I’ve been intrigued by the dynamic of building lead volume in our Apartment Finder business over the past year.

As I’ve discussed before, the multi-family marketing business is a competitive, lead-generating business that is driven by consumer’s accessing print and online directories and inquiring about apartments for rent.

There are three ways that marketing companies like Apartment Finder hand customer leads over to its clients:  a phone call directly to the apartment community; an e-mail to an apartment community, either directly or through a leasing intermediary; a click-thru to the apartment community web site; and, a prospect who walks directly into the community leasing office without making prior contact.

This week, one of our biggest competitors in the space shared a few public metric related to their lead production.  According to their recent earnings release, the company increased leads 35% year-over-year, and currently produces more than 75% of their leads from their Internet and mobile platforms.

That made me curious.  How did our metrics at Apartment Finder measure up?

The chart to the right shows the increase in lead production at Apartment Finder over the past year.  Overall, leads gained 43%.  Phone leads were up 25%, e-mail leads were up 169% and click-thru’s to property web sites were up 71%.

This data is derived from two third-party sources:  CallSource, which manages our tracking number program, and Omniture, which provides us with web analytics.

Most interesting to me was the distribution between leads from print distribution and from internet and mobile distribution.

At Apartment Finder, 53% of our leads, including click-thru’s, are driven by our Internet distribution and 47% by print.  Subtract click-thru’s, which can’t be tracked back to a specific individual, and the ratio drops closer to 50-50.

But the key issue isn’t what source the lead comes from.  The issue is how useful the lead is.

I had an engaging conversation around the relative quality of leads with a leading apartment marketer at the National Apartment Association Conference this past June.  E-mails that are generated as a by-product of creating an appointment to see an apartment had a high conversion, he said.  Phone calls to the community were the second best kind of lead.  And e-mail inquiries were the lowest-converting type of lead.

That means there are other metrics that can point to how good the lead generation of a marketing partner will be.  A big one is the percentage of phone calls to e-mail leads.

At Apartment Finder, 80% of our leads from print and internet are phone calls.  20% are e-mails.   That’s an exceptionally good ratio, I think.

Throughout our businesses at NCI, we’re seeing signs of increased consumer activity.

One notable one has been the uptick in activity from apartment shoppers.

In the first quarter of 2010, inquiries from apartment shoppers to communities (phone calls and e-mails) from Apartment Finder‘s print and internet products have increased 44% from the last three months of 2009.

That’s a big shift in activity. And, it’s confirming of reports from property managers and reflective of the improvement in the job market.

How’s that for a green shoot?

The terms mobile internet and applications are pretty much abstractions unless you are right in the middle of it.

If you’re not one of the 10 million people or so who’ve moved to the iPhone, let me give you a brief tour of Let me show you what it means.

The four images to the right are snapshots of the screens on my iPhone.

The way the iPhone is designed is that the icons on the bottom grey bar appear on each of your screens. The information at the very top band gives you basic information about your phone — the connections, the time and your battery life.

The four icons at the bottom access the basic functions of the device: the phone, your e-mail, your web browser and your media library.

You are able to download and install, through Apples App Store, different applications that enhance the utility of your device. There’s no real limit to the number of applications that you can install.

The first page of my iPhone apps have the ones that I use most frequently. My calendar, the camera, the photos database, and a bunch of different content applications. My key social media apps are on the front page — Facebook, Twitter and CubeTree, a social media platform we are testing within the company. I also have the Kindle app, because I have ended up using my iPhone as my primary eReader, and a couple of branded news sources: Bloomberg and ESPN. Foursquare and Yelp are on the front page because I’ve been testing both apps recently.

To get to the second page, you simply drag your finger across the screen from right to left and the new page comes up.

On the second page, you begin to see some of the flexibility of this device.

I have a couple of games installed on this screen, which are primarily used by my 4-year old. I’ve got three applications associated with my social media activity: Ego, which accesses my Google analytics, Twitter and Feedburner data on a real-time basis; Statistics, which shows the stats of my WordPress blogs, and a WordPress app that allows me to create blog posts and edit comments on the moves. There’s my Amazon cart, for shopping; my ApartmentFinder app, and some other basic components of the iPhone system.

Move to the third screen and you see some less frequently used tools. A flight tracking applications. A mind-mapping applications. An applications that tells me the schedule of MetroNorth trains. A movie finding applications. Some game.

The fourth screen has the same variety. A TV Guide app. The local news channel app, which allows me to get quick access to school closings and weather. A ski report app, which I recommend to any one who skis — you get the real scoop on snow conditions from the updates people leave. And, finally, an application that turns my iPhone into a remote for our Apple TV in the library.

