15.09.2008---MULLETT

So, you all know the feeling...ya the one where you walk into class, stoked about the new year and your teacher drops the bomb..thats right your teacher did their homework for the summer and found the easiest way to put a student into a coma without even breaking a sweat. They assign a reading for the quarter and you think to yourself, which would be worse: playing in traffic or cracking open this book from the 1900's that smells like mold and the only useful thing it has ever been used for in a students life was a door stop ( you pick the playing in traffic option). Yes, that is the time where you say to yourself, sign me up for MTV's real life-death by boredom-series. You wonder if breaking out with the bubonic plague would be less painful than getting through 300 pages of 8pt font, in what you swear is a foreign language. Well, Aggy, you totally blew my mind with this one. I didn't even have to consider resurrecting the game of Frogger on Main Street.
I was somehow praying my copy of Citizen Marketers would get lost in the mail and by some divine miracle I would be excused from the readings...HAHAHA..I know..I must have been on some heavy pain medication at the time or something. Anyhow, I read the first couple pages of the book and didn't want to put it down. I was hooked (yes for a moment i thought I may be suffering from a head trauma) and realized that our generation has blown open the possibilities/opportunities of the next generation of marketing and advertisement, no diploma required :)
I never realized until reading this book how so many companies were affected by small town men and women, who simply were doing something they loved and felt strongly about, in order to bring about change, innovation and new lines of communication between business, employees and customers in a way never deemed possible in a previous life. I feel like each of us fall under one of the four F's. Filters, Fanatics, Facilitators and Firecrackers, what's your role? I thought the quote on pg 26 "People are the message" hit dead on. Companies are smart to let everyday normal people do their marketing without even having to write a script or put letters on a page. All they have to do is simply live. Why not let some common Joe promote your company or help you improve your customer service. NOw that's smart! FREE, duh! I guess it is easy to say things could get a little scary for a corporation however, not sure what will be said about you or what kind of damage control you might have to whip up in a matter of minutes it takes to produce one blog. That's called taking a chance, living on the edge! How can you grow if you arent' willing to go out on the edge and work with whatever is thrown your way. I have a new respect for Citizen Marketers. I want to be a firecracker. I want to, "mix up the equation" so to speak. I think my favorite example of the positive affect a citizen marketer had on a company was the instance with BMW and the 27.07.2006---MINI2 campaign done by Mullett. Now thats innovation and creativity at its' finest. So you know that saying I wanna be like Mike..Well scratch that..I wanna be like Mullett, a certified Bad A** citizen marketer!