Last week was Spring Break for my kids. One afternoon, my nine year old son, Danny, made the mistake of saying he was bored. So I sat him down at my computer and told him he was going to help me with a little research project. He, of course, protested, but I assured him that it would only take a minute and with a groan and a slump of his shoulders, he was prepared to make the best of it. …

When you walk into your neighborhood supermarket, what is the first thing you see? It is likely fresh flowers and freshly baked cookies and bread. This is no accident. This is priming. Priming is a manipulation of the way our memory works, where a stimulus influences our responses to subsequent stimuli. Simply put, when we see things like fresh flowers at the supermarket, items that are highly perishable, we carry that concept of freshness with us throughout our shopping experience …

The Internet has undergone numerous evolutions since its conversion from research to commerce in the early 90’s. If we were to group these evolutionary shifts into distinct waves, Wave One would certainly have to be one of Creation since, during these early days, companies were initially focused on rolling out their online presence. Wave Two came in the form of Search, where we saw Google rise to the front of the pack. During this wave, indexing all of the content …

As we all know, leveraging social media to attract prospects has been a challenging exercise. A social presence for apartment communities, with an emphasis toward retention and communication with current residents, has delivered some degree of success, but as a means to reach out to prospective renters, social media’s big return on investment has remained elusive despite referral incentives and similar strategies. To understand why this has been such a struggle, I would propose that we step back for a …

We all spend a substantial amount of time, energy, and dollars attracting consumers to our websites and, once we have them there, we focus on compelling them to interact with the site in ways we prefer. We prefer they become familiar with the communities, send an email, pick up the phone and call, schedule an appointment, or even reserve a unit. We certainly do not prefer that they scroll around a bit, click a link or two and just leave. …