There you have: a peek into the world of applications. Some of these applications cost money — the most expensive is probably Madden. I’ve downloaded and then deleted dozens more.

My web experience through the filter of applications is dramatically different than my web experience on my laptop. I am probably more brand-loyal in my app usage. I am definitely exposed to less advertising. And, my usage of Google is down, because I know exactly where I’m going for a bunch of different things. When I need to search, I’ll use the Google box in my Safari browser on the iPhone. But, I’m seeing a lot less of Googles advertising.

It’s a different ecosystem than what we’ve traditionally thought about for the experience of web content.

As the year winds down, I was curious which posts over the course of the year were the most popular. I was pleased to see that the posts that had resonated the most with all of you were ones that I felt like I’d achieved some clarity around an idea that I’d been working through. (It’s also interesting that these posts are among the most frequently accessed through search.)

The number one post was from March: Social Media Can be A Marketing Platform. This was when we were taking Network Communications into its Project Massive Network, an effort to get every person in the company using social media to broaden and intensify their professional connections.

Through the year, I kept meaning to come back to the concept of Evangelist. The word too easily connotes intense passion, while I believe that the most effective Evangelists are the ones who have completely integrated their nature with their passions, so that they communicate a relaxed enthusiasm that inspires and attracts others. Evangelism is too often associated with a mania and mono-focus that can be off-putting.

The number two most-popular post was a very detailed case study that I did in June about migrating our marketing strategy at Apartment Finder to a social media focus. My intent with this post was to demonstrate each of the steps that we had taken to extend our communications with the multi-family marketplace to multiple platforms, and our efforts to modify and adapt our messaging to the unique attributes to the platforms. This effort continues today and deserves a follow-up: the most challenging aspect of the initiative is maintaining continuity and assessing its effectiveness. Despite our intent focus, we have areas of spotty execution with our own program.

The third most-popular post was my first attempt to consolidate the thinking that I’d been doing about how a traditional publishing content workflow needed to adapt to accommodate the inclusion of social media platforms. In Thoughts on Evolving the Content Strategy in Publishing to Leverage Social Media I outlined the Sharing Model of content creation. This model outlined here as served as a framework for developing new processes at our regional home design brands, and in some instances we’ve seen significant impact on audience and enthusiasm. The process is a living work in progress.

The fourth most frequently viewed post is an down-and-dirty analysis of State Farm’s presence on Facebook. This was a period when I was trying to understand the challenges that face traditional marketing departments when implementing social media programs. The post was published in April and is one of the two most-frequently accessed posts through Google search. I recently re-visited the State Farm Facebook sites and little had changed.

In the Spring, I was doing a lot of work to try to quantify the impact of the economic decline on consumer spending, marketing outlays and media allocations. In an early April post, I pointed out the contradiction between industry research showing the effectiveness of TV and magazine advertising and the steep declines in revenue. The point: When marketing budgets shrink, the most expensive media goes first.

I’m kind of proud that a self-serving post doesn’t show up until the number 6 spot. Over a period of 6 months, we radically shifted our traffic strategy at ApartmentFinder.com in order to leverage what we percieved as our core strengths. This shift was rewarded in April when Comscore reported ApartmentFinder was solidly in the top 5 destinations for apartment shoppers on the Internet. Our work put us solidly in the consideration set for online-only marketing in the multi-family industry, and we did it despite being heavily outspent on search engine marketing traffic by our competitors.

The seventh most-popular post, from July, demonstrates how powerful social media can be. I described a disappointing customer service experience with American Express. A couple of days later, I heard from the Chairman’s Office. It doesn’t match Jarvis’ Dell experience, but it was an instructive moment in the new age of marketing and media.

A May post reporting on research that shows how effective print advertising is in driving web traffic came in at number 8. Despite multiple instances of independent research like this, many people insist of maintaing a very simplistic “Print Is Dead” position. At this point, I just shake my head and wonder why the concept of using multiple platforms to intersect with consumers to drive business activity is so hard to accept. [I very accepting of marketers who say they don't have the money to invest in premium marketing choices, whether they are online or offline. Then we can have a conversation about how to leverage their marketing resources to build their business. Just sitting around arguing about living or dead media gets old very fast.]

An October post made the top 10 and is a big search favorite: The Current State of the Economy in 5 Pictures. I realized doing this analysis that I should update the post in January to reflect the fourth quarter results. Lesson: People like pictures.

