This is a guest contribution from Aviva Blumstein.
Relationship marketing. Influencer marketing. Buzzwords, for sure.
What do they mean?
I’ll give you the definitions that sound like they came out of the Marketing 101 textbook and then translate them to layman-speak.
What Is Relationship Marketing?
Relationship marketing: a form of marketing focusing on loyalty, retention and long-term relationships, designed around developing strong connections with customers by directly providing them with information that is tailored to their needs, wants and interests.
(definition by Gregory Ciotti at Helpscout)
Ted Rubin coined “relationships are the new currency” at SMWF in 2011.
He writes,
“Blasting out sales messages rather than listening and engaging has got to be the number one relationship killer of all time. Bar none.
People hate to be sold—especially on social channels, where their main objective is to talk, get opinions, relax and have fun, or find answers to pressing problems.
When a brand spends the majority of its time broadcasting, it’s a clear message to followers that they’re not interested in real, two-way communication.
Listening should be your first priority, followed by engagement. Don’t try to sell to people until you’ve earned their trust!”
One minute.
Let’s look at that again.
“When a brand spends the majority of its time broadcasting, it’s a clear message to followers that they’re not interested in real, two-way communication… Don’t try to sell to people until you’ve earned their trust!”
So… you should shut your mouth and not try to push sales because otherwise people will think you’re not interested in real communication.
Instead, you should do lots of listening, earn their trust, and THEN sell to them.
That’s what it said, right?
Let me propose another definition of relationship marketing. Short and sweet.
RELATIONSHIP MARKETING = let me be your friend for as long as it takes me to sell you something.
And if I think I might be able to get multiple sales out of you, or you need to keep renewing my service, I guess I’ll keep being your friend.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is basically rented relationship marketing.
You find someone who has a relationship with your target audience and try to get them to promote your content or products.
Content marketer Barry Feldman defined influencer marketing as
“the fine art of getting big kahunas in your camp. To achieve greater reach and resonance (ooh, fancy marketing words), you try to win over the people who already have it. And it can be amazingly effective.”
How do you win over those big kahunas? You share their stuff, you comment on their blogs, you link to their content in your blog posts… whatever it takes.
So let’s propose our definition of influencer marketing:
INFLUENCER MARKETING = let me suck up to you for as long as it takes for you to notice me and share my stuff.
In a way, old-style marketing was more honest. At least it was clear that they were in it for themselves.
Say it ain’t true?
Like this one:
Sometimes it is painfully obvious that it’s automated.
Or this one:
And then if they follow you back, your account sends an automated direct message or welcome tweet?
And if you don’t follow them back, the artificial intelligence apparently becomes insulted and unfollows you. I guess they were really interested in what you had to say, huh?
True, I don’t know that all people who are following me are doing that – but I get rather suspicious when:
1. I send them a tweet (manually, not automated), saying thanks for the follow and including some piece of info that I like about their site so they’ll KNOW it’s not automated. And then I get no response.
Yep, no response to these. They wanted to follow me, but apparently they didn’t want to actually communicate with me.
A shame they didn’t have Commun.it. Then at least an algorithm might have noticed my attempts to communicate and told me I was a top engaged community member…
2. I get notified that someone followed me about 10 hours ago, go to their profile to check them out and see if I want to follow them back and… guess what? They’re no longer following me!
Hmm… did they click Follow by mistake and then suddenly realize I wasn’t who they thought I was?
Or did their automated follow program only give me 5 hours to follow back before they assumed I wouldn’t return the favor, and so they unfollowed me?
That’s not a lot of dedication to your “relationships.”
More on ‘the other side’ of automation coin:
Social Media Automation: A Little Less Conversation, a Little More Action – Jonathan Crossfield talks automation with Jeff Bullas at contentmarketinginstitute.com
Why You Should Get Serious About Social Media Automation – Jeff Bullas himself at jeffbullas.com
Also, here’s an interesting Twitter ‘faceoff’ – between Ana Hoffman and Nicholas Cardot:
Nick Cardot vs Ana Hoffman Twitter Faceoff: Quantity Trumps Quality – Ana Hoffman at Nick Cardot’s sitesketch101.com
Ana Hoffman vs Nick Cardot Twitter Faceoff: Quality Trumps Quantity – Nick Cardot at TrafficGenerationCafe.com
I recently signed out of Hootsuite and was offered the chance to have even less input into my social media accounts:
See?
