Social Marketing and Sandwiches

I just got back from Orlando, Florida where I attended the mid-year meeting for ACLEA. ACLEA is an organization for professionals in Continuing Legal Education. I’ve only been working in this field for 3 months, so the conference filled in a lot of the blanks for me. Since I don’t have a law school degree, I don’t even fully understand most of the products that I am no marketing. I stayed at the Loew’s Portofino Bay Resort which was kind of like Las Vegas if you took out all the sleaze and added lots of water. The photo above was taken in front of my room.

The focus of the conference was on the internet and social marketing. This part was pretty eye-opening for me, because I’ve been doing “social marketing” in some form or another for a long time. We used it to build an audience for Sex Machine in the days before Facebook and Twitter. I don’t think I was even familiar with the term social marketing yet. At that time, I was using Livejournal, Blogger and forums to build a buzz and a tiny but interested audience for our little movie. It’s always been something I’ve enjoyed doing.

So it’s kind of exciting to be able to translate all of those skills to a new industry. Now instead of using the internet to build an audience for low-budget horror movies, I’m using it to sell things like Texas Pattern Jury Charges. I’ve pretty much taken the unused marketing plan for The Spider Babies and am using it to sell law books. It may not be sexy, but it’s pretty encouraging to see that this stuff actually works. It was also a little surreal to hear all of these websites and strategies being discussed in an environment like ACLEA. I’ve been doing this so long that I sometimes forget how mainstream it has become.

And in other news, I have fallen in love…

This is a Vietnamese sandwich known as a banh mi. I’ve eaten them before, but recently, I’ve become obsessed with them. The great think about banh mi is that they only cost $3 and they are amazing. This photo doesn’t do it justice because I’ve already taken several bites. My only previous experience with banh mi was at Lee’s in OKC. This one came from Lily’s Sandwich Cafe in Austin,TX. I will definitely be going back.