DE just released the “Elliman Report: Manhattan Decade 2003-2012,” and the “Elliman Report: Manhattan Townhouse 2003-2012,” the leading resources on the state of the Manhattan housing market. As always, our market reports are produced in conjunction with Miller Samuel to provide you and your clients with the most comprehensive and neutral market insight available. 

 

The Manhattan co-op and condo market finished 2012 with the second highest number of sales in the past decade after the 2007 peak. For the fourth consecutive year, housing prices showed stability but listing inventory fell to a twelve year low, likely placing upward pressure on housing prices in 2013. Record low mortgage rates have brought new buyers into the market despite tight mortgage lending conditions. We remain encouraged about the direction of the market and will continue to keep you informed of the trends.

 

The Manhattan townhouse market had the most sales since the market peaked in 2007 and activity has been rising for the past three years. Prices remained stable over past year, as they have been during the past four. The market has tightened over the past year as listing inventory fell and marketing times are now faster on average than during the boom. The townhouse market has continued to perform well and we look forward to another active year in 2013.

 

We constantly look for ways to provide our clients with better information to enable them to make more informed decisions. Our efforts to make this market report series possible reflect my strong belief that in a market that is constantly changing, access to timely information is one of the greatest resources we can offer our clients.  We are committed to providing the best information and services in the industry. Explore our full market report series covering Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, The Hamptons, North Fork, Westchester/Putnam, Miami, Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach at http://www.elliman.com/marketreports.

In September, I spent a week in Germany. I look German and even lived in the country as a child, but I speak the language only well enough to be dangerous. 

I can order a glass of wine, but then the charade ends.

My elderly aunt isn’t fooled. She has trouble understanding my ungrammatical babble.

“Was sprichst du?” (What do you speak?) she asks. “Hoch Deutsch (high German) oder Platt Deutsch (Low German)?” “Schlecht Deutsch (Bad German),” I reply. I speak well enough to get by, but not well enough to really say anything.

And that was the problem. After three days in Germany, I had no beliefs, no opinions, no personality. As a blog writer,  I missed being able to express myself.

Having a platform that lets you communicate your personal brand is a rare gift. So go for it when you write your blog: Tell us what you think.

Say it in plain English. And celebrate who you are.

Get your personality across

Do this even if it’s abrasive. Especially if it’s abrasive.

If you’re writing authentically, your audience should know immediately that you authored a piece. My own style has been described as warm, witty, quirky. Whether you agree with that or not, you should be able to tell a piece is by me by the way I use words, by the positions I take, by the refusal to be serious for more than a few lines.

If your blog doesn’t sound like you, it’s time to rewrite until it’s genuine.

Take an outlandish position

Your blog gives you a chance to make a stand—so don’t wallow in the middle ground. Choose a position and defend it. I read a marketing blog post recently about Features and Benefits. For once, it did not say that every feature should also have a benefit. Quite the contrary. After hearing same old same old for years of copywriting, it was compelling to see a post that tore it all up.

Be that person—the one who opens eyes wide.

Don’t mince words

At dinner recently, a friend mentioned that his former wife had been in a car accident. Was it bad? our hostess asked. Not bad enough, he replied. OK, that’s cold, but we’re pretty clear how he feels about his ex-wife. So if you need to mince something, make it onions. Say it like you mean it. Forget the qualifiers and euphemisms.

If every word is a cloak for some more dastardly term, then you’re writing in another language.

Provoke disagreement

If you have a flock that follows you and it isn’t completely comprised of sheep, then engage them enough to disagree with you. Loudly, if necessary. I wrote a post once suggesting people use Readability Indices to make their posts more accessible to their audiences. One commenter said he’s tired of dumbing down his writing—and if his audience doesn’t understand it, he doesn’t want to talk to them anyway.

Bully for him.

Get rid of people

Go all the way—provoke disagreement to the point that readers unsubscribe from your blog.  No one’s unsubscribing? You’re not trying hard enough. Sure, they’ll be there as long as you’re so bland they hardly notice you. Or don’t bother to read your blog. But when you unmask, they may recoil. Good.

Distance yourself from the people who simply tolerate you.

Keep the people who love you

In some ways, business relationships work the same way as personal ones. You want to keep the people close who love you no matter what. I have three friends who would stick with me even if I become an axe murderer—although one admits she’d be disappointed.

Ultimately you want blog followers so avid that they love you even when you quarrel and want to work things out. Those people will advocate for you like the blasé folks never will.

And that, my friend, is the start of a beautiful relationship.

Guest author: Diana Kightlinger is a professional print and digital copywriter and content writer for high-achieving businesses, from solo entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 companies. For more helpful info, like Eclipse Communications on Facebook and follow her on Eclipsewriter Blog.

Want to Learn More About How to Create Compelling Content that Your Audience Wants to Read?

My book – “Blogging the Smart Way – How to Create and Market a Killer Blog with Social Media” – will show you how.

It is now available to download. I show you how to create and build a blog that rocks and grow tribes, fans and followers on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. It also includes dozens of tips to create contagious content that begs to be shared and tempts people to link to your website and blog.

I also reveal the tactics I used to grow my Twitter followers to over 130,000.

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With the proliferation of online platforms, power has shifted to the customer—and the customer is better informed and more demanding everyday. They express and share their experiences, appreciation, curses, and questions online about a product or service. With the social phenomena, it’s like high school gossip on steroids.

That makes customers the drivers of your brand. They control your message. Your business has to live up to their expectations. Smart CMOs have recognized this shift. Smarter CMOs have aligned their goals around the customer experience. And the best CMOs sit with their call centers to gather feedback.

In 2013, the C-suite is focused on customer obsession and delivering a customer experience that is as efficient and frictionless as possible. Most businesses capture only a fraction of their opportunities for customer engagement—they need to do a MUCH better job at seizing and optimizing every customer touch point. Necessarily, nearly 90% of CEOs cite customer engagement as their primary initiative in the next five years.

Of course, every employee must be enabled to own any customer interaction. Nobody owns the customer, but someone always owns the moment.

From an operational perspective, who should be stepping up?

The CCO?
There’s been talk of a new role to own the customer experience—the “Chief Customer Officer.” Identifying one owner is important, but will this individual have control over the necessary resources and budget? How will they work with the existing leaders of sales, marketing, and service?

The CMO?
The CMO is another viable option. Marketing started using social media first, as a new channel and extension of their digital platforms. And thinking through the customer experience is really just an amplification of thinking through the brand experience. But, traditionally, Marketing has been less interested in what happens after the sale is made.

The Service Leader?
Service leaders are already tied to the customer experience. Should they be stepping up? If Marketing has been responsible for the “presented” brand, then perhaps customer service is responsible for the “experienced” brand. However, unlike CMOs, Service leaders often do not have ‘a seat at the table.’

What is the correct approach? What is the path to delivering on the customer experience? For one, Marketing and Customer Service will need to kiss and make up—and figure out how to collaborate on the right technologies and processes to impact the end-to-end customer experience. More broadly, it’s about smashing down the departmental silos and getting the entire C-suite to step up. As an enabler of internal and external collaboration, the CIO’s role in driving the customer experience will be critical.

What’s next? To delve more into this discussion around the customer experience, join Bluewolf, salesforce.com, and Bunchball at the Redefining Customer Engagement Forum in Newport Beach on Feb 21st to discover how you can maximize every customer moment.