Im an admirer of Eric Brown, owner of Urbane Apartments outside of Detroit. Hes a practical-minded entrepreneur whos turned his if-I-cant-touch-it-its-not-real sensibility to social marketing in order to drive prospective renters to his units.

The results have been well-documented. Eric has experimented with a lot of different approaches to using social media tools to create destinations for current and prospective residents. Some have worked, some have not, but Eric has tied each experiment to his actual results.

In a recent post on his blog, he distills these lessons into a new set of metrics that can be used to help determine the effectiveness of the social media tool set in a larger marketing mix. Its a great starting point for conversation. One thing that you can be sure of: these are things that Eric has tried and found that work.