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Apartment Marketers: Afraid to Blog?

Below is a link to a story that resonated with me relative to a conversation that was broached on Mike Whaling’s: Apartment Marketing Gone Digital’s last episode. I believe it was Eric Brown that made the point about the lack of conversation about blogs as it relates to apartment marketing at NAAs 2010 convention.

Apartment Blogging: Fear

I agree to some extent with Eric that there is a dearth of examples with apartment blogging in the Apartment Space as I think the offerings are growing everyday. For example – Mills Properties – is on the verge of launching seven regional blogs in addition to revamping the Mills employee-centric blog. In addition, JC Hart, Trillium, Paragon, Village Green and PCMG have ventured down the path of blogging and from my perspective are doing a good job of it. I applaud the fact that these firms have taken the endeavor on as an in-house marketing function.

With that, I feel it necessary to make the point that I am not an advocate of ILSs that offer blogging as a part of their advertising package. And, time should be of no excuse. I would rather hear the fear stuff like; I am afraid of what others might think of my choice of topic, my grammar, my spelling or what if I can’t think of anything to write about. Not that those things are not important but – time as an excuse – save it. This is something you make time for at the expense of other things.

Apartment Non-Blogging

To the topic at hand – the following post was offered up on the Conversation Agent Blog a couple weeks ago. In it Valeria Moltoni suggests alternatives to blogging that could and are effective in building your digital footprint. If you are not into creating original and or mashed up blog content – this read is for you. The premise is that participation is an equally compelling form of content creation. She offers some real practical applications using LinkedIn, Twitter and others. So – if you just can’t bring yourself to do it and you elect not to farm it out to a third party, try this method.

Enjoy and let us know your thoughts in the comments below –

Conversation Agent: Blogging at Work if You Don’t Have a Blog

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Participation is content because it is what will activate your content in the context of the conversation. Remember when you worried about nobody coming to your blog? It’s the same with content in other places – you’ve got to interact to activate it.

0 Responses

  1. We at PCMG out of Ft. Myers, FL have been blogging for about 4 months not with great results. Our site traffic continues to grow. We post about twice a week with content ranging from local information and moving tips to apartment decorating and energy savings.

    It adds such a dynamic tool to your site and opens up communication with others. Then plug that into social media tools, your blog becomes the all powerful hub.

    Thanks for the post Mike.

    Cheers!

    Reply

    1. Ryan

      Thank you for sharing your experience –

      I am a bit confused – you suggest that you have not had great results but then you go on to share what sounds like some really great things. Did I just read that wrong?

      How are you handling the posts – are they done by your team or a team of residents? Do you pay for the posts? Are you re-purposing other content or creating original works?

      I applaud your efforts and agree with your all powerful hub remark

      Have a compelling week and thank you again for taking the time to add some value here.

      Reply

      1. My mistake, I'm not sure how that “Not” got in there. We have had great result and are planing to step up the posting to see what type of effect it has.

        Right now I am doing about 90% of the posting. About 50% of that is original content and another 50% topical articles from places like ezinearticles.com.

        Reply

    3. Ryan, Hi
      Can you share what kind of monthly visitors you are achieving and how often you are posting per month?

      Reply

  7. I will focus on the time point you bring out Mike. @mbj Mark Juleen talks about this often and he is quite correct that time really should not be an excuse. We have no choice but to explore options that will improve our company's footprint. Otherwise we would still be using smoke signals and yodeling from mountain tops in order to send a message. Blogging only helps improve that footprint.

    Reply

    1. Great analogy –

      Mark is 100% right in that respect. We found time to create newspaper ads back in the day. I can remember going back and forth for hours with my regional managers perfecting ads that would run for one day. Imagine what a person could do with that time today.

      It really is a matter of carving out the sacred cows and creating space for this as it's not going away and in my humble opinion – it's not something you farm out to a third party. We must find the time and own it!

      Have a smashing weekend and thank you again for finding time to drop a line or two.

      Reply

  8. I will focus on the time point you bring out Mike. @mbj Mark Juleen talks about this often and he is quite correct that time really should not be an excuse. We have no choice but to explore options that will improve our company's footprint. Otherwise we would still be using smoke signals and yodeling from mountain tops in order to send a message. Blogging only helps improve that footprint.

    Reply

  12. Hey Mike,
    Just a couple of points here, we have seen a pretty big difference in return with increased posts, meaning at say 8 posts per month = a certain result, and say 12 per month = a greater result. At our Urbane Life blog, once we built up to 35-40 posts per month, our readership and traffic really grew. The point being, more content is better and creates more traffic, assuming it is of high enough quality that folks actually read it.

    With that we were fooling around with a blog project earlier in the year and were doing (80) posts per month and drove the readership numbers to a little over 11,000 monthly visitors in about four months.

    Not sure if any of that is helpful, and it is off your topic, but wanted to share.

    Reply

  15. I disagree with Valeria's post, to an extent. While participation in the form of saving bookmarks, sending tweets and posting to a Facebook page may qualify as content and may help you grow a following, it will only have a limited impact if you're not finding ways to drive at least some of that traffic directly back to pages on your own site (e.g. blog posts).

    I think that participation can be a great way to extend your reach and bring attention to your efforts, but it's probably not worth much if you don't have a strong central hub where you can capture people's attention (and maybe convert a few into fans/leads/customers). There are very few brands with a big presence in social media that aren't trying to drive readers to a website, a blog or an email signup form.

    To your original point, I was indeed very surprised at the lack of conversation at the conference around some of the things that can move the needle the most – blogs, photos, videos, and most importantly, a message that actually resonates with your audiences. I appreciate that you tuned into our show and picked up that conversation so we can continue it here.

    Reply

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