I have a story to tell you that proves the effectiveness and, in this case, importance of content creation.
I am currently sitting in the lobby of the Morgan Hotel in Dublin, Ireland. I got here at 6 am and am waiting for the rest of my immediate family to join me. This weekend I am attending a family reunion of 15 or so American relatives I've never met and about 30 Irish relatives, also all of whom I never met. This may never have happened without the Internet and the magic of content creation.
My dear grandmother, Margaret Francis Donovan Carpenter, passed away back in February. She lived an incredibly full life and was a very thoughtful and caring woman. The years I got to spend with my grandmother were special beyond words and I will hold those memories near and dear to my heart for the rest of my life.
In addition to this social media blog, I also maintain a personal blog called The Leiter Side of Life. I started it as a creative outlet of sorts. I love to write. I live to write. I realized my life was missing that and, well, started writing again; about the little things that a 20-something in this day and age finds entertaining and valuable.
Back in February after my grandmother passed, I wrote a blog post rehashing some of my favorite memories. A eulogy of sorts.
Several months after writing that post, I received a message on LinkedIn from a relative in Maryland.
Needless to say I accepted Frank's request and put him in touch with my mother.
Turns out Frank had been doing lots of research on our family tree and trying to piece together all the relatives from the O'Donovan bloodline. The Internet has made genealogy a much less daunting task to try to tackle.
Had I not written that blog post about my grandmother, would Frank have found me and my immediate family? Maybe. But the fact that I did write that blog post, am active on the Internet and have a LinkedIn profile made it a whole lot easier for him to do so.
While this post isn't entirely about inbound marketing or social media, I think it proves an important point: people are out there searching for something specific. Create the specific content that they are searching for.