Place Making: “like SEO for Real Spaces" (Part 1)
Increasing property value through content design: post #1 of a series where about new trends on real estate from a community builder point of view.
You notice you are too deep in the digital scene when your metaphors use the online world to explain things in the "real" one.
There's a clear parallel between the way we do digital marketing and the way the real estate industry works: and here's the explanation of why creating content is like the art of building "lightouses" which matter both for online and offline spaces.
Ok, What is Place Making?
If you've been looking a bit into the startup or real estate scene recently, you might have heard all the buzz about WeWork. Every developer is looking to that model with curiosity, but mostly: no one really understands why, how and if they should add that “coworking/coliving” space element to their brand new development.
What they are looking for isn't a coworking space, but what it means: people, brand and leads pipeline: and there are multiple ways to get this, beyond coworking spaces.
They are actually looking at place making. But you probably never heard of it before. Before I go into showcasing success cases that tell what place making is about, let's understand what it is: using the SEO metaphor.
For the impatient ones, TL;DR:
Place making is all about attracting and engaging people to a specific location in order to achieve a certain goal, most of times related to retail (consumption), rental (space optimization) or increasing the value of the property. Sounds familiar? (:
Place Making is Like SEO for "Real Spaces"
Content is the reason why we go somewhere.
Talking about physical places: we go for meetings, dinners, parties, shopping, coffee. If you are Malaysian, you go as far as 10km to get the best Nasi Lemak in town. For virtual places, people go to read an article, browse for fashion accessories, share a picture of their latest brunch or watch cat videos. Whatever it is, content is both the excuse and the value proposition that drives people to places.
In the context of this article, content means "anything that draws people to a specific location": online or offline.
If you aren’t familiar with the SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. Google uses content relevancy as one of the key measures to prioritize search results: for them, it's about how fast people find what they're looking for.
Great content works like a lighthouse. When your content is aligned to your value proposition (products/services), you are doing more than marketing: you are helping people find what they are looking for.
That's mostly all that Google's Search Engine cares about.
And if Google starts to find that you are helping people solve their problems, YAY! Now it’s more likely they’ll keep you positioned at the “top of searches”.
For instance: content means much more than "articles" and "videos": these may be hooks, specially if you are an e-commerce or marketplace. You need content which engages your leads and makes them stay: converting them into customers. The variety and quality of items available at your online commerce is likely to be the most important variable in order to reduce your bounce rate.
How Does Content Work on Physical Spaces
Drawing a parallel between the online and the offline world: an article or video may attract traffic to your website, but the value you deliver is what makes them stay.
The same way, an event or festival may attract people to a physical space. But what would make them stay (consume, work or live at your place)?
Place making is about transforming empty spaces into places where people want to go to, engage with and stay.
It takes care of multiple aspects of space management, from design to programming.
Taking it to startup terms, place making understand that UI/UX is also an element of value delivery and that you must design spaces purposefully, to fit both the activities to be hosted by the space (functionality) and the community to be hosted in there (brand).
Making Places from Scratch
At the start, SEO is more about the relationships you build, than about content itself.
When you are new, you must go where your leads are, relying in the existing networks and places where they are to let them know about you. In fact, networking is an ever growing work, even after you build your own community of followers and customers.
That's what we call Community Building.
Building community is exactly the art of generating valuable content to attract people to one place, while weaving the network of people who will facilitate it's distribution.
Overall, the rules of attracting people from online and offline sites follow 3 principles:
- Empathizing (aka design thinking, creating something that people want)
- Giving First (aka generating relevant content, based on your users wants/needs)
- Going Where They Are (aka growth hacking)
What's Next? Part 2:
Content is, essentially, the value you add in order to attract, engage and retain customers - be it relating physical of virtual space.
Next, we will talk about the engineering of "belonging".
We will talk about why the hype around spaces related to startups, coworking, creativity hubs, innovation spaces and so on. Exploring the core of it, rather than the shape, to understand what real estate really needs to build.
Next Up:
- Why Not "Just Another Starbucks"? What Has Changed > Read Now
- Great Examples of Place-Making in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
- Interview with Key Place Makers in KL
- The Science of SEO to Real Spaces: Attract, Engage, Stay
- Engineering Serendipity: The Art of Making people feel Lucky at your Space
- Doing it yourself: Content Design, Creation and Curation