Social Media…ahem…(or, haven’t we heard enough about that, already?)

1912—radio introduced
1950—color television hits the market
1993—email becomes a form of communication
1999—Google makes its entry
2005—Someone comes up with the words “Social Media”

The reason you’re hearing so much about Social Media lately is because it truly is an enormous phenomenon. That’s why the ARDA-New England meeting organizers hired keynote speaker Sree Sreenivasan, digital media professor and Dean of Student Affairs, Columbia Journalism School, and contributing editor of DNAinfo.com as the first speaker to address approximately 120 attendees at the Providence, RI, conference in early June.

Social Media is going to be bigger than the radio, more powerful than television and more common than using email. (I’m not making this up.) Sreenivasan tells us Facebook will be bigger than Google and recommends that all businesses – large or small – jump into the mix. (You can learn to swim as you go. At this early juncture, everyone’s paddling hard to keep up with this rapidly evolving technology.)

You can find internal resources or outsource it, but you are advised to resist the temptation to pile social media duties onto one of your employee’s workload as a mere afterthought. This is getting to be a pretty important function and you’ll want to develop a well-organized strategy to address it.

Resorts working smarter to make ends meet

We could all spend hours commiserating on the sad effects of the U.S.’s recent economic disaster on our homeowner associations. But developers, management companies and suppliers at the Providence meeting revealed there’s plenty of innovative thinking going on.

One manager shared some of the actions her resort operation has undertaken recently to help bolster drooping annual maintenance fee income. One of these was to have Vacation Specialists call owners/members to help them plan vacations. They particularly select customers whose maintenance fees are in arrears and encourage them to come to one of their properties During the call, they never even mention the past-due amount. The first goal is to rekindle their initial motive for buying – to have a great vacation. Once they’re excited about ‘going on vacation,’ the resort can structure a customized payment plan that works.

Without exception, developers mentioned offering shorter term options for purchase, even leases, and looking to provide consumers with greater flexibility, rather than pressing for the typical longer-term real estate interest-based ownership model. True to type, timeshare operators are creative when it comes to new and ever more interesting business models.

ARDA initiatives described

Howard Nusbaum, president and CEO of ARDA, gave his typically insightful synopsis of the association’s activities during the ARDA New England meeting, including information about its assistance in the non-judicial foreclosure issue. ARDA is focused first-and-foremost upon acting as our industry’s liaison with legislators and regulators, of course. But another vital issue for ARDA is to help developers in sales gain access to the capital market. You are encouraged to visit www.ARDA.org to review ARDA’s whitepaper addressed to prospective lenders and investors reviewing the opportunities in the timeshare industry. Others among ARDA’s top five issues are finding an answer to the resale problem, helping build awareness about social media and helping timeshare entities to develop new business models.

By Sharon Drechsler, RRP for SPI Timeshare Software

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