First Tuesdays Technology Update

I went to the Clausen Law Group technology update networking event last night. The group meets the first Tuesday of every month at Point Richmond and features a speaker with great work experience and insight into an industry.

The speaker last night was Tony Ruggiero, CEO of FirstOnScene LLC. He started his talk discussing the quality and price differences that the  military is spending on fighter jets.  He turned this around and compared the trends in fighter jet quality and price to the technology industry. He showed how IBM at its rise had some 55K workers, Microsoft had 27K, and eventually down the technology line, Faceboook has 1K workers with 300,000 users (a 1 to 300 employee to user ratio). The phenomena that he expresses here is that technology, when used efficiently costs less, therefore reaping greater profit margins, and requires less man power. The jump in technology that has made programs like Facebook and the iPhone so successful is that these programs were written to pair with API (Application Program Interface). API allows non-paid employees to create tools that will integrate into the open source program.  An  example of an API program for Facebook is Animal Farm,  and an example  of  a program for the iPhone  is the Kindle, as it is an add on created by another company not employed by Apple.

The take away from this meeting: Innovate or Die.  Embrace the latest trends in technology and use them to your advantage (ie. create your own application to integrate into programs such as Facebook and the iPhone and find a way to make money through the benefits of free viral marketing).  For example, Kindle is a free app on the iPhone, but Amazon makes money when consumers purchase and download Kindle books. Tony Ruggiero referenced the fart app for the iPhone. Most thought the idea was ludicrous, but because of the viral spread of the name, and the low cost to download the app for the general public, the .99 application made the owners rich.

Right, time to build my app!

10 Things Social Media Can’t do. Advertising Age by Ochman.

Amid the endless pronouncements about social media — often shortened to “social” these days by consultants trying to sound like they know what they are talking about — is the reality that social media is not a solution, or a sure bet.
Social media can’t:
Substitute for marketing strategy.
A Twitter campaign or a Facebook page that announces your weekly specials is not a marketing strategy.

Succeed without top management buy-in.
Social media requires a way of thinking that includes willingness to listen to customers, make changes based on feedback and trust employees to talk to customers.
The culture of fear (of job loss, of losing message control, of change) is ingrained in corporate cultures. Top management has to want to change.

Be viewed as a short-term project.
Social media is not a one-shot deal. It’s a long-term commitment to openness, experimentation and change that requires time to bear fruit.

Produce meaningful, measurable results quickly.
One of the complaints about social media is that it can’t be measured. But there are many things that can be measured, including engagement, sentiment and whether increased traffic leads to sales.
Those results can’t be produced or measured in the short term. Like PR, social media marketing often produces its best results in the second and third year.

Be done in-house by the vast majority of companies.
A successful social-media campaign integrates social media into the many elements of marketing, including advertising, digital and PR. Opinion and theory are no match for experience and the best social media marketers now have more than 10 years of experience incorporating interactivity, blogs, forums, user-generated content and contests into online marketing.
You need strategy, contacts, tools, and experience — a combination not generally found in in-house teams, who often reinvent the wheel or use the wrong tools.

Provide a quick fix to the bottom line or a tarnished reputation.
Social media can sometimes provide quick results for a company that’s already a star. When a well-loved company like Zappos or Google employs social media, its loyal fans and followers pay attention.
However, there’s a lot of desperation in a lot of corporate suites these days, and many companies seem been convinced that a social-media campaign can provide a quick fix to sagging sales or reputation issues. Sorry, nuh, uh.

Be done without a realistic budget.
Building a site that incorporates interactivity, allows user-generated content and perhaps also includes e-commerce doesn’t come cheap from anyone who knows what they are doing.
Even taking free software like WordPress and making it function as an effective interactive site, incorporating e-commerce and creating style sheets that integrate with the company’s branding, takes more than time. That takes skill, experience, and money.

Guarantee sales or influence.
Unless your effort can pass the “who cares” test — and most simply can’t — your social media efforts will fall flat.
And unless you know how to drive traffic to your contest, video, blog, event, etc., you’ll have little more than an expensive field of dreams.

Be done by “kids” who “understand social innately”
You can climb Mount Kilaminjaro without a sherpa guide, but why would you? Experience and perspective can make the trip easier, or even save your life.
Companies trying to run social media without experienced consultants waste time, money and reputation on their efforts. And then, sadly, many decide that this new-fangled approach doesn’t work.

