How a cat (and a mouse) turned a business into a winner
There’s something energising about standing in a room about with a hundred businesswomen, keen to hear about how to grow their online presence.
That’s how I felt last night at the monthly Social Media Women event, listening to the online expert Valerie Khoo speak animatedly about her success also helped.
A recent winner of the NSW Telstra Small Business Award, Valerie related an insightful, if not amusing tale about her journey to success that may make some of our very serious corporate business readers wince, as it doesn’t fit into any sanitised templates. That’s because it’s a story about the application of very basic leading edge technology with an entrepreneur’s creativity.
In 2006, Valerie established her business, Sydney Writers Centre. Like most small businessowners, she had non-existent funds. But what she did have was a cat: Rex.
Valerie decided to use Rex as the star of an experimental social media campaign which only cost her time. So out came the Rex Catbook Facebook Page, Rex on Flickr, Kitten Rex TV on You Tube and The Adventures of Kitten Rex Blog.
All this was done anonymously with no linking back to Valerie’s business. It wasn’t long before Rex became a cyberstar and he began receiving hundreds of and emails and posts from around the world while PR companies also began sending him catfood! But it was when Valerie overheard an unknown woman in a pub one evening showing Rex’s blog to a friend that she knew that she had come upon a very powerful marketing tool.
She then knew that she could take the project out of the incubator and apply the learnings to drive her own business to profitability.
What impressed me was the ingenuity that Valerie showed by trying to learn how to use the new technologies. She acknowledged that she spent hours over the weekend setting up the campaign and that she needed to stay on top of it while it was running. But this investment is one that many women can make to drive their own businesses forward, and take continue to take the lead in online innovation.