Is there a downside to stockpiling tips and tricks for your communications toolbox? – SCN Encourager

Yep! It may cause YOU to miss the most important message.

Of course, by YOU…

I mean ME.

Since I’m the one who does this all of the time.

So, I’m sorry for connecting YOU by inference what really is a common mistake of mine.

I guess I just liked the look of YOU rather than ME  in the headline.

I know this doesn’t change the fact that goof-ups like this one typically aren’t yours.

Here’s my travail down the wrong road.

Today I was hyped to show  you how marketing mastermind Seth Godin “event-jacked” the new Steve Jobs movie into his blog post last week.

Godin even titled the post Selling like Steve and published for his legion of readers within hours of the movie’s premier.

I thought the trick was pretty cool.

Just like I always do whenever I spot a good communicator elevating the relevance of a story by tying it to big time, real-time event, ad campaign, or some other grand experience.

So that’s what I actually intended to write about today… the valuable technique of event-jacking.

And how I thought we could use it in our school PR.

Until I read the short Godin blog post again.

He wrote something that I had totally missed thanks to my myopic quest to quickly snag a tip.

Something much more important to our schools than my yapping about the technique of event-jacking.

Godin sent up a red flag about a marketing reality we may want to wrestle with for awhile within our respective leadership teams.

Here’s his clarion call.

“Be interesting… that’s a slot that’s available to more people than ever before, regardless of industry or audience.

Average stuff for average people is getting ever more difficult to sell.

If that’s all you’ve got, get something else.”

Well now, how’s that for straight talk?

I kinda took it as personal good news, though.

If average is now so bad… maybe there’s a bright future for the mediocre!

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