the blog

Lots of momentum in the valley around Eric Reis’ Lean Startup.  Though I find his advice particularly valuable to startups, I think there are other applications to the general principles.  If you haven’t seen it, here is his presentation from the Web 2.0 Conference.

 
In our industry, the traditional methodology of developing and implementing a new idea or service seems to stifle creativity.  At a typical property management group, the risk-profile is perceived to be very high.  Further compounding the problem, traditional mediums are viewed as efficient “enough”.

I’m not recommending you spend hours a day tracking and measuring leads, but putting some simple processes in place will help you identify which leads are converting from which sources.  Though the general goal is to drive the most leads possible, maybe it should be to drive the most qualified leads possible.  

3)  Reduce total time through the loop.

The general idea is the getting through the feedback loop as quickly as possible.  The faster you are at identifying what renters want or how to interact with renters, the more branding and lead generations opportunities you will have.  

I think a lean startup is about testing a variety of hypotheses, using feedback and data to identify consumers’ needs, and being able to quickly change strategy and iterate again.  This may be a bit of a stretch for property management groups and I know I am oversimplifying things, but I think some lessons can be learned and applied.  What do you think?

Last week, Gables Residential announced the integration of their websites with RentWiki.com’s content. Why is this significant?

The multifamily housing industry is not known as the most progressive space, often slow to adopt new technology.

However, even with the last few months, the space has drastically changed. Multifamily companies are gaining a deeper understanding of the social web, experimental budgets are increasing, and adoption of existing social media distribution channels are increasing. Are we close to a tipping point?

Gables becomes the first property management company to take in RentWiki.com user content. With the integration, I think Gables Residential takes two large steps.

Step 1: Movement towards contributed content.

The typical property website displays static information (bed, bath, price, photos). Unfortunately, consumers are accustomed to reading and interacting with contributed content. We rely on Amazon, Wikipedia, and Yelp when making a purchasing decision. Gables Residential has identified the needs of its consumer, understands the benefits of user generated content, and is filling a large need.

Step 2: Transparency.

Driving the largest quantity of leads is part of the game. However, the other component is the quality of the lead. By providing more content, you provide more transparency and increase quality. Similar to posting a video tour, by providing more content, the resident will be further along in the decision making process. Though transparency increases accountability, it also increases the quality of the leads and more importantly creates trust with consumers.

“We’ve put a lot of effort and resource into making Gables.com a world class consumer site,” explained Jason Tripp, marketing director for Gables Residential. “To make it even more consumer-friendly we realized Gables.com needed a social media aspect as well as neighborhood-centric information. By integrating with RentWiki.com we’re able to tap into their consumer-provided neighborhood content as well as their Twitter integration, Facebook integration, Walk-Score widget, YouTube integration and much more.”

Management companies in the Multifamily Industry can spend anywhere between $10,000 to $100,000 or more to build and maintain their websites. And, re-engineering these websites to include social media aspects can be very costly, with no guarantees of getting any real social activity. “RentWiki.com’s content sharing solution allows Gables.com to grab this content and become active participants in the social media sphere,” said Tripp. “It also allows us to be tuned in to what consumers are saying about their surroundings and be highly responsive to them.”

Congrats to Gables Resident in showing its commitment to the consumer.

Can’t get enough of RentWiki? Add our blog widget anywhere you want.

Blogging about a blog…feels like a circular reference.

Enjoy -

Jonathan

Yesterday, Yelp announced that businesses will be able to respond to reviews. According to the NY Times: 

Starting next week, Yelp will let small-business owners publicly respond to reviews. This is a big change for the site, which has until now steadfastly refused to give businesses significant access to its pages. 
 
Yelp’s co-founder and chief executive, Jeremy Stoppelman, has said that to protect the voice of the consumer, the voices of businesses, many of which advertise on the site, had to be muted.  

 As a member of the multifamily community, I am excited for communication and interaction between businesses and consumers.  Businesses will have a voice and a way to depend and refute inaccurate and unfair content.  

However, there are dangers involved with going down this route.  The slippery slope of rebuttaling can actually cause more damage to your reputation than the original negative comment.  By adding fuel to the fire, you can convert a simple dissatisfied customer into a flamer.  

Additionally, the integrity of the content may be altered.  The “hovering affect” may occur where users are no longer writing transparent and honest reviews.  As a consumer, I want honest opinions, not opinions when the business owner is standing in the room.   

