Collaborative Thinking About Digital Marketing.

I met +Neil Patrick through LinkedIn only quite recently. In fact, I came to Neil’s attention through my LinkedIn Publications, which is kind of ironic as Neil is a strong believer that we should not provide free content to a platform who hold their providers in such low regard* (a point which is actually very valid).

Neil was, I believe, one of those readers who remains in the shadows, until a critical momentum of interest has built up, a tipping point is reached or an opportunity arises.

This is one of the hidden benefits of blogging that most business don’t realize, that there is “dark” side to it which cannot be measured by so called “engagements” on individual posts (views, likes, comments, shares). It is a fact that many of the people we are influencing do not feel it necessary to make themselves visible to us or other readers, but simply enjoy and benefit from our works quietly. Many of my most beneficial business relationships occur when something tips the balance and a hidden reader pops their head above the parapet to say “I have been following your work for sometime and…”

So it is with joyous surprise when Neil popped out of the woodwork, said he will be in my area soon and suggested we meet to discuss possibilities for collaborating. After reading through Neil’s LinkedIn Profile I jumped at this chance. So we met up in my local pub within the week, and I am very glad we did, because it was one of those life changing encounters which are so rare.

Neil and I hit it off immediately. As we chatted it became more and more apparent how much we were the same. We have both arrived at Digital Marketing with fresh perspectives, coming at it with significant experiences of other business sectors. We both feel we have been on a journey of learning and research over the timeframe of years and have now arrived at the same advanced stations. We have both independently examined digital marketing and social sales at a forensic, thorough due diligence, business focussed level, to a depth which we believe no-one else really has. We have both come to the firm conclusion that much of what businesses and organizations are being told to do in the digital space is not just ineffective but actually damaging to them. We both despair at the levels of mis-selling and snake oil vending of social media marketing to business.

Indeed, perhaps the strongest tie which binds us is that our integrity and ethics in this space is paramount to both us and our clients. As my new found friend Neil would say “I would rather live comfortably than die rich compromised”. I could not agree more.

We since have been in regular contact by telephone, bringing together our brilliant minds, plotting our way forward, hatching our plans, consolidating our ideas and know-how, playing to each other’s strengths. Another thing we have in common, you see, is that we both believe strongly in the power of Collaboration with the right people in Business. What has become very clear is that Neil and I are right for each other to take what we have each learned, to bring it together in a whole greater than the sum of the parts and to therefore offer extraordinary support to clients on projects for which we can collaborate.

Last Saturday we met up for a second time down the local pub. This meeting once again accelerated our own thought processes. We discussed the importance of the massive Digital Reputations we have each amassed and evaluated our combined Digital Assets. We discussed the proofs we have that our methods do work for businesses. I told Neil about my work for Carii, how I had helped to put the platform on the world map, how this had helped the Company achieve a major “Innovation of the Year Award” and how my ideas and technical support had shaped the technology itself. Neil told me about how he had just reviewed his work for a client he has only been working with for just a couple of months and how he could already show a real terms 200% rise in revenue against the same period last year.

Then we got onto the subject of business blogging. Did you know that the combined page views of our blogs is half a million? Here is another thing we have in common and which we believe very strongly in: perhaps unusually, we do not use our blogs to try and sell products and services, apart from experimental purposes for clients with blogs, and we do not use them to capture people’s information. We know that blogs are for other purposes entirely.

At the end of our chat we had a light bulb moment. We almost simultaneously pitched an idea to each other which combines all the above commonalities and thoughts on strategies. We said to each other “why don’t we each write a post about our developing relationships on our blogs”?

So here we are. This is my companion piece to Neil's article on his blog, http://40pluscareerguru.blogspot.com/2015/11/why-linkedin-best-practices-are-myth.html