In doing some homework online I made a few discoveries I found innovative and intriguing.  What's most interesting is that these discoveries come from one company.  UDR (formerly United Dominion Realty Trust) has added some new features to their website.  Namely, Digg, Twitter, and NextRentals.com.  I can't confirm that NextRentals.com is a "new" feature, but it's new to me.  The URL was first registered in 2003, but in 2008 has had the most activity/updates.

First up Digg.  On the UDR website they explain, "Digg is a 3rd party program where users can mark content they find interesting and share with other Digg users. If you are not a Digg user, you will be able to see the icons to "Submit" content or you can also "Digg it" if another user has already submitted it. You can also see how many Diggs the content has received."

According to Hubspot.com, for a business, there are three primary goals for using Digg:

* Submitted content provides an inbound link to a deep page on your site.
* Send interesting individuals to your site.
* If you strike gold and make it to the front page you can get thousands of visits and generate links from other bloggers writing about your content.

Now incomes Twitter.  UDR explains their twitter account allows apartment prospects to "Follow" the apartment feed according to their specifications (e.g. price changes) and UDR apartment information will then be sent every time the community webpage is updated. In addition, Twitter users can get a UDR apartment feed on all available apartment inventory that will include search, send "Tweets" on available apartment inventory, and all inventory updates are automatically fed to opt-in Twitter users.

Again, according to Hubspot.com,Business Goals for Twitter are:

1. Engage your senior executives in social media. Social media is a great way to build relationships with your market. You can make and manage connections with prospects, customers, bloggers and other influencers. Senior executives typically has little time to write a blog or answer lots of messages and friend requests on Facebook. If your CEO can send a text message, they can use Twitter from anywhere in the world. Twitter is perfect for any influential senior executive who is always on the road meeting with people and who has some interesting opinions on your market.

2. Build and maintain PR relationships media / bloggers. It is really easy to follow someone on Twitter. And you'll be surprised how often they decide to follow you as well. It's often an easier way to connect with influential people in the media instead of calling and emailing them.

3. Monitor your company / brand on Twitter. Similar to how we want to monitor articles on the web about our company monitoring what people say on Twitter can be just as important. It's also a great way to connect and engage with individuals.

4. Promote blog articles, webinars, interesting news and more. Its really easy to post a link to something in Twitter like links to blog articles or other news articles relevant to your audience which in turn can drive traffic. If you have RSS feeds like a blog you can even feed that to Twitter automatically.

5. Announce specials, deals or sales. If you are a retailer or anyone who often has special offers, you can use Twitter to announce these deals instantly to a large audience. Amazon is a great example of this. Their Amazon Deals twitter account has thousands of followers who are interested in deals that get posted to this account.

6. Live updates on events or conferences. If you participate in a large trade show or run your own corporate event, you can use Twitter to announce last minute changes or cool events that are happening ("Just announced, David Meerman Scott book signing in the exhibit hall until 11am"). If you can excite your audience into sharing on twitter you can get a whole lot of extra exposure. With conferences you can extend offline events into online marketing buzz.

Lastly, I stumbled upon a link at the bottom of the UDR homepage that said "Apartments for Rent".  In clicking it I was taken to www.NextRentals.com, or an ILS website containing strictly UDR communities in the listings.  Very innovative and very clever.  Small and medium sized companies wouldn't be able to pull this off the same way, but kudos to UDR for making it happen.

So, let's summarize.  A large company like UDR is starting to "socialize" their main website with Digg and Twitter, and they are optimizing it like crazy all the time with ideas like NextRentals.com.  I love the approach, and believe we should all be keeping an eye on UDR.  I believe they are one that is setting a benchmark for corporate websites in the multi-family industry.  This is a large company with great minds driving their marketing efforts.  One of those great minds is Steve Taraborelli, Vice President of Marketing.  I look forward to hearing him speak at this year's AIM Conference on the topic of, "Online Brand and Reputation Management: Seeing What the Search Engines See." Hope to see you there too.

Mark - AKA The Marketing/Apartment Nerd