But overall, I think it is a great move by Yelp to allow businesses to openly communicate with critics and reviewers, beneficial for businesses and consumers alike. Businesses can refute inaccurate and unfair information, consumers will still continue to review regardless, and communicate will occur between the two parties.  In the end, the feedback loop and interaction will hopefully help businesses owners create more value and serve consumers better.

What do you think?

NAA welcomes several of social media’s best minds to discuss how this marketing trend applies to customer service and retention at a Thought Leaders session at the 2009 NAA Education Conference & Exposition on June 27 in Las Vegas.
By Eric Wu

All the current talk is about social media - how Twitter is taking over e-mail, how Facebook has more users than most countries have citizens, and how engineered virality can replace a marketing budget. With all the chatter, one might think that social media should be a substitute for advertising, a reason to eliminate a company’s marketing staff, and even cure cancer.

All too often, abstract concepts in social media marketing and communication are not concretely defined or measured. The result is the perception of a far-fetched land of geeks getting together and somehow magically altering business operations, marketing strategies and branding.

On June 27, 2009, at the NAA Education Conference & Exposition in Las Vegas, the “Thought Leaders in Social Media” panel aims to provide some experiences and relevant insight into how to use the social web. As a precursor, let’s introduce the panel and take a look at how these individuals have applied social media strategies to increase brand recognition, retention and revenue.

Panelist #1 – Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com

Tony Hsieh has grown Zappos.com from $1.6 million in 2000 to $840 million in 2007, a measly 525,000 percent increase.

How was Tony able to change a company from a little over $1 million in revenue to almost $1 billion in revenue?

If you ask Tony, he’ll say, “customer support.” For most people, these words act as reminders to answer phone calls and please the customer. And, granted, Zappos does both of those brilliantly. However, Zappos has consistently adopted social media as part of its customer support strategy to engage and listen to customers.

“We actually take a lot of the money that we normally would have spent on paid advertising and put it back into customer experience,” says Tony. “We’ve always stuck with customer service, even when it was not a sexy thing to do.”

Zappos shortens the engagement loop with the entire organization by being very active on Twitter. Tony has more than 350,000 followers, and more than 400 of his employees are using Twitter.

For Tony, growing the business has not just been about answering phone calls, but about building a brand around the principles of engagement, creativity and a laser focus on fulfilling customer needs. These initiatives have resulted in 7.4 million total customers, 75 percent of purchases coming from returning customers and repeat customers ordering more than 2.5 times every 12 months. Talk about retention.

Panelist #2 – Jeremiah Owyang, Sr. Analyst at Forrester Research

Jeremiah Owyang is a senior analyst at Forrest Research and a leading expert on social computing, social media and interactive marketing. Jeremiah’s blog was ranked 19th by Advertising Age, he has consulted for large brands such as Hitachi Data Systems, and he is a speaker and educator at many conferences such as Web 2.0 Expo, SXSW and CES.

In a recent study titled, Social Media Playtime Is Over, Jeremiah writes:

The recession has put more pressure on interactive marketers to deliver measurable results. While many marketing budgets are being cinched, more than 50 percent of interactive marketers say they will increase their spending on social marketing. Why? These inexpensive tools can quickly get marketing messages out through interactive discussion and rapid word of mouth and, properly managed, can deliver measurable results. But in this downturn, interactive marketers must move beyond experimentation by making social applications a permanent part of marketing, measuring and demonstrating their value, and integrating them into marketing efforts.

As a part of the study, Jeremiah found that 53 percent of marketers are determined to increase their social media budgets and 42 percent will keep budgets the same, a total of 95 percent of marketers bullish on social media marketing. Even though these budgets are small (three-quarters are less than $100,000), Jeremiah recommends that marketers do not approach social media marketing as an experiment. “Remember, the most expensive cost isn’t the tools, it is the soft costs–strategy, education, process, roles and measurement,” he says.

Jeremiah continues to provide empirical data and demonstrate why social media outlets can be an integral part of marketing and distribution. His message is spot-on; it is not just about being there, but it is about having a strategy and goals for the engagement.

Panelist #3 – Pete Flint, Founder of Trulia.com

Flint founded Trulia.com in 2005 and it now is one of largest and fastest growing real estate Web sites in the United States. Trulia.com has over 5 million unique visitors a month and has raised more than $33 million in funding.

Trulia has been able to bridge the gap between buyers and real estate professionals by building a community called Trulia Voices. Some stats include:

• Visits to Trulia Voices increased 146 percent year over year
• The volume of question and answer activity in Trulia Voices Q&A increased 114 percent year over year
• Real estate professionals’ answer volume increased 96 percent year over year
• Consumer questions increased 181 percent year over year

How has Trulia engaged both millions of home buyers and hundreds of thousands real estate agents?

