All posts by : Brenton Gibbs

Property industry website TheUrbanDeveloper.com has fast become the essential source of daily information for those in the property and urban development sector wishing to stay informed and be engaged.

Founded in 2014 by Adam Di Marco and Lachlan Webb, TheUrbanDeveloper.com has attracted an active community of 25,000 subscribers and over 250,000 monthly visits.

The site provides daily content covering the latest projects, property transactions, trends, analysis, opinion pieces and guest columnists. Its readers are varied but mainly consist of property developers, investors, architects, designers, real estate agents, town planners, marketers, construction industry personnel and an assortment of other associate professionals.

Di Marco describes how the site came to fruition:

“We were frustrated with the way our industry – the property and urban development industry – collected and shared information.

“We were within one of the largest sectors of the Australian economy, which employed more than one million people and generates over 10 per cent of the GDP, yet it still relied upon daily newspapers to feed us the information that we depended upon to make big decisions.

“Why did it have to be that way? So, we got on the horse and decided to improve it.”

As they say, the rest is history, but they are not content to rest on their laurels, instituting a policy of continuous improvement and investing in their site. RG Communications has been engaged this year to augment their existing news and content production capabilities so that the founders can put more time into growing the business.

So what are some of the key building blocks to developing an online presence like TheUrbanDeveloper.com?

Know your audience – Understand who your intended audience is and what makes them tick. How will you target them and what messages are appropriate? Spending time defining, analysing and listening to your audience is crucial. Articulating and refining a strategy gives you a solid platform to guide future decisions.

Content – Good content is king. There’s no point in creating content that isn’t engaging or misses the mark on what your audience is seeking. They will drift away pretty quickly or turn off. Provision of regular, interesting but varied content that is topical will help dramatically in the engagement stakes and have them coming back for more.

Get The basics right –

Website – Your website needs to be engaging and properly project your offering and facilitate engagement. There are many options available. These days you can pretty much self publish and control your own site using platforms like WordPress which have great functionality.

Corporate Identity – Invest in your brand identity and stand out from the crowd. Make sure it represents you brand personality and USP.

Social media – Utilise the power of social media to extend your reach, encourage interaction and importantly listen to what your community are saying about you!

Ever an innovator, General Electric (GE), one of the world’s largest conglomerates, has made a splash on social media platform Snapchat by releasing a version of the famous moon boots worn by Apollo 11 astronauts in 1969.

The just completed campaign celebrated GE’s contributions to the NASA Moon Mission 45 years ago. GE supplied advanced materials used in moon boots and the helmet visors worn by astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins.

The company made only 100 pairs of the 2015 boots and priced them at $196.90 (in homage to the year 1969). They were made available through online retailer JackThreads.com and sold out quickly.

GE decided to unveil and heavily promote the boots on Snapchat as it made it debut on the platform. Sam Olstein global director-innovation at GE said that the nature of Snapchat, fitting into the world of erasable media – media that goes away after a period of time, lent itself to storytelling and driving engagement and action. The Snapchat campaign featured photos, videos and stories about The Missions moon boots as they were named.

They even had Buzz Aldrin take over the Snapchat account for a day and talk about his trip to the moon and back. GE also used other social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter to drive Snapchat activity.

Olstein’s goal is to introduce the venerable GE brand onto new platforms and to new audiences. The company has been shedding its image purely as a maker of industrial products, light bulbs and refrigerators as it embraces the Internet age.

“We need to change the way the younger generation identifies with us as a company,” Olstein said.

“We’re transforming the company to be more of a software brand.

“This is the future of GE: the digitisation of industry. We’re taking all of our incredible complex machinery and mashing it up with software and sensors and evolving into more of a high tech industrial company.”

Olstein’s mission also includes – as he describes – using commerce as content.

“We see the role of product in a completely different way – around really using commerce as story telling,” he said.

Sam Olstein, Director of Global Innovation at GE, spoke at Interactive Minds Digital Summit 2015 in Brisbane.

Images – GE and NASA