The number 10 position is taken by a post where I ranged outside of my limited sphere of knowledge to speculate about how social media platforms would change the way that people searched for information. The premise was that “human search” would develop through the filtering of content by overlapping social graphs. This is happening on Twitter and is expressed by many as crowd-sourcing. I had fun thinking about the problem and putting together the schematics. The post attracted a broad readership and started many conversations. I’m sure that those followers soon dropped off as I returned to my more mundane noodling about business models, business processing and marketing approaches.

Over the past 12 months, we’ve participated in a dramatic shift in the online market place in the multi-family industry.

As you can see from the table showing the performance of five top multi-family sites, the share of the top 3 has declined by 1.4 million unique users, or 21%, while the share of the next 2 (ApartmentGuide.com and ApartmentFinder.com) has increased by 694,000 users, or 45%. The overall market for the top 5 sites has declined by 716,000 users, or 9%.

The overall decline of the market is a by-product of reduction of demand for investment-grade rental units, driven by the economic downturn, as evidenced by the declining financial performance of leading REITs and the sober outlook for the year ahead. In fact, two other leading multi-family sites, MyNewPlace.com and ApartmentRatings.com, were down a combined 501,000 unique visits versus prior year in October 2008.

All of the media players serving the multi-family market have experienced operating pressure as property managers have reduced marketing budgets and increased their demands for accountability and concessions from the marketplace.

Over at the blog Being Present, Todd Dubner looks at this shift in a more discrete fashion, with details for each of the participants over the last 12 months. Todd speaks to the benefit to online traffic that the distribution of print copies delivers. A very small percentage of traffic at ApartmentFinder.com is driven by paid search; the majority of traffic comes from direct log-ins to the web site and from organic search. This trend is a result of a focused strategy to build traffic from our print distribution and by developing targeted content and a broad social media footprint in order to tap into multi-word searches from apartment shoppers.

I’m intrigued, however, by the order of magnitude of the shift and the relatively small shifts in share of marketing spend that have accompanied this change. I would venture that fewer than 4 points of marketing spend share in a $750+ million market have shifted over the past year, despite the 200 basis point shift in online audience.

The audience shift has definitely been reflected in significantly higher lead generation at the Apartment Finder business; anecdotally, we know that a similar increase, at least in terms of online lead generation, has been noted at Apartment Guide.

The surplus of marketing options, and the relative changes in performance, create an interesting dynamic in a tightly described market, such as multi-family.

From a purely objective point of view, marketing spend should shift to those media channels that are increasing their value by growing audience share and increasing lead share, while improving the quality of their leads.

In a declining market with seasonal variations, tracking this objective measure is challenging. And, ultimately, determining the quality of a lead in any market means being able to measure the conversion of hard leads — phone calls — into hard activities, such as visits or purchases.  Few businesses have the wherewithal to track these details accurately, never mind in the multi-family space, and, as I’ve noted before, trying to attribute leads to single sources in a market with multiple free information resources misses the benefit of saturating a market with branded messages.

From a subjective point of view, there is a lot of logic to slow shifts in market share.

An important part of working with a media or marketing partner is trust, reliability and continuity. When you shift from one partner to another, you take a risk that the benefit you’ve received from the service will be disrupted in the transition. During periods of shifts in market dynamics, businesses are slow to change their buying habits because of the relative risk of change.

Typically, price can be a lure, but price is rarely the primary reason for making a change from one partner to another.

What happens, then, is that market shifts develop over time, as emerging new forces in the market demonstrate reliability, productivity and trust.

The decision to shift is also influenced by a calculation about whether the market change is structural or marginal.

In the Internet marketplace, share can shift fairly rapidly as new entrants dilute the market or as existing entrants change their investment in acquiring customers. Ironically, the relative ease of transfer experienced by consumers is not equally experienced by the marketer: Each partner has different systems for order entry, billing, service and fulfillment.

In some respects, the changes in the multi-family internet market over the past year are structural. At Apartment Finder, we’ve built our larger audience base by changing our operational approach, not by increasing our overall spend on Internet marketing. We’re only half way through our operating plan and expect to see improvements in audience growth, lead production and lead conversion. Apartment Guide has also clearly shifted their operating model. [For insight into the Apartment Guide strategy, see the investor relations section of their  corporate web site.]

In this challenging environment, I would venture that property managers are acting logically in evaluating their third-party marketing spend by emphasizing  subjective criteria while insisting on accountability and concessions from their favored vendors. They are also acting logically in looking at solutions that can reduce their reliance on third-party marketing while bolstering their own control over lead generation and renewals. (At NCI, we have some interesting visibility into these conversations by virtue of our CommunitySherpa service.