Again, the answer seems to be centered on the engagement of the customer. Heather Fernandez, Vice President of Marketing of Trulia, says, “Consumers are looking for guidance and education and are relying on our pool of more than 200,000 real estate professionals for advice and insight.”

With multifamily housing traditionally closely tied to the real estate sector, Trulia is a relevant example of how user-generated content can change the flow of communication to consumers.

Moderator – Eric Wu, Co-Founder of RentWiki.com

I’m a 26-year-old entrepreneur and co-founder of RentWiki.com, a socially-driven rental search that connects renters with peer advice. I’ve spoken at conferences such as NMHC Technology, AIM Conference and the Harvard Business School Entrepreneurship Conference. In 2006, I was named one of BusinessWeek’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25.

Conclusion
Having a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page and a viral YouTube video will not cure cancer, but they can and will affect your bottom line. The underlying message is not about usage or presence. It is about having a consistent strategy to engage consumers, listen to customers and focus on their needs. As Jeremiah puts it, “Fish where the fish are.”

Eric Wu is Co-Founder of Rentwiki.com. He can be reached at eric@rentwiki.com or 415/640-4970. The “Thought Leaders on Social Media” session will be presented 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. on Saturday, June 27 in the Mandalay Bay’s Lagoon Ballroom as part of the 2009 NAA Education Conference & Exposition.

Spoke with Joshua Dorkin, founder and CEO of BiggerPockets.com, last week about adoption of social media in the real estate market. BiggerPockets.com is a real estate professional social network, who’s slogan is “31,131 people are currently networking their way to real estate success… Are you?”

Networking their way to real estate success… At first, I was weary of how that resonates with me.  But then I thought about how people MySpace’d, Twitter’d, YouTube’d, and Linkedin’d themselves to fame and success.  Social media and social networks provide an opportunity for unparrelled exposure… which in the case of real estate professionals can directly translate to success.

“The goal of BiggerPockets.com is to help real estate investors, professionals, and consumers to connect, share knowledge, make deals, and market themselves and their businesses,” says Josh.  

Similar to many of the incentives to joining a network like Facebook, BiggerPockets.com allows users to meet with real estate colleagues, create and join groups, and share ideas.  For some real estate agents on BiggerPockets, the incentive structure goes behind increasing social status or self-expression.  Agents gain financially from procuring business from the network on BiggerPockets.

Thus, BiggerPockets.com recently announced Pro Accounts, which gives agents a suite of additional functionality for a monthly subscription.  The freemium model has worked well for Linkedin because users gain financially from the network, so I’m sure BiggerPockets will succeed with it’s new Pro Accounts revenue model.  I wonder if Facebook could charge brands for fan pages on a per “fan” basis?  (Higher bidder per fan gets premium placement throughout the site?).

Josh is a great guy and is looking for feedback, so send him some if you have any.

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Smart entrepreneur in the space, Dan Daugherty, launched a new service that estimates average rental rates in over 4,000 cities. The tool provides a reference point for renters to predict a baseline cost for a rental. “With this new service, renters, owners, agents and property managers can now make more informed decisions when negotiating or pricing the rental home” says Dan Daugherty, President and CEO. Dan is providing access to over 7,000,000 data points to provide accurate estimates.  There has yet for anyone to aggressively be the Trulia.com and Zillow.com of rentals and I like what Dan has put together. On a side note, I hope someone does what SF Mullinslab has been doing, which is tracking craigslist rent rates in SF for years.

I wanted to write a followup post to take a closer look on how Twitter is affecting specific markets. With our recent Twitter integration, we’re still figuring out the impact of how local conversations affect the renters decision-making process.  Let’s take a closer look on how it is affecting the stock market and traders, wholesalers of consumer goods, and the rental market.

Stock Markets

Stocktwits.com, a San Francisco based company, specializes in tracking conversations around stocks to give investors insight on stocks. Funded by veteran Wall Street investors, Stocktwits is a simple tool that combines twitter with stock charts. But the magic is in the Twitter conversations and its surprising ability to gauge public opinion.

According to the BusinessWeek titled, “StockTwits May Change How You Trade”, the transparency of a Twitter and the recorded track record allows traders to identify who to follow and who not to follow.

