Recently, I went on an excursion for arts and crafts supplies—let’s face it, I was forced… hijacked… bullied into going by the loveliest of possible captors: my wife. After an impossible eternity traversing the local topography we found ourselves in a Mom-and-Pop art supply shop just south of the beaten track.

It was located inside one of those old gutted restaurants. You know the type. Where all but the outdoor signage and indoor seating have been removed, in a manner to suggest the new tenants might not be sticking around long. Surely here we’d reach the end of our daylong voyage, for surely here at the bottom of the proverbial barrel my captor would realize all avenues for thriftless spending had been exhausted.

Steeling myself against the avalanche of boredom set to fall, I went willingly. And found myself facing an eye-level poster advertising the shop’s Twitter page. I might have fainted, if enduring the day’s torturous activities hadn’t already served to strengthen me against all sensory shock. For here, within an establishment just a few hard knocks away from skid row, I’d found what I realized I hadn’t seen once in every place we visited that day: real life, honest-to-goodness social media in action. And the light of an enterprising mind who’d seen how to use Twitter for strategic marketing the way even corporate giants fail to do.

Suddenly I wanted to meet the proprietors, to shake their hands, to congratulate them for being one of the all-too-few to realize the value of marketing on Twitter. But the shop was being tended by a gangly teen, who cheerlessly informed me that the owners were away for the weekend—attending a seminar on twitter tactics, no less. The day was made; I smiled. And all was well once more.

Vince Font is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments. WriterAccess is powered by ideaLaunch, a full service content marketing agency serving hundreds of clients and thousands of writers since 2000.

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Tags: content marketing

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under Content Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.