The Connection Economy in Action: Rand Fishkin Gets It

I’m a fan of Rand Fishkin. Mostly because I glommed on to his company’s social media work a few years back when I was really learning the game myself. When you don’t know much about a thing and you’re casting your intellectual line into the waters of the interwebs, sometimes you catch whales, sometimes old boots. Moz was a whale.

Rand does a great job here summing up the beauty of the connection-economy: that people you connect with are better than people that you buy, or beat over the head with ads.

There’s a fun thought experiment I’d heard years ago: Imagine if you could, growing up without any sense of religion in any capacity, and then when you turned 25 you were suddenly exposed to all the major organized religions of the world. Like a job fair, but for your soul.

Now imagine that you’re walking through this expo-hall and talking to the reps from all of the majors about their beliefs and weighing them against each other equally. Would you wind up choosing the religion that you currently belong to? Or, without prejudice of social pressure and indoctrination, would you choose another faith? I know, it’s a tough question, but that’s what makes it interesting.

I bring it up because the same thing essentially happened to me, but with marketing. I’d had no prior indoctrination before 2011, at least in regards to the social media space. I was searching through the different schools of thought that were emerging and I had choices to make. Was it best to focus on pure SEO, or Adwords ads, or Content Marketing? Was simply being on Facebook, Twitter, etc… enough to turn into dollars? What exactly was “Content Marketing” and what was the point?

And of course, the holy grail question: “What’s the ROI of social media?”

After months of TED talks, blog posts, youtube videos, white papers, forums, etc… it became clear to me that Seth Godin’s “The Connection Economy” was probably the closest match to my conclusions as to the best approach.

Rand and Moz belong to the same overall school as Godin, Sinek, Vaynerchuck, et al. I count myself as a firm believer in this school. I’m constantly looking at what marketing moves me, and those around me, and the answers are the same: Social connection.

When I believe what a company believes I want to see them win. A few great examples that I’m nuts about: Alamo DraftHouse, Purple, Rock, Scissors, PackageLog, and  Radiolab. Each of these groups are doing amazing things to connect with people and I feel a part of what they’re doing.

Trust is rare, so it matters. “Real” is rare, so it has value. Because we’re bombarded with a constant cacophony of ads our defenses are up and we trust no one. As marketers (and if you work for a company that sells anything, you’re a marketer) it’s our job to connect people and create value. Ads for the sake of ads are a black hole and a waste of opportunity and treasure.

Let’s be people. Let’s do what people do best and connect with one another. The rest will take care of itself.