The multi-family marketing landscape has been highly ordered and orderly over the past five years. This past year has witnessed  dynamic market shifts that will  have a profound impact on the size and distribution of marketing investments by property management companies. It is going to take some time to play out, but the landscape will look very different when it is done.

What it will look like and who will sit in which seats? I don’t have that kind of crystal ball!

I’ve been intrigued by the dynamics of the online audiences in the primary markets that we serve at NCI. In the past, I’ve written about the surprisingly low overlap among the visitors to the leading online apartment aggregators (termed ILS’s in the multi-family industry.)

We’re finishing up some interesting research on the different ways that consumers use media across multiple channels when they are shopping for a home or apartment. Not surprisingly, people will consumer information wherever they can get it, in print or online. The key driver of usage is availability: Can the consumer easily find it and use it?

Some of the research results got me wondering again about the attributes of the online audience. I went back to Comscore/Media Metrix and did an analysis of the cross visits among four of the leading rental sites. The performance of the three integrated media players was of particular interest, since we all have substantial advantages in terms of promoting our internet brands in our print publications. Apartments.com is a joint venture of a consortium of newspaper companies and also enjoys some of this advantage.

The results for September were interesting. First, and in a pleasant surprise, ApartmentFinder.com had the lowest instance of cross visits among the group of four, despite being at the bottom in terms of overall traffic. What does that mean? First, we have to acknowledge some margin of error, given the sample size within Media Metrix’ panel. But, the results suggest that ApartmentFinder.com has the same size unique audience as its three peers.

Why do we have a lower instance of overlap? Our theory is that our strategy of focusing on longer search terms helps to drive a different type of apartment shopper. If you search the key shopping terms, like “Apartments for Rent,” our competitors have a larger share of voice than we do. (They also spend substantially more on search marketing dollars than we do.) Search longer terms, like “garden apartment for rent someplace specific in a specific state” and ApartmentFinder.com is more likely to come up as one of the first options in organic search.

Some more research showed me that while this conclusion was generally true, our traffic has also been driven by our social media marketing strategy. Compete! shows that Facebook was the largest referrer of ApartmentFinder.com traffic in September by a factor of 2 over Google.

I suspect that helps to create a unique audience in the apartment space. As my colleague Todd Dubner has pointed out, the relatively low audience overlap among the leading internet service providers in the apartment space argues for broad distribution by apartment communities of their basic listings, in order to create the largest digital footprint to draw prospects from.

Social media tools are simplified tools of content production and distribution. Consumers have adopted them wholly, leveraging the simplicity to participate in an explosion of content all over the web.

As marketers, we are just beginning to explore how social media can be used to facilitate strategies to communicate about our brands with consumers. Some things are apparent: Consumers are spending an increasingly large proportion of their online time on social networks, and the growth of personal content on the web is increasing the connectedness and engagement of people on the web with each other. That circumstance makes it ever more imperative that marketers evolve ways to engage and intersect with consumers on the social web.

The challenge is how to do that.

As we’ve expanded our marketing and product strategy at my company, NCI, to incorporate social media, we’ve learned a few interesting, first-stage lessons. I thought it might be useful to organize and share some of the learnings, to help others as they plot out their roadmap to tackle what can at first appear like a daunting journey.

The circumstance is not that different from the early days of the open Internet in the first half of the 1990s. Consumers had flocked from closed systems like AOL and CompuServe out onto the web, where, using HTML and NetScape’s Mosaic browser, they were able to create content outposts. Web sites sprang up, audiences developed, and marketers struggled to find ways to translate their traditional marketing approaches to the new media.

The outcome of that transition is all around us: a web with increasingly organized information and highly professional marketing practices.

Obviously, the puzzle of marketing using social media will get solved. But what changes need to take place in how we approach marketing to generate clarity and momentum?

The answer is Content.

As marketers, we don’t focus on Content. We focus on Brands. We focus on Messages. We focus on creative approaches, media assets and ultimately, business activity and leads.

When we hear Content, we associate it with Media. Content changes. It’s variable. It’s creative. Media uses Content to attract an audience. As a marketer, we leverage that audience and their engagement with that Content to deliver our Message and enhance our Brand.

A web where Google in the primary organizing influence thinks differently about Content, though. Everything on the web is Content, in Google’s eyes. There isn’t differentiation between advertising, marketing or creative content: it’s all out there. And the more content that is in one place, the more people that create it, the more people that share it, the more Google pays attention.

As we all know, Google’s attention drives business activity. In a fundamental way, that is the most powerful opportunity for a brand in social media marketing: Can you create content that engages people and that prompts them to act. For if you can, you’ll accomplish the main things that you are looking for from your Internet marketing: impact with Google and engagement with prospects and customers.

