Things, I would guess, like Capture their attention, show them Courtesy, handle their account with Competence, and Cultivate a long-term relationship. Just sayin’.

I was involved in some internet buzz-creation about two years ago and had a fairly unique situation that let me see it unfold. My paying work was in a niche Quaker bookstore and its related websites; in the evenings I wrote a prominent Quaker blog. A great pamphlet was published, one that was pretty sure to fall into obscurity, but which I loved and which was only available through our bookstore. I posted about it on my blog but there were no immediate orders. A few weeks later another blogger was writing about a related issue and I commented about how this pamphlet addressed it in a fresh way, providing a link to my post. A few days later the blogger ordered it and within a few weeks he blogged about it. He brought it to a visioning committee he was involved with and I was able to see each committee-member order it in turn. Two months later they decided that every Quaker meeting in their region should get two copies and a mass order went out.

Did I create the buzz? Yes, but it wasn’t a publicity campaign. I genuinely liked the pamphlet and talked it up on my personal blog. There would have been only one sale if the pamphlet hadn’t been any good. I was coming to the conversation as a fellow customer that likes this niche so much that I had figured out a way to be gainfully employed in it. I wouldn’t be able to sell some randomly-selected book that way (or I might be able to see one once before my audience saw I was selling-out!).

I feel that I should say that I was dismissed from this job a few weeks ago. Although I was constantly busy, my new supervisor kept asking me what I did with my time; I think he was suspicious of my after-hours blogging (he’s the kind who can barely navigate email). I think my most important work is relational and I think its more important to empower those I worked with than to produce the most perfect product. I’m not selling something so much as creating an audience for sales. I wonder if these paradigm differences are part of the reason I’m sitting in my pajamas on a Monday afternoon surfing blogs and Craigslist postings…

Might be a post of my own brewing…