URL, ISL, Company websites, printed brochures and business cards on paper — these are all standard operating procedures for apartment community collateral. It’s time to step out of the print world and re-present your community digitally to fit into the new world of our mobile consumer.

Mobile will be the first screen for web access with the majority of your future residents. 66% of mobile downloads are video and over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube—that’s almost an hour for every person on Earth. 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute. How much of it features your property? According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more US adults ages 18-34 than TV/cable network. Today Netflix allows you to surf YouTube on your TV!

(http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html).

What can you “show” over the phone, by text and digitally without paper? What are you doing to evolve your text, e-mail, video and audio presence when communicating with future residents about your community?

Do something different for 2014! Here are some creative new resources to re-present your community! Add Video to your business card with a vCard. Wikipedia has a great definition of a v-card: VCard is a file format standard for electronic business cards. VCards are often attached to e-mail messages, but they can be exchanged in other ways, such as on the World Wide Web or instant messaging.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard).

Eyejot.com – turn your business card into a digital v-card for only .99 cents. Eyejot.com has a new mobile app that allows you to create and send video business cards. Include your contact information and links to your social networks. An importable VCF is created and included, along with a QR barcode and link to a Google map of where contact was made. The Eyejot vCard app also turns into a virtual name badge when rotated. You can download the app from iTunes.

Picmonkey.com – brings new life to old photos with artistic overlays and captions for FREE. Add a drop shadow and finish with a museum frame. Change the mood with interesting lighting and texture. This used to be only available for expensive professional Photoshop experts – today you can do it all with picmonkey! To re-present your community begin by adding more interest to your photographs. This site is less than $3 a month and a picture is worth a thousand words. To the right is a before and after using pic monkey. I use this to create many of the photos I use to make video brochures in the next idea with Animoto.

Music Video Brochure / Animoto.com – Turn photos and copy from brochures into a Music Video Brochure for FREE!! Add area images, media photos from your community’s city’s website and pictures of happy residents to give future residents a powerful persuasive moment instead of paper or a flat motionless, silent pictures of your website!!! Check out these examples: example 1 | example 2

This is part 1 in a 3 part series. Get started with these and I will GIVE you MORE!!!!!! Send me copies of your creations and look for new tools to re-present your community in the next issue of Rent & Retain!!!