The thesis is simple enough. The execution, on the other hand, is a bear.

The basic impediment to executing a social media marketing strategy is that our overall marketing strategies are usually driven more by the format and production requirements of the communications channels that we choose, rather than the core story that we want to tell about our brand.

Developing the Brand Story

Great stories captivate us and make time stop. Great brands have great stories: Where they have come from, what they are striving for and where they aim to go.

Without a cohesive brand story, the entry into social media marketing ends up happening in fits and starts. The story gives you the framework to create all kinds of different content around your brand, and, in social media, marketing is content.

For our Apartment Finder brand, the creation of the brand story that has made the transition into social media marketing a relatively smooth and seamless process began in 2004, when we invited the agency TMG Brand Communications to work with us. [Shameless Plug: TMG is owned by my wife Tami. The focus on the power of stories to elevate brands is a family conviction. You can learn more about TMG here.]

The outcome of the work with TMG was a foundation statement, and a set of content and image guidelines, that were the filter for all the decisions that we made about marketing and product development. The foundation statement was a reflection of a series of core beliefs share by the team and reflected in our product and service. It was the framework for a brand story that we could believe in and deliver on.

Apartment Finder is the preferred choice of critical information for apartment shoppers.  By constantly studying the lifestyle of today’s renter and adapting our strategies, we effectively connect apartment communications to the most qualified prospects.

From this foundation, we articulated four aspects of the brand that we felt were critical to communicate in all our marketing messaging, and which we believed would also prioritize and focus our business decisions and our product development.

For Apartment Finder, these four brand elements addressed our interaction with consumers, our approach to our product, our orientation to our customers and our goal for ourselves.

• Prospect-focused distribution
• Product quality
• Flexible service
• Leadership

Five years later, these foundation elements of our brand story remain as relevant and focusing as they were at their inception.

How to create your own brand story

To create a brand story, you need to move beyond a cataloging of your product and benefits and answer questions about your purpose, your identity and your position in the market.

This begins with a series of questions that you ask internally:

• Who are we?
• Why do we do what we do? What do we care about?
• What’s our purpose? Why do we matter to the people that we do business with?
• What would we want people to say about us when they are satisfied?
• What would we want people to say about us when they are dissatisfied?
• What will we absolutely not do?
• What are we most proud of?

The internal questions are followed by an examination of the external environment:

• Who are our competitors?
• How are we different?
• How are we the same?
• What is their story?
• What do people say about them when they are satisfied?
• What do people say about them when they are dissatisfied?
• What are the things that our competitors do to tell their story?

The process of answering these questions is very clarifying, albeit fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. The stressful emotions stem from identifying those attributes about your organization and your product that you may have focused on as key differentiators that are, in the stark light of a honest assessment, of minimal value to your customer and minimally different in the marketplace. As you work through the process, however, you see more clearly the power of your true points of difference, and as you develop the story about your brand, you end up in a place that is more powerful and extendable than where you began.

We had that experience at Apartment Finder, which was a promising but under-developed brand when we began, and which today has grown four-fold, is our largest business line at NCI, and has a strong position in a highly competitive market.

The relevance of the Brand Story to Social Media Marketing

The development of a concise and powerful Brand Story is helpful to any marketing organization, but has particular relevance in helping to extend into social media marketing.

In social media, marketing is Content.

Too strong a statement?

Think about how you lay out your branding and marketing program for the year. You have a product or service and a list of key features and benefits. You have a target market and a channel strategy. You have a pricing matrix, cost factors, and a goal in terms of volume of sales.

In order to drive demand for the product, you and your team will sift through which communications channels will give you the largest impact with your target consumers at the most efficient price. You reach out to professionals who facilitate delivering messages into the different channels: agencies, creative shops, communications firms, media partners.

Proposals come back, budgets get set, and then the process of driving the benefits and features into creative formats that fit the channels begins.

Language, image, emphasis: All are subject to modification due to the limitations of the marketing format that is being developed, whether it is sales collateral, a television spot, a magazine ad or a promotional event.

At the end of the processes, if you were to break down the costs of creating and distributing the marketing messages, you would find the largest amount of money was spent on the process of designing, producing and distributing the marketing piece.

The least amount of money was spent on creating the Content.

In social media, however, the Design imperative is low and the Content imperative is high. Content creation and distribution engines are already in place, in the form of blogging platforms, video sites like YouTube and social networks like Facebook.

The focus of your resources have to shift to creating Content. This is a challenge for most marketing staffs, which are highly skilled and enjoy the process of conceptualizing, creating and distributing highly-produced marketing materials. And many agencies have cost structures that are designed to profit from the production of these materials.

