One of our best marketing programs continues to be our Tenant breakfasts.  Sure, we Tweet, of course we’re on Facebook, we blog and we try to keep a wide footprint across the web. But the best form of Social Media is also the oldest. The more we get overloaded with information, the more we tend to rely on those we know and trust. We understand that our best salespeople are our satisfied customers. Our networking breakfasts are a great way to help us learn to be salespeople for our tenants and for our tenants to become salespeople for us.

Which leads me to a short exchange that I believe is the essence of what we all strive to achieve in our marketing. Jamie Danburg, the owner of our company was commenting how difficult it was to use his phone to give himself reminders of meetings, people to call etc. Heather, the Marketing Coordinator at TGI Office Automation, who sponsored the breakfast, then demonstrated how she could use Siri on her iPhone 4S to schedule appointments and reminders on the fly by voice commands.  By lunch, Jamie had purchased his new iPhone.

Of course we can’t all be Apple, but at Danburg, we’re very good at providing great homes for great companies. We are proud to have some excellent ambassadors in our long term tenants. I also want to let you know that our friends at TGI have a super cool copy machine that produces 1’ x 4’ waterproof color banners that would be great for any presentation.

So the object of marketing in the age of Social Media is to find those people who can help promote your product to their own trusted audience. The benefit of tools such as Twitter and Facebook is that it extends our reach to a wider audience while maintaining a reasonable amount of personal credibility. There is still no substitute for word-of–mouth recommendation, but the new media bridges the gap between one on one personal recommendations and the impersonal mass promotion we get through traditional media.

Is “New Media” just a fad that will fade away? The answer is an emphatic no. New media is not new, it is simply the latest phase of an evolution that started with the spoken word, moved to the printed word, then to radio, movies, TV, the internet and now the social platforms. The challenge is to layer all of the tools available to us to cut through the information overload we are all experiencing, and bring useful information to our intended audience.