Marketing Hack #9: Example of a great [fill in the blank] 

Let me give you an example

No, really – Janine Warner used one of my Facebook pages as an example of good Social Media Design in her book. OK, great you say – but how is this marketing? Any mention of your work is marketing – in this case, it happens to be a page that features the world wide screening of On Wings of Hope. (We’ll look at the event itself in next weeks MarketingHack #10.)

The long tail from event to example

Everything you put online is there forever. Usually “long tail” refers to search, but I want to challenge you to think about how to use projects you’ve done for a long time–let the project have a long tail. In this case the premiere was on April 8th, 2013 – and the conversation to make this an example in a book took place almost half a year after the event.

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How did you do this?

I’m a small business. No PR company, no advertising agency, no rep. So how do I get an opportunity like this one? Simple: I ask. I was watching a Creative Live webinar. If you’ve never checked them out, it’s a great place to learn. When you participate in these workshops, p-a-r-t-i-c-i-p-a-t-e! There’s a chat room and you’re encouraged to tweet cool quotes during the live broadcast.

It’s a great way to get to know the speakers. Check out the conversation I had with Janine after the workshop was over. It’s just a few tweets about the Facebook page – she had mentioned that she was looking for a few examples she could publish in her upcoming book.

A few months after that conversation, the page is published in her book.

This Marketing Hack is valuable, because …

I got to meet Janine, who’s a social media influencer (even if it’s just via Twitter), but now I can always refer back to “hey you featured my Facebook in your book” and she’ll know who I am. In addition to letting her use my FB page as an example, there’s many readers who’ve seen this printed page of Social Media Design for Dummies and thanks to Google books, that page is also online.