Just like the credibility and objectivity crisis of sell-side analysts in 2001 led to a boom in financial blogs like Seeking Alpha and Barry Ritholtz’s The Big Picture, the credibility crisis afflicting mainstream financial media today has led to a boom in investor social networks. Traders and investors alike have come to view these platforms as trusted filters that help them make more informed decisions because they can discuss and interpret the news with their peers. At the same time, unlike financial bloggers who make their mark by writing commentary and opinion pieces, StockTwits users are essentially creating a trading record that’s scrutinized on a daily basis. A trader’s reputation is always on the line, and that’s the beauty of the financial social Web—it forces people to be accountable.

Wholesalers of Goods

Dell, over the past year and a half, has sold over $1 million in personal computers on Twitter. People sign up to receive Dell alerts, and are sent messages when discounted products are available. Dell turned a simple chat tool into a distribution channel.  According to InternetNews:

Less altruistically, some businesses have discovered that Twitter is an effective way of communicating with consumers. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts. People who sign up to follow Dell on Twitter receive messages when discounted products are available the company’s Home Outlet Store. They can click over to purchase the product or forward the information to others.

Also cited as how Jet Blue is announcing discounts on Twitter and gaining some traction with consumers.

Rental Market

We give people searching for a place to live real advice from renters living in that area. Via Twitter, we feel potential renters can get a sense for the neighborhood vibe, types of people living in the area, and identify locals to ask for feedback.

Again, as stated on a previous post, Twitter seems to be hosting conversations that may prove to be very relevant to multiple industries, including the rental search.  With Twitter, we are expanding the conversation beyond just our site and into the real-time social web.

Here is a slideshow created by a Twitter enthusiast:

My conclusion, though Twitter may not be an end all source for stock advice, shopping, or rentals, it suppliments the experience with information, data, and consumer views in real-time.  Once a place for geeks to talk about Technology, Twitter showing its versatility and proving it can be used for more than just answering the question, “What are you doing?”.

A good guy in the space, Dave Dugdale, launched a new rental site called PickRent.com, which took him about 180 hours to complete.  Pretty good considering nice functionality and usability on the site.

It’s a free listing site, with the intention to syndicate listings from other internet listings site.  In terms of monetization, Dave plans on charging premium listings a nominal fee after he reaches critical mass.

Dave’s looking for lots of feedback so let him know what you think.

Bill Gurley recently had a great post about how TenCent has been able to monetize through the use of digital goods and games.

For those that don’t know, TenCent is the owner of the leading IM franchise in China – a product known affectionately as “QQ”. TenCent was founded in 1998, has 355 million users, US$1.2B in annual revenues, and a US$11.2B market capitalization. The stock chart for the past 5 years is included in the adjacent graphic. The two primary drivers of revenue for TenCent are digital items and casual game packages and upgrades. Advertising, which doesn’t work well on U.S. products like IM, doesn’t work well in China either. Advertising revenues for TenCent represent only 12% of total revenues. Recently, I asked a leading Internet analyst which company in China is best positioned above all others? He quickly replied “TenCent”.

Facebook already has very large succesful third-party games and could build some killer ones internally. Additionally, virtual gifts are approximately 1/5 of Facebooks revenue. Surprisingly, an estimated $50 to $60 million is made from Facebook virtual gifts.

Though I agree that the digital goods and games model will undoubly be extremely profitable if executed correctly, here is my easy and fast recommended revenue model for Twitter and Facebook.

1) I’ve been saying for years that our all aspects of our offline lives are migrating online. Our conversations, our interactions, and our thoughts are being held and recorded online.

2) We are already recommending books, restaurants, electronics, websites, and all sorts of consumer goods online.

However, these mentioned on Facebook and Twitter are not hyperlinked. What if Twitter and Facebook hyperlinked mentioned of goods or services relevant to the conversation? For instance, if a friend recommends a book on Twitter, it would link to Amazon so I could purchase it or read a summary/reviews of it. Think Zemanta.com or Apture.com for online conversations.

Would I pay for a link to a neighborhood or apartment in a conversation on Twitter or Facebook? I am cheap and I would pay boatloads for that.

So similar to the Google model that brings back relevant advertisements based on key terms, advertisers could pay for links in the text of conversations as long as it is extremely relevant. If I mention Apple Macbooks in a conversation, the “Apple” text is linked to Apple’s homepage. No doubt there is downside to the user experience if it is not executed correctly, but I think a few relevant links here and there would actually be helpful.

On that note, “I’m going to Barnes and Noble right now to attempt to buy an advanced CSS book.”

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