I don’t really like Social Media.
There.
I said it.
Is that a bad thing to say for someone whose primary job is creating marketing content?
My TweetDeck runs for many hours a day. It blurbs little blurbs, it tweets little tweets, and I ignore most of them.
Social Media attracts a lot of schemers, hucksters, and shills because it sounds “easy” . . . .
Seth Godin is a pretty smart guy. I own several of his books, and I typically enjoy reading his blog to get interesting snippets of marketing conversation.
His posts are usually short and aren’t always earth shattering, but they always have a clear underlying message, and they almost always get me thinking.
Today’s blog entry was no different, but I wanted to add a small corollary to his post.
As he has stated on many, many other occasions, Seth’s message was once again that the company that “wins the battle” is the one that creates new and unique ways to interact his/her vendors and customers, the one who doesn’t act like a “faceless factory.”
Here’s my addendum: You need to be a “faceless factory” before you can be anything else.
Let me explain what I mean . . . .
Buzz Marketing: Beanie Babies, Flying Wrenches, and Ice Castles
26 December 2009 — Ken Krogue
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Brent Christenson is one of my favorite people. He is scrappy, and that is a trait that is getting harder and harder to find. I have found that the single most important success ingredient in running an inside sales department is a scrappy manager; so I look for stories of “scrappiness” and share them when I find them. Here’s one:
By summer he runs a small engine repair business he calls http://www.flyingwrench.com/ throughout all of northern Utah County. When he told me he was starting that business years ago I thought he was crazy. But with three or four mobile mini-van repair vehicles and several employees later, he definitely proved me wrong.
What does an owner of a small engine repair business do to drum up more business? Normal owners would take out an ad in the Yellow Pages or hand out business cards; not Brent. He shoots Beanie Babies from a home-made compressed air cannon dozens of feet into the sky to the thousands in the Alpine Days Parade. And he does it while riding on the roof of his Flying Wrench van every single year.
When one of his many vans isn’t out on a service call it is parked in a field very […]
