Upgrading my marketing skills

Though I know I’ve been a victim, or at least target, of marketing at least since I was a little kid coveting a Mickey Mouse t-shirt, only in recent years have I studied marketing with some fascination. My informal education began a couple of years ago, when I signed on as a copywriter for a small marketing firm here in Austin.

I remember an early assignment when I was asked if I might want to write some white papers for Google. I unhesitatingly offered an enthusiastic yes in response, despite the fact I didn’t know what a white paper was. I did know what Google was and also knew that, as soon as I got off the phone with my boss, I could use that tool to figure out what I had to do.

It worked. Between finding online examples of the sort of work that was expected of me, and patient coaching from my boss, I became quite good at white papers, case studies and other marketing writing.

Then I got this gig, writing for LaunchPad Coworking, and in a Pygmalion scenario, found myself zipping along the learning curve of everything 2.0 and all things social networking courtesy of Julie Gomoll. I thought I knew the Internet, having been an early adopter (by general population standards) of email, message boards, and listservs. And way back in 1995, Prodigy Services hired me to write a precursor to blogs, a weekly update of my life that was sent to subscribers.

But compared to Julie’s knowledge, I was a kindergartner at best. She tutored me in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other networking sites. She handed me articles on viral marketing, SEO, and other tools to improve visibility. Of course much of this education was learning how to best serve LaunchPad Coworking in my capacity as writer-in-residence. But I was welcome to take the knowledge and apply it to my sundry personal endeavors.

Julie convinced me to move my blog from MySpace (my sole pre-LPC attempt at social networking) to blogger.com. I also started a second blog to market another business gig I have, writing about the world of art quilting. I joined a number of online communities with varying degrees of enthusiasm. And, with my heightened awareness, I found myself stumbling upon, and intently reading all sorts of news items about marketing, especially the online variety.

A month or so ago, the New York Times Magazine ran a story by and about Emily Gould, a blogger mostly famous for blogging (as opposed to contributing anything major or innovative to society). The piece detailed the pitfalls of this life, but also noted all the hits she was receiving.

This past weekend, I read a similar piece, this time a profile of Julia Allison.  This is the cover story for a recent issue of Wired and in it, we learn that Julia gets a lot of attention mainly playing the role of hated target for the masses. I came away with the impression that she mostly tries to shrug off the negativity and/or that she actually thrives on it. The piece also featured advice on how I, too, could take steps to become immensely popular.

One thing that struck me was the realization that, had I read this piece less than a year ago, pre-Julie, it would’ve been Greek to me. 2.0? Twitter? Huh? But there wasn’t a thing I didn’t understand about the techniques and outlets listed. And while I have no desire to garner the sort of undeserved attention Julia Allison has cultivated, I did get to thinking that I really could be putting myself out there more, particularly in regards to my quilting stuff, since doing so would be good for my career and could, ultimately, lead to bigger royalty checks for books I write on the topic.

So I sent a note out to an art quilt listserv I’d been lurking on for months. I was careful not to be pushy or commercial, although I did mention my various projects (one quilting book out, one in progress, and a documentary in the works). I linked to my quilting blog. This tiny experiment, the culmination of months of learning, yielded immediate results. My quilt book rank at Amazon, at least for one day, jumped up nearly 40,000 slots. Really. And hits at my quilt blog—which I admit I had sorely neglected and so was barely getting hits at all—jumped into the hundreds overnight and netted me plenty of personal responses.

I read another piece recently in the Times about changing habits. Dr. Val Curtis was working to figure out how to market hand washing in Africa, since not doing so can literally lead to death courtesy of germ borne illness. Working with three big consumer goods companies, Curtis analyzed the problem. The solution they came up with was really interesting. Instead of marketing cleanliness, which wasn’t working, they marketed disgust.

As it happens, their target demographic did not — as Americans do — associate bathrooms with “gross place where we vacate our bowels.” Instead, plumbing being a vast improvement over what they’d had before, bathrooms were hailed as these wonder locations. So they came up with a plan where commercials demonstrated how bathrooms actually might be considered gross. This improved the situation tremendously.

I’m no marketing genius and I have a whole lot more to learn on the subject. But it’s cool to see how rethinking angles can have tremendous results. I don’t suspect that LaunchPad Coworking will ever roll out a full court press campaign that focuses on the yuck factor of working alone. We’re much more focused on the positive results that collaborating, or even just working around others, brings (immediate case in point being that my coworking with Julie has improved my skills.) But there is a little bit of that thing where we look at what’s not working for people—isolation, procrastination, weariness of the home office and coffee shop as workplace—and pointing it out to them. And folks are paying attention.