BusinessTN

Think of David Bullock as a case study within a case study. In 2007, the engineer-turned-salesman realized he was witnessing a marketing phenomenon when, in a matter of months, a charismatic but unseasoned U.S. senator rose from relative obscurity to the forefront of American politics. Unlike traditional presidential candidacies, Barack Obama's didn't appear suspended from above but rather sustained from below, by grassroots voices seeding every form of social media.

Bullock knew good engineering when he saw it. He and colleague Brent Leary started tracking the campaign's strategic use of social media and networking, and by 2008 they had published what they learned in a book, Barack 2.0: Barack Obama’s Social Media Lessons for Business.

The book itself was a manifestation of those lessons. To wit:

1. Find a compelling subject (Obama's groundbreaking use of social media).

2. Put it in a virtual "container" (a blog devoted to the subject).

3. Use social networking (in Bullock's case, Twitter) to start a dialogue about it, posting secondary links to measure the response.

4. Use that dialogue to drive the conversation back to controlled platforms (the blog, a Web site with tracking mechanisms).

5. Watch "real" media pick up the scent.

The result? An agile, interactive, self-perpetuating marketing process that allowed Bullock to turn a blog into a book into speaking engagements -- an idea into a product line -- within six months.

An entrepreneur's dream.

"The model that we have is the same model that any business could use, large or small," Bullock says, "because it's fully scaled. That's how we created it."

David Bullock, president of White Bullock Group, a Murfreesboro business development firm, talked to BusinessTN about how small businesses can use that model to level the marketing playing field.

BTN: Can social networking replace traditional marketing?

DB: Social networking is an extension of marketing. The customers are out there; they're already in the marketplace. Your goal is to show up where they're looking. That may be on LinkedIn; it may be on Facebook. It may be in well over 1,000 social media platforms. So it's not a replacement; it's augmentation of your current marketing.

BTN: Which social media have untapped potential as a marketing tool?

DB: Web 3.0 is on the rise. People aren't talking about it yet, but it's the semantic Web. It's very different than Web 2.0, which really has just allowed a vast amount of two-way communication.
Is there any social media place people can use more? Their own blog. I’d start there.

BTN: What are the pitfalls of using social media as a marketing tool?

DB: Not managing your persona in the marketplace. If you check my Twitter stream, you'll find that it's tool- and information-oriented. Like, "Hi, I just noticed that Google has created this new ad. Check it out." Or, "I've found this new tool that allows me to skim WordPress quickly. Here it is." My conversation is about tools and resources to market, to better equip, to move content. That's the persona I've created in the marketplace for me and my business. I have other things to do besides Twitter. I'm not on Facebook five times a day for 20 minutes. It's not necessary because these things are tools to leverage.

BTN: Surveys have shown a gap between what businesses hope to gain and what they do gain from the use of social media. How would you explain that?

DB: Knowing pay-per-click, understanding search engines, understanding testing and tracking, and being able to tie all that together -- that's what is lacking when high-level (marketing) strategies are put in place. The Internet moves so quickly that whatever strategy you had on this day is obsolete by the time you get ready to start implementing it.

BTN: So the shotgun approach is ineffective?

DB: The shotgun approach obviously is not effective, and just putting content out there for the sake of content, without a call to action that is measurable and definable, is really a waste of content. Small businesses are providing a solution set. And that is what people gravitate to and take action on, and that's what gets them into the store, and that's what gets them to actually purchase. Whereas too many businesses start with...a beautiful logo. They spend all the money on the Web site, the wonderful office, the wonderful infrastructure, but they don’t have any customers. No clients, no interactivity. But they've built an infrastructure that requires working capital. What we did was a little bit backwards, but I've learned more in the 18 months of putting this together than I've learned in the last 15 years I've been in business. We were able to take an idea, contain the idea for less than $500 and produce a situation that now has major media calling me, has the Wharton School of Business calling me, has major businesses calling me -- all of them wanting to know, "How does this work?"