I am preparing for a short trip to Columbus OH Monday and Tuesday to attend the Small Business Marketing Unleashed Conference. I am excited to meet in person some of the finest marketing bloggers out there, Mack Collier; The Viral Garden, Beth Harte; The Harte of Marketing, Jennifer Laycock; Search Engine Guide, and many others. It is a great opportunity to learn some new techniques and strategies, and to just be around like mined folks for a couple of days.
One thing I hope to take away from the conference is a better understanding of early adapters, sometimes referred to as influencers, evangelists and ambassadors. Specifically, just how many evangelists does it take within your core Resident Base to “Self Rent” your apartments, and how do you properly nurture and cultivate them.
An article by Robert Scoble touches on the importance of early adapters, quoting Robert here; “Today the angst is onto things like Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. Even older Web 2.0 properties like Flickr haven’t really gone mainstream. Last week we spent some time with Ansel Adams’ son. He had never heard of Flickr. Ansel Adams son!!! That dude should be the first that photo sharing sites pitch, since he’s always talking to press about photography and his company does tons of classes for photographers in Yosemite and other places. Heck, Flickr should figure out how to sponsor the Ansel Adams’ Gallery. But they don’t.
Why not? Because convincing late adopters to change their behavior is VERY hard and VERY expensive. It’s why Amazon doesn’t do TV advertising. Rather they build a product that early adopters, passionate computer geeks, and influencers like. How does that affect their business performance? Well, compare Best Buy’s price/earnings ratio to that of Amazon’s. According to Google Finance Best Buy’s is 13.91 and Amazon’s is 67.03. I know which one I’d rather have. Early adopters DO matter. Anyone who says that they don’t needs to go back to business school.”
Based on these observations and our own experience of push back and naysayers regarding the manner in which we market our own boutique apartment management company, convincing other Multi Family Owner/Operators to embrace Social Media may well be a long time in coming. Perhaps the best way is by example, to the Lead the Charge and Break From the Pack of Apartment Commodity, creating our own “Blue Ocean” and to show by metrics everyone in this industry understands, increased NOI, double digit Cash on Cash Returns, and high occupancy. Apartment Operators across this country are very smart, they are just very late adaptors.