I’m a member of a professional organization.
The group hosts a monthly industry oriented event, preceded by a semi-formal board meeting, which is usually filled with egotists arguing about why their idea should become next month’s event.
(Oh the tortures we endure in the furtherance of our careers, huh?)

Battling LA Traffic: A Losing Proposition

Most of the events are held at the Long Beach Grand “Events Center” (which is really just code for upscale convention hall).
Now for those of you familiar with the perils of LA traffic, you have some idea of how painful the trip from my place in West LA (right on the edge of Beverly Hills – it’s nowhere near as fancy as it sounds) to Long Beach can be. Especially amid the crush of rush hour traffic, which is unavoidable as the board meetings generally start at 9:30AM.
The long and the short? I need a GOOD HOUR to get there.

Ever Running Late…

So of course when I lit out my front door, I was already 15 minutes behind schedule (which I confess, sadly, is not that unusual these days).
And to further complicate matters, there’s no straightforward route (of course, right?). Plus, I’ve barely been a member for six months, and the events aren’t always at the Grand. So the venue location isn’t yet etched in my memory.
That means I’ve got to rely on navigation. I don’t have a fancy whip with nav built in, so I’m forced to use the Google GPS on my phone. I wake up my Samsun Galaxy, launch Google Chrome and, using speech to text, blurt “the Long Beach Grand” into the phone’s mic.

A Love Hate Relationship With GPS Nav

Now if you’re like me, you have a love-hate thing going with Google nav.
You love help with getting where you’re going (because your sense of direction s*cks).
But the twisting and turning route the GSP directs you to follow…
a) Stresses you out even more because you’re already late and now you’re wondering why the heck this new-fangled piece of techno-junk is taking you on a totally wacky route;
And b) makes you nuts because you always have to be in complete control of every situation and you’re sure these direction can’t possibly be correct (full disclosure, I may be projecting a bit here).

And That’s exactly what happened on this trip…

I’m sitting in bumper to bumper traffic, screaming at the phone “where the F*ck are you taking me!?” as I watch the minutes roll by on my digital dashboard clock.
And then (queue harp music as the clouds part), the impossibly circuitous route deposits me on the 405 freeway (much faster than I ever would have expect while in the midst of it, screaming and crying).
I’m less than 20 miles from Long Beach. And well past the angry snarls that slow traffic to a halt around the 10 & 405 freeway interchange and LAX.
So in the end, I wasn’t late. In fact, I made it to my meeting 10 minutes early.

The Moral of The Story?

Google GPS may be newfangled (and that’s scary to 40yr old boobs like me), but that doesn’t mean it’s not effective.

There’s another lesson here, too.

When it comes to embracing new technology, the same thing happens in marketing. A little too often in fact…

What Do I Need a Website For!?

I remember working in residential real estate marketing in the late ‘90s. So-called “web development” companies where charging $5,000 – $10,000 to build personal websites for realtors.
“Well, this will never fly,” was the attitude of most in the industry at the time. It took my then employers until 2007 to get it together and build their own site. In the meantime, their competitors had left them in the dust and upstarts new to the industry were cutting a piece of their pie because they had developed a strong online presence.

Blog? Schmog!

This attitude was common among many in the early to mid aughts. Many in the business world were convinced blogs were time wasting vanity projects.
Fast-forward a few years and content marketing (which isn’t new or exclusive to blogging, but is employed rather effectively with a blog) is accepted as one of the most effective marketing tools available today. Thanks largely to the success of business blogging.

Social Media Marketing? Balderdash! (it’s a just a toy for kids)

I was reviewing some old articles I had written for a now defunct business website and came across a piece I’d written six years ago: “Is Social Media Marketing Effective?”
In the piece, I challenged the validity of social media marketing. I hypothesized it was useless outside a narrow target group (what we now call Millennials). But I did concede social media was likely to grow as a marketing tool…
(Genius prediction, huh? Yeah, DUH!)
In the meantime, social media marketing has proliferated and become one of the most powerful tools available to small businesses –
reaching far beyond so-called Millennials.

Mobile Web!? Cellphones are for TALKING!

Should your website be mobile optimized? This is the latest marketing measure to be queried and questioned to death.
Well if over 50% of internet users access the web on smartphones (and a large percentage of those exclusively on smart phones), I’d say the answer is a pretty obvious YES!

So What’s Next Big Marketing Innovation?

Who knows (I mean, I have some speculations, but we’ll save those for another day). The point is: It’s coming (I guarantee it).
So instead of dismissing it, or cataloging all its flaws, or fighting against it – take a step back and evaluate it objectively. Does it make sense for your business? Because in the end, that’s what’s relevant, right?

What About You?

What was your marketing misstep? That new platform you were CONVINCED was worthless and dismissed it… Only it turned out to be bigger than sliced bread?
Join the conversation over on my Google+ page!