The Online Marketing Circus

My father was fifty eight years old when he died…

He was a big man with a big heart which gave out in the end due to poor exercise, diet and a high level of frustration and the pain of living with unfulfilled dreams.

It’s five years almost and still it feels like yesterday.

One thing he taught me was the power of personality and how you could create a spirit that others would be drawn to like gold.

My father was a hostage negotiator for the prison service. A tough job, as the saying goes, but someone had to do it. In truth, he hated the job although he knew there was a certain appeal to it and realised it was possibly as glamorous as you could get behind fifty feet of stone wall and barbed wire. So every day he put on his work hat and headed through the gate wondering what the day had ahead of him. He worked long hours, travelled to wherever he was needed and spent his working hours trying to secure the safe release of inmates, guards or any unsuspecting prison visitor held as hostage by the prison tribe, selecting his each and every word the way you might select a parachute in a mid air emergency; knowing you had little time but no option other than to make the right decision.

In the evening things were very different…

He would arrive home from work, take off his work gear, wash the smell of incarceration from his skin and put on his best shirt and tie to head out for a few drinks and a little male bonding at the local public drinking house.

This was my father’s chapel. He wore his best clothes, put on a smile that was wide and welcoming and told his greatest tales to a gathering of friends and colleagues who crowded round him in eager anticipation of his next parabel.

And the truth is people loved him for it. He was unique and entertaining. His tales were embelished only to add a little extra life where it was needed but they were always the truth and for that people listened and trusted him. You could argue they learned a little too.

He was a social media leader who knew the power of trust, honesty and adding value to others.

When he died over five hundred came to celebrate his life. They told tales about him, laughed, cried and cursed at the legend he had become, a social legend within his own world; a world now filled with stories he left behind…

Want to leave a social media legacy?

Lead the tribe.