Now I can have my automated system spit out tweets you’ll like – and your automated system can retweet them, and then my other automated system will thank you.
And neither of us have to be involved!
This is the stuff which deep relationships are made of…
Not even real people using automated systems.
Fake. Made-up. Imaginary. Only exists as a figment of the imagination in the mind of some marketer or marketing program somewhere.
Recently we got a record number of likes on a tweet of ours.
I was excited – and a little suspicious. (I’m jaded, I know.)
So I decided to click on the list of likers. Mm-hm.
And sometimes it’s even harder to tell.
Whenever I get followed, I usually check their profile before deciding whether or not to follow them back.
Two months ago, when I went to check out a new follower, I was impressed with the following-followers ratio:
But I wasn’t as impressed with the tweet stream. Just a lot of tweets of digital marketing related posts. No conversations.
So I didn’t follow him.
Around the same time, I kept seeing a certain profile come up in the “suggested people to follow” section.
I finally went to check it out. Good photo, nice header, good bio something along the lines of “Helping businesses succeed. Digital #marketing leader. Father. Believer in God.”
The website link made me raise my eyebrows though. It was hosted on a free blogging platform – johndoe.weebly.com or johndoe.wordpress.com or the like.
Strange. You’d kind of expect a professed marketing leader to have his own website.
But the tweet stream made me stop short. It looked exactly the same as the other profile. Lots of digital marketing content tweets. All beginning with a number (17 Ways… 12 Things… etc.). The same unusual URL shortener.
And… as I scrolled down the tweet stream, I noticed that the posts actually repeated themselves.
Except they changed their numbers.
Yep.
17 Ways to Supercharge Your Facebook Marketing in December 14 tweet became 16 Ways to Supercharge Your Facebook Marketing in December 7 tweet. Which became 15 Ways to Supercharge Your Facebook Marketing on December 1.
I kid you not.
And every single tweet was part of this pattern.
Now I simply had to check out the website.
It was a standard free blogging platform template, with marketing articles. Anonymous, filler marketing articles. No about page. No hint of who was behind this site.
That was only the beginning. Over the next two weeks, I was followed by/suggested several other accounts of purported digital marketers who, upon account inspection, matched the same criteria.
- Real sounding names and profiles.
- Good photos.
- Follower/following counts looked believable and in some cases even “influencer-worthy.”
BUT
- The profile link was a filler site on a free blogging platform.
- The tweets were all curated posts, many of them with the same “rotate the posts with different numbers” strategy mentioned earlier.
Only one of the accounts actually had a real site with [hisnamehere].com. It looked a little outdated, like no one had touched the design for the last decade, but still – it was real!
‘Was he the mastermind behind all these fake accounts?’, I wondered.
Since I’m not a Twitter vigilante, I decided not to pursue the matter, and just copy the accounts into a Google Spreadsheet, should I ever decide to write a post about this.
Well here I am.
And while I would love to have shown you screenshots of the “rotate the posts with different numbers” game – or a screenshot of the real-sounding profiles, I can’t.
Because when I opened up the Twitter profile page for the first account on my list, I did a double take.
Joe Schmo, the marketing leader, had abandoned digital marketing in favor of promoting persian bridal gowns.
Here’s his new Twitter header.
Well, now.
I checked every one of the other 5 accounts I had pegged as “fake.” The exact same bio. The exact same header. Not even an attempt to vary it, like when they were all “digital marketers.”
On a whim, I took one of the head shots and searched it in Google Image Search (this inspired by Issamar Ginzberg’s article on how he looked into an alternative medicine provider his client wanted to do business with – only to find out that her photo was a stock photo and was used across the web for other “professional profiles”).
The photo returned 27 results in Google search. About 20 of them were varied Twitter profiles. Are we thinking a stock photo?
It got worse. The last few results were profile shots of a professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She shows up several times in their online Experts Guide, as she’s a professor of landscape architecture and an environmental specialist.
Dearie me. Oh, dearie, dearie me.
I scrolled back the tweet stream in one of the Twitter accounts to try and find some of the old marketing tweets. They appeared around January 1st, interspersed with the bridal tweets. As you go farther back, the bridal tweets disappear. Marketing only.
I guess our marketing leader decided that marketing is all a bunch of lies and made it a New Year’s resolution to change professions. He should be an example to us all at keeping our resolutions.
