HAROLD HEFT, Freelance
Published: Saturday, September 19Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone is Connected.
Connect Your Business to Everyone
By Mitch Joel
In one of the hit movies of the summer, Julie & Julia, a frustrated office worker, Julie Powell, decides to start a blog describing her attempt to cook 524 of Julia Child's recipes in 365 days. On one level, the film is about the act of sharing good food and good company as a route toward happiness and self-discovery. On a much more profound level, though, it is about Julie Powell putting her life online, giving the entire world access to her enterprise, and transforming her circumstances in the process. Human beings have been cooking since prehistoric days, but Julie & Julia couldn't have been made before the first blog was launched 12 years ago.
Great things happened to Powell based on the experiment expressed in her blog, including widespread media attention, a bestselling book and a movie deal. Her success would not surprise Mitch Joel, whose new book, Six Pixels of Separation, provides a detailed examination of the vital importance of online marketing for entrepreneurs. As Joel writes, "building
relationships and turning those relationships into an online community is more powerful and more important than ever before."
Joel should know. As president of Twist Image, a digital marketing company based in Montreal and Toronto, he has emerged as a guru of online connectivity. His thesis is simple: No matter what you are trying to achieve, you have an unprecedented opportunity to speak to the entire world and, by extension, to market your product, through the Internet. To support this thesis, he meticulously walks the reader through the many channels available to build an online community through social marketing, from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to blogs, podcasts and YouTube video postings. Moreover, he coaches the reader on how to build a personal profile and a community, providing tips on crafting content and tone better to engage an audience.
Throughout Six Pixels of Separation, Joel, whose column of the same title appears every other Thursday in The Gazette's Business section, applies his lessons to a wide spectrum of entrepreneurs, and gives numerous examples of individuals who have boosted their business fortunes and outpaced their competitors by creating a clever online presence. One such example is Tom Dickinson, the founder of a company called Blendtec, which sells blenders. When Dickinson started posting popular videos on YouTube under the title Will it Blend?, in which he tries to blend everything from a golf club to a Rubik's Cube, his profile and, by extension his business, benefited.
Joel's challenge to all entrepreneurs, whatever their business, is to be creative and find a hook to attract online attention, and then engage in an entertaining dialogue with the newfound community. To illustrate his point, he provides an example of a fictional pen and stationery company, and effectively walks the reader through each of the many options available to create a compelling online presence, which in turn will, ideally, attract a broader market.
Although Joel is speaking primarily to business entrepreneurs, it could be argued that his message is equally applicable to virtually any endeavour. Barack Obama, for example, is mentioned late in Six Pixels of Separation, but he single-handedly stretched the limits of online social marketing farther than anyone previously had in driving his political and fundraising agendas and becoming the first person to win a presidential election with the help of an innovative digital strategy. And although the ASPCA is discussed briefly, Joel could have dedicated several chapters to the ways in which major charitable organizations like World
Vision and Greenpeace have grown tremendously, both in their fundraising and in advancing their missions, by building online communities through effective social marketing. The challenge for all readers, whatever their field, is to interpret how to apply Joel's message to their own work.
Joel's key message is that the Internet is, first and foremost, a powerful marketing tool, and should be approached strategically, with a well thought-out commercial agenda.
There was a time when social marketing tools like blogs, Facebook, and YouTube were thought to be the domain, principally, of people with too much spare time on their hands - a place where members of the lunatic fringe could post a daily political rant or where teenage skateboarders could post videos of a gnarly Frontside 180 Powerslide.
The breakthrough of Six Pixels of Separation is in providing a wake-up call: The Internet has advanced, and those who fail to merge their Great Idea onto the superhighway as quickly as possible are going to be left behind.
Harold Heft can be found in the virtual world on Facebook, LinkedIn
and other social marketing tools.
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