I’ll Take Two – A Lesson From Steve Jobs

Guest post by Jeff Mesnik, Socialize Your Stuff

The Year 2008! The weather much like today, cool fall day, the place, a restaurant in downtown Boston, known as The Elephant Walk.  I had just checked my coat and sat down at a table with my wife and another couple.  What happened next was a life lesson that will stay with me forever.

The conversation started light.  We chatted about our kids, the schools, the weather, and getting to Boston from Needham, MA.  Then our friend leaned over with a serious look on his face, his eyes were like daggers into our soul.  “Guess what I brought?” He stated calmly.  We could only guess, but we bit on the bait.  “What?” I asked calmly back. He shifted his eyes to the right and left, and then pulled it out from under the table, the original iPhone 3G!

He started talking about it,as if it was his favorite child. He expounded all the wonderful virtues, Steve Jobs couldn’t have done a better sell job, by the time he was done I turned to the waiter and said, “We’ll TAKE TWO.”

While I may have over dramatized the story a bit, the interesting reality was that our friend was not the only one at that restaurant selling iPhones, the whole restaurant seemed to be abuzz about the iPhone.  And that is when the pure genius of what Steve Jobs had accomplished fully hit me. It wasn’t the sleek looking case, or the amazingly easy touch screen interface, it was that he got everyone else to sell his products for him.

We cannot all be Steve Jobs, and we can’t easily buy that enthusiasm, we can find it within our own customer base. Because when people decide to buy something, they want to validate it, they want to tell everyone how great a decision it was.  All they need is to be is asked to do it.  With the revolution created by all the social networking sites a single person’s message about a company or product, it can have a great impact.  It should be every marketer’s goal to attempt to activate the customer base into advocates, because they will be the best sales people.

Socialize Your Stuff, works with organizations on how they can develop and engender that positive messaging, and convince their customers and supporters to become advocates.  We support organizations in the step-by-step approach to make the initial contact, create loyalty with great content, and develop then ask for their support. When you have a team of advocates representing your organization, there are no bounds to how far and wide your impact can be.