Without a clear Brand Story, it’s virtually impossible to change habits to generate the kind of Content that makes a social media marketing strategy work.

Creating and implementing a Content Marketing Strategy

The exciting thing about social media is that consumers are willing to engage with you and your brand.

The challenging thing is that they aren’t interesting in hearing all about you.

Good marketing is the combination of Image and Voice.

The Image of your brand is something that is fixed and controlled. You manage the perception of the image by the way you present messages, the media environments you use, the creative approach that you take. Image is key to a first impression; it’s feeling like you’re turned out and looking like a million bucks.

The Voice of your brand is what develops as a consumer interacts with you. It is the customer experience, the discrete and intuitive knowledge of your brand that comes from experiencing the product, trying to solve a question, having success with a service.

Voice is what develops when you spend time with someone, learn about them.

In Social Media, your voice is the dominant marketing element. If you build a marketing content strategy that is all about You — your product or service, the benefits, the successes — in general, declamatory ways, then you are going to create a voice that turns the consumer off.

The important lesson is that a marketing content strategy is not only about your brand. It is about things that are relevant to your brand.

This leads to the second question after developing a clear brand statement: What kind of content can I create that will be consistent with my brand statement?

What does this mean? Think of the content in three buckets:

1. Things about my brand that communicate my brand position. These aren’t brand statements. They are examples.
2. Things that reinforce my brand position. This is content that shows examples of the brand position at work.
3. Things that by sharing with my target market will enhance my brand position. This can be related content that appeals to a consumer in a way that is consistent with how you have positioned the brand.

As we developed our social media marketing plan for Apartment Finder, we laid out a few basic goals for how we wanted the content we created to reflect the cornerstones of our Brand Story.

First, we wanted to share examples of things that we were doing at Apartment Finder that reinforced our four cornerstones.

Second, we wanted to share information about marketing, in the multi-family industry and in general businesses, that could help our customers be smarter.

Third, we wanted to share with our customers the things that got us excited — primarily our people and our customers, together and having fun.

And fourth, we wanted to make sure that when we found something that was important to a local market — a useful news development, an industry meeting — that we shared it with our connections.

In every instance, we are looking to share and to engage.

When you look over this list, only one of the four areas of focus are on the features and benefits of the Apartment Finder brand. The other three are extensions of what we believe are some of the most important aspects of our brand story — our flexibility, our focus on our customers and our desire to be leaders in any way that we can.

The focus is well outside the scope of a traditional marketing organization and requires rethinking and retooling in order to implement.

Creating a distribution strategy for your social media content

The logical next question as you follow along and assess whether this program could be implemented in your organization is: How on earth do we gather and distribute this content?

Unlike traditional marketing, social media marketing encourages wide and deep involvement from all the members of your brand team.

In order to facilitate that activity, you need to plan your distribution strategy as carefully as the content strategy.

At Apartment Finder we have a national brand that has local teams in more than 100 markets around the country. Our customers are organized locally, regionally and nationally — we have more than 12,000 in all.

In order to make a social media marketing strategy relevant and effective, it needed to be both consistent, flexible and local.

Our solution was to leverage several different social media tools in order to create a central point to distribute content and local points for content creation and distribution.

In developing this plan, we were sensitive not creating too many technical requirements in implementing the local content program.

The core of our social media marketing program is a national brand blog — The Apartment Finder Blog.

We use this platform to create each of the four different content elements that were described above. The blog is a collaboration among the top management team for Apartment Finder, not the output of the marketing group alone. We try to have each member of the management team contribute one blog post a week. We want to share our business successes. And, we want to share the incredible activity that is out in the field.

The blog is set up on the WordPress Multi-User platform and requires relatively light maintenance, which is handled internally.

Once we’ve published content into the blog, we immediately distribute it into the Apartment Finder identity on Facebook and our @AptFinderNews identity on Twitter. We also send a summary each week of the content that was published on the blog to the field.

In order to give each market the platform for creating and distributing their own market-specific content, we encouraged them to establish market-specific Facebook pages, as well as Twitter identities. These were in addition to the broad personal networks that they had established.

Currently, we have over 80 local fan pages and groups with more than 7500 connections across the Apartment Finder brand.

We decided to use the Facebook fan pages because they give our local markets a tremendous amount of flexibility in producing content without requiring a significant level of technical skill. Our research showed us that about 70% of our customers were on Facebook, so the platform would give us significant reach into our target audience. Our research also showed us that about 80% of our customers’ customers were heavy users of Facebook, so that by drawing our clients and prospects into Facebook we were helping them get acclimated to an environment widely populated by their residents.

