Raving Apartment Fans Equal Efficient Search Results
“If you don’t like change, you will like irrelevance even less.” – General Eric Shinseki
When I think of ILS’s as we know them today, I can’t help but to think about them in the context of irrelevance. Now that is not to suggest they are going away nor do I think they should. That being said, the apartment advertising community have long been the middlemen – positioned brilliantly right between owners and renters. They had the appropriate amount of influence that allowed them to assemble the audience that owner’s needed to put heads on beds. That is until the web became hyper social. As it stands, the tide has been shifting for the past few years and with the advent of social platforms, real time search, hyper-local content development and curation along with distribution – a wave is about to crash down.
Google and Bing and the great Twitter Integration
Jeremiah Owyang noted in a recent Forbes.com article that Google and Bing announced partnerships with Twitter that would move tweets into search results. He went on to say that, “Eventually, tweets, blogs and Facebook wall posts will influence these search results. The effects on paid search marketing are unpredictable.” I see that this way, the more consumer [user] generated content that is created via social platforms and migrated into search, the more the ability to influence falls away from the middleman. The point here for ILS’s is that you had better get social or you better get comfortable with irrelevance. The point here for owners is that you had better get social or you’ll continue being subject to the middleman.
Community Sherpa
I think what Dan McCarthy has done with the Sherpa is brilliant and in the same breath I would say it’s the same song just a far different dance. It’s the ILS re-imagined. And, it’s the middleman re-imagined. Moreover, to the extent that shrewd [I mean that in the smartest of senses] business leaders, like Dan, can influence the herd by accumulating and organizing organic and repositioned works of content then they keep their position in the middle and owners keep paying the monthly fee to feed from the audience trough. I must admit – it truly is a brilliant use of the very mediums any operator out there can use to their own advantage. My suggestion, don’t be seduced by the thought that it’s too difficult to manage. Is it difficult? Yes. Is it impossible? No. Is it worth the effort to do it yourself? Yes. I say re-imagine your organization and cut right to the consumer.
Raving Apartment Fans Equal Efficient Search Results
The game has shifted and giving consumers a reason to rave about you via any and all social platforms for the reason of generating Google and now Bing Juice is the end all be all. It’s about your opportunity to cut out the middleman. The writing that is drying fast on the walls of change is a more hyper local real time social content driven net means a more efficient consumer search. Today the consumer can miss the ILS and other apartment specific media all together and land right in the lap of an astutue apartment owner. The key? Care about your consumer’s experience. Engage them with relevant context and content. The point? You want to move them emotionally so that they [not the new middlemen] create the Juice.
