I am not a social media pundit. I am a person with a somewhat unusual track record of using social media to connect with business prospects, unusual in that there are actual sales associated with that activity. That experience, which continues as I work on marketing at Catertrax (my employer) and 24PageBooks (my publishing company), has forced me to think through the entire marketing landscape which is practically an alien planet compared to even a few years ago. The old media is obliterated by the new model of social connections and this requires an entirely different approach to how we communicate with our customers and prospects.

I’ve been working on a 24PageBook called Learn To Market, Fast. It’s my distillation of what I’ve learned about marketing in the past three years or so. My grandiose vision is that you throw out everything you think you know about marketing and focus on two things: your reputation and reaching out to people who are publicly seeking a solution for a problem that you can fix. Your reputation gets you in the door and your response to their problem gets you the business. Simplistic? Yes, when compared to the arcane brand strategy mumbo-jumbo marketing and ad agencies are pitching. They offer secret sauce in a world where nothing is secret.

The best thing about this 24PageBooks project is the discovery that subjects like this, which have had millions of words written about them over the years, can be distilled down to a brief format without really losing much, if anything. My approach is to show a business owner exactly how to do marketing in a socially connected world, regardless of the size or kind of business they have. And I’ve discovered a measurement for the success of that marketing, a very concise measurement based on some serious research by a guy named Frederick Reichheld. More about that shortly. The book should be out in a few weeks if I can pull my business partner Mike out of the sea of work he is swimming in.