I discovered two significant mistakes I made at Senior Housing Forum. Maybe you can learn from them.

None of these items are exactly article length but all worth writing about.  The first two are web mistakes I recently made. Once of which has been fixed and the other will get fixed next week.  The third item is what I think is a cool idea for a sticky, contagious video that could be done by a senior living community. Webpage Mistake #1 Several weeks ago it sort of seemed like the number of new people subscribing to my newsletter had dropped way off.  I was a little puzzled and concerned, but had a lot of other things going on and figured it was a cyclical thing and would resolve itself. 

Big Mistake!

Then a week or so ago I got an email someone through LinkedIn, telling me that they read a number of articles and really liked them.  He went to the sign-up page only to discover the submit button was missing.   I was skeptical but went and looked.  He was right.  I have no idea what happened, but it is fixed now and sign-ups are back to normal or better.  Two lessons:

  • Check all your pages from time to time, just to make sure they are actually looking the way you want them to look.  Look for old orphan or blank pages and make them go away (ok, I haven’t finished this one either).
  • Don’t ignore little signs that things might be broken.  While I hope that I ultimately got all those lost sign-ups I suspect I didn’t and won’t.

Webpage Mistake #2

After your homepage the second most visited page on your whole website is your “About Page.”  Yep, everyone wants to know who you are, what you do and what makes you special.   If you are like me and most organizations with web pages,  you created your About Page way back when, and haven’t touched it or even thought about it since then except maybe to make changes contact information or about staff. This page is hugely important to the image you project. It is where you can really tell your story.  It the place you have total control and can put your best foot forward.   I will confess that if you look at my About Page you will find it horribly dated outdated.  But it is one of my projects over the Thanksgiving break to rewrite it. A Viral Video Idea One of my favorite senior living viral videos is the Harlem Shake Video done by a BMA community that has been viewed more than 13,000 times.  I think cheesy home video is one of the most powerful and under-utilized marketing tools a senior community has at it’s disposal.  Yesterday someone pointed me to a new ad for Volvo Trucks with this headline “Advertisers Should Just Quit. Nothing Will Top This Volvo ad”  (I have embedded the video at the end of the article in case you haven’t seen it.) So here is my idea as a take-off or spoof on that ad. Your video starts with part of the Volvo Ad with a voice over that says something like this:

“Our Seniors are stronger and more limber than Jean-Claude Van Damme”

You would then fade to a pair senior living vans driving side-by-side with a dummy senior who either gets crushed, stretched or split apart or something else. . . .  The end of the video would of course include the line “No Real Seniors (or anyone else) were harmed in the making of this video.” If you have the right mix for what happens as the vans split apart or merge together share it here.  Or better yet make the video surprise us and share it here. Finally . . . if you think this is the dumbest idea you have ever heard my only defense is that it came to me in the middle of the night.

If you want to know how the video was done, it is the real deal but there were lots of hidden safety devices you can read about it here.   That’s it.  Have a great weekend. Steve

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