Enjoy Your Living Experience

About a month ago I joined the other members of our executive team at the J.C. Hart Company for a retreat to discuss the "brand" of the company.  These "meetings of the minds" are always a great way to take a step back and really look to see if we are delivering on our purpose, vision, and goal as a company.  Since joining the company back in 2003, we've had 3 of these "executive retreats" and we've always come away with an improved vision for the company.

As I said, at this most recent retreat we wanted to review our "brand."  After going through a few exercises discussing our "touch points," watching the Fish! Philosophy video (the 5th time for me), sharing some good and bad customer service stories, and reviewing our company Core Values, we came to the conclusion we really like the direction we've taken the business.  However, we also concluded that the message or "brand statement" we share at our "touch points" just wasn't sticky enough.  While our Purpose is "We make your Home and enjoyable living experience," this doesn't just roll off the tongue in everyday conversation.  So we've taken our first step in improving the way this message is sent.  First, for marketing purposes we shortened our Purpose into a "brand statement":  Enjoy Your Living Experience.  It's a start, and our associates are excited about the message.  We've always been a management company that is known for customer service, but our goal is to take it to the next level.

But none of this is really why I'm writing this post.  Since rolling out "Enjoy Your Living Experience" I feel like customer service has become a hot topic for many others in the marketing world.  For Jay Ehret it's something he does everyday, but for Jeremiah Owyang it's not his usual expertise.  This is why I love following these guys and others on Twitter.  Not only do they share great blog posts, but they also make great observations and share them with the Twitter community.  Before Twitter and blogs we'd make business decisions and hope they took us in the right direction, now we can just do a Twitter or Google search and find out if another company has already tried our idea.  Better yet, we can write a blog post or tweet and get feedback on our idea from a plethora of experts.  By using these tools we can all make better business decisions and ideally become better businesses.  I certainly am enjoying my living experience since branching out into social media and I thank all of you that share with us your ideas, knowledge, and expertise.

Thanks for reading and enjoy your day.

Testimonials - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

What's the power of a testimonial? Does it depend on the product? Does it depend on who it comes from? Does it depend on where you find it? Does it depend on how it is delivered? These are all things I have been pondering as we decide to solicit testimonials from our residents. The testimonials we use need to be as powerful as possible and must be genuine.

In the apartment business the largest forum of testimonials is www.apartmentratings.com. At this website anyone can create a post that rates a particular community in different categories and then allows for an open essay to praise or bash the property. After surveying our residents about what websites they use as resources when searching for a new apartment home, apartmentratings.com was one that seemed to pop up frequently as a write in for the "Other" option. After seeing that I dove back into apartmentratings.com to see what all the fuss is about. What I found is that people have a lot of passion about where they live. Whether they love it or hate it, they want to write about it, defend it, slam it, or just be heard. The only concern I have with this site is how honest and genuine it really is. It's easy to see when a property manager or leasing associate tries to post something positive or as a defense post against someone that has slammed the property. From the other side, I also can see how negative posts can be taken way out of context and can be exaggerated to the point where they are not very credible either. While many of the resident's surveyed indicated this website was a resource they used, my next question for them would be how much weight they gave to what they found.

This being said, I think what we are seeing on Amazon.com and many other online stores is that customers are sharing their opinion about products and this will continue to be the trend. People have a lot of passion about the products they own/rent and we can't ignore it. The way I see it, is that it's the responsibility of the marketers to insure there are more positive posts and testimonials out there than negatives. It's also our responsibility to make sure that our customers are more likely to find positive posts. Things can turn very ugly online if you make mistakes and don't make an effort to fix them. Before the Internet it was much easier to ignore bad word of mouth, but now that bad review lasts a lifetime. What are you doing to insure your product, brand, etc. has a positive position online?