Jane Griffith, Director of Marketing at Pinnacle called recently to talk about the importance of monitoring and responding to Better Business Bureau (BBB) listings.

BBB and the Chamber of Commerce business listings and reviews are old school. But they’re online, user-generated content. They’re SEO-optimized, locally searchable and validated by a staff of experts. In other words, they still matter and can make or break a potential customer’s impressions. Renters, investors, lenders – they can all find your properties’ reputation at www.bbb.org.

Do you know how your property ratings are affecting public perceptions of your brand?

Bad ratings at the BBB or Chamber of Commerce can happen to anyone. I checked four San Francisco properties owned by one of the most prestigious apartment owners. One had an ‘F’ failing rating due to non-response to complaints. The good news is that complaints and disputes with the BBB can be constructively resolved.

Jane kindly offered to share with the industry a step-by-step process for checking and responding to BBB reviews and ratings (use link below to download).  If you don’t want to monitor reviews yourself, ask your ad agency or ILS if reputation management is service they can look at providing for you in the future.

By the way, Jane and Donald Davidoff, Group Vice President, Strategic Systems at Archstone will be co-presenting at the Apartment Internet Marketing Conference (AIM) 2010.  We hope to see you there!

Very best regards,

Steve Lefkovits
Executive Producer, AIM Conference

Jane’s BBB Process (click to download)

Register for AIM 2010

PS – BBB and Chamber of Commerce listings can provide great search engine optimization.  At last year’s AIM Conference Chris Sherman, one of the country’s leading experts on search laid out a step by step approach to improving a business’s visibility to the search engines.  First on his list was leveraging Chamber of Commerce and local community guides.

Even if you’re not going to do it yourself, be sure to ask your agencies and listings vendors if they’ve seen Chris’s presentation.  He is executive editor of Search Engine Land and producer of the internationally acclaimed SMX Events.  His presentation contains new product ideas, competitive research and insights into changing local business search behavior that might interest them – and you.  Check it out:

Chris Sherman’s AIM 2009 Presentation

The AIM 2010 Conference theme – Many Marketing Channels: One Goal – reflects the needs of owner/managers and their service providers to master many channels to drive and validate their impact on net operating income. AIM 2010 will feature cutting-edge business education designed to help simplify using multiple marketing channels to achieve a targeted ROI occupancy. With more than 200 companies that own and operate apartments in attendance, it’s an event you can’t afford to miss!

We’ll be meeting at the beautiful Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort and Spa in Huntington Beach, California. The location is fantastic and has to be seen to be believed. It’s right on the beach with lots to see and do in the immediate area. Best yet, it’s a family-friendly resort so bring the family and stay the weekend! There’s more information about the Hyatt and how to reserve your guest room at the special AIM Conference rate at www.aimconf.com. Be sure to make your reservations soon before our room block sells out.

There’s an exceptional line-up of presenters this year. Keynote conference speakers include Google’s Sam Sebastian, Director of Local and B2B Markets; Greg Sterling, Founding Principal of Sterling Market Intelligence; Danny Sullivan, Editor in Chief of Search Engine Land; Gary Angel, President of Semphonic; and Vivek Sodera, Co-Founder of RapLeaf. AIM 2010 also features intermediate and advanced sessions specifically developed with topics and speakers that address the challenges of using multiple marketing channels.

And we’re grateful to our sponsors who make it all happen. They include Apartment All-Stars, Apartment Finder, Apartment Guide, Benson Media, Capture the Market, First Advantage SafeRent, G5 Search Marketing, Grace Hill, Level One, Move, Multi-Housing New, Numeric Analytics, On-Site.com, Property Solutions International, RealPage, Realty DataTrust (Founding Sponsor), rentbits, Spherexx.com, The Rainmaker Group, and Yardi.

True to its reputation, the AIM Conference is going to be packed with educational value, growth opportunities and plenty of networking. We’ll see you there!

Register here for AIM 2010.

Click here to view AIM 2010 press release.

A digression.  I recently bought my wife a car.  I searched five web sites, and then looked up the dealer’s site to check his hours and location.  As I sat there signing the purchase documents, I wondered, who gets credit for bringing us in?  I asked the salesman.  He laughed.  He said he gets the credit.  He offered that the dealer just looks at his total marketing spend per sale. In their view car buyers use lots of sources to gather information.  He explained that multiple sources provide validation, trust and different perspectives.  Their research showed that different people absorbed different take-aways based on the source and the user experience.

