Guerrilla girl

Hot and sweet! I guerrilla-marketed today and already have some response to show for it. Does anything  satisfy like instant gratification?

What I did was post free notices on a local Northeast Ohio subscriber list announcing Geniocity.com’s search for artists and ad salespeople and got replies from promising people almost immediately. This was a relief, as I’ve been pricing paid advertising in area publications and finding it well beyond my means.

The next thing I need to learn how to do (among dozens, alas) is to use Facebook and LinkedIn effectively to reach resource people and markets. For the last 18 months, I’ve been going through what amounts to a self-directed crash course in Internet use, trying to educate myself at odd moments about a system and culture that other people have been immersed in for 20 years. I’d say I’m still at the “Have you seen the pen of my uncle?” stage in mastering the language, but fluency may be mine one day.

In the meantime, I’m also trying to attract press interest by making direct appeals to individual media people I know and trust. That effort seems to be off to a good start, too.

And so, happily, is the weekend. Let’s celebrate with a tune! Bombs away ….

Political partying

Last night, I went to a fund-raising event for a local politician who’s running for re-election this fall.  Being of the journalist persuasion, I’ve attended such things in the past only as a working reporter for a major daily, so finding myself there as a private citizen with my business cards in my pocket felt a little odd.

But not that odd, as it turns out – the crowd was made up pretty entirely of members of the arts community I’ve covered and known well for years and I quickly discovered that it’s fun to network with people I already know and like a lot, but who haven’t necessarily heard about my new business yet.

I’m capable of making myself converse with roomfuls of total strangers, but I don’t enjoy it much. Ok, that’s an understatement - generally speaking, I’d rather unstop toilets all day than walk up to circles of people I’ve never seen before and engage them in chitchat.

So while I realize that the point of networking is to expand the number of people who know me and my company, it sure was nice to walk into a party and realize that I was never going to be able to catch up with all the people I wanted to talk to before the evening ended. 

It’s also clear that politics offers a great way of connecting with the people likeliest to share the ideas and value the mission my business champions. I have to believe that supporting candidates and issues would be a good guerrilla-marketing strategy for any business that wants to be – or at least doesn’t mind being – associated with certain philosophies and positions.

So I had another V-8 moment in my ongoing self-education as an entrepreneur. Only one problem: Political support costs a lot more than a can of juice.