By Sean Beckingham

It all started when I put up my hand and said, “I’ll learn it.”

It was 2010, and I was the Creative Director at Bamboo Magazine, an online publication focused on sustainable clothing, food and travel. Looking back, maybe we were a little ahead of our time.

During one of our editorial meetings, the conversation turned to a problem every online publisher had: how do we get more eyeballs on our stories? We definitely were not going to print the magazine. How gouche!

 

Someone suggested we start sharing them on Twitter and Facebook.

I put up my hand.

“I’ll learn it.”

Remember, this was 2010. Social media wasn’t yet the sophisticated marketing machine it is today. Brands were not even putting a line item in their marketing budget for it.  What could Twitter and Facebook actually do for them — and for us too?

At Bamboo, we were also writing about the emerging craft beer movement. People were starting to discover local breweries and get excited about the stories behind the brands. I got to sample some of the beers and had my 1st IPA Great Lakes Lager, Crazy Canuck now called Canuck Pale Ale.

 

Marian — yes, the same Marian who would later become my partner at Branding & Buzzing — was working with celebrity chefs, another movement that was just about to explode.

The two worlds gave us an idea.

We worked with local chef Tawfik Shehata, pairing local craft beers with sustainable dishes for a Bamboo article. It was good content, and naturally, we shared the story on social media.

Then we noticed something interesting.

Tawfik was going to be appearing as a stage demonstration chef at the Toronto Festival of Beer, and some of the breweries featured in our article were going to be there too.

Everything connected.

So we contacted the owner of the festival and asked if we could give away some tickets through Bamboo’s Twitter account. It might have been one of the 1st Twitter contests in Toronto.

The contest was incredibly simple:

Retweet the article for a chance to win tickets to the Toronto Festival of Beer.

Yes, we were doing that in 2010.

Partway through the contest, the festival owner asked me to come into his office.

I had no idea what he wanted to talk about.

He pulled out his phone and showed it to me.

It was full of Twitter notifications.

Then he told me something even more interesting: ticket sales for the festival were spiking.

He looked at me and said:

“I don’t know what you did, but I want it for my festival.”

That was the moment.

We hadn’t talked about impressions, engagement rates, algorithms, creators or conversions. Most of the language we use to describe social media marketing today either didn’t exist yet or wasn’t part of our vocabulary.

We had a good story. We connected the right people and brands. We gave people a reason to share it. And it drove a measurable business result.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that little Twitter contest would help set the direction for the next 15 years of my career.

Branding & Buzzing hadn’t been born yet.

But the idea behind it had.