I have been thinking a lot about the words consumer, prospect and resident lately. It seems as we continue to scale our social being over the likes of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or otherwise; we become more human. That goes for corporations as much as it does people.
Apartment Prospects
Prospects and residents are human beings and or people. Treat them as prospects and you treat them according to your needs. Turn that around and treat them as people and you treat them according to their needs. A prospect is thought of as a head on a bed, a occupancy basis point or a check in the bank – a person on the otherhand is thought of as someone who dreams of a place to call home; a place that he/she can be proud to tell their friends about.
Who are you serving today?
*Photo credit: Spreadshirt.com
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Spammy
That is likely the shortest @mbj comment I have ever read/heard. I had to read it twice to make sure it was real… It’s an exercise in brevity and clarity! Like it!
I’m trying to scale myself more effectively Mike. 🙂
I’ve seen those pop up from time to time as well. If it’s not authentic, don’t do it. Anything less than real isn’t worth it.
On Foursquare, right? One of the worst things to happen to Foursquare for apartments, IMHO. Never like to see this and see it all too often.
Hard to argue with you, and Lisa/Heather/Mark, on this Mike. Having worked at Apts.com with some insight into AHL’s strategy, here’s why they do it: experimentation to drive traffic acquisition. What happens if we leave a 4sq tip on every property in our database? How does that impact visibility for those props in Google, in 4sq search or in order locations are returned in their mobile apps? Most importantly, will the link included in this tip to AHL.com improve their PageRank and drive organic traffic growth?
Tactics like these caused me to roll my eyes any number of times when excitedly expressed to me by team AHL, believe me. I openly questioned a lot of what they did, quite frankly, and my roadmap for driving organic traffic growth always looked pretty different from theirs.
That said, it’s hard to argue with the results AHL has delivered in the past 2 years in terms of traffic and leads to properties advertising with them and Apts.com. Where Rentwiki and many other ILS startups have failed, they succeeded, with a totally bootstrapped business. Playing around the edges like this definitely was/is the backbone of their traffic acquisition strategy and while many of their initiatives go nowhere, they are net positive historically.
It’s not the approach I would take, is certainly opportunistic and does not add anything to the 4sq user experience. But, I can’t throw them under the bus for the experiment.
So, here’s the question to you as a property manager: do these fairly trivial spammy tactics override the possible lead benefit to your properties they may deliver when making your buying decisions? Either answer is valid, IMO…
TG
In this instance, the benefit for the 4Sq user isn’t necessarily the tip itself. The benefit comes in the external link that leaving a Tip allows.
This link to “More Info” next to the tip connects a Foursquare user who might be on their apartment shopping adventure directly with More Info on that particular property. This additional info is all info that Foursquare’s limitations don’t currently allow for – i.e. Rent, floorplans, pictures, email contact form, etc. All of which should be current when the user clicks the link where as the information housed on the Foursquare page, may not be up to date.
To me that’s quite a bit of value regardless of the text found in the tip.
While I can see the view of the tip as “generic” of sorts, I see a ton of value for both the shopper and manager as well as AHL in being able to provide that link. And – I’d rather see positive comments that add positivity to the web community and contrast to the vast majority of negative comments that can be found out there. Most users are only radicalized to comment when they have something negative to say…so while generic…I see value in the contrast to the negative tips that many users may leave – mostly for the community
It can also promote dialogue for other users. Many of the communities that can be found on FourSquare, have little to no conversation within the Tips for they place. A 4Sq user who either agrees or disagrees with this “TIP” may be radicalized to say so after seeing this, where as if there was nothing posted before them – they may be timid about being the first and only to leave a tip. Even this comment, as simple as it may be could radicalize other users to converse.
Lastly let’s look at the TIP itself – “Great Place to Call Home.” While somewhat generic there is validity in it. The emphasis is on it being a great place, which can be an objective judgement made from analysis of a communities photos, location, etc.
If the Tip were something like “I live here and it’s great!” – then I could see that as being spammy, false and insincere. But frankly, that’s not the Tip. Adding simple info in the TIP might be a good way to go, but that might be seen as simply regurgitated information. Personally seeing something positive, although generic, speaks to me more than seeing regurgitated information.
I can see either side of this, but the tipping point for me is that the link adds tremendous value.
“Where Rentwiki and many other ILS startups have failed, they succeeded, with a totally bootstrapped business.” Huh???
I wasn’t aware that RentWiki “failed.” Or was that what that sentence was actually saying?