We chatted with FPI Management’s Jill McNiesh, Social Media & Reputation Manager for the Pacific Northwest, and asked her for 5 things a property can do to directly and positively impact their online reputation management efforts.
Tag Archives: close more leases
Howdy Jack! Curb Appeal for the Season
While autumn brings beautiful colors to the foliage on our properties, it also ushers in some new opportunities to make a unique impression, particularly around Halloween! Pumpkins are prime this time of year, and they can make a festive addition to your already great curb appeal. Most properties will put out an iconic Jack-o-Lantern, but here are some ideas to take pumpkins beyond the usual your property this year:
Building Your Digital Message
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!
The Madonna Approach: Say What You Need
What is it that you want? You might be surprised by how many people in this world have no idea how to answer that question. We focus so often on the things that are disappointing us, making us unhappy, or angering us that we lose sight of our own goals. Without an endpoint, we cannot create a map to our success.
Once you finally do know what you want or where you’re going, the challenge of asking other people arises. If you don’t know who to ask to get what you want, then start asking people who they think you should talk to. If you’re not asking for what you want because of pride, that’s a tougher problem to fix, because you have to make a decision whether or not your pride is more important than your goal. (Psst! Your pride should always be second to your goals!)
Personal Power – Improve Yours Now
Power Poses:
People are often more influenced by how they feel about you rather than by what you’re saying.
According to Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy, holding your body in “high-power” poses for short time periods can summon an extra surge of power (through increased testosterone) andsense of well-being (through lower levels of cortisol).
“We used to think that emotion ended on the face,” Dr. Cuddy says. “Now there is established research showing that while it’s true that facial expressions reflect how you feel, you can also ‘fake it until you make it.’ In other words, you can smile long enough (two minutes) that it makes you feel happy. This work extends that finding on facial feedback, which is decades old, by focusing on postures and measuring neuroendocrine levels.”
Are You Close to Closing More Leases?
How is your occupancy these days? A New Year brings new opportunities to raise rents, retain more residents, increase traffic, and close more leases. But how many leases are you really closing? Are you closing 50% of your prospect traffic…25%?… even less? Are the challenges of increasing costs, online reputation, and market competition driving your closing ratio down? It doesn’t have to be that way. Raise your closing percentage back to amazing with these Take5 closing tips.
Multifamily Must Sees
The art of communicating has now been enhanced by thousands of apps we can add to our hand-held mobile devices.
In the past, graphics, photo editing and video production were all expensive time consuming processes understood only by the experts – today there is an app for that! Everyone expresses their inner Steven Spielberg and Ansel Adams using these new platforms. Photo sharing has become the vocabulary of today’s relationships. From Instagram, Flickr, Picasa, Kaptur, to Tumblr, everywhere you look are photo sharing sites with millions of uploads per second.
All Cowbell, No Guitar
There is a fantastic old Saturday Night Live skit that centers around the need for more cowbell in the Blue Oyster Cult song, Don’t Fear the Reaper. “Fellas,” says a brilliant Christopher Walken, “I’m tellin’ you, you’re gonna’ want that cowbell.”
It’s true folks. You’re gonna’ want that cowbell. Those little things that you do that make your community stand apart – chilled towels in the fitness center, package delivery, truly great resident events, an active and interactive Facebook page – they’re as signature to you as the overindulgent cowbell beat is to Don’t Fear the Reaper.
Make Your Content Pin-Worthy
The most important thing to consider with Pinterest is how people use the site. It’s virtual window shopping, so anything you do on Pinterest needs to center around extremely strong visuals — the goal is to capture someone’s attention and draw them into your “storefront” (click through to your website).
Apartment companies can create their own Pinterest pages (business.pinterest.com), but they should also be thinking about how they can create their own “pin-worthy” visuals. What can you showcase on your website that looks so great that your visitors might want to pin it to one of their boards?
Rent & Retain’s Reading Suggestions
We love companies that spend time on training and professional development, but we also know that some companies just don’t have those resources quite yet. We’d like to help you with that by continuing with Rent & Retain’s Book Club! In each edition of Rent & Retain, we’ll be posting three books, one for each month in the quarter, which we think are great professional development reads for people in the property management industry. Join us in reading these books, and tell us what you think of them on our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/rentandretain during our book post each month. We want to know what was useful to you, what good ideas you found, or what behaviors that month’s book inspired you to change or begin. Did you agree with the author or not? Was it a good read? We want to hear from you!