But he had help, you see. Because while scrolling backward through the stream I came across this tweet:
Mm-hm.
How many Twitter accounts does this company operate? How many people follow these accounts – assuming they’re following real people? How many people who had followed marketing leaders got blasted with bridal tweets?
By the time this blog post is published, our adventurous marketing leaders, er – bridal dress experts, may have undergone another career pivot. You see, I’m writing these words on January 13. The Persian Bridal Show is on January 17. They’ll probably be bored afterwards.
Relationship Marketing Food for Thought
You know what?
I didn’t intend to write this as an expose. When I started writing it, I had no idea how bad things were going to get. And I still don’t intend it to be an expose. That’s why I blurred out identifying information in the screenshots above.
Because that’s not the point.
The point is not to aim an unforgiving spotlight at some *other* marketers. It’s to aim one at ourselves and take a good look.
I’m not saying that social media can’t be used for building relationships.
Most of us can testify to deep, true relationships that we never would have had if not for Facebook, Twitter, and the like.
I’m also not saying social media shouldn’t be used for business and marketing.
It’s a great medium with high potential for targeting and reaching the right audience.
It’s when the two get confused that I wonder where humanity is heading.
When someone gets a follow from you on Twitter, should they feel flattered? Or should they feel used?
If we start to see “relationships as the new currency” – are we focused on the person on the other side of the relationship? Or only on what our “relationship” will buy us?
I’d love to hear some intellectually honest discussion about this in the comments.
Let me share one idea that I’ve been mulling over, to start off the discussion.
I’m into classic Jewish philosophy. This topic is discussed a lot. (Without mentioning Twitter and marketing, obviously. We’re talking philosophers, not prophets.)
It’s the concept of doing outwardly positive acts for ulterior motives. Is that a good thing or not a good thing?
The classic sources say conflicting things.
On the one hand, there are statements like “If you do it for the wrong reasons, you’ll come to do it for the right reasons.”
On the other, there are statements like, “Anyone who does it for the wrong reasons, it would be better if he hadn’t been born.” (A little strong, right?)
One way to resolve the conflict is to determine the ultimate motivation behind your action.
Do you want to be able to do the right things for the right reasons? Is your eye on the goal even though right now you need a little ulterior motive to push you in the right direction? Okay; then you’ll get there – eventually.
But if you’re content with your motives and really see no reason to ever change them, you’re doomed.
If you’re a “relationship marketer”, be honest with yourself.
What do you really want the end to be?
Do you really want an ongoing relationship with this person you’re targeting?
Would you be happy fostering a relationship with them, giving to them (whether it’s help, information or an ego stroke) even if you knew it would NEVER EVER lead to any profit?
If that’s your goal (even if right now you kind of have to make a living, so you don’t have too much time to devote to non-profit-generating relationships), then go forth. Your relationships will end up being real relationships, even if the impetus was marketing.
But if these relationships are just another tool on the way to a sale, and otherwise you would dump 9/10 of your followers and fans in an instant… that’s about as much of a relationship as early 20th century sweatshop owners had with their “employees.”
Do we really think we can have our relationships and eat them too?
Would love to hear from you.
Aviva Blumstein
Aviva Blumstein would someday like to be your friend, but now she just wants you to hire her company’s virtual assistants. You can create a relationship with her logo by following her on Twitter, checking out the Virtual Assistant Israel site, or sending her an honest-to-goodness email [aviva AT virtualassistantisrael DOT com] that she’ll actually read, appreciate, and respond to – herself.
(Insulted? Wait, wait! Did you read the article above? 🙂 )
Could not have written or express better if I tried.
I thought the idea of social media was engagement. Seems I am seriously naïve. Ah the way of the world now I suppose. Computers replacing people. Soon robots will replace workers and auto drive vehicles will move everything. AI will rule and the last human will wonder what happened.
Let’s hope not, Patrick. Not if you and I and the other readers can have anything to do with it, right?
P.S. to the post above:
I just read this latest post by Seth Godin entitled “I am not a brand”: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2016/04/i-am-not-a-brand.html. I thought it provided a nice addition to the theme of “are we blurring necessary boundaries between life and business?”
I dunno. That’s just the way Twitter is, so I really don’t get the point of the rant. I’ve churned and burned so many Twitter profiles I lost track. It’s always supposed to be a great place to build relationships yet so narrowly focuses its hard to choose exactly which part of your personality/niche/genre to use it for. I think it’s a waste of time getting annoyed by these kind of accounts or practices. Just ignore them.
