Interview with Earl Everson on his social media strategy and branding work.

22nd Century Management With Ken

I've always been. Into marketing, marketing, myself, marketing different parts of my life. And as well as the company, you know, I've been on LinkedIn now for about six and a half years trying to get attention. And that's what branding is all about. But back in the day, you know, I was 16, 17 years old and a long time ago, like 30 something years ago.

But anyway, we had a band and throughout this. This thing of having a ban, I wanted to market our band two major record labels, and that's where it kind of really took off. I had so much enjoy. I got so much enjoyment out of marketing this band. And so I pulled something up. I'm going to show you real quick.

This is how we use the market back in the day. Now we have social media, but everything you're going to see here is something that I created again. Still in junior high school, but that was our band name. It was called. We were called fellows. Okay. Were band members of five and I pulled this up and what I would do.

And you can notice here. Everything is on a dot matrix. That's how old this is. I still have it. And, uh, I would pull all of the record labels throughout the country. The top executives record producers, you name it. And here I would jump on the old traditional phone, no email at the time. And I would contact them and I would market our band.

Like we are the next greatest thing that we want to be a part of your label. And I would set up appointments for us to fly to New York, fly to Atlanta at the time, fly everywhere. To meet these record labels, these top executives, and I had so much fun doing it. And again, you know, back in the day, we would have resumes of who we are, how old we were so on and so forth.

And that's kind of where it took off. And from that point I realized. Hey, you know what? Getting attention is the ultimate goal. How do you get attention here? We are 35 years later, and now I'm doing it from a company standpoint. How do I get attention from different people out there, but more importantly, how can I give a shotgun approach through social media, but also give a rifle approach that everybody on LinkedIn, they don't see my rifle approach, but that's kind of the secret sauce.

How do I get attention? How do I set appointments with top executive? By targeting them through LinkedIn. Okay. Yeah. And as I mentioned, I see you everywhere. And of course you, and I know each other, we've known each other for a while, but one of the things that you probably do more than anybody I've ever seen is you go live on LinkedIn.

And so what got you started doing that and how's it working for you? Yeah. So, I mean, Y Y has been a great thing in my life. Uh, shows are pretty much off the cuff. It's something that, uh, may have happened the previous day or even that day. And I just want to kind of get it out there because I think it's critical to share and help educate customers on my industry.

At the end of the day, Ken, I want to be the expert. I want to be the brand here in Chicago. You know, there's much larger competitors out there, just like any, anywhere else. However, if you were to ask anybody on LinkedIn, who's the guy in Chicago, that's selling hardware, selling technology. Nine times out of 10, it's going to be, they're going to say Earl out of Chicago.

Right? And so even though sometimes they may deal with me directly and they may not. But at the end of the day, they're still doing business with elite documents, solutions. They're still getting Xerox technology again, Xerox the best in the business, as far as branding. That's why we wanted to partner with those guys.

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