As budgets get tighter, the struggle gets fiercer between apartment operator, their lead tracking and their ad vendors.  But is the struggle warranted?  Is each lead a zero-sum exercise?  Or are there more sophisticated ways that big advertisers look at the value of their advertising placements?

At AIM 2010 we will try to answer “Where do leads come from?” for companies that advertise in more than one place.  The answers are likely to lead to collaboration, data sharing and new ways of looking at effectively reaching prospective residents.

AIM 2009’s highest rated speaker is returning - Gary Angel, President of Semphonic, an international web analytics consultancy.  Gary will be just one of our speakers to address the topic. (Gary’s 2009 advanced presentation on different types of web analytics and how they’re used is found here.)

I hope you’ll come to AIM 2010.  Apartment companies and sponsor companies alike will benefit from the presentations that touch on more sophisticated understandings of lead attribution.

And of course, there will be so much more!

AIM 2010 (click here for more info)

Who: Marketing, Pricing and Operations Executives in the multifamily industry (owners and managers and sponsors only)

What: Apartment Internet Marketing Conference 2010.  Intermediate and advanced educational sessions on marketing, revenue management, transactional technology and more.

Where: Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort and Spa, Huntington
Beach, CA (Orange County)

When: April 28 – 30, 2010

Registration: $595  register now

Apartment Finder, a comprehensive resource for people seeking residential rental space, and Yelp, an online urban city guide that features reviews from its members, have joined forces to collaborate on an upcoming webinar “Yelp: Managing Your Online Reputation.” Experts will discuss how apartment operators can manage their community’s online reputation and learn the most up-to-date information on apartment ratings.

This is an exciting announcement. ApartmentFinder’s presentation of this webinar is a huge breakthrough as the apartment industry has historically avoided reviews and review sites. ApartmentFinder is a `legacy’ internet listing service that started with a print platform, but is evolving by utilizing social media and teaching folks to use the latest communication techniques to reach new audiences.

Yelp is a rapidly growing website that has presences in major markets throughout the US, Canada, UK and Ireland. “Yelpers” have written more than 8 million local reviews, making Yelp the leading US local guide for real word of mouth on everything from boutiques and mechanics to restaurants and dentists. Yelp extends its reach through social networks and mobile applications.

This webinar is very interesting, showing a change in posture from the apartment industry.

Click here to register now!

The 2010 AIM Conference is right around the corner. Join us April 28-30. Click here to register today!

Two years ago at AIM, experts from Sitewire, a full-service digital advertising agency, did a usability analysis of a renter’s search experience from start to finish. They recently caught our eye again.  Sitewire just published a fascinating post on juicing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results that leverages eBay ad listings.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a popular and effective way to market your company or services. However, those clicks can add up and result in a costly campaign, often times leaving the marketer wondering how to increase SEO without spending thousands.

Danny Stansfield at Sitewire takes a closer look at how to use eBay to get local Google search listings. He theorizes that by listing your item using keywords that a Google searcher would use as well as an eBay buyer, you can take advantage of eBay’s deep pockets to substantially increase your SEO on Google.

Stansfield is in the process of testing his theory one step further by testing how this strategy could affect local listings in Google.  While perhaps not directly applicable to apartment marketers, the theory of placing keywords in a larger site’s ad listings is worth thinking about carefully.  All of the apartment ILS sites can provide this same function.

Read more about Getting Local Google Search Listings with eBay here.

How changes in renter behavior are affecting apartment marketing strategies

Christina Aragon, the director of strategy and marketing at Rent.com, offers up great marketing advice for multifamily managers in the whitepaper ‘Maximizing Apartment Marketing Return on Investment: How changes in renter behavior are affecting apartment marketing strategies.’

Huge drops in employment and home ownership across the United States have dramatically altered the multifamily housing industry. Because of this, trends in renter search behavior are clearly impacting the effectiveness of apartment marketing strategies and tactics. For savvy Internet marketers, this scenario creates opportunities. But it could be a potential pitfall for those who do not adapt to changing conditions.