In looking at how to develop a distribution strategy for your brand’s social media marketing program, consider the following:

How much content will we create and in what format?

How many people associated with the brand will be contributing content? What is their level of technical comfort?

How many tiers of brand representation should we have? Will it be one national platform? Multiple platforms segmented by geography, sales channel or customer group?

What social media platforms does the audience I want to reach use most frequently? How can I distribute content into those platforms easily and without significant extra work?

In creating this kind of flexible distribution strategy to complement a focused marketing content strategy, you are able to ENGAGE frequently and with impact.

A word about control. When thinking about extending their marketing program into social media, many executives get uncomfortable with the idea of opening up their marketing dialogue. The idea of giving customers the tools of production that allow them to intersect with marketing content is discomfiting. And the idea of the entire company having the ability to contribute to a marketing content strategy feels contradictory.

My personal perspective is that your comfort with this openness and freedom is driven by your confidence in the resonance and simplicity of your Brand Story. When you have that confidence, you can feel good that the expression of your Brand’s Voice — the communications that all of your people are having every day with customers, and that your customers are having with each other — will be consistent with your Brand Image. Not relentlessly aligned: that is not realistic in the human condition. But consistent enough in tone and content so that when people think about your brand, they are convinced of its authenticity and its relevance.

Social media marketing is accretive, not explosive

A final observation about the relationship of social media marketing to your traditional marketing programs: the pace is different.

Traditional marketing is event-driven: an ad breaks, an event happens, a promotion occurs. Social media marketing is about creating networks of relationships, connection by connection. These networks build slowly, but gain velocity as they grow.

It’s in this engagement that you are able to create powerful business outcomes. You’ve converted your standard marketing approach to a content strategy, and have given people who are interested in your brand a way to interact with you on a regular basis. If you’ve honed your content approach effectively, the way that consumers interact with your brand in a social media setting will be familiar and trusting.

What are the business benefits of this program?

The first benefit is in the connection and the conversation that you are able to have. You will improve your retention, and, if you are listening closely, your increased understanding of the customer experience will help you improve your messaging and your conversion of new customers.

The second benefit is the ripple effect of distributing marketing content through your social media strategy. This content will be saved, distributed, shared and repurposed in many different ways. With each of these actions, your brand is promoted a little more widely and a little more intensely. From this expansion of brand awareness, you’ll generate the kind of increase in market receptivity, and ultimately sales, that is awarded to a market leader.

And finally, you’ll drive Internet traffic. A well-executed and frequently updated blog, along with widely distributed and acted-upon content links, will improve your PageRank with Google, helping you capture a larger portion of the relevant searches in your market. And, many experts believe that over the next several years, nearly as much traffic will be driven through social media links as will be driven by search results. The only way that your brand can participate in this activity is through implementing a social media marketing strategy.

That’s what we’ve been building at our company. It started with solid brand stories, and it is rapidly expanding into a pervasive marketing culture that is helping to enhance our business in a particularly challenging time in our markets.

I hope that you experience some of the same impact. At the very least, you owe it to yourself, your company and your brand to try.

Coda:  Here’s the final messaging presentation that TMG gave to the Apartment Finder team in 2009.  It is still remarkably apt and relevant.

I found myself asking a basic question when I looked at the Comscore/MediaMetrix traffic figures for the multi-family industry in May: How many people were looking for an apartment online in the month?

The answer was interesting and speaks to the power of diversifying marketing spend in order to reach the largest number of consumers.

In total, Comscore/MediaMetrix reports results for 55 sites serving the rental market, with total traffic of 20.2 million.  The top 10 apartment rental sites had total unique visitors of 15.1 million in May,  75% of the total audience..

Since January, there has been very little change in the total audience of the top 10 sites, although share did shift slightly. The biggest change in share was at Apartment Finder, which had 4% of the visits of the top 10 sites in January and 10% of the visits of the top 10 sites in May. Even though Apartment Finder gained close to 900,000 unique visitors in the period, the top 10 sites only gained 343,000, speaking to the incremental shifts in share among the leaders.

While total audience is useful in comparing sites to each other, the more relevant metric to use to scale the market is unduplicated audience: the total number of individuals who are searching for an apartment online that month. This is different from the total number of visitors to the leading websites, since consumers may easily visit more than one site.

An analysis of Comscore’s data shows that there were 11.7 million unduplicated apartment shoppers on the top 10 web sites in the month of May.

Notably, 8.5 million of those users, or 73%, went to only one apartment site in the month. The remaining 3.2 million, or 27%, consulted 2 or more sites.

