Gordon Brown becomes the Prime Minister of the UK today. In a much heralded move, after ten years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he gets the job he really wanted in the first place – the boss.
How Dr Brown achieved this is a tale that anyone marketing on the Internet needs to take note of. A long time ago, in a land far away – well Scotland to be precise – Gordon Brown was a university lecturer in politics before becoming a TV journalist. He had clearly wanted to become a politician because it took him a couple of attempts to get elected.
But once he was elected as an MP he quickly rose through the ranks of the party. He did this because his Ph.D studies, his lecturing and his journalism brought him into contact with the people who mattered – the powers that be within the Labour Party. Gordon Brown clearly spent several years connecting with people in the Party, glad-handing the important people and generally making himself known.
There is the supposed restaurant “deal” between himself and Tony Blair during which they agreed that once Tony resigned from being Prime Minister, Gordon would take over. We are now seeing that deal come into play. But how did Gordon Brown get into the position in which he could make such a deal?
He achieved this by becoming known. He is widely known within the Labour Party, within the circles of power and within the political world generally. The same is true for anyone in the higher reaches of Government. True, they may have ability, but most of all they are simply well-known.
Gordon Brown achieved such “fame” without the benefit of the Internet – though he could have used it. Instead, it was face-to-face meetings, articles, speeches and books that got him known amongst the right people.
Yet translate that onto the world of Internet marketing and what do we see? We see so-called experts telling us to tweak our headlines, to use “secret” methods to get to the top of Google, or to pile our pages with bonus offers. Yet consider the truly successful people and businesses, like Gordon Brown or Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. They all achieve their success without such minutiae. They spend most of their time connecting with real people.
For anyone trying to succeed online this means learning from the Gordon Brown experience. Get out there, meet people, give talks, write articles and generally make yourself and your company known. You will gain more online sales this way than following the advice of so-called gurus who the world has never heard about.
