Had a busy day today, started at 7 am with a networking breakfast, and that was followed by another quick meeting and then a consulting session with some clients (a team of three).

I’m a bit tuckered out, but today really drove home the point for me that although you can never reach as many people in person as you can with online tools, person-to-person contact (especially in business, obv.) is still number one. After a long day of shaking hands, meeting new people and making presentations, I feel like it was all time well spent. (I hope my colleagues feel the same way about the time they spent with me!)

I’ve met some exciting new clients these past few weeks, and I’ll be rolling out the result of some of our recent work soon, so watch for that.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a thought: The reason why I felt today was so productive and fun was that I made so many connections with the people I want to do business with. The same principles apply to online networking and marketing tactics, except that the technology makes it possible to make more of those connections.

And speaking of online networking tools: I’ve just done a re-jig to my MySpace page, (thanks to some code from Rob) and it’s looking more and more like my main site all the time.  Had to change my headline on there too, because as Mack points out, MySpace now has over 100 million users.

This exciting new world of Viral (capital V for Mack) marketing, where everybody has a voice, means that business people must remember that technology has made it a lot easier for people to tell ten friends when they are NOT happy with you, too.

From the Church of the Customer Blog: A TV reporter from Tampa, FL is so miffed with his plumber that he posted about it on his blog, and again on Craigslist. Word is spreading, and now when you do a Google Search for Chris’s (sic) Plumbing Service, right close to the top of the results you see his warning about them, on Craigslist. In fact, it’s six results higher than Chris’ own site.

Ouch.

Here’s an interesting story I spotted today at “My Boring Ass Life,” a blog by filmmaker Kevin Smith.

(Smith as Silent Bob)

Twice this week Kevin has hit back at critics, once after Joel Siegel walked out of a screening of Clerks 2, and once today when he was criticized for putting the names of 10, 000 MySpace fans at the end of the credits. As a marketing idea, this one was brilliant, and Smith credits that one to the Weinstein Company. It got people talking and it got press. And it happened on his MySpace, which we should all know by now is free.

The real interesting part of the story is that we’re seeing a real trend here: The critics of the mainstream media are no longer safe. You’re entitled to your opinion, Ms. Critic, but so is everybody else. And in the case of Nikki Finke, she’s being blasted by fans of Smith en masse for her close-minded evaluation of the tactic. Check out the comments on his duplicate post from Myspace.

As Smith notes, not a single industry honcho or guild member has complained, even for one second. (Finke claims that putting fans in the credits is an insult to the folks who work so hard to earn those credits day in and day out) Well guess what Finke? It’s a new world, where the audience is the marketer, and is just as deserving of being honored for posterity for their word of mouth efforts in the credits, which they can then freeze frame for their friends when they buy the DVD. (Because they will. All 10, 000 of them)

Just another example of how the gap between blogging and traditional media is closing. Soon, not only will journalists have to write for their audience and Google (a skill they’re slowly mastering) but now they’re inevitably going to have to accept the fact that they’ll have to open up comments, and leave their writings at the mercy of immediate response from their readers.

I hope Clay won’t mind that I pulled this from an email he sent me much earlier today:

Traditional media is so far behind the news cycle; they report business news two/three DAYS late. By that time, it’s been digested, blogged and commented about by bloggers everywhere. Faddishness? I think not. Of course, we’re not journalists. We’re not the first draft of history. Journalistic media will always hold this place in our society.

What we do is provide the commentary in the margins of the first draft. Once journalistic media can get out of its “Traditional” (mired in print) phase and begin reporting in truly real time… well, that’ll be a different day.

I agree almost entirely, except I want to add that when the mainstream media opens themselves up to instant feedback, the way the blogospere operates, then that “commentary in the margins” will be of as much or more value than what he refers to as the first draft, and writers will be cautious of that fact, to say the least.