When was the last time you heard a really good story? I’m talking about one that absolutely captivated you, one that evoked genuine emotion, or one that made you really think or question something. Storytelling is an extricable part of almost every culture in the world, and, in most societies, verbal artistry is revered because entertainment is a high value experience, despite the intangible nature of it.
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.
Pop culture is a powerful ally in marketing, but all too often we try to tug on the most common cultural thread that we can grasp, only to find that our carefully woven marketing plans unravel when wrapped around the lowest common denominator of resident. While this type of broad shotgun approach has been shown to work, it is hardly what could be considered a targeted approach. Tightening in our marketing sights will help us achieve a higher rate of success – this isn’t a case of a good idea versus a bad idea, but rather a good idea versus a better idea!
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?
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!