For apartment marketers to effectively maximize the return on apartment marketing investments, they must understand where and how their prospects are searching for apartments. They also must understand how to capture and analyze the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and their true costs. Aragon addresses these two areas and helps incorporate fluctuating renter behavior into marketing strategies.

‘Maximizing Apartment Marketing Return on Investment’ provides insights for readers to make the most of their advertising budgets and maximize marketing ROI by looking at these key points:

1. Where rental prospects are searching for apartments
2. How rental prospects are searching for apartments, both on search engines and on apartment Internet listing sites
3. How to implement strategies for developing online marketing campaigns and fine-tuning ROI calculations
4. Change implications in renter search behavior for apartment Internet marketers

Click here to read the full report.

Written by Lisa Trosien, President of ApartmentExpert.com

The Internet Listing Services (ILS’s) haven’t had it all that good lately. They’ve been getting some pretty close scrutiny on the Multifamily Insiders website, as well as some discussion at national conferences including NMHC Tech and the Multifamily Brainstorming Conference.

Just to make sure we have full disclosure here, I have worked for many of the ILS’s, either as a paid speaker or a paid consultant. Am I currently under contract with any of them? No.

In the interest of fairness, I want to add a few points to the ILS debate. These points are all based upon my opinion after having numerous discussions with the ILS community over the years.

1. Ratings: All of the ILS’s are very much aware that renters want ratings. However, they (the ILS’s) have received significant pushback from their advertisers (NOT their renter/users) on the whole idea of ratings. The majority of their advertisers have been vocal in saying that they do not want ratings on the ILS sites. Rock, meet hard place for the ILS’s. Years ago, some of the ILS’s used to advertise on Apartment Ratings. Why? The site receives a tremendous amount of renter traffic, exceeding some of the smaller ILS’s on some occasions. Their advertising on this site was dropped however, again due to pressure from advertisers.
2. It appears, to me at least, that the majority of the ILS’s are continually striving to keep changing, upgrading and improving not only their product, but the end user experience. Apartment Guide was the first ILS to come out with an iPhone application. Apartment Finder launched their Community Sherpa product, in an effort to help property management companies pursue a social media strategy. For Rent just launched the first augmented reality application for the ILS’s, yet another way to improve the renter experience.
3. Most companies who choose to work with an ILS never try to leverage their relationship. The ILS’s have a wealth of knowledge about your renters at their fingertips such as the top ten search items for your market. Have you asked what these are? If not, why not? Have you asked them how renter behavior changed due to the recession? Rent.com even released a white paper on the topic, loaded with great information on number of searches and more. ILS’s can tell you how many properties the average renter views, how many they contact, what features are most helpful to you in gaining more ‘page views’ and more. (Coupons can increase your leads by 18%; including accurate pricing can increase them by 30%).
4. One of the biggest criticisms of the ILS approach to the rental market is the fact that all property ads basically look the same. And I agree, that’s clearly an issue for companies that have been able to successfully build a brand. Unfortunately for those forward thinking companies who’ve managed to do this, they are in the minority (on an national basis) and in their case, they might not be the best properties served by an ILS. Taking an extraordinary approach with their extraordinary brand is smart marketing on their part. I will throw in one caution, however. For potential renters coming in from outside the immediate market, the personality that these companies have established might not be immediately discernible to someone who is simply searching for an apartment home with geography, size and price as their qualifiers. In that case, the ILS model would serve them and I believe, serve them well.

Lastly, I must say that I fully appreciate and support the discussion that has been started by folks on the ILS model. Pushing the ILS’s to improve the experience for both renters and property management companies and owners is only going to improve the performance of the product. In NO WAY am I
criticizing those who have been willing to ‘take up the charge’ so to speak. They have actually publicly stated what many were ‘whispering about’ for years and for that and more, I applaud them.

Let’s keep the debate going and help to increase leads and leases for all of us.

Lisa Trosien
President
ApartmentExpert.com

Multifamily operators and property managers are always struggling with lead-to-lease tracking; especially now, when Internet marketing plays such a key role in the promotion of properties. Just what leads are coming from Internet listing services (ILS) providers? What do all these “clicks” mean? How accurate are these numbers from the ILSs?