Replace PR.
No matter how great your website, video contest, blog, Twitter strategy, etc., you still need publicity. Or you may end up with a tree falling in the forest and nobody hearing it.

Making Money With Facebook-AIM Presentation

Facebook is no longer just targeting student housing and can link to ‘Fat Finger ‘ Websites (www.21Rio.com)

Quantcast.com and Compete.com are 3rd party tools to track.

Intellectual Property and Trademark

At work I helped to create and drive the branding process of our apartment marketing site (www.cypressbayapartments.com). My company decided they wanted to take marketing in house, to the owner level.  As part of taking property marketing to the owner level, we needed to come up with a new  name, separate from Hamilton Zanze.   This was a four month process in which we brainstormed elements of branding the property on the physical site. In the end, we decided the best place to start the brand was on the internet.   I worked with a team that specializes in multi-family apartment marketing sites called MyNewSite to create our website. I directed the design of the landing page and created the logo. Once the Cypress Bay website was live we needed to trademark the name (we should have done this before launching the site in case the mark was taken.. but we did things the way we did).   I worked with our lawyers at Foley to conduct searches for similar companies, names, alternate names in federal, state, common law, and internet on the name and trademark.

Cypress Bay Apartments Landing Page

The mark is currently being filed and should be officially protected in six months.   Cypress Bay Apartments is set up with google analytics.

San Francisco Entrepreneurial Yelp Event

Through my SF Entrepreneurial group on meetup.com I learned of the Yelp Business Success Panel  hosted at the Westin. About 100 people showed up to discuss how social networking, specifically yelp, had helped their small business. Many business owners are using social networking sites like Facebook to market themselves, or even as part of their business plan.  For example I met a lady who was selling Vi Pak, a food supplement for weight loss product through Visalus. This company will hire anyone to promote their product by spreading awareness through their personal network of friends on Facebook. People are rewarded with a leased BMW, sounds a bit like a modern day Mary Kay business to me.  I met a lady who started her own company that focuses on social networking identity. She manages people’s social networking sites by creating consistency. There is a market for this, really?

Two small business owners gave a presentation on how Yelp had helped promote their companies — International Orange Spa and Tax Ninja. Both of these companies spend no or very little to place their business on yelp. They receive so much coverage from this one source that it is their only marketing source.

Brainstorming 08 Technology

Hurdle Rate equation is used to calculate amount of leads needed to stabilize and provide an idea for the monthly advertising spend.

Do social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter really work?
How is the manager able to manager the page to ensure positive comments? Will residents really network with one another to create a sense of community?

As part of the web campaign design two sites for each property. Create one for pay/click that is well designed and create another that is optimized for SEO. One could also design a basic html site intended for PDAs, but this doesn’t seem like a good resource because not many people search for apartments via their PDA.

How do you track the referrals you’re getting from other sites to your site? What are consumer behaviors that lead people to your property website? This is a gray area that google analytics does not track. –Solution — Use a script that will change the  e-mail and phone number (tracking information) per source site as a user is directed to you site.  Example: a prospect is routed to the property website from apartments.com and the phone number/e-mail listed on the property site is changed to the apartmetns.com tracking number. You will find out your prospects behavior and discover what back end network (secondary network) sites are driving traffic to your property site. Keep the secondary networking sites that work, dump those that don’t drive traffic.

Executive Brainstorming 2008

In November I went to the Executive Brainstorming session hosted by Multifamily Pro.

The conference brought together people in the multi-family housing industry to discuss marketing, advertising, best practices, management of the onsite teams, including motivating the teams to keep them energized and inspired, especially considering current economics. The executive session placed representatives from ownership groups, management groups,  and vendors in a round table discussion environment.

Some of the issues we discussed:

Marketing and Outreach, Considering the Current Economy: No doubt that the times are difficult as owners need to hold onto assets as equity is not available, the price of real estate has dropped, and Cap rates have risen. Acquisition/disposition teams need to change gears and operate as owners because deals aren’t happening.  Unfortunately, there is even more bad news on the operational side as vacancies are higher and rents are lower.

We discussed the importance of resident retention and the need to outreach to foreclosed homes.

