The coolest thing happened to me online the other day. In the sea of billions of people online, I was made to feel important.
I really was! And the amazing thing is, it all happened in a 140 character burst!
See, a few evenings ago, I had dinner with the lovely Ms. Lisa Trosien. The Apartment All Stars were in town on a speaking engagement and I had offered to take her out for some killer seafood. By the way, if the All Stars are coming to your town, you MUST go! It was a phenomenal presentation!!! Anyway, back to me feeling important...
I had told a twitter contact that we were having dinner together and she replied to me:
@artchickhb Lucky you! Where are gals heading to?
Now, because i don't have my phone set up to receive anything but direct messages from Twitter, I didn't get her reply to my posting until after we had gotten back. When I got home that evening, I directed my reply to her, saying:
@HappyAllDays We went to Ivar's downtown :) It was really good! :)
That was it. That was all I said. A few hours later, this tweet came to me:
IvarsClam@artchickhb Glad you enjoyed it. Hope you're KEEPIN' CLAM now. Check out Happy Hour if you're 21+, Acres just got a great review.
And for a brief moment, I felt really special because someone heard what I said. Now, being a marketing type of person, I know that this is just a vehicle, and yes, I didn't miss the Blatant advertisement on the end of it. BUT the moment someone contacted me to thank me for positive feedback and to tell me that they heard me, it made me feel even better about my dining experience, which had been over for almost a day by then.
Do you make your residents feel heard? I posted a single line about a good dinner and someone sought me out to thank me for it. This is a company that understands how important word of mouth really is to the success of a business. Do You?
If you're not already on twitter, I say grab up an account! It's a really good vehicle for making your residents feel important. And if you are already on it, are you running keyword searches to see what people are saying, even if it isn't directed squarely at you? Are you optimizing the tool for it's greatest efficiency? It doesn't take much. 140 characters made me feel special. Think what you could do with your resident retention numbers!