Hi Dave,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It may be that that’s the way Twitter is, and that’s the way marketing/marketers/human beings are in general.
The point wasn’t to be “annoyed at them”; it was to take a good look at myself and ask if that’s how I want to be. If I think it’s hypocritical or damaging to myself as a human being who wants to grow. And I wanted to share that question to inspire thought among other growth-oriented marketers out there.
All the best,
Aviva
Hey Aviva and Ana,
As I was reading this post I was thinking about my own growth with online marketing.
When I first came on the scene it was all about sell sell sell follow follow follow. We’ll that changed because I hated when I was being hounded by others for just their own personal gain.
I think tools help if you’re genuinely trying to connect with someone. There’s nothing wrong with leveraging social media to get a loyal following. But if you’re only trying to connect just to make a quick buck then not only does it defeats the purpose of social media but also it becomes more of a challenge to make money only.
We’re all selfish, no doubt about that, but the question is what type of selfishness do you focus on. Is it more of a deep self fulfillment with longevity as far as building continuous rapport or is it just to make a quick buck.
Thanks for sharing this! Many will appreciate this post and it will be an eye opener!
Hi Sherman,
Yep, social media (and life) is definitely a lot of live-and-learn (hopefully, that is – glad to see you’re using it like that!).
Certainly true that we’re all selfish. I recall hearing once that there’s no way – or purpose – in trying to deny the “I”. The goal is to expand our “I” – to see family, friends, followers, etc. as a part of ourselves, in the sense that we care for their needs and success just like we care for our own (and not just see them as a tool to leverage for “my” needs and success).
Hey Ana and Aviva,
I finally made it here Ana, thanks for the heads up about Aviva’s guest post here. You knew I’d have my two cents to share. LOL!!!
So Aviva, I don’t think we’ve connected before but I’m HUGE on relationships. HUGE!!! Now I do automate tweets on Twitter but I also have conversations with my friends and followers. Ana knows this about me, she’s mentioned me numerous times in some of her posts because of this.
I connected with a gal last week who had a suggestion for me so she wanted to DM me so she asked me to follow her back. She was pretty cool so I did but I’m VERY picky with who I follow. You can tell by my follow back count. Anyway, I immediately get a DM from her and she’s trying to convince me to sign up for a course she’s doing. She apologized and told me that wasn’t meant for me, it was her automated DM. Exactly which is why you shouldn’t have one if you’re immediately trying to sell me on something. Big turnoff for me.
I might have well over 10,000 followers on Twitter but if you’ll go down that list you’ll see a LOT of junk and I have a good feeling a lot of them are fake. Hence the fact that I’m super picky with who I follow. I’m about connections, conversations and relationships on every single platform. Those who don’t, well they are SO missing the entire point of what social even means.
I love your humor, I love how you called so much of this stuff out and I love how you brought it back to the way this should be done.
Make those connections people, it’s the only way to do well online.
Great share Aviva and thanks Ana for having her. Hope you both have a super day and week.
~Adrienne
Hey, Adrienne,
Thanks so much for coming here to share your thoughts. I totally agree that when it comes to real relationships, it’s about quality, not quantity. And it’s about a give and take: not just taking by asking for help, favors and the like, and not just “giving” information about your industry/offerings in the hope that someone will bite (=taking).
I’m on my way to check out your blog – I’d be happy to hear what you have to say!
Nope not alive yet I just came for the coffee and newspaper Ana . Good one again
Hi Ana and Aviva. I really enjoyed that. I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one who has noticed all of the bots, though I haven’t gone to the same extent to prove they were all bots. Sometimes they get real creative and all use the same username with a different number at the end. When someone follows me I look at their profile and their Twitter feed. If I can go back a week and all I find are retweets, no “original” tweets, then I don’t follow. Also, if there are so many #hashtags that I can’t #figure out what they are #trying to #say, I don’t follow back. Beyond that, if they are saying something that I’m interested in I’ll follow, and I’ll retweet. I’ll be honest though, I’m more engaged with people on Facebook.
