Earlier this week, social media guru, Chris Brogan blogged about an incident where some old-school marketing was applied to him - a faceless press release from someone he didn’t know, an embargo he could care less about and no attempt to get to know him. This form of marketing - all push and no relationship - just doesn’t work in the new world of engagement with your market and its consumers (or prosumers, ideally).
I’m certainly not anything like as high-profile as Chris, but I’d like to talk about a company that’s reached out to me to take a look at their product and done it the right way. That company is DocStoc. I’ve got no financial or other interest in them, so I get nothing from mentioning them here, I just want to, as they’ve done the exact opposite of Tom in Chris’ tale.
A couple of weeks back, out of the blue, I received an email from DocStoc’s Community Manager, Kathrien Ahn. Kathrien had read my blog (she had an informed view of it, demonstrating so), thought I might be interested in DocStoc’s work, described briefly what DocStoc did and offered to set up a conversation between me and DocStoc’s CEO, Jason Nazar so we could talk about their work.
Jason and I ended up talking for about 30 minutes. We chatted about their product, which is kind of like Slideshare (one of my favorite tools) but for all sorts of documents. They’re building a community that’s sharing all sorts of documents in a variety of forms - legal templates, e-books, educational and creative material, business tools. It’s actually a pretty clever idea. We also talked about their funding - they’ve just taken a Series B from Rustic Canyon - and are planning for some growth.
I would probably not have noticed DocStoc if Kathrien hadn’t approached me. I certainly wouldn’t have paid attention if the approach had sounded like they were selling me something. But, you know, they did this the right way - they approached me, spent a little time building a relationship and put me in touch with senior people, despite the fact that I’m a pretty minor player in the social media world.
If DocStoc’s ideas sound interesting to you, I’d take a look, even if only because they have their heads around the social part of what they are up to.
Hey Stephen(et all) its jason from docstoc. You had such nice things to say about Kat, I thought Id totally embarrass her and share her pic
http://blog.docstoc.com/introducing-docstoc-team-member-kathrien.html
she’s also an amazingly talented screen writer and our resident star (major role in a classic episode of “the office”). Hey its Hollywood, community managers double as aspiring talent
I think it was docstock who was at TechCrunch 40, and if so, I spent a little time talking with them briefly about their app. They seemed nice, friendly, and “of the community.”
Maybe that’s something we should consider, too. If people are FROM this community, it’s not exactly as hard to be connected in to share news. Meaning, if I were trying to get a message into another community, like the biker community, I know that I’d have to tread lightly because I don’t know the social norms.
Hmm. Interesting. And nice story about a company doing it right.
Chris, thanks for the comment. I agree, the DocStoc folks that I’ve spoken with really seem to get social media - from the need to build and nurture community, to maintaining a conversation with them, to collaborating with them in terms of application features.
As far as I can tell, they really do get it. If for this reason only, I hope they go far.