads do disappear into cyber oblivion. However, if you look at where online is going you’ll see the best marketers saw that many moons ago, and they are now focused on search results, creating online community, or embracing customer testimonial/ratings sites like Yelp! It’s not about shouting your message, it’s about sharing your message. We dropped all our banner ads online even before dropping the print. Messages now need to be targeted and specific. They cannot be an interruption to one’s regular activities. I would even argue that the listing guides are actually great permission marketing sources. No one is going to just pick one of those up for leisure bathroom reading or as coffee table décor. People pick it up for a reason, they need an apartment. However, the ROI for these print listings continues to slip, and it’s easier than ever for marketers to reallocate just a portion of those dollars for results that are equal to or greater than before.

From my perspective this isn’t a question of evaluating whether or not print is DEAD. The question management companies need to ask themselves is if they can continue to justify the ROI for print marketing. If you can justify it, great! If not, don’t be that guy continuing to do things the way we’ve always done it. Go for it! Do your homework, find an online marketing consultant to help you if necessary, and change the way you share your message. Print doesn’t have a NEW partner, the Internet has an OLD partner.

Question: Are You Overwhelmed by Social Media?

In Episode 2 here of The Apartment Nerd, I ask your thoughts on Social Media and where you're going with it. Enjoy.

Mj

The Apartment Nerd - Episode 2 from Mark Juleen on Vimeo.

Revenue Management in a Declining Market

Last week I had an excellent opportunity to participate on a panel at the AIM or Apartment Internet Marketing Conference 2009. It was a fantastic experience and I felt honored to have been able to share my company's experience with revenue management. Below are the slides from my presentation, and when the video becomes available I will share it as well. In the mean time, you may visit www.apartmentinternetmarketing.com for information about the conference, and to view all the presentations (when they are available). Also, for you Twitter nuts, the hashtag from the conference was #aimconf and there was a special social media tag during the social media presentation #aimsm. Check those out and let me know if you have any questions about revenue management or about the conference in general as I'm happy to share our experience. Enjoy.

Revenue Management in a Declining Market - AIM 2009

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