MarkWhittaker.com

It’s popular wisdom that you’ll never get anything if you don’t ask for it, and variations of the bromide are oft repeated in the sales and marketing world (“You can’t close the sale if you don’t ask for the money!”).

One of my online marketing teachers, Christopher S. Penn, often encourages his readers to come right out and ask for re-tweets, comments, follows, etc. It works, and a recent experience with a Dream Local Digital client demonstrated the theory.

We helped children’s book illustrator Melissa Sweet launch a new Facebook business page. She had been using Facebook, but only had a personal page that, with more than 1,000 friends, had become unwieldy to manage as a marketing tool. Her business page started with just 60 or so fans, or “likes,” and we had to grow that number quickly.

Facebook offers business page administrators a handy tool for inviting your personal Facebook friends to like your business page. If you’re a page admin, you’ll find an “Invite Friends” near the top of the right column on your Facebook page. It took about an hour and 15 minutes over two days, but I sent invitations to all of the client’s personal friends to like the new business page. It yielded immediate results. Within two days, the business page had 300 new “likes.” About 30 percent of “friends” from her personal page, many of whom are fans but not personal friends, agreed to like the business page.

I encountered just one glitch during the invitation process, but it was significant. When I tried to invite 100 or so friends at one time, it appeared that not all of the invitations had been delivered. So, I limited the number of invitations and had to repeat the process many times (thus the 75 minutes spent on the task).

Below is a Screenr.com video I put together for the client to demonstrate the process. Please note that since the video was created, the location of links to access business pages have changed, but the invitation process is still the same.

The Tampa Tribune laid off 165 employees a couple of weeks before Christmas. It was just another straw on the back of the buckling camel that is the newspaper industry, but it vexed me more than many similar announcements over the last four years.

I have two friends among those who received pink slips. I’ve had other former colleagues forced from the newspaper biz, but I think these lay-offs touched me deeper because I was with both at the beginnings of their journalism careers. They were part of an amazing team of people that worked at the North Hills News Record, a suburban Pittsburgh paper that no longer exists, during the 1990s.

Thanks to a 1992 strike that shut both of Pittsburgh’s metro dailies and the resulting effort by owner Gannett Inc. to turn the News Record into a major suburban daily, the News Record newsroom was a hotbed of talent. Much as it did with USA Today, Gannett pulled in some of its brightest editors and up-and-coming journalists and sprinkled in a few outsiders such as myself.

Joseph Brown was a young photographer at the News Record. If it wasn’t his first job in journalism, is was one of his first. He’s a Florida native and a graduate of Florida A&M. The News Record job might have been his first venture to the North. The gray skies of Pittsburgh must have seemed daunting, but he brought with him a love a golf, and western Pennsylvania is home to lots of good courses.

He had a great photographer’s eye, but he was raw. I remember that he was always willing to listen to advice, and our chief photographer worked closely with him. When he left the News Record, he returned to Florida and took with him his future bride, Elizabeth Lee, who was a young reporter at the NHNR. They have four beautiful children, and for now, Joseph has no job.

Courtney Cairns Pastor is the other News Record alum who lost her job with the Tampa Trib. She came to the News Record as a Penn State journalism graduate. She was (and still is) talented and eager to learn everything she could about writing. She covered a lot of meetings, and I’m pretty sure I edited a lot of her early stories. Courtney also found her mate — sports writer Frank Pastor — at the News Record.

I wish I could remember a good anecdote or two about Joseph and Courtney, but none come to mind. They were fun to work with and helped us put out an award-winning newspaper. Away from work, Joseph made a 3-wood for me when I was just learning to play golf.

Both now have experience with Web. Joseph was the Live Desk coordinator and multimedia editor for the Tampa Tribune, and Courtney was the family and “mommy” blogger for the paper and became adept at using social media to grow her audience.

I haven’t been in close touch with Joseph, Liz, Courtney and Frank over the years. We’re Facebook friends, and the Browns have been kind enough to exchange Christmas cards with me over the years. Somehow, I feel worse about Joseph and Courtney losing their jobs than I did when, after 30 years working for newspapers, I was laid off in December 2008.

I wish I could have done more to “save” the newspaper industry, not for me, but for people like Joseph and Courtney. I worked on the online side of the business for eight years, and depending on your perspective, might be among those to blame for the changes that have eaten away at newspaper profits. On the other hand, I saw the changes coming, but never could figure out how to take advantage of them or convince my bosses to invest more to prepare for the interactive future. Of course, I’m not the only one who hasn’t been able to figure it out.

Both Joseph and Courtney know I’ll do anything I can to help them (I’m pretty handy at setting up WordPress blogs, for example), but I don’t have jobs to offer. For now, I hope that during their time at the News Record and with me, they learned some skill or lesson that helps them persevere this current setback and move to something better.