Don’t Forget The Game

A quick post today… major snowstorm here in Boston has got me busy.

Remember the game you are playing: If you are marketing your restaurant, the same things appeal to people now as they always have, good food, social interaction, not having to cook, do the dishes, or all eat the same thing. People respond to many factors including your location, cuisine, price point, and philosophy. You are spreading the word about what you are doing. That is marketing. It doesn’t matter that you are using twitter and not a guy with a sandwich board on the corner. The tools have changed, the game hasn’t.

The guys in this picture are playing chess in Washington square park in 1969… if you and I started a chess game tomorrow we would play by the same rules. Just because you are in Toronto and I am in Boston, and I am playing on an iPad and you are on a MacBook Air doesn’t mean that we are playing a different game. It is chess. It is Marketing.

What you need to do is get the same reaction, by marketing the same things, using today’s tools. Sure tactics change based on the medium (A post on this) but there are countless new tactics introduced to chess from the Sicilian Defense Taimanov System to the Classical Kings Indian to the Spanish Gambits… new tactics have been introduced to chess over the ages. It is still the same game, remember that. It is Marketing.

So you may need to brush up on the new technicalities of moving your pieces, and communicating your move to your audience, but you are moving them for the same reasons.

You must be Human, Identifiable, Yourself. Any notion that Social Media Marketing has changed the need to be any of those things is fools gold. If you are anonymous nobody listens, if you are too polished nobody feels you, if you are a corporate name you are seen as a seller only.

This is what we do for our clients at GuestFeed, we use modern communication vehicles to express their humanity, to distribute their uniqueness, and to do it better, faster, cheaper than older methods. If you want a free suggestion of what we would do for you contact me here, or via @spirocks, or spiro@guestfeed.com…

Otherwise have an amazing time tonight, I will be shoveling myself out of 3 feet of snow here… yikes.

Update 6/2011 I just came across this intelligent and eloquent article that I believe gets asimilar point. Removing Technology