Retention: The most cost effective approach to keep a property stable is to retain residents. Because the housing industry is so competitive it is important to reach out to residents weeks before their lease is up for expiration. They should be offered a competitive renewal bonus that will keep them on the property, vs. moving across the street because they can receive a fantastic move in package.  Because the market is expected to become uglier in the next year or two, we discussed the idea of offering all good standing tenants a renewal  now, no matter what stage they are in their lease, with large concessions so that they are signed in and wont be able to leave for more competitive concessions one year down the line.  Another incentive to retain residents is to offer a partial payment plan as an amendment to the lease contract. Best practices to create a happy healthy living environment is to create a sense of community. Resident activities, if done correctly will bring the residents closer to one another,  closer to the onsite management team, and will overall create a better living environment. Resident referrals are another facilitator for the creation of community, as residents are likely to recommend the apartment building to their friends and coworkers.

Outreach: Outreach: Outreach to the homes that have been listed for foreclosure. Send direct mail to a recent foreclosure list emphasizing the benefits of renting vs. owning. Outreach to single family home brokers by offering double referral fees so they will be incentivized to refer their clients.

Green Initiatives in the Apartment Industry: What can owners and managers do to market their properties as green? It is not economically feasible to convert an existing apartment building to meet LEED qualifications. However, LEED will come up with new qualifications specific to apartments that are attainable. As the market is now, residents are not wanting to pay more for green benefits. So the question is, what can owners do with little overhead investment to cut costs in a green manner?

• Use Non VOC Paints
• Paperless Community
• Replace with Energy Efficient Lights on Turns
• Add Adapters to Faucets and Showers to Reduce Water Use

What the Failure of the Google-Yahoo Deal Means

Posted by: Spencer Ante on November 05

So the Google-Yahoo search deal finally fell apart. It’s not terribly surprising. From the beginning, I said that this deal was very problematic, probably anti-competitive, and would raise the ire of government regulators.

Google read the handwriting on the wall and realized the deal no longer made sense. So it pulled the plug this morning.

Yahoo! is clearly the big loser here. They don’t get hundreds of millions in additional revenue that the deal would have generated. Once again they do not have a strategy for turning around the company. And with the economy getting worse, the online display ad market is likely to deteriorate for at least a few quarters, and it may even see negative growth.

“Time is not on their side,” says Dave Morgan, the former chairman and CEO of Tacoda, an online ad network that was sold to AOL in September of 2007 for a reported $275 million. “The longer they wait the worse their numbers get.”

So why is Yahoo’s stock up 6% when the stock market is down 3% today?

Clearly, the market thinks that the failure of the Google deal means that Yahoo is takeover bait again. Problem is, they are running out of dance partners. “It’s a game of musical chairs and the music is stopping and there are not many chairs left,” says Morgan, who left AOL in March.

Google can’t acquire them. Microsoft is probably leery of re-engaging with Yahoo as long as Jerry Yang is running the show. That leaves AOL. It wouldn’t be a merger of strength but it may be Yahoo’s only option at this point—unless the board boots Jerry and invites Microsoft back to the table.

And who wins? Microsoft is the big winner here. Either it gets to buy Yahoo on the cheap, or it can steal market share from Yahoo while the company continues to flail and dither.

“All of this stuff creates an extraordinary distraction for people who buy and sell advertising,” says Morgan. “Who wants to cut a big deal with Yahoo if they have to unwind it a few months from now?

Link to the article.

4 Factors for Blog Success

Based on an analysis of the most popular blogs and communities we’ve identified four driving factors to their success. Success being defined by the growing attraction of the content/author, the number of consistent viewers , ratio of post to comments and the viral distribution and referencing of the blogs content throughout the social web. The four driving factors are:

1. Attention: Businesses and individuals are using the tools of the social web to garner attention from specific consumer markets of interest to the audience and the business. Attention does not come from advertising rather relevant content and commentary by a credible audience.
2. Attraction: To keep people’s attention a focus on design, content and utility are the elements which create stickiness which indicates attractiveness. The art of combining design, content and utility is not something available in a playbook rather much is learned by trial and error. Media, in the form of text, images, video and audio are the tools used to create attraction combined with unique content.
3. Affinity: Content, design and community are the attributes of creating affinity to the proposition and the users of the online community. Unless the conversations related to the user’s needs or interest the attraction is lost because the users find little affinity to the conversations.
4. Audience: Once 1, 2 & 3 are accomplished then you have an audience to provide continuous value propositions in order to reinforce 1, 2 & 3. The cycle is demanding and the art and science is ever evolving. Unless your actively involved, experimenting and engaging with the audience you cannot learn what gets their attention, creates the attraction, develops the affinity and thus creating your audience.

Link to this article.