The top 5 sites had 9.1 million unduplicated visits, or 75% of the total unduplicated audience for the top 10 sites. The percent of unduplicated visitors was slightly higher for the top 5 sites, with 77% of the 9.1 million visitors going to only one of the top five apartment listing web sites.

The duplication of visitors between specific sites is fairly low, an analysis of the Comscore figures show. The three sites with the highest duplication are Rent.com and Apartments.com, which share 15% of their users, and Rent.com and MyNewPlace.com, also at 15%. Generally, duplication rates between any other two apartment web sites in the top 10 was below 10%. For instance, Apartment Finder shared 6% of its traffic with Rent.com, 6% with Apartment Guide and 5% with For Rent, according to the Comscore figures.

The numbers suggest that the wide number of options available to consumers online has not contributed to heavy duplication of the audience. This is true also for the distribution of print magazines as well: of the roughly 5 million magazines distributed each month by Apartment Finder, Apartment Guide and For Rent, virtually none are distributed through locations where another apartment magazine is available.

A conclusion? For those marketers who are looking to drive a significant volume of leads, distributing your marketing spend across multiple marketing partners should give you relatively high access to a unique audience, given the low duplication of usage.

This scale of usage is interesting relative to the available stock of apartment housing. According to the National Multi-Family Housing Council, there were more than 12 million apartments in buildings with 10 or more units, and the top 50 property management companies managed close to 6 million apartment units in the first quarter of 2009.

The methodology of theComscore/MediaMetrix reports is laid out here, for those who are interested.

Also, to reinforce the disclosure on my blog, for those of you who are reading this out of context, I am the CEO of Network Communications, Inc., the publisher of Apartment Finder.

The March Comscore numbers were released today and they paint a clear picture of what a good plan and good execution can accomplish.

For March, ApartmentFinder.com gained 52.5% in unique visitors to 1.33 million. That puts us in second place among the three multi-platform marketing partners in the apartment space: behind ForRent.com at 1.65 million and ahead of ApartmentGuide.com at 1.19 million.

(We’re the orange line in the accompanying slide: a fitting reflection of the team’s Orange initiative this year.)

It’s a nice position to be in and creates a tremendous amount of value for our customers.

What’s most gratifying is the way that we’ve gone at building our Internet product and Internet presence over the past six months.

We haven’t driven our growth through spending a lot of money on keywords and unqualified traffic. We’ve focused on optimizing the long tail of organic search. We’ve focused on creating a simple product for consumers that gives them lots of ways to interact with the apartment communities we list. We’ve focused on keeping the distracting bells and whistles to a minimum.

We want our internet strategy to be about the same, single focus that we bring to our print product: High quality content and presentation that drives high quality leads.

The consumers are voting for us. That’s exciting. And our customers are benefitting. That’s even more exciting.

Congratulations to our ApartmentFinder and Interactive teams. They’ve done a great job.

I’ve been out in California for the past several days at Kelsey’s Local Interactive Marketplaces conference. The weather has been beautiful and I’ve had a chance to listen to a lot of engaged and interesting people talk about new ways of doing business.

(One of the nicest guys was Craig Donato of Ooodle: he makes sense and can’t repress his smile.)

But the most energizing experience I’ve had the past few days was with Jamie Jump, who runs our Apartment Magazine franchise in Southern California.

As we were winding down a lunch that focused on how to make it easier for her team to be more successful, the conversation turned to a challenging dialogue she’d had with a client. The client is looking at spending money with a lead generation company. The program would be billed on a cost per lead basis. The client was going to drop their advertising spend as a result.

Jamie’s counter was simple: How much are you going to pay per lead?

The client said, X.

Jamie: OK. I’ll give you the same deal. Pay me X per lead.

The client’s response was: But your leads aren’t the same!

Jamie: Why not?

The client is considering Jamie’s proposal. Why didn’t she jump at it? I don’t think she was ready for the creativity and the flexibility that Jamie was offering. Clients are thinking about their marketing in neat boxes: I’ve got search, I’ve got lead generation, I’ve got print and internet advertising.

But in the end, the issue comes down to economics: How much am I paying for a lead and how good is the conversion of lead-to-lease from each of my sources?

Jamie was comfortable making the offer because she’s done a lot of work analyzing how many leads she’s generating for her customers. She was willing to bear the risk, and she knows that at the lead-generation-company prices, she is going to make what she charges her customer normally.

The challenge in the multi-family industry isn’t innovation, it isn’t flexibility and it isn’t new sources. It’s having access to good data and applying good marketing discipline to new tactics.