It’s a giant, huge, massive bummer when work gets you down because it’s where you spend the largest chunk of your day. There’s just no getting around it. Sometimes you work so hard and you bust your hump and it feels like you are screaming into an empty canyon.
And then sometimes, people are nice and things turn out better than you hoped. Today I read an email that basically restored my faith in humanity, my work, and myself.
Here’s the backstory: Right now I am a marketing team of one, trying to get the word out about the greatest accounting product in the world that you have never heard of. The marketing before I came on board was abysmal, the product development exceptional. Sadly, better marketing always wins the market over better product. This sucks for WP, which really is better and cheaper than Outright, Freshbooks, Quickbooks etc but it’s the way life goes.
So here I am, marketing department of one. My main focus is Social Media and I am trying to use my policy of being genuine and generous to drive what the monkeys who code call “organic links”. This means getting people to write about us, without paying for it. This is seperate from our paid advertising and our adwords campaigns which the monkeys who code do really really well.
If I had to break down how social media works into one simple sentence it would be this: get people to like you and to talk about you. They can have fancy names for those people; champions, influencers, market makers etc. Ultimately they are people who have access to other people who will listen to them and the compass is just illustrating how in a perfect marketing world word of mouth spreads. Technology has made it easier for this word of mouth to spread, but not to convince people to talk about you. That still has to be done the old fashioned way.
The real goal of Social Media Marketing is to market to people who will, well, do the marketing for you.
I’ve been talking a lot about being generous, and why that’s important for Social Media Marketing and this email is just a beautiful perfect example of how it works.
Next time someone asks me “Why should we post someone else’s content that has nothing to do with us?” I will use this story as empirical proof of my methodology.
Let’s start with this email that went out to this guy Sparky Firepants personal list. His real name is David and he’s one of the nicest people I have met in the long time (and also incredibly talented).
Here’s what I did and did not do to get him to send this email, and to write about our product to his personal list:
I did find his really great comic strip and realize that his demographic was also our demographic. Although not directly about accounting software or an online financial tool, this seemed like something cool our community might want to see. I believe laughter is an important tool, especially when you are a hardworking small business person.
I did email him, even though the content was Creative Commons licensed, and ask him if we could include his content on our blog. To me this just seemed like the right thing to do. He was really nice when he responded and decided to check out WorkingPoint. He just went and did it. That was awesome!
I did continue to email him when I saw he was having some support issues in our system to make sure everything was ok. I also emailed him when he had an exceptionally funny post. As a person who creates things, I know how nice it feels to hear positive feedback so I try to do it often to others.
I did not ask him to send the email to his list. Nor did I ask him to tell everyone about how great our product was. To me, this only makes his feedback on it more meaningful and genuine.
Another influential blog, Web App Storm, liked the Botpreneur Comic and praised it in an article, which will in turn hopefully drive more traffic to our blog, and in turn our product.
So to sum up, I got to be nice to a nice person, look cool because I promoted some really great content (that I didn’t have to spend time creating myself!) and as a result our blog is better, our product has a new “Champion” (and links) and I get to refer to my fuzzy slippers as my power shoes. This is when I love Social Media the most!