My pleasure, Ben – glad you enjoyed. And I like your standards of measuring Twitter accounts. Yep, those accounts where everything is a retweet… I have one Twitter follower who is constantly retweeting me. Constantly. Along with lots of other retweets. I sometimes wonder how he chooses what to retweet. Is it based on the hashtags I use? Does his automated system retweet every thirteenth tweet of mine? The world may never know…
It’s sad to see social media marketing losing the thin line between real relationships and marketing minded ones. Great post by the way!
Thanks, Jacob – and agreed. It is a thin line, and one that takes a lot of self-awareness if you want to know what side you’re on at any given moment.
Hey Ana and Aviva,
What a fabulous guest contribution on Ana’s blog.
Selling without listening is really effective….if your goals is to repel people away.
I hate getting automated tweets, lol. I know some people have good intentions, but gosh..just don’t -..-‘
Like I mentioned in a previous post on Twitter by Ana, I used to not check my DM’s because I received a lot of automated welcome messages. I have a feeling that there could be a lot more potential in DM’s if you had a setting of declining automated messages getting to your inbox or something of sorts.
I just couldn’t help but mention something you said made me laugh out loud (literally):
“Now I can have my automated system spit out tweets you’ll like – and your automated system can retweet them, and then my other automated system will thank you.
And neither of us have to be involved!
This is the stuff which deep relationships are made of…”
I also like to check a profile to see if someone is fake. One of the key things I look for is an own website. And I don’t know if I’m dropping a little nuke here, but I also hate seeing Social Quant in my account, these accounts literally take over your Twitter stream and even have endorsements by some big marketers like Kim Garst.
When someone follows me, I like to personally thank them. When they’re particularly interesting, my second step is usually to visit their site and leave a comment and join their list. You can build a relationship quickly from there!
The connections are a lot more important to me than a potential sale. It makes entrepeneurship a lot more fun and I’ve learned a lot from others in the process.
I appreciate you for sharing these fantastic insights, Aviva. I really enjoyed reading your post. Even the edgy parts. 😉
Enjoy the rest of your week, both of you!
– Jasper
Thanks, Jasper! I’m glad the post was able to make you laugh (and not just LOL 😉
I agree about algorithms that take over your account. I was once pitched by a social media automation company that was telling me how they create several accounts for the company, and all of them are run by an algorithm that chooses what content to share, chooses who to follow, does a prescribed number of interactions per day with followers (shares, retweets, DMs, whatever), the goal of which is to have so many interactions that hopefully some of them will bear fruit in people checking out your website.
The company didn’t end up going with it, mainly for financial reasons (and I also said I wasn’t sure it would be too effective). Ever since then, though, I’m much more suspicious when it comes to new followers. Even if it’s a real person, is anyone home? Especially when I have the all-too-common experience of “he follows me, he follows me not” when I take a little too long to follow back.
Have a great weekend!
Finally, someone who’s making tons of sense; thank you!
I’m always griping about how social media really isn’t all that “social”. Too many people marketing, too many popups before anyone has a chance to get to know the people asking for their information, too many people only sharing their own stuff without ever sharing or engaging with others… pooh!
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with people trying to make money online, heck, I’d even encourage it. But “trust” or “trustworthiness” is in my top 3 as far as my morality goes, and most of these people aren’t even trying to earn it, instead saying “trust me and I’ll take you to a better place” without even giving me a reason to trust them. So they throw out numbers showing how proficient they’ve been somewhere; that just means you’re good at what you do but I still don’t trust you because for some reason you don’t want me to know you.
Thank you, and I do mean “THANK YOU” for this post, and thank you Ana for allowing it; I don’t read a lot of guest posts but the topic was so compelling I had to. 🙂
Thanks so much, Mitch! True – the “media” is definitely starting to overpower the “social.” That’s why often when I’m deciding whether to follow someone, I’ll check their “Tweets and replies” stream. If it’s exactly the same as their “tweets” stream (i.e. they never talk directly to any other person on Twitter) – that’s a bad sign. What are the chances they’ll ever interact with me?
“Too many popups before anyone has a chance to get to know the people asking for their information” – such a good point, although I haven’t seen it as much on social media as I have on websites. I think we’re – or at least I’m – approaching “pop-up blindness.” Whether it’s the now ubiquitous exit pop-up (“No! Stop it! I’m not leaving yet! My cursor touched the browser bar because I was trying to click my Hootlet button so I could SHARE your post.”) or the SumoMe welcome mat: I just click it away as soon as it opens, without even registering what it says. *sigh*
Hi Aviva,
You really hit this one out of the park. Ana, you know how to pick guest writers. 🙂
Twitter is hurting financially, and this article helps to show why. There is no other SM platform that has so many “bots” running rampant. Sure, all of them have faux accounts, but Twitter has faux accounts that are way too active to be fake. And what other platform has anything close to annoying as the dreaded DM? Nobody.
