multifamily maniac
Apartment Podcasting Marketing
“For corporate marketers, podcasting is low-hanging fruit.” – Paul Gillin
Low Hanging Fruit
Caught this video over at businessgrow where Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner throws down his 18 to 24 month content marketing prediction. It’s an interesting thought and one that I am trying to wrap my head around as it relates to marketing apartments. His thought comes in near the end of the four-minute vid:
Your wondering about apartment podcast marketing multifamily manic,
M
Love: Be the Difference that Makes a Difference
You will always be the second best anyone else. – Leo Buscaglia
Leo, in his book titled: Love, tells an amazing story as it relates to having love for oneself. I intend to give you the very much paraphrased version. He takes you on a visual journey back to grade school. He has you remember the anticipation you held in your little heart and mind over the art teacher coming around to your classroom. It was that time where you got to put down the lead and pick up the oily Crayola. It was time to put method, pragmatism, social order and conformity to rest so as to wake up the wild and the crazy. It was time to do the thing you love. Or, so you thought….
I Don’t Love Your Tree
His story picks up in description of the art teacher drawing a simple tree on the chalk board and instructing the class to follow suit by replicating it on the blank sheet of paper in front of them. Two lines mirrored just inches apart and headed for the top of the page. Lines that lend themselves to branches. And, a line that mimics a camel hump repeated in a circular motion starting on the right and finding itself up and around nearing the top of the page and back down to a point where it intersects with the vertical line on the left. Boom – it’s a tree. Yes – you did it. You and everyone else except for Junior.
You quite presumably know where this is going. Yes – Leo inserts ‘that guy/gal’ into the story. He calls him Junior. And, Junior produces a tree with the love and care that Michael Angelo gave in creating some of the finest art the world has ever seen. The love that a kid gives to choosing his yellow, green, orange and magenta with overtones of red and shades of grey, black and just enough brown. The love that creates the freakiest most awesome and over the top tree that art teacher, the class and the world at large has ever seen. That love that gets shunned, booed, kicked and yeah butted right out of the room. The love that gets you remarks like – I don’t love your tree…
Please Conform
Conformity kicks the teeth right out of love. It asks a maintenance technician to master electricity when plumbing is his first love. It’s asks our best maintenance supervisor to lead the troops to the top of the mountain and into war when tinkering and solving mechanical problems is his first love. It asks our best leasing people to master accounting when servicing people is his/her first love. It’s telling someone who the best way to do something is the way that you do it. Or the way the company does it. Or the way your dad used to do it. It’s the continued ripping of life right out of people the same way it was ripped out of Junior.
Punch Line
Starting today – Don’t give up your tree…
Have a non-conforming weekend,
Your, never giving up my tree, multifamily manic,
M
Apartment Marketing: Real or Just Great Storytelling?
In all fairness, I have not taken the time to view an episode of the show Ghost Adventures . In face I just learned about it this past Thursday when Mary Korte of Mills Neighborhood Blog fame wrote it. It immediately got me thinking about the topic of storytelling, the following quote being the real catalyst;
Zak, Nick, and Aaron go to some of the scariest places to try and get answers and information about the people who used to inhabit the spaces. These guys aren’t your average investigators. They are not afraid to go places where other paranormal investigators refuse to tread. From apparitions to demons, these guys find it all!
Real or Just Great Storytelling
First, let’s give Zak, Nick and Aaron props for profitting on one of the most fundamental emotions that makes the world go around – fear. It’s well know that we are motivated by the pursuit of pleasure or the quest to avoid pain and fear plays a major roll in that. Can we profit off the back of fear like these three and all associated with their show have so brilliantly done?
Let’s face it, we humans have been scarying the hell out of each other from the beginning of time. You read about it in every kind of fiction and non-fiction. You hear the folktales and hear the creepy stories while sitting around the campfires we stoke up with every single passing summer. It’s just plain fun. Persoanlly speaking, I get a real charge out of scaring my kids into a frenzy through stories and outright hide and seek styled shockfests. And, they love it too. Ok, after they get over the initial reactions. But, do they belive it? Na – they just think I am a fun dad. And, good chance they will carry on the tradition with their kids.
Lesson for Apartment Marketing?
Is there a chance we could sell more apartments by scaring the wits out of the people that walk in our front doors? Not likely, but we may be able to calm the fears they have of renting a new home. Espcically, those that have been burned in the past by bad service, bad attitudes and bad storytelling.
Everything is marketing and storytelling is the vehicle that moves people to action.
What is our lesson? Glean what you can from Zak, Nick and Aaron in the way of storytelling. Make their tactics and strategies your own. Add a dose of personality. Entertain the people that choose to live in your apartment communities. Consider your office the theater, your desk, tour route and display apartment the stage and you are the main character. Act accordingly and tell some mind blowing stories.
Game on –
Your – beliving not in ghosts but rather the power of storytelling – multifamily maniac,
M