Mark Juleen, vice president and director of marketing and training of Indiana-based J.C. Hart Co., shook things up when he posted a video questioning the Rent.com’s lead tracking on industry blog sites including theapartmentnerd.com and multifamilyinsiders.com. (Responses from Peggy Abkemeier, president of Rent.com are included on the blogs.)  A recent article from Multifamily Executive takes a look at this debate and Juleen’s questioning of ILS practices. ILS pricing and reporting methodologies are being put under the microscope as multifamily operators struggle to fully understand the leads ILSs are charging back as part of their normal billing cycle.

Last month, we posted a blog Does Anyone Still Use MySpace?, which summarized an article from the Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge about a study of the users of social networks: who they are, and what they are doing on these sites.

One fascinating finding in that piece was that people are in fact using MySpace – 65 million to be exact. It just may not be who you think. According to the research noted in the article, it’s because MySpace users populate smaller cities and communities in the south and central US. “MySpace has a PR problem because its users are in places where they don’t have much contact with people who create news that gets read by others,” said Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, the Harvard Business School associate professor featured in the article.

And recently, a related story aired on NPR about the social divide on social media. The piece examines the use of social media among high school students at The Urban School, an elite high school in San Francisco, and art students at Southern Exposure, a San Francisco community gallery. While all students are living in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the US, there still seems to be a divide on social media. This story suggests that social status and race are the reasons for this online social stratification.

The majority of students at The Urban School are part of the group of 90 million Facebook users and held somewhat elitist attitudes about social media, one student saying, “No one uses MySpace. [Facebook] is safer and more high class.” Another student said of MySpace, “The only people who use it are trashy people.”

The students over at Southern Exposure have their own thoughts on who’s using social media networks, one stating, “Not to be racist or anything, but there’s more white kids on Facebook.”

While this is just a microcosm of the real world, research (and a lot of it) is supporting the idea of social stratification on social media. One social media researcher, danah boyd (name spelled in all lower case) thinks the online social world is dividing up – just like the real world – into neighborhoods.

“Young people – and for the most part adults as well – don’t really interact online with strangers,” says boyd. “They talk to people they already know. You have environments in which people are divided by race, divided by class, divided by lifestyle.”

boyd theorizes that business analysts have been dismissing MySpace because they do not belong to the social groups using that site. Because studies show that lower income users are more likely to click on ads, boyd feels MySpace is an excellent place for advertising

What do you think?

Click here to read the full article.

As we try to wrap our minds around how to use social media networks to our advantage, it’s just as important to understand the audience. Just who are these users of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter? How are people using LinkedIn? Is anyone using MySpace anymore?

A recent article, “Understanding Users of Social Networks” by Sean Silverthorne in Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge looks at the surprising findings of Harvard Business School associate professor, Mikolaj Jan Piskorski (shown at left) regarding his study of the users of online social networks. Through these findings companies can develop strategies to leverage various online networks for profit. Silverthorne’s article highlights five major insights regarding online social networks.

“No One Uses MySpace.” It turns out that little phrase isn’t true. In fact, there are 70 million MySpace users, not too far off from the 90 million on Facebook. So why isn’t MySpace getting any love? According to Piskorski, it’s because MySpace users populate smaller cities and communities in the south and central US. “MySpace has a PR problem because its users are in places where they don’t have much contact with people who create news that gets read by others.”

Then Came Twitter. Piskorski found that 90 percent of all “tweets” were created by 10 percent of users. More women are on Twitter than men but they tweet at about the same rate. Only people who are willing to put themselves out there publicly to others that they may not know use Twitter.

Addressing Network Failures. Online networks are successful when they point out the operational shortcomings of offline networks. For example, you might be less apt to keep up with classmates if you relied on reunions, telephone calls and mail, but online you can be up to speed on your friends’ lives very easily.

Empirical Evidence. Why are people on social networks? What are they doing? Piskorski has found that 70 percent of users look at pictures or view other’s profiles. He also discovered some major gender differences in site usage. For example, the biggest usage category was men looking at women they don’t know, followed by men looking at women they do know. Women on the other hand look at women they do know.

From Social Media to Social Strategy. Piskorski says that executives are treating social network sites like websites, as another channel to get people to click through. Users on social sites do not click through on advertising. These are social sites and to be successful, you need to think socially. The mindset needs to change from social media to social strategy. Firms need to help people fulfill their social needs online, and they can do that by making products more social and leveraging group dynamics.

Click here to read the complete article.