I thought my last post, What is YOUR Brand of Social Media Snake Oil?, was provocative, and might stir up some controversy, if not flames and violent disagreement. (For the record, I really do believe what I posted and did not do so just to get attention).
But there really wasn’t much blow back (OK, I lost a few Twitter followers).
This could mean any number of things: either everyone agrees (I sincerely doubt this), no one reads my blog (I know that isn’t true), people read it and just didn’t care enough to want to comment, or those I was most obviously talking about consider me to be small potatoes, and me and/or the topic to be unworthy of a response.
Anyway, I did get a very nice pitch from Deb Holland of The Marketing Zen Group.
There is so much noise about bad pitches (and believe me, I do get my share of these); in comparison, much less attention is given to effective ones, and to people who do the job well. So, in the spirit of Karma (appropriate, given the name of the company and book) I thought I would shift from the snarky tone of my last post to my more usual charming self (OK, I know I am laying it on thick here) and share a few nice words about her pitch.
Deb obviously took the time to discover topical blogs such as mine and approach me with a personalized email pitch. Her note said:
…your post about the various brands of social media snake oil is so dead on, I decided to tell you about my personal brand of social media snake oil.
Mine is called the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the unvarnished truth. And that is that social media ONLY works if you remember two things: that its a consumer platform, not a marketing platform, and that it is an amplifier, not a shortcut. It isn’t a replacement for solid marketing strategy and it certainly doesn’t replace a great PR effort.
Thats the whole point of my boss’s new book, The Zen of Social Media Marketing. This book is based on real life case studies, and practical examples, and starts with the premise that social media marketing comes LAST…
When I mentioned that I liked her pitch, she replied:
My theory on pitching is simple – pay attention to the outlet you’re pitching, and try to give them something appropriate that fits in with their editorial focus. (I’m not big on “canned” pitches that are the same for a thousand targets on a list you pulled from a database.)
Makes so much sense, doesn’t it? And, news flash – it really works.
