Whenever I’ve thought about content for this blog in the past, I’ve kept coming back to the idea that I wanted to highlight case studies of companies and people who I’ve run across who are succeeding when it comes to relationship building, communication, and customer service – particularly in the technology & social media marketing spaces.
So the following is the first in a planned series called “You’re Doing It Right” – an attempt to bring awareness to the types of actions that turn casual customers into loyal ones and sometimes even into brand evangelists.
Obviously, since these are based on my own experiences, this will be an intermittent series not a regularly scheduled one. But I certainly hope it’s a frequent one.
Doing the Unexpected
I was rather stunned at the end of March when my husband came back from the mailbox with a hand addressed envelope for me from Atlanta.
Atlanta… Atlanta…? Sure, I know a number of people in Atlanta – but it wasn’t Christmas so it wasn’t a holiday card. And I couldn’t think of any other reason I’d be getting a letter from anyone in Atlanta instead of an email.
What was inside was a refres
hing surprise. It was a brief, warm, and personal note from my friend Brandon Eley at Kelsey Advertising & Design. It was a follow-up note penned shortly after spending time reconnecting the week before at SXSWi.
We’d first met last year at IzeaFest when he let me bleed a little bandwidth off of his wi-fi connection after we were introduced by our mutual friend Jeremy Wright. I’d been lucky to spend some time with him down in Austin this year and considered him a very brilliant and fun to hang out with guy – but I hadn’t really dug into what exactly it was he did in his day-to-day job.
Then out of the blue this old-school, traditional ‘snailmail’ correspondence showed up in my hands.
You’d better believe I know what Brandon actually does for a living now. And I know what his company does too. It didn’t take me very long to get to the website for Kelsey and to poke around until I got a “feel” for their web presence and exactly what their customers experience when they visit for the first time. When they say that they are “Results Addicts”? I believe them.
Standing Out
There were over 15,000 people in Austin for SXSWi this year. Most of them were focused on being ‘cutting edge’ and onto the latest trends. But years from now? The impression this one piece of old-school mail left on me will long out-last anything that was new-and-edgy down there in 2010.
In our industry, far too many people get excited about whatever the latest technology or platform is and do the business equivalent of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in their haste to adopt the new. Sometimes, innovation in marketing means being the guys who are willing to use proven methods in order to stand out in the crowd. Being there first is not always the same as being the best.
In the future, I won’t merely be socializing with Brandon at a conference, or just following him on Twitter or Facebook — I’ll be following what he does with Kelsey and what they do for their clients. Because they seem to get that there’s more than one way to connect with potential customers and business partners – and that’s a huge plus in this arena.
So Brandon Eley & Kelsey Advertising & Design? Thanks. You’re doing it right.
