‘On the Ground’ with Eric Brown: Apartment Communities are Natural Curators

Apartment communities are in an excellent position to add immense value for their residents and prospects by becoming expert curators of all things hyper local. Not sure if everyone knows what “Content Curation” means, or what we are referring to, so here is a quick definition:

“The practice of Content Curation is a gathering of information (sorting, categorizing, directing, and presenting) such that material from multiple sources creates a unique editorial experience for readers/visitors.”

It seems that apartment communities would be natural curators. Curation is about adding value from humans who add their qualitative judgment to whatever is being gathered and organized. It is about selection, organization and presentation. In an era of data abundance, the thing that is scarce is taste.

Fred Wilson, well-known venture capitalist and blogger (avc.com) wrote a post that clarifies the changing landscape for publishers on his blog. According to him:

“If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I’d go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them.”

Think about the connections you could make, before even meeting a prospect for the first time, because your apartment community became the “go to” resource for hip and cool happenings in and around your neighborhood.

Take this a step further and fast-forward—your apartment community now ranks much higher on a Google search because of all of the content you have curated. Note that we are not referring to original content, just reorganizing content that is already created. To be fair, this takes time and a knack for finding hip and cool things; however, it can be done on a much smaller scale than creating all original content, and still have the same effect.