Apartment blog
#Apartmentmarketing: Blog for Juice
No matter what, the very first piece of social media real estate I’d start with is a blog. – Chris Brogan
Blog About Everything Unrelated
United Blogs of Benetton is one of my very favorite blogs. It was one of my early inspirations when I started writing a multifamily industry related one back in 2005. The thing that struck me most about the blog is that it had absolutely nothing to do with their core business of fashion. In fact, I remember reading a post they wrote back around that time that suggested their reason for doing so.
I can’t find the post so I am doing my best to recall here. The gist was that they thought that the real value of blogging was to give the people that read it the essence of what they valued as an organization. In other words, they wanted to translate the values of their organization by way of compelling and worldly content.
Our First Company Related Blog
When we started our first company blog in 05′ we did just that. But in lieu of a forward facing, community gathering effort; we brought out the personality of EQRs Portland Portfolio. We called the blog: Portland Rocks Newsletter and the content consisted of stories about our teams. Be it work related or a personal experience we allowed just about everything.
Everything that is except for content about EQR or any specifically related to our apartment communities. Our chief aim back then was to invite people into relationship. Whether they bought from us or not was not the point of the blog. If they did, we considered it icing on the cake.
And, fathom this for a minute. It had nothing to do with SEO or SEM back then. Whoa!
It’s All About the Juice
Fast forward to today – everyone has a blog and everyone is jockeying for the first page of Google search. And, we all do it for Google Juice. We wrap it in 800 count Egyptian cotton [Read: adding value or enhancing experience].
All that being said, I agree 100% with Chris B.
AI: Start a blog today – if you have not already!
M
#Apartmentmarketing: Waiting
“If you wait until there is another case study in your industry, you will be to late.” Seth Godin
It goes against the old axiom, ‘good things come to those who wait.’ Anymore you get cooked in the squat if you wait too long. With the advent of the Internet came an accelerating pace of change. Moore’s Law even exists, to some extent, in the world of property management. We are seeing newer, bigger, better and flashier ways of attracting new people and keeping relationship with them over a long bit of time. It’s nuts out there.
Oh, and we have a blog…
Multifamily: Second Mover’s Advantage
At Mills Properties, we like to think that we are exercising the second mover advantage. While we did have our company [internal] blog in place nearly three years ago now; we were a bit delayed in getting our forward facing blog out to pasture. It did put us behind the eight ball and in the same respect, it allowed us to make observation of several other industry movers and shakers. That time and those observations gave us the ability to design a strategy that has yielded some very good results for us.
At just six months in we have achieved the following with our blog:
It’s been the result of some hard work and dedication on the part of many people, first and foremost. Beyond that I would suggest that it’s been the result of setting back and making some observations, learning from others experiments and applying as much as we could.
Today’s call to action – wait. Sometimes, it is okay to wait, watch, learn, strategize, act and fail fast. We did!
What have you gained by waiting?
Mills Properties: Blog Stats
Thought it would be fun to share our Neighborhood Blog stats from time to time in a snap shot view.
Melissa P wrote about the team in her post titled: (B)usiness (L)ove and (O)ther (G)uts whereby she laid out the overarching premise of our new marketing strategy.
Our first blog post went live on November 24, 2010 and since that time we have achieved the following.
Stats are accurate as of lat May, 2011.
Business, Love, and Other Guts
In the beginning…
It began with strategy. We set out to re-think our marketing. Scratch that. We set out to re-think Everything. Our mission includes Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and a new website for the online world as well as other off-line ingredients.
So the first question was: Who shares our passion and do we have the support we need to be successful? – Yes.
Here we go!
Our delectable combination…Business, Love, and Other Guts. (This combination is true for all our social media and other endeavors, not just blogs)
b.l.o.g.
business: Apartments, the experience of
love:
- People
- St. Louis
- Apartments (crucial that your business falls in the love category as well)
other guts: The fire in your guts that is dying to come out. Passionate people with everything to say.
And then we blogged…
We selected Mills associates who are creative, passionate, and gifted writers – they all have a common b.l.o.g. (Learn more about them here) And then, we gave them the matches…
We knew we had a talented group of associates but our first blog posts were INCREDIBLE, and the next ones, equally amazing. I feel like the best is yet to come!
Our quest is still in its infancy, but every day I am excited to see what we will ignite next. Check out their work at millsapartments.net/neighborhoods…
Tell us what you think!
