The Brains of the Outfit

Today, June 21 is Ride to Work day! In honor of that, I contacted Cousins Properties, Inc., who runs the office building in which I work. They reserved the first three visitor spaces closest to the building for motorcycles only, and allowed me to put up some Ride to Work signs. (Note: they have since rescinded that, saying it wasn’t approved by the right person, took down all my signage, and made me move my motorcycle.)

Did you ride to work today? If you did, I’d encourage you to comment on why you rode to work today, or why you ride, period!

(By the way, comments are moderated, so they won’t appear immediately. I’ll approve ‘em as fast as I can, though!)

Ride to Work provides this list on their pass-out cards:

• Riding to work is fun
• Riding to work reduces traffic and parking congestion
• Riding to work uses less fuel than an automobile
• Riding to work leaves me alert and energized
• Riding to work results in less pollution than commuting in a larger vehicle
• Riding to work is less destructive to road surfaces, bridges, etc.
• Riding to work gets me to work (and back home) faster
• Riding to work demonstrates motorcycling as a social good

By the way, not only did I ride to work today (which I usually do), but I’m riding to a speaking engagement this evening, too. Probably going to pass out a few Ride to Work pass out cards with my business cards.

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I received a letter yesterday from The Dream House for Medically Fragile Children, who Realize has chosen as a charity to benefit from our community outreach program.  If you live in Georgia, they need your help, and it’s easy and inexpensive, but it’s urgent.

In 2008, the State of Georgia created licensure for Children’s Transition Care Centers (CTCCs) – places where medically fragile children could be cared for while they are transitioned out of institutional care and into regular homes. These centers are designed to help the families of these children coordinate resources and care for these kids for a successful transition to a full time regular home.

When this legislation was passed, a Medicaid administrator on the advisory committee for this bill insisted in a very high staffing ratio as part of the rules and regulations for this licensure, and acknowledged at that time that Medicaid would need to provide reimbursement to support this ratio.

Medicaid administration here in Georgia is now objecting to reimbursement for CTCC services.

Help us help Dream House by supporting their letter-writing campaign. All you have to do is download the advocacy letter, sign it, and mail it to the State officials listed in the letter.

Or, if you’re more comfortable simply making a donation, we’d encourage you to do so immediately. This delay in reimbursement for CTCC services from Medicaid has created an operational shortfall.

Thank you for supporting Dream House for Medically Fragile Children and Realize’s community outreach.

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This above all – to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

When I wrote my last blog post – Client, to thine own self be true, it didn’t dawn on me that in addition to Polonius being right on about branding, he also has a great point about social media, too.

A basic tenet of social media success is authenticity. Your brand has to be authentic. It has to reflect the realities of your company. Your company has to live it and breathe it.

Take Realize as an example. Our brand personality is largely based on my personality. One of the things I’m not good at is sugarcoating anything, therefore one of our core brand values is directness. We try to be direct in everything we say and do. Why? Because our clients would immediately know it if we tried to be something else.

Now extend that to social media – our clients are very much into social media. We have clients on just about every social media outlet imaginable, and they are connected to Realize and me personally as well in many of those outlets. If they saw through our brand, they could very quickly call us out on it. But by being true to ourselves, it must follow, as the night the day, that we canst not then be false to any man.

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During my guest appearance on High Velocity Radio, I talked about using event marketing to build your online community, but that’s only a small part of the story. Your offline and online communities should feed each other in an infinite loop.

I attend a lot of offline networking events, and the first thing I do when I get home is go through whatever business cards I’ve gathered and try and find those people on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. For large events, this can be pretty time consuming, which is why I can’t wait for the future that Cory Casciato of Westword postulates, where social media is completely integrated. If I find them, I invite them to connect.

If they connect with me via whatever channel they choose, they’re going to receive notifications of new blog posts, my media appearances, and probably see what events I’m attending on my profile. I’ll frequently meet with people from my online network at real-world events they’ve seen on either my social media profiles or those of my online connections. I’ve also gotten anecdotal evidence from people that they’ve seen or listened to one of my media appearances after seeing it on one of those outlets.

This is where your own events come in. Realize is hosting Food (& Wine!) For Thought on October 28th. We started promoting online earlier today, and already we have a pretty respectable number of attendees, all through social media channels. Interestingly, some of them have already passed the online invitations on to their friends, who have signed up for the event, and will likely join my online community. They’ll then get invited to future events, and get notified of offline activities.

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One thing I continue to hear from my colleagues in the marketing realm is how social media and Web 2.0 has changed the fundamentals of marketing.

Not really.

Don’t get me wrong. Social media has provided a wide variety of new paradigms about how we approach marketing. It has created wonderful new channels where we can create communities of people who are interested in what our companies say and do. These channels can cross-market to each other for virtually zero cost, and almost automatically.

But fundamentally, marketing is still the same. You still need to provide a compelling product or service, at a price that the consumer will find palatable. That product still needs to be promoted and delivered. My B-school professors called this the “four P’s of marketing.” Price, product, promotion, and place.

My next four blog posts will examine Web 2.0 and social media’s impact on each of the four P’s. Okay, I might throw something else out there in the middle…

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