The Brains of the Outfit

While at lunch with a local colleague, Dawn Gartin, we were talking about different types of social media, and how we both like to eventually meet our social media connections in real life whenever possible. In fact, Dawn and I had lunch for just that purpose. We met on Twitter, discovered we were both local to Northside Atlanta, and decided to meet up.

While talking about this, I came to a realization. While I’d love to sit and lunch with every one of my followers and friends, it would be timely and costly after a while. I think Dawn had a similar epiphany while we were sitting there, so we decided to host a Tweetup.

So if you do business in the northern ‘burbs of Atlanta, I’d like to take a moment and invite you to AlphaTweet on July 14th, 7:00PM, at Village Tavern. If you have questions, you can comment here or hit up @dawngartin, @johncloonan, or @loismarketing for details!

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I was speaking to the North Fulton Small Business Owners this morning, who, by the way, are a really fantastic group. Not a huge group, generally 15-20 people, but really dynamic and very networking-savvy. While talking to these folks, I got a question that I’ve been getting quite a lot lately about separating your personal from your professional profiles.

My answer – you can’t.

Sure, it’s technically possible on individual outlets to do it with privacy settings and company pages, but why would you? Some of my best business leads and referrals come from people who, had I decided to try and separate my personal and professional lives, I would have placed in the “personal” category.

Let me offer a couple examples. One of my old high school classmates has connected with me on Facebook. Not an uncommon occurrence, you’re thinking. He’s become a pretty regular reader of this blog, and a fan of Realize on Facebook as well. He has recently connected me with a friend of his who is on the adjunct faculty at Rollins College. She has invited me to speak to her new media class virtually, as a practitioner who isn’t there in Florida, and who has a broad base of geographically dispersed clients across industries. Had my “personal” friend not been as aware of my business, I’d have missed that opportunity.

One other opportunity came in today that started the same way. Another high school classmate, also connected to me on Facebook, has unbeknownst to me, been reading this blog and generally following the activities of Realize. I received an e-mail from him today through the contact form on the Realize Web site. He runs a large seafood business back in my hometown, and is looking to us to help him solve some pretty serious marketing issues. Again, a “personal” contact that resulted in business.

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Yesterday evening was another big first for us – our first official Realize-sponsored event, ‘Food (& Wine!) for Thought’. Knowing that most businesses are in the swing of planning and budgeting for 2010, we wanted to gather a group of business owners and decision makers in the north Atlanta area to share our thoughts on marketing for the upcoming year.
We partnered with a fantastic restaurant in Flowery Branch, GA called Grapes & Hops Bar & Bistro, who was very welcoming and provided a wonderful facility along with great food and drink. Also, Salon Greco in Suwanee attended and very graciously provided all of our guests with gift certificates for free massages or facials.
After a bit of networking and introductions, we all settled in to watch John present a 20-minute slideshow on what we believe are the absolute ‘must-dos’ for marketing your business in 2010. After the slideshow, we all joined in and discussed the challenges of marketing in our current economy, how best to balance traditional and social marketing, brand authenticity, and what to plan for down the road.
We’ve already received quite a bit of favorable feedback from this inaugural event and hope you can join us for the next one! If you’d like to check out the presentation, we’ve also uploaded a PowerPoint version onto our website. Check it out and let us know what you think!

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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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Even when a startup company like ours is really 10 years old, it’s still scary and exciting setting all this up. Building a brand identity, and then capitalizing on that brand identity through a Web site, collateral material, business cards, and social media is a ton of work!

The funny thing is this – we’ve been so busy supporting our clients that we haven’t had time to focus the marketing mirror on ourselves until now. And then when we really started to build it all, everything changed in a really great way.

We realized a couple things. First, nobody is going to believe we know any of this stuff unless we’re doing it for ourselves. And not just personal Facebook and LinkedIn pages, and tweeting on Twitter, and writing this blog. But all the strategies that make those channels valuable to our clients. So we’re trying to be the exemplar, and that’s a lot of work – especially when you can’t bill for it.

The other thing was that while our personal networks are powerful, we’re starting to reach the ends of our ability to expand, and expand we must if we want to best serve our clients. So here we are. Welcome to Realize.

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