Editor's Notes

1. Yep, there are ton of them. We’re going to focus on a few that we think can be good for your marketing efforts and one’s that will integrate with facebook, Twitter, or your blogs.
2. Eric Brown and his team use Ning as their resident portal. Much more social place that offers more than just a place to pay your rent. A good website developer can customize Ning to fit your needs.
3. Building out a site needs some skills, so maybe you can just start out on Ning by finding a cool niche group to join. Smaller Indiana is a business forum for people only in Indiana. With groups like this you really get out what you put in. There are a number of people that get a ton out of this site, and you may find a cool niche group in your area that you can use to build up some brand recognition.
4. If you build it they won’t necessarily come. Here’s another Ning site that pretty much died. It had good intensions, but they pretty much have given up on it. Last blog post Oct. 2009. If I were these guys I would at least put some type of notice on here for where to find new information, or at least syndicate their regular blog content here. It’s not a worthless site, but they’ve given up on it. Their website is UBER social! Like I was saying before, you don’t have to be on everything. It’s about what feels right for you. Personally, I think you can get everything accomplished on Wordpress to be social. Urbane using their site as their portal makes sense, but you definitely need a niche and use the platform to be much different than any of your other online assets.
5. As we’ll talk about in the second half of this session, integrating your social tools is a big part of what you can do to maximize your online brand. With video, it’s not that you have to be on YouTube. Blendtec has done a great job with that, but like Gary Vaynerchuk, myself, and countless others we just use YouTube or Viddler or whatever to host our video. Once you have that embed code or link you can share it all over the place. For example, I put my vlog posts on YouTube, but embed them at theapartmentnerd.com and over on Brent’s site MultifamilyInsiders.com. I’m able to basically be in 3 different places, and I can share links to those places on facebook or twitter or myspace or my ning site or linkedin or you get the point. When you do this, however, I want you to really think about your content strategy. I’m not suggesting you go out and just create some commercials for your company, post them, and see what happens. I’m suggesting you have an ongoing video content strategy.
6. Flickr has a following, and there are groups that really use it. There’s an opportunity to engage with a unique crowd, and to basically own some keywords. For example, out of the 60 photos on this page for the search term ‘Indianapolis Apartments’ only 5 photos are not of a J.C. Hart property. Shhhhh, don’t tell anyone. 
7. What do awesome companies have in common?Total customization + integrationWith full HTML/Javascript/Stylesheet control, custom domains, and a robust API, your Tumblr blog can be fully integrated with your existing site and design. Your own analyticsInstall tools like Google Analytics and Feedburner for total control of your analytics. Search engine loveURL slugs, XML sitemaps, automatic pinging, and dozens of other features help your posts get ranked fast and high. Choose one of our optimized featured themes to get started. A wonderful place for feedback and communityTumblr posts get 3x more responses than traditional blog posts. Use unique features like answers, submissions, and reblogging to engage your audience. Social syndicationTumblr can automatically update your Twitter account and Facebook Fan Page. Keep up with your customers, users, and fans wherever they are.
8. Setting this up is as easy as just emailing post@posterous.com. Actually, that’s the only way to begin an account. After you do that, you can just email in your posts. Your subject line is the title of your post, and any attachments like audio, video, pictures show up as well. It can be customized, but just like Tumblr you can syndicate your content almost anywhere by just using the tools right within Posterous.
9. This applies to online reviews as well. Now, people are fighting this, but I believe it is a battle that won’t be won. Even if any of these models fail, there will somebody waiting to replace them. Personally, I have a couple URLs just waiting to be turned into review sites. 
10. So, does everyone understand how powerful Google really is?I know I don’t, but if you really start thinking about it, it gets kind of scary.Essentially, much of what we build online is geared around the mighty Google. Other search engines obviously have their place, and Bing has made a nice push, but Google accounts for over 65% of searches conducted.
11. So much of this is website optimization as well, but you should know what people are finding when they search for your property name or management company brand name.
12. Claiming your businesses will make an immediate impact just on the mapping services of the search engines, but it will also help you with your website optimization in general.
13. If you are building out blogs for your brand/properties I recommend you install Disqus as well. If you have a little then Disqus gives you instructions you can follow. Otherwise, as I’ve said all along, doing it is much different than building it. You can hire people to build them.
14. The beauty of social media and websites is that we can follow people. We can see what’s working, and we can adjust based off of real data. These are just of the tools, but we’re in marketing here folks. Many of us report to someone that wants to know what’s working, what our ROI is for our marketing efforts, and how we can improve our efforts. If we’re not tracking and measuring we’re just winging it and all the work you’re putting in and what you’ve learned the past couple days might as well get thrown out the window.That all said, I don’t want you to think that you’ll spend countless hours going through reports, but when the time comes all the info will be there for you when you need it. More importantly, some of the tracking tools help you measure engagement