While I am still glowing over the successful trade show for Creative Bandwidth, I am in a mood to think about what we did right, we changed. The thing I am most proud of (besides not eating all the M&M's) is that we took Frank Rumbauskas advice, and did something different.
We were on a path that Frank hates that leads to cold calling, and it's kissing cousin, power networking (which our good friend Steve Harper has warned us about). Instead we got lucky, and got invited to see a group of people that we have the power to help. I love to help, really, it warms the cockles of my old outsourcer's heart. Besides I REALLY need the good karma.
We were waiting to launch at an "industry" event, which for us would be games or training. But instead we made our first event our customer's event. So the great thing was, we were the only games company at a technology trade show. We were the fun ones. If we had gone to a games trade show, we would have been snubbed as sell outs by the rapidly dwindling gamer crowd. Which would have been unfair, we are trying to lead people back to the games table, to get folks interested in face-to-face entertainment and away from their instant messenger addiction.
What surprised me as an ex-big5 consulting person was the momentum that the message "we are smarter than you so buy whatever we are selling" still has among the solutions provider crowd. I thought that went out with the "Vote Ross Perot" buttons. I guess I am old fashioned about technology, just tell me what it does and assure me that it works. My cell phone thinks it is so smart with the blue-tooth headset that sends my calls to the glove-compartment. It doesn't make me look all that smart.
I get a kick out of the new marketing campaign for men's shower soap, "Does not wash off testosterone" lets face it testosterone has much more momentum than perfume. As Sir Isaac Newton warned us in his first law,
Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.
Generally that external force is luck, so be prepared to get lucky, get OK with being the external force acting on someone else's uniform motion. However, look out for Newton's 3rd law about equal and opposite forces. Keep watching this could get interesting.
