Three stories from one interview: Kevin Kiene of ezLandlord Forms

It started with a call about ezLandlord Forms, an e-commerce site with meaningful traffic that was based in Philadelphia.

I interviewed Kevin Kiene, the CEO and founder of the online provider of property-management legal documents with 300,000 members nationally, for a story for Technically Philly. During our conversation, I found out he was a Fox Chase native who now lives in Frankford, the same neighborhood I now call home, so I wrote a story about him for NEast Philly, too.

That got picked up by the father and son team at Frankford Gazette, who do a great job of chronicling the bad and more importantly the good of their native ‘hood. Suddenly, a few hundred new eyeballs know about Kiene and his product.

After the jump links to both stories I wrote, a couple quotations that didn’t make it into either and the video that prompted it all.

It isn’t the mass appeal of a story in the Inquirer or another major newspaper or magazine, but, rather it’s a smaller, more loyal brood who are invested him because of his ties to the region. That’s something to think about for the future, young marketers. I don’t believe you can undervalue smaller niche coverage.

It was only after I questioned Kiene about his Philly roots that we found we both lived in the same neighborhood — Frankford — and he raved about his ties to the city.

  • “There are endless ideas and reasons why I’m here but, really, everything in Philly is the food. I have not had a better food selection anywhere.”
  • “There’s a lot of great people in Philly.”

All this came because a friend forwarded me a link to a Phillyblog thread that mentioned a video produced by a landlord form company. The video was a little silly, but I was intrigued by the swing at viral marketing by a relatively small e-commerce company.

http://neastmag.wordpress.com/2009/06/29/fox-chase-native-and-frankford-resident-behind-ezlandlord-forms/

One thought on “Three stories from one interview: Kevin Kiene of ezLandlord Forms”

  1. Well done on the story spread.that happens often in NY but by the time the story is spread to the mass it’s no longer the right information lol.word of mouth does that.However I think the concept is always brightly exampled around here…pride in the area commits people to keeping an ear to their local streets.now if only they could get even a scrap of the story right I’d say they were doing a good job to but…no i’ll save that for you!
    If that guy really wants to make a difference in Landlord living,he should expand to central NY,Syracuse at it’s furtherest.That’s my Grandmother job title and I couldn’t even begin to explain the injusices that CNY pulls on Landlords.It’s not only digusting but disheartening as well.Don’t go into relaste in CNY even if it is to save it from developers…

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