But this is not about gratuitous pandering to a great client (they know I do enough of that).
The first-ever Never Stop Marketing Award is goes to them because of what they have done over the past 5 months.
It wasn’t a planned “campaign,” rather an ongoing, relentless pursuit, in an open “perpetual beta” way, of improving their story of “what is a mashup?”
If people don’t understand what a mashup is, they probably won’t buy it.
Let me walk you through a case study of how JackBe displayed a Never Stop Marketing attitude.
(Remember, THEY are the ones who executed this).
- Back in March, the Luis Derechin, CEO of JackBe was on the Fox Business channel and after he sent me the video, I wrote back (fearing that I was making a career-limiting maneuver) saying “I think the story needs work.”
- To his credit, he showed that he is a CEO built for Web 2.0 and willingly backed a “Beat the CEO” contest where he asked the members of the Mashup Developer Community to offer a better explanation than he gave of what a mashup is so that “Everyone gets it.”
- Then, the company decided to go even deeper on the subject of “how to explain a mashup” and take the challenge to a larger community (those who aren’t developers) and was the sponsor client for WOM Slam 2
- From there, they engaged two communities, their own and that of GeniusRocket, where they “crowdsourced” graphic and video ideas on how to best tell the story.
- Out of that came a series of 6 “mashup trading cards” on the back of their business cards, which are different representations of “mashups” in more common scenarios (pizza, yogurt, burritos, bouquet, Frankenstein, and a symphony)
- But they didn’t stop there…they went back to their community, asking them to vote on which of the cards best represents the mashup ideal
And I’m sure there is more to come…
What is so remarkable about this story of JackBe’s marketing is how it wasn’t planned.
We realized we had an issue and just said, “ok, what can we do now to start to solve this problem AND engage our community in the process at the same time?”
It’s not about being perfect. It’s about a continual effort to improve and to share the fact that that is what you are doing.
So, congratulations to the team for winning award.
Now, in my own NSM moment, I need to figure out what the award for them actually is! ;-)
BTW, nominations are open for next NSM award (I’m thinking quarterly). If you have a customer, client, organization that demonstrates NSM principles, let me know and we’ll feature them here!