Genuine Marketing

Zach recently linked to a good post from Megan McArdle about networking. It’s worth highlighting here:

People with great networks aren’t people who maniacally collect business cards while pumping every random acquaintance for possible signs of a career advantage. They’re people who like other people, who talk to other people because they are interested in them, who seek to help other people because, well, that’s just what a decent chap ought to do.

Other peoples’ lives are interesting, even if they themselves aren’t fabulous raconteurs. A good networker is someone who starts out on the presumption that you must be interesting, and looks for the things that make you so. Along the way, they naturally find out quite a bit about you–and because they genuinely care about other people, they will remember three months hence that you said you wanted to move into new media when their friend the new media consultant starts hiring. Maybe five years down the road, you’ll help them out. And you will genuinely be glad to, because they were glad to help you.

In other words, it can’t be faked, it can’t be hurried, and you can’t strip out the part where YOU are a person worth knowing. All the business-card warriors would do themselves a lot more good in the long run by focusing on getting good at their jobs, and helping other people when they can just because it’s nice to be able to help.

Megan’s thoughts dovetail quite nicely with this post about the ghastly prevalence of businesses and marketers using Twitter accounts. The whole post is worth visiting, but the thesis is simply that technologies like Twitter (and Facebook and blogs) are popular when they are the natural extension of an individual or small group behind them. Using such services to churn out impersonal press releases of a faceless business entity (like the over-hyped networker pushing his business cards) is an exercise in futility. It won’t work, and may actually have a net negative effect. In short, whether you’re marketing an individual or a business, it helps to be genuine.