I’m stumbling into article left and right this year about the importance of real, human connections…people are fed up with all the fakery online, it seems.
To answer your last question, no, we cannot have our relationships and eat them too. At least not if we want to grow our business over the long term. It’s encouraging to see people waking up and saying, “no more.”
Twitter needs to make some changes, or they’re in trouble.
I’ll be sharing this one.
Matthew
Thanks so much, Matthew. I’m happy my post was up to Ana’s standards. 🙂
“Twitter has faux accounts that are way too active to be fake.” Fantastic line – and point. When you can tell something isn’t worth the effort (like the accounts that follow me with username “xzyghuka” and bio “We will get 5 million REAL followers for you on Twitter!!!!”) you just roll your eyes and move on. But it’s really frustrating to put in the effort for something you thought was worth the effort, and never get any return on that effort. Either because the account was fake, or because it was real but the individual is more interested in broadcasting and “being social” than in creating actual relationships.
Making relationship with your audience is most important for any company. If people don’t believe in what you have to offer your business is gonna take a deep dive.
True, Prateek. Good business-customer relationships are the backbone of any successful business.
Hi Aviva,
It depends on your motives. Automation is never a good idea when you use it to take the effort out of communicating. I use a bit of automation: an autoresponder service and TweetDeck – alongside me backing this automation up with live and human activity too.
I first got onto Twitter when I was learning all about the internet. I’ve found some really great writers on Twitter, I found my mentors on Twitter. Before anyone told me building relationships mattered, I shared their content because I thought it was exceptional and that others should read it. After a while, they started getting in touch to thank me. I kept up the conversation because I wanted to. A few of them asked me to let them know when I start my business. I thought they were being nice.
Move forward into starting my business. Guess what, they’re sharing my stuff and offering their help. Twitter’s my favourite social medium for who it’s introduced me to and it’s brought me in touch with my readers and students.
As for marketing, networking, etc, etc, are these partly why social media exists? If it wasn’t surely anyone marketing, networking, etc. etc. would be asked to leave.
Yes, there are some practices I’ve seen that put me off sometimes. But all in all, social media does what it sets out to.
Choose your social media presence wisely.
– Tom
Hi Tom – thanks for sharing your thoughts.
It certainly sounds like your motivation in many, if not most, of your Twitter interactions is focused on building real relationships. And my point really was about the motivation behind what we’re doing, and not necessarily the tools we’re using, auto-DMs or no auto-DMs. 🙂
It’s great that you’ve had such positive interaction with the “influencers” and mentors you found on Twitter. When did you start out there?
I’m wondering if there’s been more of a trend toward “tweeting only for what I can get out of it” as time has gone on and social media/influencer/relationship marketing has become a “thing.”
I’m in a similar position to yourself. I use a bit of automation to scrape my favourite content from trusted RSS feeds direct to Twitter. Not a lot – just a few podcasts and videos every week – but I do this because I treat Twitter as my RSS reader.
I do interact and engage a lot. About 90% of my activity on Twitter is human interaction.
The automation of content I mentioned is of high quality and relevant to both myself and my followers. It is not one of those non-stop Twitter accounts that simply broadcast garbage all day, every day. I’m quite selective.
LOVE this, Aviva. Love it.
Quick wit and dry humor aren’t utilized nearly enough in blog posts. Yours would have been great without them, but I love the punch they added to your expose. 😉
That was my feeling exactly. 😉
Thank you so much, Kevin. It was a topic I felt strongly about, and it just kind of flowed, especially as my jaw kept dropping as the situation with those Twitter accounts got worse and worse.
I’m glad you appreciated the humor. I figure if I’m at least able to amuse myself, then it’s worth it. Otherwise all these marketing blog posts (including my own), start to sound the same. I recently needed to write something for our own blog at Virtual Assistant Israel, and I was looking through all these topics I had written down. “I’m going to be really bored writing those,” I thought… and then decided to write a Dr. Seuss story-inspired marketing post. Bing – instant excitement. 🙂