You just need one person
Most of the answers to the questions you've been asking exist in someone.
Need a job? You need to meet someone.
Need a partner? You need to meet someone.
Every single time I've needed something to change in my life, the answer was found in one other person.
I either knew this person from the jump, or I had to meet them where they were.
Sometime in the past, I was late on my rent.
And it was a direct effect of a poor couple of months I had prior and was on the verge of losing the apartment. Tale as old as time, right?
All that I needed to turn my terrible past couple months to a profitable one was closing one more client.
Not two, one.
And the answer was in a single email I sent to one friend of mine based in Arizona, touching base and asking for work. (this is a link to a post I made about email templates you can send when you need more work)
Email turned to call. Call turned to paid invoice in full.
I am an avid believer in the fact that most terrible cases you can ever find yourself in can be solved by meeting or talking to the right person.
We're going to look at how this is a key mindset to have to market your brand properly on social
Short Announcement (skip if you want)
This is the last email of the year from me. It's been an excellent year, and I've sent way more emails out than I ever thought I would.
Thank you for joining.
Thank you for reading.
Thank you for buying.
Thank you for supporting me in 2024.
I'll send a proper gratitude email next week but I just wanted to let you know this is the last (proper) email of the year.
I hope you have the best holidays ever.
Business → People
Back in the day, businessmen were always attributed with holding briefcases.
It's even something we see in the emojis for business - there's always a briefcase.
Yes, these cases carried documents and such.
But there was something else valuable in these briefcases - call cards.
The best business people even had extra pouches with so many contacts they had picked up and could reach out to at anytime to initiate a business conversation.
Obviously times have changed now and people rarely print these call cards anymore.
The beauty is social has made it extra easy to get these contacts for yourself, and reach out to them at any time at all.
If you are reading this as an email, it means you gave me your contact sometime in the past. I'm typing this email at 5:34 am on a Friday morning.
I can send this email to you anytime after it's done, and we might have a little dialogue via email. It's incredible what we can achieve these days.
With social, we can collect these contacts at scale!
And when a lot of people know who you are and reach out to you on a consistent basis, we call that being popular.
Or having attention - my favourite word in marketing.
Attention is the game - always has been
Attention was the game when companies used to fight for ad space on radio stations.
Attention is still the game now that small business make and post organic content with the aims of reaching their intended audiences.
What's really changed between then and now is that now, it's a lot cheaper to get attention.
You're always just a couple YouTube tutorials away from running a successful ad campaign on any of the popular platforms, and you're on your way.
It's so easy to not recognize how privileged we are today.
We can make a creative and depending on how good it is, it could reach millions of people without necessarily spending a dime (if you use organic social)
It's insane.
The people and companies that know how to engineer attention for themselves on the lowest of budgets are the most valuable assets in this digital economy.
2 signs social is serving your business
Social is only an attention tool for you.
This is easier said than done.
I only recently started treating my social this way.
It was this year I decided to give proper attention to marketing off of social media and using social media as my attention tool.
It's how I get people to notice me and start to like my ideas.
Most of the selling I always did exists outside of social.
This is the best way to get your business out of the matrix.
Ask yourself if Instagram disappeared today, will my business suffer?
2. You have a briefcase of contacts (wink)
This is what we call a CRM (customer relationship management) tool.
It could be as simple as an Excel sheet or as robust as a HubSpot system.
But you need to be collecting contacts and nurturing relationships outside social media.
Social is the attention tool, and you funnel all the people you speak to inside your CRM.
That way, you can keep up with them, get in touch whenever you want to and build meaningful relationships with them.
Social is only going to get crazier in the coming months.
TikTok might not exist in a couple of weeks anymore. There will be more platforms and algorithm updates.
The only thing not changing is social media in its core.
It's a social tool for personal relationships.
It's an attention tool for businesses.
Don't lose sight of that.