Morgul Marketing

    Miami, FL

    Social media for plumbers whose worst day happens to somebody downstairs

    In a county of towers, a plumbing failure is almost never one household's problem. A supply line lets go on the eleventh floor and by morning it belongs to the unit owner, three residents below, a building manager, a management company and two adjusters. The geometry of the stock is what should shape a Miami-Dade plumbing feed, because it decides who is watching, what they own, and when you are allowed inside the chase at all. The audience in a Brickell or Edgewater building has no water heater to flush, no yard shutoff and no lateral of their own, and almost everything published about residential plumbing was written for somebody else.

    Write for the neighbor below, because that is the person having the worst day

    The resident who did not cause the leak is the least informed person in the building and the loudest one afterward.

    A leak in a house is witnessed by one family. A leak in a Brickell or Edgewater tower is witnessed by whoever is under it, whoever got a notice slipped under the door, and whoever heard about it in the elevator the next morning.

    Nobody publishes for them. Plumbing content is written for the person with the burst pipe, and the person with the ruined ceiling gets nothing except an argument about who pays.

    Post what helps in the first hour. Where a unit's shutoff usually sits and why it may not stop water arriving from above, what to photograph before anyone moves furniture, who in the building should be told and in what order, and what a plumber can do in a unit that is not the source.

    Stop short of the money question. Who pays for what between an owner, a neighbor and an association sits in the building's documents and with the insurers, and a contractor guessing at that in public is guessing at somebody's claim.

    Say what a plumber is even permitted to touch in a unit that is not the source. Reaching the chase above a soaked ceiling usually needs the condominium association's approval and sometimes its own contractor, and a resident who understands that stops reading the wait as indifference.

    In a tower there is no water heater in the garage to talk about

    Most published plumbing advice assumes a single family house, and a large share of Miami-Dade households do not live in one.

    No heater to flush, no hose bib, no crawl space, no main in a yard box, no lateral of their own. Hot water arrives from a plant room the resident has never seen, and the shutoff that matters is a valve in a chase behind a closet wall.

    The standard maintenance post is not merely unhelpful there. It tells a tower resident, quietly and immediately, that this account was written for somebody else.

    Write the version that fits the stock instead. Angle stops and braided supply lines under a sink, a washing machine box in a closet with occupied units below it, a dishwasher connection sitting over a neighbor's ceiling, and the fact that a fixture change usually waits on condominium association approval before anyone opens a wall.

    Ask the building engineer what the risers are made of before you write about them. Cast iron stacks, copper domestic lines and the age of the pump room decide which advice is true in one building and wrong in the next one down the street.

    When a tower starts recertification you will be tagged in threads you should not answer

    Residents ask public questions during a building review, and a plumbing contractor is the wrong professional to answer most of them.

    Once a building enters 40-year recertification, owner groups fill with people asking whether the plumbing is why an assessment is coming. Somebody will tag you. The instinct to be helpful is the dangerous one.

    Have a standard reply and use it. You can describe what a drain line inspection involves and what a camera can show. You cannot give a view on whether a building passes, what a structural report means, or what an association should decide, and saying so plainly reads as competence rather than evasion.

    Name the right professional in the same breath. A licensed engineer, the building official, and the association's own advisors. Anything circulating in an owner group is a rumor until one of them says otherwise.

    Never name the building in your own reply, even when the thread already has. A contractor putting an address next to speculation about its condition is doing something the association remembers, and vendor lists in Miami-Dade are short.

    The morning the water goes off is the only show in the building

    Riser work runs on the building's notice schedule, which fixes both when you can shoot and when everybody is paying attention.

    Stack and riser work needs the line dry, so residents get told first and the window is set by the building rather than by you. It is the rare plumbing job with a date on it weeks ahead.

    It is also the only time the pipe is open. There is no return visit for a better angle in an occupied tower, so whatever gets captured inside that window is all that will ever exist of it.

    Residents watch that morning because their water is off, which makes it the one day of the year a plumbing explanation is the most interesting thing on somebody's phone. A short, plain account of what is happening in the chase gets read by people who would never watch a plumbing video otherwise.

    The job in front of your camera was decided long before. Condominium association approval moves on meeting dates, so today's work was agreed months ago and the next one is being argued about now, which is a useful thing to say out loud to owners who think a proposal disappeared.

    None of the craft of running an account changes at the county line, so the general version, from what to film to how often to publish, lives on our plumbing social media page.

    Questions we actually get

    Most plumbing advice assumes a house with a garage. What do we post for tower residents?
    The parts of the system they actually control. Angle stops and supply lines under a sink, a washing machine box with somebody living underneath, a dishwasher connection over a neighbor's ceiling, and what the shutoff in the chase does and does not stop. Add that a fixture change generally waits on the association, because a resident who buys a faucet first and asks later is the person who calls you in a bad mood.
    Should the account be in Spanish, English or both?
    Both, written rather than translated. Publish the piece twice as its own post in each language instead of stacking a caption under one video. If a real share of your work is in North Miami or Little Haiti, Haitian Creole is worth adding for the explanatory pieces, which are the ones people forward to a neighbor.
    Nobody in our office writes Haitian Creole. Is machine translation good enough?
    No. A native speaker abandons a machine translated paragraph in the first sentence, and they remember which company published it. Either pay somebody who speaks it to write the piece properly, or stay in the languages your own people speak. A short, correct post in two languages beats a long one in three where the third is embarrassing.
    When are we actually able to film a riser job?
    In the window the building gives you. Stack and riser work happens with the line dry and with residents notified in advance, so the date belongs to the building, not to a content calendar. Plan the shots before that morning, because the pipe is open once and nobody reopens a chase in an occupied tower so you can get a better angle.
    Residents keep asking us about recertification in the comments. How do we answer?
    Describe only what a plumbing contractor can determine, such as what a camera inspection of a drain line shows. Say plainly that whether a building passes is a question for a licensed engineer and the building official, and leave it there. Do not name the building, and do not repeat anything an owner group is circulating about it.

    What is different here

    License numbers belong in advertising, as with the other trades. The more useful local variable is that water source, water chemistry and sewer versus septic service differ between neighboring municipalities, which changes which problems a plumber is actually called about and therefore what the page should be about.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

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