Categories: Articles

The Accidental Marketer

Sometimes, the biggest lessons in marketing come from the strangest places.

Selling a book is a lot of hard work. That’s the lesson I’m re-learning right now as CTRL ALT Delete enters into its second week of sales (re-learning, because I went through this in 2009 when launching the book, Six Pixels of Separation). Working up to the launch of the business book on May 21st, 2013, all of the plans were in place. The work we were doing at Twist Image to build the digital experience, the public relations, communications and marketing all coordinated with my publisher, Grand Central Publishing and much more. There was a long list of marketing collateral that included everything from building that digital experience, to writing a traditional press release, to planning some book launches (some public, some private) to creating contests and more. Leading up to the book launch, it felt kind of chaotic and in looking back, it all seems to have come together around the digital experience, which has been getting rave reviews by everyone who plays along with it.

Then, something happened.

In watching all of the feedback surrounding the CTRL ALT Delete digital experience, I thought it would be fun to strip out some of the statistics, add in some new ones, and put them into a simple PowerPoint deck that I could upload to SlideShare. Candidly, it was easy to do, got pulled together in a couple of hours and was posted to SlideShare on May 26th with the title, 25+ Mind Blowing Stats About Business Today – CTRL ALT Delete. As of this writing, that deck has been viewed over 45,000 times, and it is still going. Within a few hours, SlideShare had chosen it as one of their top presentations of the day. That’s not bad for a piece of content to promote a business book.

This is not about me… this is about you.

Everyone at Twist Image is pleasantly surprised by the success of this initiative, because it wasn’t the one we would have pegged to be this successful… and that’s the lesson. You have to try things. You have to tinker with a campaign. You have to keep at it. You have to iterate. You have to try different channels. You have keep at it. Too many marketers still work with the, "set it and forget it," mindset. It would have been easy for us to hand out bellyrubs and lollipops in the boardroom after reading all of the feedback on the book’s website. We weren’t done. We’re still not done. Some of the biggest successes of your marketing may come from a strange corner of your campaign. Don’t let that go. Don’t let it slip. Was it accidental that we knew the content would work well in a SlideShare setting? No. Was it accidental that it became one of the highlights of this campaign considering the myriad of initiatives that we’ve undertaken to date? Absolutely.

Isn’t that part of the beauty and magic of marketing?

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.